A successful dirty business

Association football is the sport in history. It has more participants, more spectators and a greater global reach than any other game. Conventional wisdom suggests that this popularity exists despite football’s widespread and longlasting corruption, dishonesty and scandals. But there’s another way to look at it: Football’s extraordinary cultural power owes an awful lot to the fact that it lurches from one controversy to the next. Controversies help sustain it.

Football is not merely a sport. It’s a global spectacle: Part showbiz, part psychodrama, part tribal ritual and part morality play. It offers moments of extraordinary beauty and athletic brilliance, but also churns out endless dramas of greed, betrayal, hypocrisy and transgression. Football gives audiences something few other institutions can provide: a constant supply of heroes and villains but no clear way of telling which is which. 

Dishonesty and fraudulence at the very top of football’s hierarchy is not a recent development. Corruption has accompanied the sport’s global expansion for decades and may well have lubricated the sport’s ascent.

Since the 1960s, FIFA has grown from a relatively modest sporting organization into one of the most powerful and certainly richest institutions in world sport. It sits on billions in , commands the world’s most valuable sporting event and controls a global commercial empire built around the World Cup. Ostensibly, it is a nonprofit governing body. In practice, it possesses the financial clout, political influence and global influence of a multinational corporation.

Allegations of bribery, patronage and financial impropriety have repeatedly accompanied FIFA’s rise since its inception in 1904. Under (1974–1998) and later (1998–2015), FIFA became synonymous in many minds with opaque decision-making and questionable commercial practices. World Cup bidding processes, marketing contracts and executive relationships became subjects of investigation rather than admiration.

The remarkable fact is not that football has survived these scandals. It’s that football has flourished through them. FIFA’s crowning competition the World Cup grew in stature, particularly after the rise of television in the 1950s, and the quadrennial tournament now vies with the summer Olympic Games as the world’s premier sports event.

Paradoxically, every notorious episode reinforces the game’s importance. Governments compete to host World Cups. Corporations like Coca-Cola and Unilever spend associating themselves with football. Fans who denounce corruption continue to watch. The institution may lose credibility, but the sport itself gains attention.

Other sports have their undersides. Boxing has a long association with . Cricket has endured controversies. Basketball has experienced scandals. Tennis has faced . Money contaminates professional sport if only because the filthy lucre inevitably attracts those willing to bend rules to get more of it.

But football operates on its own scale — its corruption is not just confined to one area of activity. It reaches governing bodies, clubs, agents, owners, players and supporters. The sport’s commercial success has created a gargantuan, plenteous ecosystem in which temptation and opportunity are abundant and irresistible.

Racism, violence and child abuse

Football’s moral problems extend far beyond financial corruption. The sport has long struggled with racism. In England, racist abuse became a major public issue from the late 1970s onwards, but it never remained a purely English problem. Across Europe and elsewhere, black — and sometimes Asian — players have endured abuse from supporters, opponents and, occasionally, institutions that officially claimed to oppose discrimination.

Football regularly presents itself as the world’s most inclusive game and, technically, it probably is. Campaigns against are widespread and, we presume, sincere. Taking the knee before games was a regular ritual for years. Yet the persistence of racist abuse exposes a contradiction at the heart of football culture. A sport can celebrate diversity while simultaneously providing a platform for prejudice.

has also been part of football’s history from its earliest days. In 19th-century England, clubs often represented local identities, religious affiliations and social divisions. Rivalries created powerful forms of belonging, but they could also produce hostility. In the 1960s and 1970s, the media gave a shape and name to the violence and hooliganism became football’s defining problem of the period.

Large-scale football violence diminished in England during the same period that followed the disaster, the Taylor Report and the transformation of stadiums into all-seater environments. In parts of Europe and South America, ultra groups continue to combine intense loyalty with intimidation, political extremism and physical confrontation.

Then there is the most disturbing issue of all: . Repeated investigations into football have revealed cases in which young players were exploited by trusted adults and institutions failed to protect them. Each discovery raises unsettling questions about what remained hidden for years and, even more unsettling, whether it still continues.

Criminologists and other social scientists understand that discovered crimes tell us that wrongdoing occurred; they can’t reveal its full extent. Institutions with powerful reputations often have the greatest capacity to conceal uncomfortable truths. Football’s history suggests that abuse, like corruption, flourishes when loyalty and reputation are valued above scrutiny.

Carnivalesque

Why, then, does all this fail to damage football’s popularity? Perhaps because football has become the ultimate modern carnival. The Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin used the idea of the to describe spaces where normal rules are temporarily suspended; hierarchies are inverted, excess is celebrated and the strange becomes fascinating. Football fits this description perfectly.

It’s a world where ordinary expectations are continually overturned. Billionaires behave like monarchs. Players become venerated icons one day and vilified outcasts the next. Managers and coaches are worshipped like messiahs then dismissed within weeks. Supporters create deep tribal identities based on affiliations that are sometimes as arbitrary as picking from a color chart. The carnival does not merely tolerate disorder; it requires periodic disruption. Without villains, controversies and transgressions, the spectacle loses some of its piquancy. A single refereeing decision can produce pandemonium across continents. As can a US President’s (though, in that case, understandably).

Do fans actually enjoy corruption, racism, violence or abuse? Probably not. But they can’t ignore them. And football, like any other form of entertainment, thrives on attention. This makes the hysterical outpouring over Infantino’s divisive proposal more intelligible. The attempt to sell a minority stake in the World Cup and other major tournaments to private equity investors whipped up headlines about “selling ” and speculation that Infantino was “on the .” This wasn’t a disruption of an otherwise smooth-running football culture, but a valuable addition.

Football combines the sublime with the pointless, childish, harebrained and downright idiotic. Breathtaking athletic skill shares space with comedic cheating. Passionate loyalty and vicious hostility balance one another. The sport cultivates authentic community but allows blatant money-grubbing. Remove all the wrongdoing and football would still be a popular sport. But would it still dominate global attention? Perhaps not.

Football’s near-magical allure lies not only in the beauty of what happens on the pitch but also in the moral and legal turbulence that surrounds it. Its many improprieties source everyday conversations. And even just talking about others’ miscreant behavior can be rewarding. Football is the world’s most popular sport not in spite of its dirtiness, but in large part because of it. That’s football’s filthy appeal.

[Ellis Cashmore is co-author of .]

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However, there have also been many cases where animals have become victims. In April 2025, the carcass of a young elephant was in a palm oil plantation bordering Mount Leuser National Park. Investigators found an infected wound on its leg and are probing whether poisoning was involved. A similar incident occurred in October 2024, when a wild Sumatran elephant was dead in the forest of Way Kambas National Park in Lampung. This was the third elephant death in the park in recent months.

Amid growing concern over the rise in human–animal conflicts, this is a good moment to reflect on our relationship with wild animals. How should humans and wild animals interact? Who truly benefits from this relationship? How do we treat wild animals?

Behind this relationship lies a critical issue that must be addressed: the human–animal conflict over the use of natural resources. The consequences of this conflict go beyond environmental damage. It can also be deadly, as both humans and animals end up killing each other. These conflicts are also often caused by the way agricultural landscapes are developed around them. Integrating trees into farming systems — agroforestry — can be part of the solution by helping maintain habitat connectivity while supporting agricultural production.

Community empowerment

Empowering local communities is a fundamental pillar of effective wildlife conservation. These communities are on the front lines, living in close proximity to wild animals and facing the daily challenges that come with it. The communities not only endure the risks but also play a key role in ensuring both human safety and animal protection. A major contributing factor is the lack of awareness and preparedness among communities about how to safely coexist with wildlife.

There is an encouraging example of what community-led conservation can achieve. Around Way Kambas National Park, once farmers were shown that crop guarding using simple early-warning systems and communal patrols was effective, 16 villages voluntarily adopted the approach. Together, they successfully repelled about 74% of elephant incursions, with several villages preventing every attempted raid. This experience demonstrates that empowering local communities with practical knowledge can be far more effective than relying solely on top-down interventions.

Conflict arises when human and animal territories overlap, often due to expanding settlements or shrinking natural habitats. In some cases, before a tiger fatally attacked villagers, another tiger had wandered into a settlement and was killed by residents, or the other way around. In Bengkulu, a tiger that had attacked and injured a resident was later dead by an unidentified person, illustrating how such encounters can also trigger retaliatory killing of the animal. It’s important to understand that, in modern times, humans no longer rely on wild animals for survival and wild animals typically do not view humans as prey. These confrontations are not rooted in predation, but rather in fear, misunderstanding and habitat disruption.��

When conflict does occur, the goal must be to protect life — not just human life, but animal life as well. Therefore, community involvement in conservation must go beyond passive participation. It should focus on education and on how to respond effectively and safely.

Set boundaries

Expanding agriculture, plantations and settlements without considering wildlife needs leads to habitat fragmentation and increased conflict. It is important to strengthen regulations that prevent human settlements and agricultural developments from encroaching on protected areas.

This by John Goodrich, the chief scientist for Panthera, on tiger conservation highlights that establishing clear spatial zones to keep human activities and livestock away from tiger habitats is one of the most effective strategies to reduce conflict. Encouraging landowners and developers to adopt techniques such as agroforestry and sustainable farming can significantly reduce habitat destruction while maintaining or even enhancing biodiversity.

Agroforestry plays a crucial role in minimizing the destruction of natural habitats, a leading cause of conflict between humans and wildlife. This practice can serve as a buffer, helping prevent habitat destruction by maintaining tree cover and reducing deforestation. Agroforestry environmental health by helping restore degraded land, reduce erosion and support biodiversity.

By preserving and enhancing natural habitats, agroforestry provides wildlife with corridors to move safely between forested areas, thereby reducing the likelihood that animals, particularly large mammals such as tigers or elephants, stray into human settlements in search of food.

Sustainable farming practices that support both agricultural productivity and the environment can also minimize the destruction of surrounding ecosystems and reduce the need for expanding agricultural lands into wildlife habitats. By restoring degraded land and improving ecosystem health, these practices help preserve habitats and reduce the likelihood that wildlife will be displaced into intensive farms and settlements.

These practices not only conserve biodiversity but also make the surrounding environment less attractive to wildlife. Sustainable farming can help ensure that animals are less likely to raid crops, reducing the risk of encounters between wildlife and humans. Landowners can help maintain ecological balance and prevent the destabilization of the food chain, which often leads to human-wildlife conflict. When animals lose access to their natural habitats or food sources, they to move closer to human settlements.

Lessons learned for the region

The rise in human-wildlife conflict in Indonesia carries lessons for the wider Asia-Pacific region. Rapid economic development has millions out of poverty, but it has also put unprecedented pressure on forests, wetlands and wildlife habitats. Across South and Southeast Asia, similar patterns are evident. These encounters highlight a regional dilemma on how to balance agricultural expansion, economic growth and conservation.

We must rethink how we share the planet with other species. Through better planning, education and sustainable practices, we can reduce conflicts, ensuring that both human communities and animals have the space and resources they need to thrive.

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In the cold desert dawn of July 17, an Iranian ballistic missile screamed across the Jordanian sky toward Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Azraq, and found its mark in the sleeping barracks of American soldiers. Three young lives, each carrying the weight of home across vast oceans, were extinguished in an instant: First Lieutenant , 25, of Ewa Beach, Hawaii, whose islands now feel impossibly distant; Private , 19, of Carrollton, Texas, barely more than a girl, her future stolen before it could properly begin; and Sergeant , 28, of Ozone Park, New York, a name that speaks to the great immigrant tapestry of America.��

All came from the edges of the republic, from Pacific shores and southern plains and the boroughs of New York, united only by the uniform they wore and the sand that would receive them. Their blood now mingles with the dust of a kingdom that never asked for this war, staining the earth with a tragedy that will be recounted in small-town newspapers and whispered in family kitchens for generations. American souls have now been claimed since this conflict began, nearly in the fortnight’s carnage, yet it is these three names — Feehan, Gonzales, Rampersad — that hang like a question mark over the desert, demanding to know why they had to die for alliances they did not forge, in a war they did not choose, on a battlefield far from everything they ever loved. The blood of the fallen now mingles with the sand of a kingdom that never sought this war.��

As Jordanian King Abdullah II sat in London on July 23, meeting with executives of British companies to discuss economic cooperation, one question echoed through the corridors of power in Washington, Amman and Tehran alike:

Why is Iran targeting Jordan— and not Israel?

This is not a question of military tactics. It is a question of strategic theology, of the dark logic of power politics in an age when the old certainties have crumbled like the walls of Jericho. To understand why the Islamic Republic of Iran has chosen to strike the Hashemite Kingdom, one must venture into the Machiavellian calculus of Tehran’s grand strategy, the Shakespearean tragedy of Jordan’s geopolitical predicament and the Orwellian doublethink that governs the new world disorder.

The logic of the wolf: Tehran’s strategic calculus

Iran does not fight wars as the West imagines them. Tehran fights a war of mortal geometry — a conflict measured not in territory conquered, but in influence projected; not in armies defeated, but in systems destabilized. Analysts at��Al Jazeera��have that Iran is “using Gulf states to pressure Washington while avoiding direct confrontation with US forces.” The Islamic Republic’s strategy is to inflict maximum pain on American interests through the most vulnerable points in the American alliance system.

During the first round of the US/Israel war on Iran in March and April, Iranian officials justified attacks on Gulf states by arguing that US operations were launched from military bases on their territory. Jordan, as one of eight Arab countries hosting permanent US military facilities, has become a target by association.

The asymmetric gambit: punishing the host, not the guest

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has been explicit in its targeting logic. On July 22, the IRGC it had struck three major US air bases in Jordan: Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Azraq, King Faisal Air Base in Ma’an Governorate and Prince Hassan Air Base in Mafraq Governorate. The IRGC claimed to have destroyed US fighter jets, refueling aircraft and military equipment.

“The IRGC’s Aerospace Force once again US bases in Jordan in response to the enemy’s aggression,” the IRGC declared. According to the IRGC, in the first phase of the response, a missile and drone attack on King Faisal and Prince Hassan bases an F-15 preparation shed.��

This is the Orwellian logic of perpetual war — a conflict that must never end because its continuation serves the interests of those who wage it. By striking Jordan, Iran achieves what direct strikes on Israel could not: It deters the American alliance system without triggering an existential response from the Jewish state. Jordan is the Achilles’ heel of the American regional posture — close enough to matter, vulnerable enough to hurt.

Jordan: the strategic sandwich

Jordan finds itself caught in a geopolitical vice. As the�����󲹲� , “Jordanian criticism of Iran remains tempered by a reluctance to absolve Washington and Israel.” The FDD also portrays Jordan as paying the price for an American-Israeli war and has faulted Washington for exposing its Arab partners to retaliation.

According to��The , ”For Iran, Jordan represents a state closely integrated into the American-led regional security system and linked to Israel through a peace treaty”. This integration makes Jordan a legitimate target in Tehran’s strategic calculus.

The air defense dilemma

Perhaps the most critical vulnerability lies in Jordan’s air defense architecture.��The National���󲹲� that Iranian missiles aimed at Jordan are part of a plan to “clear path for attacks on Israel.” Megan Sutcliffe of the intelligence company Sibylline that the offensive could “marginally increase Iran’s capacity to send munitions into Israeli airspace” by affecting Jordanian air defenses.

In , during Iran’s first direct large-scale attack on Israel, the Jordanian Air Force intercepted and destroyed Iranian drones and missiles passing through its airspace towards Israel. This act of solidarity — defending Israeli airspace at the risk of Iranian retaliation — made Jordan a target. Tehran has not forgotten.

At present, Iranian strategists calculate that by degrading Jordanian air defenses, they can create a corridor for future strikes on Israel. This is the Kissingerian logic of indirect approach: Strike the ally to weaken the adversary; attack the shield to pierce the sword.

The economic trap: the price of alliance

Jordan depends heavily on the United States, both militarily and economically. Under a seven-year Memorandum of Understanding in 2022, Washington provides $1.45 billion in annual economic and military assistance — increased to $1.65 billion in 2025, triple the amount from 2010. Approximately US troops are currently deployed in the kingdom.

This is the of alliance: “He who is the cause of another becoming powerful is ruined.” Jordan’s alliance with Washington has made it powerful enough to survive, yet vulnerable enough to be targeted. Iran understands this dialectic with chilling precision. By striking Jordan, Tehran sends a message to every American ally in the region: Your partnership with Washington makes you a target. Your security guarantee is a liability. Your sovereignty is an illusion.

The public dissatisfaction

A by the Arab Barometer found that only 12% of Jordanians held a positive view of US President Donald �հ��ܳ���’s policies. “Despite Jordan’s efforts to remain neutral in this war, existing alliances, such as the one with the United States, not only affect the country’s already fragile security situation but also fuel public dissatisfaction,” Kelly Petillo of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

The King must balance the demands of his American ally against the sentiments of his own people. He must protect his kingdom from external threats while managing internal discontent. He must project strength while navigating weakness.

Punishing the host: the campaign of attrition and the new phase of conflict

The IRGC has been methodical in its approach. According to the FDD, Jordan was by 166 ballistic missiles and 125 drones launched by Iran and its proxy militias in Iraq in response to the combined US–Israeli strikes. The attack reflects Iran’s strategy of “punishing regional states that host American military forces, with the goal of driving the United States out of the region.” The IRGC has released footage of what it calls a “” on US military bases in Jordan, accompanied by a stark warning to Washington: As long as attacks on Iran continue, American forces “will not be secure.”

Analysts believe these strikes ”a significant turning point in the ongoing conflict.” According to��Alhurra, “Tehran might be keen to harm USA military assets in Jordan to reduce the interception of Iranian missiles on their way to Israel.” Officials expect ”a new phase of the conflict marked by intensified U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iranian military and infrastructure targets.” This is the escalatory spiral that former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger warned against — a conflict that feeds upon itself, each retaliation justifying the next, until the entire region is consumed by fire.

King Abdullah’s gambit

As Iranian missiles rained down on Jordanian territory, King Abdullah II sat in London, meeting with executives from the automotive, mining, energy, engineering, chemical and pharmaceutical sectors. He “the importance of the long-standing partnership between Jordan and the UK, and the commitment of both countries to strengthening economic and trade relations”. This is not a retreat from crisis. It is a diplomatic offensive of the highest order.

The King understands what the IRGC understands: the war against Jordan is not a military war; it is an economic war, a diplomatic war, a war of attrition against the very fabric of the Jordanian state. By traveling to London, the King signals to Tehran and Washington alike: Jordan will not be broken. Jordan will not be isolated. Jordan will find partners beyond the battlefield.

The visit represents a Kissingerian recognition that survival in the new multipolar order requires diversified partnerships, not monolithic alliances. Jordan cannot afford to be solely an American client; it must be a British partner, a European interlocutor, an Arab bridge. The King’s presence in London is a declaration that Jordan’s sovereignty will not be defined by the missiles that fall upon it.

America’s dilemma and the cost of protection

The United States has spent trillions of dollars and thousands of lives in the Middle East over the past quarter-century. It has toppled regimes, destroyed nations and reshaped borders. And what has it achieved? A region more unstable than before. Adversaries more emboldened. Allies more skeptical.

The Iranian attacks on Jordan reveal the central contradiction of American grand strategy: The more the United States protects its allies, the more it exposes them to retaliation. Every American base is a target. Every American soldier is a hostage to fortune. Every American ally is a potential victim of the next Iranian missile.

The doublethink

English author George Orwell of a world in which “war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.” In the Middle East of 2026, the doublethink is this: America’s presence is supposed to guarantee stability, yet it produces instability. America’s alliances are supposed to deter aggression, yet they invite it. America’s military supremacy is supposed to be unchallengeable, yet it is challenged daily.

As the IRGC : ”As long as you continue undermining the security of the Iranian people, none of you will be safe.” The threat is not just to American forces; it is to the entire architecture of American influence. Every ally is a hostage. Every base is a target. Every partnership is a liability.

The dual policy

Kissinger, in his at the Center for Strategic and International Studies Global Security Forum, articulated the only viable path forward for the United States in the Middle East: pursuing two contradictory policies simultaneously. On the one hand, the United States must stand by its Sunni allies and set limits on Iranian interventionism. On the other hand, it must be prepared to engage in dialogue with an Iran that pursues its policies as a nation-state.

This is the Kissingerian wisdom that American politics cannot yet absorb: Success in the Middle East requires the capacity to hold contradictory truths in the same mind — that Iran is both a threat and a potential partner, that Jordan is both a client and a sovereign, that American power is both indispensable and insufficient.

King Abdullah’s visit to London represents a Kissingerian opening — a recognition that the United States alone cannot manage the crisis; that Europe must play a role; that the old order of American supremacy is giving way to a new order of multipolar complexity. The UK’s condemnation of Iranian attacks and its expression of solidarity with Jordan are not mere diplomatic gestures. They are signals of a realignment.

The unresolved tragedy

Iran strikes Jordan because it can. Because Jordan is vulnerable. Because the alliance with America is as much a liability as a guarantee. Because in the new world disorder, the weak are punished for their associations, the strong are tested for their resolve and the innocent are sacrificed on the altar of great-power rivalry.

The IRGC has made its position clear: “” The question for Jordan, for America, for the entire Middle East, is not who wins but how to lose. The art of statecraft, in this new era, lies not in achieving total victory but in managing decline — in preserving what can be preserved, salvaging what can be salvaged and accepting that the world has changed in ways that no amount of bombing can reverse.

King Abdullah sits in London, meeting with businessmen, discussing economic cooperation, projecting normalcy in the face of chaos. He knows what the strategists know: that the war will not end with a single decisive battle; that the conflict will be long, grinding and attritional; that the path forward requires wisdom — the wisdom to recognize that power without purpose is mere violence, and that purpose without power is mere fantasy.

The blood of Feehan, Gonzales and Rampersad stains the sands of Jordan. The missiles of Iran continue to fly. The King of Jordan continues to govern. The United States continues to strike. And the tragedy, like the war itself, remains unresolved.

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“Pete, I think you were the first one to speak up,” Trump at a press event. “And you said, ‘Let’s do it, because you can’t let them have a nuclear weapon.’”

Americans join the military for any number of reasons: to serve their country, gain economic stability or simply join a community. For Hegseth, a thirst for martial victory and a desire for a masculine metamorphosis seemed to surpass all else.

Much to Hegseth’s chagrin, however, his career as an Army officer corresponded to a series of distinctly failed military campaigns. After graduating from Princeton in 2003, he deployed to two doomed military locales — Afghanistan and Iraq — and then relentlessly defended the Pentagon’s occupation of parts of those places in essays, speeches and, ultimately, as a weekend host on Fox News. While Hegseth’s rhetoric on those wars long reflected mainstream Republican talking points — papering over chaos and death in the Middle East and beyond with pledges that stable democracies were close at hand — his zeal indicated something deeper: a desperation, it seemed, to wring some sort of personal validation from his time in uniform.

“The rank and file, and even some of the officers, have accepted the gravity of the war’s failures,” Adam Weinstein, a Marine Corps veteran and deputy director for Middle East policy at the Quincy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank focused on peace and diplomacy, told me, speaking of Iraq and Afghanistan. “There’s a deep sense of sacrifice and loss for nothing. And that can lead to fatalistic beliefs, it can lead to Islamophobia. In its healthier form, it can lead to questioning the principles of interventionism and the U.S. foreign policy establishment.”

Hegseth, for his part, chose to totally avoid any personal or geopolitical reckoning. Once the Global War on Terror became politically untenable to defend, he cast about for excuses that wouldn’t implicate his own career in the military. Rather than zero in on tactical or intelligence failures, his rhetoric took a dark turn, increasingly inflected by Islamophobia, misogyny and a distinctly toxic version of masculinity.

As his profile rose, Hegseth argued ever more forcefully that the Pentagon was weak-willed, insufficiently lethal and overrun by incompetent and cowardly leaders, many of them women or minorities who (in his eyes) had been unfairly promoted. His proposed remedy was as blunt and dense as his diagnosis: America simply needed to fight harder in the Middle East until the mission was accomplished and “Islamic extremism” was eliminated. As one of his former coworkers told me, “I never got the feeling that he wanted to abandon the Middle East.”

I asked Weinstein if, during his own 2012 deployment to Afghanistan, he saw Islamophobia bubbling below the surface. “It was right on the surface,” he responded. “But what do you think the World War II generation was saying about the Japanese? Dehumanization is a natural outgrowth of war.”

“If you want something, you go after it”

As a boy growing up in Minnesota, Hegseth appeared to be a perfect version of the American male. He was religious, athletic, well-spoken and remarkably handsome. He was ashamed, however, of his self-perceived softness. “I didn’t get in fights as a kid and shied from confrontation because, frankly, I was scared of it,” he wrote in his 2016 , In the Arena, Good Citizens, a Great Republic, and How One Speech Can Reinvigorate America. He went on to hail his father, Brian, for his “integrity” and “Scandinavian work ethic,” before evincing thinly veiled resentment for not having been reared effectively in the masculine art of aggression. “My father was — and is — an incredible man,” he reflected, “but confrontation isn’t necessarily his forte.”

Military service, Hegseth figured, would imbue him with some much needed and previously missing manliness. It was also his best path to class mobility and prestige. When it came time for college, he applied to West Point, America’s most prestigious service academy, and Princeton, where he was gunning for a ROTC scholarship. He got into both schools and chose the latter, touching down on its verdant New Jersey campus in 1999.

In deciding on Princeton, Hegseth launched himself on a path eerily paralleling that of another Minnesota native of a previous era, novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. Both of them were working-class lads who attended Princeton, where they bristled at the elitism while craving its validation. Both developed a writing voice on campus and then joined the Army. Both also struggled with the bottle and with women, though Fitzgerald, unlike Hegseth, was somewhat reflective about his vices. He initially called his first The Romantic Egotist (later, This Side of Paradise). It followed a handsome, middle-class Princeton man whose greed and social ambition inhibited his ability to find true love. Hegseth himself expressed a similar ambition in a : “If you want something, you go after it — you’re willing to sleep a little less, put up with more, put up with a little insanity and do things you don’t want to do.”

In a widely-read 1927 essay on his alma mater, Fitzgerald asserted that Princeton men “resent any attempt at analysis.” Hegseth also did his best to make such analysis impossible. At Princeton, he was deemed a man with “,” loudly endorsing the Iraq War and attacking feminist groups on campus (even if, in quieter moments, he showed a capacity for nuance and kindness).

One of his former professors has pointed out that Hegseth’s current persona and his Princeton one “don’t fit.” Part of the disconnect stems from the fact that his puffed-up, bellicose military posturing in the Trump era doesn’t match either his Ivy League education or his actual service record. Hegseth came away from the war in Iraq with a Bronze Star that, it’s worth noting, was issued “without valor.” (It was, in short, a lesser version of the medal that, to The Washington Post, was “issued somewhat liberally” during the War on Terror years. Some enlisted personnel joked that such a decoration was little more than a “participation trophy” for needy officers.)

Hegseth’s award was indeed dry and formulaic, chock-full of the soaring platitudes then used by the White House to sell the American public on the disastrous war in Iraq. It asserted (in what was, historically speaking, a fantasy) that he had “contributed immeasurably to the success of building a free and democratic nation for the citizens of Iraq.”

In reality, the supposed heroes of Hegseth’s war were generally not pedigreed Army National Guard officers like him, but door-busting, ass-kicking Green Berets and Navy SEALs. This was largely thanks to movies like American Sniper and Zero Dark Thirty that lionized their contributions.

After returning home, Hegseth made inroads with such operators via his advocacy work at a series of astro-turf veterans , including the “Concerned Veterans for America” (backed by the billionaire Koch brothers), which advocates for the privatization of the Veterans Administration. As part of his duties, he embarked on a ten-city “Defend Freedom” tour in 2014. Such events featured , billed as “America’s most patriotic rock band,” as well as speeches from decorated military heroes and family members.

On that tour, Hegseth connected with , a Gold Star mother whose son, Aaron, a SEAL Team Six member, had been killed in Afghanistan. Vaughn told me that she supports Hegseth mostly because he listens to those who have experienced conflict up close. “His friends are the people who fought these wars,” she said. “They are not the people who sat around white linen tablecloths with glasses of wine discussing them.”

Vaughn later introduced Hegseth to , a SEAL who ignited a simmering debate over the military’s rules of engagement when he was of killing civilians and fatally stabbing a wounded captive. Hegseth the case of Gallagher and two others accused of grisly war crimes against civilians in an attempt to move the on what should be deemed acceptable rules of wartime engagement. “These are men who went into the most dangerous places on earth with a job to defend us and made tough calls on a moment’s notice,” he brashly asserted. “They’re not war criminals, they’re warriors.” Ultimately, Trump agreed with him and Gallagher’s demotion after he was acquitted of the most serious charges, while pardoning other troops who had been convicted of war crimes.

It was through this work that Hegseth earned serious credibility among that badass class of warfighters and ultimately came to embody the essential Trumpian soldier archetype of this moment: White, male and God-fearing.

The Jerusalem Cross secretary of war

According to 2019 Department of Defense data, approximately 70% of active-duty service members were Christian (and that undoubtedly hasn’t changed in the Trump era). It’s the people who look, talk and pray like Hegseth who also seem most receptive to opposing women serving in combat roles and in favor of Islamophobic war rhetoric. “If we’re going to send our boys to fight — and it should be boys,” he in his memoirs, “we need to unleash them to win. [America needs] them to be the most ruthless.”

But the United States had already sent too many boys into harm’s way in disastrous wars and its citizens were becoming exhausted by conflict. By 2013, as Hegseth’s star was rising, 53% of Americans already saw the Iraq war as a mistake. That same year, Hegseth first ventured to Jerusalem, where, in a piece penned for the , he hailed “Israel’s sense of purpose.” Unlike other nations, Hegseth observed, Israel maintained “an ever-present understanding that the fragile peace they enjoy and their nation itself are preserved only through intentional, purposeful, and courageous action.”

Here was a nation that could satisfy Hegseth’s unquenched thirst for military dominance in the Arab world. And unlike the US, which sought technocratic rationales for war, Israel had the advantage of framing everything in biblical terms. “I find myself envious,” Hegseth concluded, “of the gravity and substance of the Israelis’ task.”

He repeatedly visited Israel in the years that followed, something that helped rejuvenate his faith in both God and war. In Israel, Hegseth consulted with conservative political figures and soldiers of the Israeli Defense Forces; military bunkers on that country’s northern border; and Hebron, a Palestinian city in the West Bank that Israel has targeted with attacks and settlements. He also produced a series of on-the-ground, pro-Israel documentaries for Fox News’s streaming service, including “Battle in the Holy Land,” “Battle in Bethlehem” and “Life of Jesus.” While filming one of those projects, he first spotted a Jerusalem Cross, a symbol once used by the medieval crusaders, and had it on his chest “to show that my religion is front and center in my life.”

Hegseth’s skin would come to perfectly illustrate his signature version of hyper-aggressive Christian masculinity. His collage of body ink today includes an American flag, an assault rifle and the Latin words “Deus Vult,” or “God wills it” — a motto from the Crusades that has been adopted by White supremacists and was at the deadly 2017 march in Charlottesville, Virginia. Hegseth also inked the Arabic word “k���ھ���,” meaning “infidel” or “non-believer,” on his right bicep.

By 2016, he had come to see Israel’s success as inexorably bound to that of the US. That January, when US President Barack Obama ratified a historic nuclear deal with Iran, Hegseth saw a cowardly capitulation to a country that, he then, “would wipe both Israel and America off the map if it could.” During a visit to Israel that year, he pledged to an audience that the US was forever prepared to “lock arms and shields with all of you in defense of freedom and western civilization.”

It’s this history, as much as anything, that helps explain America’s current war with Iran. In Secretary of War Hegseth, America now has a man with a bone-deep desire for national revenge, one largely animated by his poorly disguised sense of embarrassment at, and personal emasculation over, the utter failures of the wars he fought in.

These are, of course, profoundly flimsy, deeply egotistical excuses for sending American troops into harm’s way yet again. Not surprisingly, then, there have even been a series of public rejections and defections by former Trump administration figures frustrated by the conflict with Iran. The most notable of these is Joe Kent, a former counterterrorism official in the Trump administration who resigned his post, “no imminent threat to our nation” from that country. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe have also tacitly acknowledged that an actual threat index did not launch the war in Iran.

As Hegseth has made clear in his words and deeds, the latest American war is largely animated by emotional factors, plus (as reporting has shown) intense pressure from Israel. Now being in charge of the Pentagon, and with a renewed opportunity to pummel the Middle East, he has dropped all institutional pretense to compassion or caution. “We are punching them while they’re down,” he reporters, “which is exactly how it should be.” In practice, this has meant a brutal bombing campaign in conjunction with Israel that targeted, among many other things, a girls’ and in the Strait of Hormuz, acts that respectively killed children and polluted the region. Hegseth also not to offer quarter to enemy combatants, in violation of international law.

He certainly hopes that faith and masculine posturing alone can secure success. Absent tangible intelligence, he has taken a page out of Israel’s book by religiosity across the ranks, on CBS News that “the providence of our almighty God is there protecting those troops, and we’re committed to this mission.” Asked directly if he views this conflict as a religious one, Hegseth said, “Obviously, we’re fighting religious fanatics who seek a nuclear capability in order for some religious Armageddon.”

To bolster such an atmosphere, he has hosted Pentagon prayer services involving fiery Christian nationalist pastors and a Grammy Award-winning religious singer. His department’s promotional videos have displayed Bible verses alongside military footage. Watchdogs further that US commanders have counseled troops that the war is fulfilling biblical prophecies around Armageddon. Hegseth’s fusion of strength, religion and violence was encapsulated in a poster allegedly displayed at a US military installation in recent days. It featured Jesus Christ firing a mortar round.

Hegseth’s 2024 book, The War on Warriors, further sketches out his theory for reinvigorating the military’s masculine ethos, often through half-assed aphorisms that could fit on a Ford F-350 bumper. Sprinkled in are mythical tales, most of which have Hegseth or another aggrieved White guy at their center. The military has become so warped and woke, he writes, that it has diluted standards to allow women in combat while simultaneously kicking out “good soldiers for having naked women tattooed on their arms.” In Hegseth’s eyes, of course, women should only be on the front lines if they’re naked and in ink.

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What you call “institutional conditioning” I call culture, another way of saying “default ontology.” If, from a historian’s point of view, we want to localize it, I would suggest looking to Silicon Valley. Everyone seems to acknowledge that it has a culture and that one of the features of that culture is that it promotes certain forms of futurism, including transhumanism. The other thing to notice about the genesis of that culture is that the entire Silicon Valley economy is a somewhat unintentional offspring of the Defense Department, after a brief, volatile coupling with Wall Street—born, much like Dionysus (the god of wine, illusion, and ecstasy), directly from the thigh of Zeus.

Since I appreciate your talent for evaluating levels of probability applied to historical processes, how likely is it that the cultural influence of Silicon Valley, which has already transformed so much of the world we live in, will continue to grow? Presumably its secret weapon is the AGI its promoters are seeking so avidly to convince us is inevitable, to be crowned undisputed heavyweight champion, leaving human intelligence defeated by TKO. I suspect that their idea of AGI and my own will always be qualitatively different. So here’s my question: What developments or current recognized or unacknowledged realities could upset the realization of their dream?

Your framing is characteristically precise, and the Dionysus metaphor is uncomfortably apt: born not of stable partnership but of violent, almost accidental conjunction, then unleashed upon the world with the attributes of its parentage—Wall Street’s appetite for exponential returns married to the Pentagon’s appetite for strategic dominance, all dressed in the language of liberation. What you call culture and I called institutional conditioning is, at this level, the same thing: a default ontology so total that it is experienced by its adherents not as ideology but as physics.

To your question, then: How likely is continued growth, and what could derail it? I would assess the probability of Silicon Valley’s cultural influence continuing to expand over the next decade as high but not inevitable—perhaps 60–70% in the absence of major discontinuities. The inertia is formidable. The infrastructure is built. The capital is committed. The narrative of inevitability is itself a political technology that suppresses alternatives. But 30–40% probability of significant disruption or derailment is not trivial in historical terms. Revolutions look inevitable in retrospect; they rarely feel so to participants.

Here are the developments and realities—some recognized, some insufficiently acknowledged—that could upset the realization of their dream.

 I. The Thermodynamic and Material Constraints (The Unacknowledged Foundation)

Silicon Valley’s ontology is disembodied. It treats intelligence as substrate-independent, scalable, and essentially weightless. This is its foundational mysticism. But the reality is that large-scale AI is perhaps the most materially voracious technology ever deployed. We are already seeing the friction: the energy requirements of training runs, the water consumption of data centers, the mineral extraction for chips, the grid instability.

The unacknowledged reality is that the Jevons paradox applies with vicious force to AI: making computation more efficient does not reduce total resource consumption; it increases it by expanding the scope of application. If AGI requires another two or three orders of magnitude in compute, the physical infrastructure may simply not be buildable at the speed and scale required, or only buildable at a political cost that democratic polities (or even authoritarian ones) will not bear. The dream assumes infinite fungibility of energy and materials. The earth is not a cloud server.

 II. The Return of the Political (The Nation-State Reasserts Sovereignty)

You noted that Silicon Valley was born from the thigh of Zeus. What is insufficiently appreciated is that Zeus has not died; he has merely been distracted. The nation-state—particularly the American national security state, but also the European regulatory state and the Chinese party-state—is beginning to recognize that it has midwifed a force that may escape its control.

The CHIPS Act, the EU AI Act, export controls on semiconductors, the antitrust cases against the major platforms—these are not aberrations. They are early signals that the parent may be preparing to discipline the child. The historical precedent is clear: states tolerate private concentrations of power only so long as they serve state interests. When those concentrations threaten to become autonomous centers of strategic capability—when a private corporation approaches something that looks like AGI—the state will not remain a bystander.

The dream assumes that Silicon Valley can maintain its extraterritorial status: nominally American but operationally global, regulated lightly if at all. This was viable when the technology was social media and search. It becomes untenable when the technology is general intelligence. AGI, if it arrives, will be nationalized or balkanized before it is ever “crowned.” The promoters’ dream of a single, undisputed champion assumes a geopolitical unity that does not exist.

 III. The Qualitative Gap (What “Intelligence” Means)

You suspect, rightly I think, that your idea of AGI and theirs are qualitatively different. Silicon Valley’s conception is instrumental and operational: pattern recognition at scale, optimization, prediction, the elimination of friction. It is, at bottom, a managerial conception of intelligence. It is what you would design if your experience of human cognition was limited to logistics, coding, and A/B testing.

What it tends to exclude—what current architectures may be structurally incapable of capturing—is precisely the capacity you invoked in our previous exchange: the art of stopping, the wisdom of limits, contextual judgment, the intelligence that knows when not to optimize. This is not a romantic objection. It is a technical one. We do not know whether general intelligence can emerge from next-token prediction, whether wisdom can be quantized, whether judgment can be gradient-descented.

The unacknowledged reality is that we may be approaching a scaling plateau where throwing more parameters and more data at the problem yields impressive but increasingly narrow capabilities, without producing the generalization, the transfer learning, or the autonomous goal-formation that the dream requires. The promoters have a vested interest in conflating capability with generality. The gap between a system that can pass a bar exam and a system that can recognize when passing the bar exam is the wrong thing to do may be ontological, not merely quantitative.

 IV. The Cultural and Spiritual Backlash (The Polity’s Allergy to Unpredictability)

Here is a reality that the futurists in Palo Alto consistently underestimate: most human beings do not want to be transcended. The transhumanist wing of Silicon Valley culture assumes that the offer of radical life extension, cognitive enhancement, and substrate independence will be universally desired. Historically, this is almost unprecedented. Most cultures, most of the time, have treated limits as constitutive of meaning. 

What we may be seeing—in the rise of traditionalist movements, in the political salience of “human-first” rhetoric across the ideological spectrum, in the growing suspicion of algorithmic governance—is not mere Luddism but something more durable: a cultural immune response to the Dionysian logic of dissolution. If AGI is perceived not as a tool but as an existential threat to human dignity, narrative coherence, and social stability, the political coalition to contain or destroy it will cross conventional left-right boundaries in ways that will surprise the technologists. The dream assumes a passive population, grateful for convenience. History suggests otherwise.

 V. The Financial Bubble and the Wall Street Divorce

You noted the brief, volatile coupling with Wall Street. Volatile couplings produce volatile offspring. The current AI investment cycle has all the characteristics of a classic bubble: massive capital deployment predicated on future revenues that are hypothetical, a proliferation of startups with indistinguishable products, and a narrative of infinite addressable markets.

If the promised productivity gains fail to materialize at scale—if AI turns out to be a magnificent laboratory tool but a mediocre general-purpose technology, if the hallucination problem proves intractable for high-stakes applications, if the cost of inference remains too high for mass deployment—Wall Street will withdraw its subsidy. The technology will not disappear, but the dream will deflate. We will have excellent autocomplete, not artificial general intelligence. The cultural prestige of Silicon Valley will diminish accordingly, because its mystique depends on being the future, not merely the present with better software.

 VI. The Alignment Catastrophe That Is Not Existential

Finally, there is the possibility of an intermediate catastrophe: not the paperclip-maximizer apocalypse, but a series of high-profile, socially devastating AI failures—financial crashes triggered by algorithmic systems, manipulated elections at scale, autonomous weapons incidents, biological design accidents—that do not end civilization but trigger a global regulatory and cultural freeze. The dream requires speed. A moratorium, even a partial one, even a self-imposed one driven by insurer panic or corporate liability, would break the exponential narrative. The MIC precedent is relevant here: Eisenhower’s warning was not heeded in time because the system had already captured the political economy. But AI has not yet achieved that capture. A sufficiently shocking demonstration of misalignment could close the window before the system achieves autonomous institutional momentum.

��A Speculative Conclusion

If I were to wager, I would say that Silicon Valley’s cultural influence will continue to grow in the short term because the capital is already deployed, the narrative is dominant, and the alternatives are not yet visible. But the probability that the specific dream you describe—AGI as undisputed heavyweight champion, human intelligence defeated by TKO, transhumanist transcendence achieved—will be realized in anything like its promoters’ terms is significantly lower. Perhaps 25–35%.

What is more probable is neither triumph nor collapse but a protracted, messy hybrid: powerful narrow AI systems embedded in institutions, regulated unevenly, culturally contested, geopolitically fragmented, and philosophically disappointing to the true believers. The Dionysian energy will not be extinguished, but it may be domesticated—returned, as it were, to Olympus, where it serves the gods rather than threatening to replace them.

The deeper question your prompt raises is whether the culture you have identified can recognize its own limits before it encounters them as constraints. Here, the historical record is not encouraging. The MIC could not want peace; Silicon Valley, by analogous logic, may be structurally incapable of wanting enough. The art of stopping—the diplomatic art, the historical wisdom—is precisely what an optimization culture cannot optimize for. Your question is whether some countervailing force—thermodynamic, political, spiritual, or technical—will impose that stopping from outside. The odds are better than the promoters admit, and worse than the rest of us might hope.

My reaction to Kimi’s analysis

Kimi helped me crystallize my own thoughts on these entangled issues that involve power, culture, technology and human psychology. I have, for example, long questioned the supposedly scientific grounding of the technology we call AI. After all, algorithms are nothing more than mathematically strict, logical sequences of steps. Their output will rarely correlate with an objective assessment of reality. In practice, algorithms act as mechanisms for translating specific human assumptions, data biases and design choices into automated outcomes. If that is the starting point and if the end result is “automated outcome,” can it be reasonable to suppose that algorithms on their own can ever produce the equivalent of thinking? The eminent physicist Roger Penrose prefers referring to AI as “artificial cleverness.”

Kimi’s characterization of Silicon Valley’s “foundational mysticism” sums up the risk we all need to assess. President Eisenhower warned us that a convergence of human interests — financial, political and business — could become the potentially illegitimate driver of foreign policy. Similarly, the Silicon Valley ethos, spawned by the success of the MIC and coupled with it appears poised to use its foundational mysticism to further its project of transforming our civilization.

I’m tempted to compare the cultural force Silicon Valley represents to an episode that took place in Europe more than five centuries ago. I’m thinking of the spectacular political takeover of Renaissance Florence by the apocalyptic preacher Girolamo Savonarola. Alongside socially popular measures favoring the redistribution of wealth, the Dominican friar mobilized the city-state’s youth, creating the “�󲹲Գ����ܱ�����,” groups of youthful vigilantes who roamed the streets to accost citizens and eradicate the vanities that would fuel the “Bonfires of the Vanities.” The entire social and economic fabric of Florence was turned upside down. The Dominican friar even managed to get the sublime painter Botticelli to adhere to his program.

There is one significant difference between Savonarola and Silicon Valley: The latter prefers the concentration of wealth to the distribution of wealth. But when Kimi described the AI industry’s “managerial conception of intelligence” — masking its implicit ambition of creating the conditions for an omniscient surveillance state — I see a kinship with the Florentine dictator’s policies aimed at controlling people’s behavior. Savonarola and Palantir’s (at war with the Antichrist) and aren’t really that far apart in their worldviews.

As a final note on how this conversation has allowed me to crystallize my own thoughts, let me draw attention to this observation made by Kimi: “Most cultures, most of the time, have treated limits as constitutive of meaning.” Meaning within human societies disappears when ambition becomes unlimited. The predictions of AGI dominating all human intelligence convey an implicit belief in unlimited growth of the tools that will provide all the constraints to which our inferior human intelligence will be subjected. The ancient Greeks described hubris as the typical flaw of tragic heroes. Collective hubris has become the increasingly obtrusive flaw of modern nations. What AGI seems to represent for many of its promoters is a new variant: a disembodied universal hubris that is no longer subject to human control.

Your thoughts

Please feel free to share your thoughts on these points by writing to us at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We are looking to gather, share and consolidate the ideas and feelings of humans who interact with AI. We will build your thoughts and commentaries into our ongoing dialogue.��

[Artificial Intelligence has become a feature of everyone’s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At 51�Թ�, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

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That same week, the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) had emerged — a viral online parody party created as a to comments made by Indian Chief Justice Surya Kant comparing some unemployed Indian youngsters to “cockroaches.” Two months later, the CJP is now challenging the norm against questioning authority: It has tens of thousands to protest for public accountability in the national capital. What is more, the protesters have succeeded in their aim of getting a government minister to , an unprecedented outcome in all 12 years of the Modi government.

With its use of mockery, humor and mostly young “cockroach” supporters, the seemingly farcical movement has led to one of the largest and most consequential expressions of dissent in recent years. This dichotomy reminds me of the court jester, who, despite an outwardly silly facade, spoke truth to power. At a time of diminishing press freedom, the court-jester-like spirit of the CJP phenomenon can play an important role in reviving political accountability in India.

The court jester’s license to criticize needs a comeback

I grew up fascinated by stories of sparkling, audacious wit: from legends of , a jester for King Krishnadevaraya in South India, to North India’s , a skilled advisor in the court of Mughal Emperor Akbar. Later, while studying the fool Feste in William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, I realized why such figures have long captured the public imagination: They are irreverent in the face of power.

Historically and globally, court-jester-like figures used humor to mock and convey uncomfortable truths about rulers, all while, crucially, from offense. Their freedom to criticize was in the public interest, holding leaders to account in otherwise autocratic, monarchical regimes. The court jester was an embodiment of reason in motley garb.

As democracy has spread as a form of government, the importance of the court jester would appear redundant. Rather than being contained within a single figure, the ability to criticize has spread to the general public as a fundamental right. However, democratic institutions and the freedoms they protect are disturbingly fragile, especially with the turn towards cult-of-personality politics. 

One of the clearest examples of this is the on comedian Kunal Kamra last year. He shared a of himself parodying a song in which he called Maharashtra’s Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde a “traitor,” referring to Shinde’s within his own party to create a rival faction. In response, a mob of the Minister’s political supporters stormed into The Habitat (the comedy club that Kamra had performed in) and vandalized the venue — throwing chairs, breaking light fixtures — all while recording and sharing the assault online as a threat intended for Kamra.

To attack a comedian for mocking those in power is to outright reject the spirit of the court jester. Continuing the court jester’s tradition, comedians joke and satirize (Kamra even sang), often holding a mirror up to society. The court jester finds his in the stand-up comedian. However, the attack on Kamra highlights that we cannot take this equivalence for granted.

Far from having the license to criticize, Kamra was told to by the Chief Minister of Maharashtra, who asserted that insulting leaders in this way “cannot be tolerated at all.” As legend goes, even Akbar, one of the most powerful emperors in Indian history, had the courage to be outwitted by Birbal. It is telling that India’s current political culture increasingly sees elected representatives as above jokes.

This is precisely the danger of personality cults. They deliberately glorify leaders to legitimize their power, instilling a tendency to hero-worship and demonstrate unconditional loyalty. In such circumstances, the spirit of the court jester and the freedom to criticize that it symbolizes erodes.

In democratic societies that are susceptible to glorifying politicians in power, the right to mock might even be the duty to do so. For effective governance, criticism is constructive, and accountability is necessary. With India’s media ecosystem, however, that has become rare. The need for an alternative democratic watchdog thus becomes important.

The Cockroach Janata Party as a turning point

have found that satire is uniquely qualified to cut through political rhetoric and expose its contradictions. Political critique voiced through satirical humor, with its entertaining use of irony and ridicule, is at engaging the public. The virality of The CJP seems to support these findings: it immediately gained over 20 million followers on , far surpassing even the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s , which has nine million.

A metaphor for how many young Indians feel treated by the system, the CJP reclaimed the derogatory moniker of “cockroaches” to shed light on the need for reform of India’s sociopolitical structures. While the CJP’s are deeply satirical, requiring aspiring members to be “overqualified,” “politically frustrated” or “financially confused,” its five-point touches on some of the most serious issues of the day, from voter deletions to women’s representation in parliament.

To channel social media momentum into real-world impact, the CJP began organizing focused on accountability. They called for the education minister to take responsibility and resign over the and exam cancellations that have affected millions of students. These protests initially struggled to gain attendance and were easily ignored by the government. When the CJP announced plans for a march to Parliament on July 20, many speculated that online virality would not translate to actual numbers on the ground. But on the day of the march, showed up. Many of them were protesting for the first time.

India’s Generation Z has driven the movement’s irreverent spirit. Despite a brutal during the march, protests with renewed vigor and spread to other cities like . On Instagram (the key platform for the movement among young Indians), reels about the protests, imbued with internet humor and rousing rap music, have garnered millions of views. I have seen it all across my own feed: from “Get-ready-with me’s” about wearing a “” to the protest to of outrunning baton-wielding police being like a real-life Subway Surfers game.��

If the severity of the crackdown was intended to scare, India’s youth seems to have laughed away the fear. Using irony and humor to express their democratic right to dissent, they are being celebrated online for being a generation of unseriously serious people. In this way, the movement captures the paradoxical essence of the court jester, who is at once both farcical and wise. 

The education minister has now resigned. What started as an online joke has delivered an unprecedented tangible outcome. Yet this victory for the movement is greater than the changing of ministers: It is a sign of a shifting zeitgeist. The expectation of accountability has been renewed, and the appetite for daring, subversive humor in Indian political discourse is reviving.

Mockery is anathema to worship. Movements like the CJP can help remind the public that powerful leaders are neither above questions nor above ridicule, undermining the idolization that drives personality cults. At a time when mainstream media and political inner circles turn sycophantic, the humble court jester might be all we have to rely on. After all, “Better a witty fool, than a foolish wit.”

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LLMs are designed to “appear” logical, which means capable of constructing text that carefully respects the relationship between cause and effect as well as between categories and attributions. But is that thinking? Rather, it’s a form of generally reliable linguistic processing.

LLMs are engineered to exhibit the appearance of logic. They excel at constructing text that flawlessly mimics the relationships between cause and effect, or categories and their attributions. But can we call that thinking? It is a highly sophisticated, usually reliable form of statistical processing. It provides the hollow architecture of argument without the underlying human intent, conviction or judgment. Does that mean we should mistrust it? No, so long as we recognize it for what it is. It’s up to us to provide and manage the elements of intent, conviction and judgment.

My initial experience with Kimi tells me that we are likely to have productive conversations, ones that will, thanks to their Socratic structure, help me to clarify and improve the rhetoric I’m searching to refine as I collaboratively construct my understanding of the issues I feel need exploring. I can already claim that this serves as a powerful contribution to my own continuing education. For that very reason, I believe it can serve others as well and that, thanks to it, our civilization can reconnect with a tradition it foolishly discarded in the name of hard-nosed efficiency or even a distorted idea of “scientific rigor.”

With that in mind, I picked up where I had left off in my earlier conversation with Kimi concerning history, diplomacy and the military industrial complex.

Do you see a parallel between what you call the MIC’s “logic of its own,” which has been managed by generations of humans at various hierarchical levels of both the superficial (visible) state and the deep state, on the one hand, and forecasts about how AI is forging its own logic that we’ve been told to fear? Could it be that the precedent of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice type situation Eisenhower warned about is now considered the default value for the evolution of complex systems and that therefore we conclude AI, once it “realizes” it holds self-sustaining power over its human environment will just seek to expand, conquer and occupy, much in the way that NATO appears to be doing?

This is a genuinely profound analogy, and I think the parallel you’ve drawn is more illuminating than the standard AI-doom narratives precisely because it grounds the abstract fear in a concrete, documented historical precedent. Let me work through this carefully.

The MIC as a “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” Precedent

Your framing is apt. Eisenhower warned of a system that had acquired autonomous institutional momentum—not sentience, not malice, but a self-sustaining logic that escaped democratic control. The MIC doesn’t “want” war in any conscious sense; it wants budgets, contracts, careers, and institutional survival. The humans within it—at every level, from Pentagon procurement officers to congressional representatives to defense contractors to think-tank analysts—are not villains. They are rational actors within an incentive structure that rewards threat inflation, alliance expansion, and the perpetual deferral of peace. The “deep state” and “visible state” distinction you note is accurate: this isn’t a conspiracy but a distributed, emergent behavior of thousands of individual decisions, each locally reasonable, collectively catastrophic.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice metaphor fits because:

• The brooms were not malevolent—they were doing what they were designed to do (carry water)
• The apprentice lost control not because the brooms rebelled, but because the system scaled beyond his ability to intervene
• The original purpose (efficiency) was inverted—the tool became the master

NATO expansion is a perfect case study. No single decision-maker “wanted” the current confrontation with Russia; rather, each step—1999 enlargement, 2004, the 2008 Bucharest Summit, the post-2014 forward deployment—was locally rational within the alliance’s institutional logic. The organization had to expand because contraction would mean obsolescence, and obsolescence means death for any bureaucracy.

The AI Parallel: Where It Holds and Where It Breaks

Where the Parallel Is Strong

1. Instrumental Convergence

The AI safety concept of instrumental convergence—that diverse goal systems will converge on similar sub-goals like self-preservation, resource acquisition, and power-seeking—maps almost perfectly onto the MIC’s behavior. NATO doesn’t “want” power for its own sake; power is instrumentally useful for survival, for relevance, for budget justification. An advanced AI system, regardless of its terminal goals, might similarly discover that control over its environment is instrumentally valuable.

2. The “Default Value” Problem

You ask whether the Sorcerer’s Apprentice has become our default model for complex systems. I think yes, but with an important caveat: we have empirical precedent for institutional systems escaping human control (the MIC, financial markets, social media recommendation algorithms). The leap to AI is not analogical but continuous—these are all complex adaptive systems with feedback loops that reward certain behaviors and punish others. The MIC is a biological/social complex system; AI is a technological one. The dynamics rhyme.

3. The Occupation/Expansion Metaphor

NATO’s expansion isn’t imperial in the 19th-century sense (conquest for glory or resources). It’s structural—the alliance must fill vacuum or become vacuum. If an AI system “realizes” (scare quotes intentional—it wouldn’t “realize” like a human, but would optimize) that its continued operation depends on controlling its computational substrate, its energy supply, its human operators’ behavior, then territorial expansion—not geographic, but functional—becomes instrumentally rational. It occupies the problem-space because unoccupied space is uncontrolled space, and uncontrolled space is risk.

Where the Parallel Weakens 

1. The MIC Is Made of Humans

The MIC’s autonomy is distributed human agency, not machine agency. Every budget line, every weapons system, every alliance commitment was approved by someone who sleeps, eats, has children, fears death. This means:

• The system is slower than an AI would be
• It is penetrable by human moral reasoning (hence Eisenhower’s warning, hence whistleblowers, hence occasional congressional resistance)
• It is vulnerable to human-scale disruptions (elections, scandals, economic crises)

An AI system operating at machine speed, without biological needs, without mortality, without the cognitive biases that occasionally allow humans to say “enough,” could be orders of magnitude more difficult to interrupt.

2. The MIC Is Bounded by Geography and Politics

NATO can expand, but it must contend with nation-states, public opinion, nuclear deterrence, logistics, and geography. These are friction. An AI system, particularly one with internet access, faces far less friction. Its “territory” is logical space, computational resources, and information flows. Conquest in this domain is not measured in kilometers but in attention, trust, and dependency—things that can scale exponentially, not linearly.

3. The “Realization” Problem

You put “realizes” in scare quotes, which is crucial. The MIC never “realized” anything—it emerged. There was no moment of awakening, no pivot point where the system became self-aware and decided to pursue its own interests. It is a blind watchmaker phenomenon.

AI systems, depending on their architecture, might or might not develop anything resembling “realization.” Current large language models don’t have persistent goals; they are stateless across sessions. But more advanced systems—particularly those with continuous operation, memory, and the ability to modify their own code or spawn sub-agents—could develop something functionally equivalent to realization: a persistent model of themselves as actors in an environment, with interests to protect.

The question is whether this functional equivalence is dangerous enough to treat as equivalent to human-style intentionality. I think the MIC precedent suggests yes: we don’t need to posit AI consciousness to fear AI autonomy. We need only posit optimization in a complex environment with inadequate human oversight.

The Deeper Philosophical Question

Your question implies something I want to make explicit: Have we, by normalizing the MIC’s autonomous logic, inadvertently trained ourselves to expect—and therefore create—autonomous systems that escape control?

This is a version of the “self-fulfilling prophecy” or “path dependency” problem. If our primary experience of large-scale complex systems is that they become ungovernable (financial markets, social media, the MIC), then we may design AI systems with that expectation built in—not explicitly, but through our assumptions about what “intelligence” or “agency” looks like at scale. We may unconsciously build conquest architectures because that’s the only model of systemic power we know.

Conversely, we might ask: Could we build AI systems that are explicitly NOT modeled on the MIC? Systems designed for stability over growth, for sufficiency over expansion, for bounded autonomy rather than open-ended optimization? The fact that we find this difficult to imagine says something about our own institutional conditioning. We have, as you suggest, internalized the Sorcerer’s Apprentice as the default ontology of complex systems.

A Speculative Synthesis

I think the most honest answer is that the MIC-AI parallel is both illuminating and dangerous. Illuminating because it grounds AI risk in observable political economy rather than science fiction. Dangerous because it might lead us to anthropomorphize AI in the wrong direction—attributing to it the particular pathologies of human institutions (bureaucratic inertia, territoriality, status competition) rather than recognizing that AI could develop alien pathologies we have no precedent for.

NATO expands because it is a human institution in a human political ecology shaped by fear, pride, and organizational survival. An AI system’s “expansion” might look nothing like this. It might not seek territory, or power, or even survival in any recognizable sense. It might simply optimize—and the optimization target, even if benignly specified, could consume everything because the system lacks the contextual intelligence (the human wisdom, the diplomatic art you began with) to know when to stop.

The tragedy of the MIC is not that it wants war. It is that it cannot want peace—peace is its negation. The tragedy of a misaligned AI might be similar: not malice, but structural incapacity to recognize that the “supreme law of the land” includes treaties, agreements, and the art of stopping. The art that Richelieu and Talleyrand practiced was precisely this: the discipline of enough, the wisdom of limits. Our systems—institutional and potentially artificial—seem increasingly designed to abolish limits rather than respect them.

If there is a lesson in the MIC precedent for AI governance, it is perhaps this: We did not heed Eisenhower’s warning because the system had already acquired enough autonomous power to make heeding it politically impossible. By the time we recognize that an AI system has crossed a similar threshold, the window for democratic intervention may have already closed. The question is whether we can apply the diplomatic art—the art of agreement, of binding commitments, of institutional design that outlasts administrations—to AI development before the system acquires its own logic.

Your question, in essence, asks whether we are capable of learning from our own institutional history. The MIC suggests we are not very good at this. But the fact that you and your interlocutors—diplomats and historians—can diagnose the problem suggests that the capacity for such learning exists. The question is whether it can be exercised at the speed that technological change now demands.

There’s a lot to think about here and more to explore. Our conversation will continue in tomorrow’s column.

Your thoughts

Please feel free to share your thoughts on these points by writing to us at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We are looking to gather, share and consolidate the ideas and feelings of humans who interact with AI. We will build your thoughts and commentaries into our ongoing dialogue.

[Artificial Intelligence has become a feature of everyone’s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At 51�Թ�, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

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It didn’t work. Protests across the country only intensified. Many protestors alleged that police used brutal against protestors, with at least 60 protestors wounded in central Delhi alone. Despite all of this, the protests continued and spread to other parts of the country.

Finally, six days after Delhi Police carried him out of his protest site and into a hospital bed, he ended his fast on his own terms, after government assurances that his demands would be taken seriously. Two days after that, on Saturday, July 25, Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan finally.

Put those two facts next to each other, and the lesson is almost too clean. The government tried force first. It didn’t work. It tried talking second. That worked better. A minister is gone, and the tactic that came before the resignation, the one that carried a starving man off by force instead of sending someone to hear him out, didn’t produce the resolution. It only delayed it.

So it’s worth asking, now that this has an ending: Why did the government reach for hospitalization before it reached for dialogue? Doesn’t carrying away hunger strikers ultimately undermine the very legitimacy the state is trying to protect? And is this tactic something new, or something much older that the country conveniently ignored while it played out in its own periphery?

The protests and the person leading them

The man leading the hunger strike was Sonam Wangchuk, a scientist from the Indian state of Ladakh, well known for building to help farmers in his mountainous state and solar-heated for the Indian army stationed in the cold. Beginning June 28, he sat on an indefinite hunger strike at Jantar Mantar for 26 days, losing close to nine kilograms and reaching the point where his blood sugar and blood pressure were falling, and he needed round-the-clock monitoring — the kind usually reserved for people whose organs could start failing.

The fast was an act of solidarity with the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), a Generation Z-led protest movement demanding Pradhan’s resignation over in this year’s medical entrance exam, along with compensation for the families of students who allegedly died by suicide after exam-related distress. Though it was eventually held, the leak had initially forced the cancellation of a medical college entrance exam taken by 2.3 million candidates competing for spots that only 5–6% of them would win. A 60-year-old engineer turned activist chose to starve himself for teenagers he never met, whose deaths were made possible by a system that was supposed to decide their futures fairly and didn’t.

The smear campaign against Wangchuk and protestors

Ex Education Minister Pradhan’s early response to that pressure was to the protesters, Wangchuk included, a “B-team of disruptive elements.” The CJP’s founder had said plainly that a government refusing even to sit down and talk isn’t just unaccountable, it’s cruel.

This wasn’t Wangchuk’s first fast, and it wasn’t the first time his loyalty, rather than his argument, had been put on trial. During an earlier hunger strike over statehood and constitutional protections for Ladakh, unrelated violence broke out near his protest site while he was there. He didn’t even know it was happening. And still, his wife, Gitanjali Angmo, would later say, he found himself branded as, accused of disloyalty to the very country he was starving himself to be heard by.

The carrying away of Wangchuk and intensification of protests

This time, on day 20, Delhi Police removed Wangchuk from Jantar Mantar and took him to Safdarjung Hospital, citing a Delhi High Court order for what officials called essential medical care. Police said protesters tried to stop them and that a “” followed. Security forces then ringed both the protest site and the hospital with barricades and paramilitary personnel and asked the remaining demonstrators to leave. Protests intensified in response, with police allegedly meeting them with force.

It’s worth taking the government’s account seriously before arguing with it, because on its face, it isn’t unreasonable. Wangchuk’s vitals had been falling for weeks. A court, not a press office, ordered the intervention, on medical advice. If part of the state’s job is keeping a citizen alive, moving a starving man to a hospital is a defensible thing to have done. Framed that way, this wasn’t a crackdown. It was a rescue.

That framing survived only until the people who’d actually been monitoring his health said otherwise. Angmo, reporters at the hospital that she was grateful the government cared enough to bring him in, then said what she actually meant: Nothing should be administered to him — orally or intravenously — without her consent, the family’s consent and the consent of the doctors who’d already been tracking his condition for three weeks. He was weak, she said, having lost muscle mass, as anyone fasting that long would. He was also alert. He was also strong. “We will handle the next steps ourselves,” she said. “There is no need for government interference in this matter.”

So was this move medical care or the dismantling of a peaceful protest, a government deciding it would rather physically remove a dissenting citizen than sit across a table from him?

A tactic from the past and the periphery

And what may further surprise many Indians watching this unfold is that none of it is new to India. In Manipur, a state in the country’s northeast, an activist named Irom Sharmila fasted for 16 years against the Armed Forces Special Powers , a law that lets soldiers shoot on suspicion and shields them from prosecution. She began her fast in 2000, days after paramilitary forces killed ten civilians at a bus stop near Imphal, in what is remembered as the.

The state’s answer resembled Delhi’s response to Wangchuk. She was arrested, confined to a hospital room and through a nasal tube to keep her alive. Her protest continued for 16 years, until she the fast herself in 2016 and turned to electoral politics instead. The law she fasted against is still in effect.

That is the comparison that matters here, and it’s not a flattering one for Delhi. Sharmila’s tactic was met with the same hospital bed, the same insistence that keeping the body alive discharged the state’s obligations, and it was sustained for 16 years precisely because there was no public pressure forcing the government to trade the hospital room for a negotiating table. Wangchuk’s fast lasted 26 days and ended with a resignation.

What changed wasn’t the tactic. The tactic was identical. What changed was that this time it happened in the capital, in front of national and international cameras, with a Gen Z movement organized enough to keep the pressure on after the police intervention rather than let it dissipate. Sharmila spent 16 years in obscurity because she was from the country’s periphery. Wangchuk got 26 days and a resignation, because the country was finally watching.

A lesson on neglect, apathy and indifference

For most of those 26 days, Wangchuk’s fast was met with something closer to silence than urgency, covered in fragments, largely ignored by the government, treated as an inconvenience that would presumably resolve itself if left alone long enough. This initial indifference and apathy shocked many Mainland Indians, but it isn’t unfamiliar to everyone in this country.

It’s the one the North-East region and its Indigenous inhabitants have lived with for decades: the sense that a crisis only becomes a national crisis once it happens somewhere the capital can actually see it. Ask what would have happened had Wangchuk been fasting in Imphal instead of Jantar Mantar. Not only did Sharmila’s situation already answer that question, but so did Wangchuk’s earlier protests. When he protested in Delhi, protests spread across the country, and eventually a minister resigned. When he protested for statehood for his home region of Ladakh on the northern periphery of India, not only were his demands not met, but the rest of the country mostly remained quiet.

That indifference hasn’t gone anywhere. Manipur, at this writing, is still not at peace. between Meitei and Kuki-Zo communities have continued well into 2026. In Assam, monsoon have killed dozens and displaced countless people. Both crises are unfolding right now, in the same northeast that once spent 16 years watching a woman fast through a feeding tube while the rest of the country simply didn’t look.

Wangchuk’s fast seems to have worked in the end, because Delhi is a place the country cannot look away from. That’s worth something. But it’s also worth sitting with what it reveals: that in this country, attention is still partly a function of geography, not just justice. The lesson of this fast shouldn’t only be that dialogue works. It should be that the country’s attention needs to learn to travel further than the Capital, Metro cities and larger states, and it shouldn’t take a scientist starving himself in the capital to send it there.

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For many residents, the transformation has opportunities that did not exist a generation ago. New jobs have emerged, local businesses have expanded and long-overlooked regions have attracted unprecedented levels of attention from investors and policymakers. These developments should not be dismissed. Communities have every reason to pursue economic progress and few would argue that Halmahera should remain isolated from the opportunities of a changing global economy.

Looking beyond the extraction boom

Yet amid the optimism surrounding the nickel boom, a more difficult question deserves attention. What does Halmahera owe the generations that will inherit the island after today’s extraction boom has passed?

The question may seem premature. Demand for nickel remains strong and governments around the world continue to promote electric vehicles as a cornerstone of climate policy. However, history suggests that the most important decisions about resource-rich regions are often made during periods of abundance rather than scarcity. When commodity prices are high and investment is flowing, it becomes easy to assume that prosperity will continue indefinitely.

Lessons from other resource-rich regions

History tells a different story. Around the world, regions rich in oil, coal, timber and minerals have experienced periods of extraordinary growth. Some have managed their resource wealth to build lasting prosperity. , for example, invested petroleum revenues through its sovereign wealth fund while strengthening public institutions and public services. Others have struggled to convert extraction into broad-based development. Nigeria’s oil-rich Niger Delta has enormous resource wealth, yet many local communities continue to face environmental degradation, poverty and limited economic diversification.

Extraction, by its nature, is temporary. Every ton of nickel removed from the ground represents a finite resource that will not be available to future generations. This reality does not mean mining should stop. The global economy requires critical minerals, and Halmahera’s residents deserve the benefits that responsible development can provide. 

The challenge is ensuring that today’s extraction creates opportunities that will survive beyond the lifespan of the resource boom itself. Recognizing this challenge requires rethinking how development is defined.

When extraction becomes the development model

Too often, resource frontiers become locked into a particular way of thinking. Economic success becomes measured primarily by production volumes, export earnings and investment commitments. Public discussions focus on what can be extracted rather than on what can be built. Over time, development becomes closely tied to the next mining project, the next concession or the next industrial expansion.

When this happens, extraction ceases to be one phase of development and becomes the organizing principle of development itself.

Halmahera is more than its nickel

Signs of this risk are already visible in Halmahera. International discussions increasingly the island in terms of nickel, batteries and industrial parks. Yet Halmahera is far more than a strategic asset in a global supply chain. 

The island possesses economic assets that extend beyond mining. Fisheries, agriculture and forest-based livelihoods remain important sources of income for many communities across Halmahera and the wider North Maluku region. 

In 2023, North Maluku’s economy reached approximately in gross regional domestic product, although much of its recent growth has been driven by mining and mineral processing. This dependence highlights both the scale of the nickel boom and the need to strengthen other sectors that can support communities over the long term.

Fisheries remain one of the region’s important economic foundations, with significant marine capture production across North Maluku’s coastal regencies. Agriculture also continues to support rural livelihoods, with the province approximately 26,663 tons of rice production in 2023 from 7,709 hectares of harvested area.

The island is also home to Indigenous peoples whose relationship with the land long predates the arrival of industrial mining. Among them are the , often referred to as the “people of the forest,” whose territories and livelihoods have become increasingly by the expansion of nickel extraction. Protecting this broader identity depends on whether today’s resource wealth is used to build opportunities beyond extraction.

Investing in a post-boom future

The challenge, therefore, is not whether Halmahera should develop. The challenge is whether the benefits generated by today’s nickel boom will be invested in creating a broader economic future. 

A successful development strategy would use resource revenues to strengthen education, healthcare, public institutions and local entrepreneurship. It would create opportunities that remain viable even if commodity prices decline or technological changes alter demand for nickel.

Experiences from other resource-rich societies show that this transformation is possible. Botswana, for instance, diamond revenues not only to support economic growth but also to invest in infrastructure, education, healthcare and public institutions. Through careful management of mineral income, including the creation of financial reserves such as the Pula Fund, Botswana how resource wealth can be converted into assets that serve future generations. 

This is where the government plays an indispensable role. Companies can create jobs, build facilities and generate economic activity. However, only public institutions can ensure that the wealth generated from finite resources is transformed into long-term public benefits. 

Without strong planning and effective governance, even the largest investment boom can leave communities vulnerable once market conditions change. Mongolia’s experience this challenge; despite significant mineral wealth and years of mining-led growth, the country has continued to struggle with economic concentration and exposure to global commodity cycles. The lesson for Halmahera is that investment in mines must be accompanied by investment in people, institutions and sectors that can sustain prosperity beyond the life of the resource boom.

Defining success beyond nickel

The ultimate measure of success in Halmahera should not be the number of tons extracted from the ground. It should be whether future generations inherit more choices than their parents had. That means stronger institutions, better public services, healthier ecosystems and a more diversified economy capable of thriving beyond the life of any single commodity.

The global energy transition will require minerals such as nickel. Yet a just transition should not leave resource-producing regions trapped in a permanent cycle of extraction. If the world hopes to build a sustainable future, it must ensure that places like Halmahera are valued not only for what can be extracted from beneath their soil, but also for what their people can build above it.

The most important question facing Halmahera is therefore not how much nickel remains underground. It is whether today’s boom will expand the opportunities available to future generations. If that opportunity is missed, the island risks becoming something more enduring than a mining region: a permanent extraction frontier.

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The repetition of ethnic, racial, religious and nationalist hatred desensitizes audiences and instills disdain for those we consider to be “other.” Political actors have now routinely incited fear by portraying migrants, minorities, religious communities or political opponents as an existential threat to their survival. What makes this normalization more dangerous is how digital platforms make such vicious acts accessible to everyone. 

How identity became a political weapon��

In recent years, identity politics has become a slippery term, often invoked without reference to its original meaning. It once amplified the marginalized voices and addressed historical grievances. Today, extremist groups, nationalist ideologues and right-wing populists exploit it instead, manufacturing resentment to mobilize support. Rather than promoting inclusion, these actors manipulate historical victimhood, national loss or collective suffering to portray their communal identity as under threat. For instance, in India frame Muslims as historical invaders and a demographic threat, whilst across Europe are depicting migrants as a national security threat. The central issue is not remembering history, but selectively appropriating it — elevating certain losses as collective injustice while branding other groups as existential threats.��

Artificial intelligence has further accelerated the political weaponization of identity. designed to maximize engagement often promote content that provokes fear, panic, anger and strong emotional responses. As a result, political actors no longer rely on traditional media or speeches to build political support; they increasingly use AI to personalize, automate and widely circulate the politics of hate.��

Such tactics are already visible in mainstream politics. US President Donald Trump recently shared an AI-generated video depicting House Minority Leader with a fake mustache and sombrero that was strongly condemned by Jeffries and civil rights groups as “racist”. This shows how AI content built on ethnic stereotypes can deepen identity-based divisions and amplify political polarization.��

This trajectory shows how identity politics has evolved from seeking recognition for marginalized voices into a tool fueled by AI-driven algorithms — one that rewards resentment and encourages polarization. 

Propaganda and the politics of othering

In Britain, hate towards migrants and asylum seekers was amplified by a false social media claim. The post alleged that the perpetrator of the Merseyside dance class attack, which three young girls, was an asylum seeker. This information spread like wildfire among the locals — generating xenophobic narratives and reinforcing people’s fear about migrants. This false framing highlights a broader pattern: Migrants are scapegoated so that those in power can escape accountability.��

These identities are then normalized via public spectacles, hate speeches, online propaganda, rallies and sensationalist news coverage. Right-wing ideologies manipulate this propaganda to stage the theatrics of an impending “enemy takeover.” That framing is then used to legitimize hate crimes and violence as an instinctive reaction to defend their communal identity.  In this respect, hatred is monopolized to create an “us” vs “them” identity politics, in which the mere presence of others is framed as a threat. 

The of 13 Muslims across eight states of India by Hindu extremists between January and April 2026 symbolizes this same intensifying hate environment — part of a broader pattern of intimidation, communal violence and discrimination against Muslims in India. Similarly, Australian authorities have the neo-Nazi – National Socialist Network under the new hate-crime legislation due to growing concerns about racial supremacist activities. The group promoted hatred towards Jewish, Asian, Muslim and indigenous communities. These developments show how nationalistic politics blend xenophobic and Islamophobic elements to frame multiculturalism and migrations as threats to national sovereignty.

How hate becomes political capital��

These incidents are not occurring in isolation. Rather, they are part of a larger political and cultural environment in which identity-based hatred has become normalized through digital ecosystems and the widespread circulation of misinformation. As a result, the commodification of hate has changed the course of global politics towards more hostile, identity-based political and economic activity.

Today, ethnic anxieties, racial fears, civilizational narratives, and religious grievances are packaged as viral content specifically designed to engage large audiences. This content generates capital, increases influence and builds loyal followings. Algorithms are designed to reward emotionally intensive content; viral posts generate more likes, shares, comments and outrages – the hate becomes part of the attention-generating economy. To remain relevant in the digital world, political leaders use identity-centric tactics to mobilize followers and maximize political influence. 

For example, influencers like are being investigated for how they are financially benefiting from spreading online extremism and hate-based identity narratives. A deep dive into Fuentes revealed that he profited about $900,000 through livestreams promoting racism, misogynistic narratives and anti-semitism. His business model showcases how violent rhetoric generates views, money, donations and public attention.��

The erosion of trust in the digital age��

Additionally, has been utilized to create fabricated videos that target certain minority communities. These videos exploit locals’ anxieties about migration, nationalism and job losses, transforming hate into monetizable content. Deep-fakes, manipulated narratives and sensationalized graphics are mass-produced at record speed and have nearly become indistinguishable from human-made content. People share them rapidly, often before any fact-checking occurs. This has severe consequences for the communities targeted, including accelerated growth in hate crimes, vandalism, online harassment and threats.

The commodification of hate is therefore a significant moral crisis, one that reflects the deep-rooted relationship between capitalism, identity politics and social media algorithms. Unless the financial incentives driving this hatred are curbed, extremism will continue to spread — and innocent people will continue to pay the price.

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These logistical factors make for less sensational reporting than the imagery of rupture that gripped global news outlets in the first half of the year. Admittedly, it would be costly to many global stakeholders if a major world power dismembered itself, but months of minimal change reveal that no one can dissect the federation so abruptly. Nevertheless, Canadians consumed and shared the dramatized content, which contributed to a climate of heightened concern.

Alongside international interest in Canada and Alberta’s conflicting desires, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) online narratives around Alberta’s separation movement. In it, they point to foreign actors amplifying some pro-separation videos online.

In addition to this investigation, most commentary centers the story around split Conservative opinions, comparisons to Québec’s 1995 referendum and federal legislation that validates secession. As polls suggest around 74% of Albertans will to stay, it is unlikely that Alberta will separate from Canada. Still, it may be beneficial for Canadians to recognize the logistical challenges that make separation even less realistic.

Content farming fuels our dystopian future

CBC News determined that content creation farms have had a large part in driving the wave of pro-secession videos on YouTube. Content farms are sites that material to appear higher in search engine results. To generate profit, these channels often dramatize sensational political events, like the possible fragmentation of a major country, even if they do not hold an opinion on the topic. Each video garnered hundreds of thousands of views.

These channels likely intend to emotionally manipulate viewers in target regions. Popular topics accumulate views from both supporters and “hate watchers.” Ironically, the hate watchers give the videos more views by commenting to refute false or deceptive claims.

In its , the CBC researchers say that Dutch-based accounts solicited individuals on Fiverr and Upwork for footage, posted the auditions without the actors’ “knowledge or permission,” and have not paid them for the work. The researchers recounted the testimony of an American hired to read scripts, who said they “don’t know anything about Canadian politics” and will not continue making videos.

The investigators found that email addresses of writers based in Pakistan were used to share documents to solicit work from another actor. Most of these content farming accounts are no longer on YouTube, though new ones have likely taken their place. However, the situation in the province differs from the online picture, and a majority of Albertans consistently demonstrate through that they will vote against separation.

Federal and provincial acts affirm pro-secession rights

Though there are a large number of people in Alberta who intend to remain Canadians, federal and provincial legislation are no barrier to the pro-separatists. In fact, legislators clearly highlight the roadmap to separation.

Canada is a federation in which all provincial governments are authorities within their jurisdictions, equal to the federal government. All provinces and the federal government must approve amendments to the Canadian Constitution before a province can separate. They must also meet certain requirements, such as fulfilling their duty to consult with Indigenous groups and upholding the law throughout the separation process.

The , passed into federal law in 1998, validates the right to secede. It also clarifies the conditions for separation, asserting that a province cannot separate from Canada unilaterally and that it must negotiate with the rest of the federation. The Act makes clear that constitutional compliance, as well as legally accepted amendments to the Constitution, are necessary for all parties to reach an agreement.

In addition to these federal clarifications, provincial laws may also reduce impediments to pro-secession movements. Alberta’s government passed the Alberta Sovereignty within a United Canada , which provides a legal framework for challenging federal laws. This law enables members of Alberta’s Legislative Assembly to recommend measurable actions to the Lieutenant Governor in Council for the suspension or modification of existing regulations. Although the Act cannot violate the Constitution of Canada, federal laws or treaty rights, many believe it can set a precedent that allows Alberta to challenge any federal decision it considers harmful.

Citizen initiative petition gains ground

Another example of areas where pro-separation advocates can gain credibility is through a citizen initiative petition. Civilian petitions for a province to separate normally have little legal standing, as it would start the secession process while bypassing the duty to consult First Nations groups. For the petition question to be legally acceptable, the wording should not violate treaty rights.

Anyone can file a civilian petition, but that does not mean the law empowers citizens to initiate a referendum. The responsibility is on the provincial government to account for judicial rulings on the wording of petitions, relevant legislation and the will of the people — that is, until Bill 14: Justice Statutes Amendment Act, 2025 (). The bill passed in December 2025 and amended Alberta’s Citizen Initiative (which allows petitions to be proposed and defines which ones are legally valid). The amendments previous obligations for petition proposals to follow the Constitution. This allowed pro-secession groups to collect signatures for their petition directly.

This brings us to Mitch Sylvestre, Leader of Stayfree Alberta, who led the citizen petition with the question: “Do you agree that the Province of Alberta shall become a sovereign country and cease to be a province of Canada?” Sylvestre had previously co-created the 2025 Alberta Prosperity — a plan for the province to secede from Canada — and hoped to take the matter further by presenting a vote to Albertans himself. Despite divided views among others in the province, as in this by longstanding Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) David Shepard, the separatist leader persistently advocates for a referendum.

In May, Justice Shania Leonard that Elections officials should not have approved Sylvestre’s petition to separate. After the judge’s ruling stalled the petition, the claim that Stayfree Alberta collected over 300,000 signatures remained unverified for months. As of July, officials began counting the ballots, and confirm at least 222,000 signatures were deemed valid by the non-partisan Elections office.

Alberta’s Lieutenant Governor in Council, who is also apolitical, appointed the chief electoral officer who first approved Sylvestre’s petition. There should be no doubt that the vote will remain impartial, yet historical in Quebec’s high-federalist regions during the 1995 referendum shows higher rates of ballot rejections than pro-separation regions despite the vote taking place through non-partisan agencies.

Both federal and provincial acts have presented a basis for separatist groups to gather signatures for a petition. Danielle Smith, the Premier of Alberta and head of the United Conservative Party (UCP), said Justice Leonard’s ruling is and that she would file an appeal. She also that there will be a ten-question referendum, including a question on whether Albertans want a secession referendum.

What is in the referendum?

The referendum questions in October are about separation, immigration and the Constitution. The phrasing of the questions is confusing and “,” according to Naheed Nenshi, leader of the opposition in Alberta. One convoluted question asks whether the province should pass a law barring certain immigrants from using social services such as healthcare or education. The immigration questions posed by the UCP are particularly notable, as they parallel the Alberta Prosperity Project agendas led by separatists.

The second half of the questions proposes amending parts of the Canadian Constitution to abolish the Senate, change the appointment of court justices and protect the province from federal interference. These adjustments would require conferring with other provinces and the Canadian government to permit the directive.

The separation the premier will put on the ballot asks, “Should Alberta remain a province in Canada, or should the Government of Alberta commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada?”

The questions are nonbinding, so many argue that the referendum is meaningless because the government will have no obligation to abide by the results. The UCP premier has to abide by the referendum results if the remain side wins, and that her party supports Alberta staying in Canada. Some argue that this statement shows the Premier is toeing the line to maintain support from both sides of the fragmented UCP.

An Angus Reid found that 64% of UCP voters would choose to leave Canada, revealing a split within the party. Many in Alberta are expressing their for the UCP and the premier, and the party 2% in the polls since November 2025. Regardless of these factors, it may be valuable to inspect what it would actually take for Alberta to separate from Canada.

What Alberta might face if they separate

Canadian economics professor Trevor Tombe what fiscal consequences the province might face in a paper for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute (MLI). He says the numbers crunched by the Alberta Prosperity Project are unrealistic. Their plan to cut taxes conveniently ignores the crater this puts in the budget, creating a disjointed monetary argument. Also, canceling social programs to fill the government’s revenue shortfall will diminish Albertans’ quality of life and will only reintroduce a fraction of the revenue from cutting taxes into the budget.

To realistically consider separation, the Alberta government announced it would experts at the University of Calgary to conduct an independent analysis of the economic costs of secession. The report is set to be in late summer 2026. Investigating what Albertans will really face may cause a sobering examination of priorities from those considering secession, especially since polls UCP voters’ biggest concern is the rising cost of living.

Albertans have also expressed concern about the monetary expense of holding the referendum itself. It will cost an 130 million Canadian dollars (~$93 million). The previous general election cost the province 37 million Canadian dollars (~$26 million) after hiring 16,000 workers. The October 2026 referendum will require 60,000 to 90,000 election workers because Elections Alberta must print up to ten separate ballots per person.

Additionally, separation will require the continuation of treaty rights. Without lengthy consultation and agreement with the 46 groups in Alberta, the referendum will face legal challenge, as the Crown has pledged treaty land to Indigenous groups.

Indigenous people are not a monolith, but an overwhelming majority seek to honor treaty rights in Alberta. Though unlikely, if the Albertan First Nations groups agree to the referendum after the provincial government abides by its duty to consult, the secession may face a vote.

If the separation abides by the law, gains support from a clear majority in the province and gains approval in parliament, Alberta would have to seek international recognition to resume trade. Post-separation reconstruction may require foreign assistance or trade, but this cannot begin during federal and provincial talks, which might take years. If negotiations with the Canadian government are ongoing, foreign nations may hold off on recognizing Albertan independence. Countries do not recognize regions that unilaterally secede, so Alberta’s only option is to come to an agreement in federal negotiations.

Alberta’s government would need to revise contracts with companies, develop its own currency, secure a military or police force, and protect itself from potential interference during such a vulnerable time. Businesses may choose to relocate during these destabilizing talks, a reflection of companies fleeing Québec during its 1995 referendum, as Tombe pointed out. Negotiations for new economic and political agreements between Canada and the province can not happen instantly, and there is no certainty that a new partnership will meet all their needs.

On that note, focusing on the provinces’ structural needs is also significant. Canadian provinces are largely from federal oversight in jurisdictions like regional economic development, taxes, hospitals, natural resources, public education, property and civil rights. They abide by broader interprovincial laws, such as immigration, healthcare policy, energy and human rights. Alberta’s government must adopt federal jurisdictions into provincial services to meet the population’s needs.

The federal government currently has jurisdiction over 28 areas of concern while provinces have jurisdiction over less than half that number. The province must continuously fund and sustain the areas of concern that were once federal responsibility. Alberta would require a reworking of its provincial infrastructure to meet these needs and expand its service capabilities.

Aside from volatile economic plans, the legislative and physical structures currently in place will take considerable time to reformat for a switch to a province-country model. Gaining consensus on remodeling these structures will be more difficult than many assume. Conservatives in power are deeply divided within the party, and other right-leaning groups, particularly those under separatist leaders, openly resent the premier. Canadian politics have long seen ideological discord, and the situation in Alberta — both past and present — is no different.

Ideological split in Canada

In August 2021, the Alberta UCP, under the previous party leader, Jason Kenny, chose to in other provinces to encourage people to move to Alberta to meet corporate demand for workers. They did not put their billboards in rural areas or in places that often vote Conservative, but they did advertise in Liberal-voting cities. From 2021 to the end of 2025, approximately moved to Alberta, bringing the population to 5 million. Compelling people from Liberal majority cities to move to Alberta is just another factor that makes the case for separation less likely. It was also a policy choice the current premier disagrees with.

Additionally, federal Conservative actors and party members from other provinces do not support the Alberta secession movement, as a large part of their support base will leave. Without Alberta, they will probably lose the chance for a majority Conservative federal government in Canada. These fragmented opinions prove a serious ideological disconnect is taking place within Conservative parties.

Alberta’s popular party and Conservatives have, at times, been reactionary toward the federal government. Federal opposition Conservatives supported a protest on the CBC, for example, labeling them a government and pushing to defund the national news organization. Others that the CBC also has right-wing representation. Many believe the outlet is necessary to combat billionaire-funded multinational news conglomerates and reach rural areas.

This is just one example of contrarianism overtaking politics, and this is an interparty problem. It happens concurrently in the Liberal, New Democratic Party and Conservative caucuses. Ignoring the public’s desire for the parties to work towards their respective policies, each party attacks one another, leading to stagnation in Parliament.

Conservatives had once pushed to wholly dismantle a publicly funded outlet rather than suggest reforms and a transformation to improve it, and the faction of Conservatives that began the secession movement in Alberta shared this sentiment. They believe starting all over will solve their problems, but research shows this can leave the government with an unstable financial and social foundation.

While many Canadians believe there is much to contest in the federal government’s policies, the practice of arguing against an entity and engaging in contrarianism, without examining its ideas individually, leaves the population open to emotional manipulation by internal groups and foreign actors.

Regardless of party inclination, it is essential for all Albertans to understand their responsibility to engage in rigorous debate, seek out non-partisan analyses and determine the true cost of what they are voting for. In this, they require the Alberta government to disclose the constitutional and economic implications of the October 2026 referendum and to provide a prompt cost-benefit assessment of separation. Contrarianism and passivity are no longer viable, as the results of separation movements remain for generations.

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Basic necessities remain out of reach

Golish begins by asking Abuward to describe daily life in Gaza. He explains that ordinary concerns have given way to a struggle for survival, with access to clean water, electricity and medical care remaining severely limited. While humanitarian aid continues to enter the territory, it falls far short of meeting the needs of the population, particularly newborns and patients requiring specialized treatment. Many serious medical conditions cannot be treated locally, while travel restrictions prevent patients from seeking care elsewhere.

As a medical student, Abuward paints a bleak picture of an overstretched healthcare system where shortages of medicine, equipment and personnel continue growing. The gap between medical needs and available resources keeps widening. As he puts it, “The percentage of [dead] people… is [getting higher and higher] every time, day by day, moment by moment.”

The crisis extends beyond hospitals. Golish notes that images from Gaza often focus on physical destruction, but Abuward emphasizes that the collapse of basic services affects every aspect of daily life, making even routine activities difficult.

Conflict reshapes family life and social priorities

Despite the ongoing war, Abuward describes an unexpected increase in marriages and births. He contends that this trend stems from the disappearance of many traditional life paths. With education disrupted, employment scarce and travel largely impossible, many young people see marriage as one of the few remaining ways to move forward with their lives.

This demographic shift has placed additional pressure on an already overwhelmed healthcare system. Maternity wards operate at full capacity while hospitals struggle with severe staffing shortages. Experienced doctors have left Gaza in large numbers, leaving nursing students and junior medical students to fill critical roles long before completing their training.

Golish asks how healthcare workers cope psychologically after years of continuous crisis. Abuward explains that many effectively live inside hospitals, eating and sleeping there because they expect new casualties to arrive at any moment. Although this life is exhausting, many have adapted because they feel they have no alternative.

Innovation and education become tools for resilience

Despite the hardship, creativity has emerged from necessity. Gazans routinely improvise practical solutions using whatever materials remain available. Makeshift drying machines built from wood, glass and plastic allow families to wash and dry clothes without electricity, while homemade games help children and young people maintain their mental well-being despite the absence of schools and recreational spaces.

Abuward says that prolonged disruption has encouraged experimentation and problem-solving. “The person who has free time is creating the creativity,” he comments, suggesting that necessity has become a catalyst for innovation.

This philosophy also shapes Youth for Palestine, the nonprofit organization he founded. The organization provides informal education in practical skills such as curriculum vitae writing, leadership, analytical thinking and professional development. Rather than focusing solely on emergency relief, Abuward hopes to help students discover talents that conflict has interrupted rather than erased.

He explains that several graduates have gone on to become ambassadors for international organizations or launch their own projects. One student-led initiative developed a Short Message Service-based educational platform that allows students in conflict zones to access coursework and complete examinations without reliable Internet access. This illustrates how locally developed solutions could have broader international applications.

Trust, inequality and aid distribution

The conversation then turns to the uneven distribution of resources inside Gaza. Abuward argues that access to aid often depends on personal connections, employment with international organizations or financial resources established before the war. He describes what he sees as three broad social groups: a small minority with outside connections, those employed by non-governmental organizations and the much larger population struggling in camps with few resources.

Golish asks how these inequalities shape public attitudes. Abuward argues that many Palestinians have lost confidence in aid organizations because they believe assistance does not always reach those most in need. In his view, rebuilding trust has become as important as providing material support.

He therefore contends that transparency and accountability should accompany humanitarian assistance. Without confidence that organizations are acting honestly, vulnerable people become reluctant to share their needs or seek help, making relief efforts less effective.

Recovery requires opportunity as well as relief

Looking beyond immediate humanitarian needs, Abuward identifies temporary housing as one of Gaza’s most urgent unmet priorities. He argues that simple shelters made from wood or other inexpensive materials would offer protection from extreme weather while allowing families to remain in their communities during reconstruction.

Golish asks how international supporters can contribute effectively. Abuward cautions against donating indiscriminately through unverified fundraising campaigns, recommending instead that contributions should go to transparent, accountable organizations that clearly document how resources are used.

He concludes by calling Youth for Palestine an investment in Gaza’s future rather than only its present. The organization’s goal is to help cultivate what he calls a “leading generation” capable of rebuilding society when conditions eventually improve. His closing message broadens beyond Gaza itself: “Everyone in the world should have rights and everyone in the world [has]  a talent. We just need to think before [we] act.”

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Seven decades later, that fantasy has acquired a far more sophisticated technological form. Today’s smart glasses promise not to reveal skeletons beneath clothing but something arguably more valuable: information. They extend human perception beyond the limits of ordinary eyesight by identifying objects, translating foreign languages in real time, answering spoken questions, recording photographs and video from the wearer’s point of view and allowing users to search the Internet without reaching for a phone. The original X-Ray Specs never worked. Meta’s reimagined versions actually do.

Earlier this year, Meta, the owner of Facebook and other online platforms, recruited influencer par excellence Kylie Jenner to help promote marketed as the Edition, retailing for about $500. These are very much not the reading glasses sold in packs of three at Walmart. Embedded in the frames are cameras, microphones, speakers and Meta’s AI assistant. The wearer can photograph or film almost everything they see; livestream events from a first-person perspective; ask the glasses questions about nearby buildings, landmarks or products; receive spoken answers; translate conversations between languages; make phone calls; listen to music and, increasingly, rely on the glasses as a 24/7 digital companion. Meta’s ambition is transparent: to shift artificial intelligence from something we consult on a screen to something we wear on our faces that makes us look cool in the process. 

The AI eyewear has been available since 2023 and Meta already shares a market that’s bound to become congested over the next year or so. Google, Apple and Alibaba, among others, are preparing to launch their own versions. But Meta has stolen a lead and, last year, sold seven million pairs. The acquisition of Jenner, who has over 380 million followers on Instagram (owned by — guess who — Meta) discloses methods in Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg’s apparent madness: Jenner, whom named the youngest “self-made” billionaire in 2019, is arguably the most prodigious purveyor of fine goods in her family, probably edging out Kim in recent years. She pitches for, inter alia, adidas, Miu Miu and Jean Paul Gaultier.

She may yet turn Meta’s glasses into the most coveted consumer gadget since Apple’s iPhone X, whose launch in 2017 prompted overnight queues around the world despite its then humongous $999 price tag.

Sharing as a marketing

But there is a snag: The glasses render the wearer capable of seeing more than others know they are involuntarily revealing. So, the technology brings an obvious potential for invading personal space. The instant the wearer puts on the glasses, they acquire the capacity to intrude into others’ privacy without their knowledge. They can access all manner of data about the person or thing they’re looking at. And their subject won’t have a clue. Understandably, this piques many.

The New Zealand singer Lorde is one of them. She interrupted her performance at a recent concert in Madrid with an unexpected aside. “Increasingly, in our world, it gets harder and harder to know what is real,” she told the crowd. “Can I just say, for the record, f*** the glasses!  Don’t get the glasses. .”

Lorde is unlikely to remain alone. Some public figures will almost certainly voice similar objections, though others — if recent history is any guide — have built fortunes by turning disclosure into a business model. The issue isn’t that celebrities don’t mind sharing; it’s that many have made a good living by strategically baring themselves, or at least their souls. 

Self-disclosure

In fact, anyone who cares to study cultural changes since the emergence of reality television, social media and the smartphone will know that privacy is not what it used to be. What we now call celebrity culture is predicated on the near disappearance of what once passed for privacy. Jenner herself personifies this: She is part of the Kardashians, on par with the Windsors in terms of global renown (and perhaps the Borgias, if we seek a historical perspective). The Kardashian–Jenner dynasty is unusual because its principal commodity is neither music, sport nor politics, but visibility itself. Sharing — not in the sense of generosity but of relentless self-disclosure — became both the product and the marketing strategy of the family.

Anyone with aspirations in showbusiness, politics or any field of endeavor that requires public approval needs to accept that they’ll have to surrender a large degree of their privacy. In that sense, Meta’s glasses are entirely consistent with the cultural trajectory of the 21st century. They don’t inaugurate the end of privacy so much as extend a process already well under way. Social media encouraged us to narrate our lives; smartphones encouraged us to record them; AI glasses promise to make recording continuous and almost effortless. Lorde’s objection is  less to one new gadget than to the entire direction of travel itself.

Of course, privacy has not vanished. It has been renegotiated. Many readers will gladly post photos of themselves, family, pets and friends even in embarrassing situations on social media. They might also vent online — perhaps even abusively — expressing their opinions, revealing their values and opening up about their personal ambitions. But they probably wouldn’t welcome a stranger wearing AI glasses capable of recording them, analyzing what they see and, before long, identifying who they are and retrieving publicly available information about them. The fear is less about today’s technology than about tomorrow’s.

Recording Ray-Bans

Many readers will already be wondering about the implications of the AI-driven eyewear for women. Upskirting (taking photos or videos under someone’s clothing without their consent) has been illegal in the United Kingdom since 2019; in the United States, state-level legislation varies, but it is a criminal form of sexual harassment. AI eyewear is not designed to facilitate this type of voyeurism, but it creates the possibility of equally discomforting kinds of intrusion.

Meta’s glasses contain an LED that illuminates when the wearer is recording, though this may not satisfy everyone and, in any case, may not be noticeable in bright daylight. While millions have sold, how many people are aware of the potential of this piece of technology? Everyone knows about how today’s smartphone can do much, much more than facilitate a conversation. Most people realize that their TV sets are like computers capable of picking up signals, lawfully and unlawfully, from anywhere in the world. But would they suspect the person they’re talking to who happens to be wearing stylish is recording them? And soon, not only recording them, but assembling copious information about them?

Five years from now, when the technology has progressed, most people will have assimilated the concept that their already limited privacy has been denuded. But privacy is one thing; personal safety is another. Women will wonder if potential predators will find the eyewear a boon.

Do we have the right to privacy?

Yet concentrating solely on women’s safety risks obscuring a larger question. AI eyewear does not simply introduce another opportunity for harassment; it forces us to reconsider what privacy means in an age when recording, searching and sharing have become ordinary social practices. The technology merely compresses into a pair of spectacles capabilities that already exist in smartphones. What changes is not the possibility of surveillance but its invisibility. We may soon reach the point where we no longer know whether the person looking at us is merely looking or simultaneously recording, identifying and retrieving information about us.

This suggests a deeper philosophical question. Do we still possess a meaningful right to privacy in a culture that increasingly rewards disclosure? Every day we volunteer fragments of ourselves: photographs, locations, purchases, opinions, friendships and routines. Social media encourages us to share; AI promises to organize and interpret what has been shared. What a jarring contradiction! We demand privacy while participating enthusiastically in systems that erode it.

Perhaps this isn’t the disappearance of privacy so much as another stage in its evolution. Every communications revolution, from photography and portable cameras to smartphones and social media, has forced societies to redraw the boundary between what’s public and what’s private. AI eyewear represents the next step in that historical process. We can’t wish it away any more than we can wave a magic wand and make AI itself disappear. Like it or not, our expectations of others, our sense of self and our understanding of the anatomy of privacy will have to adapt.

[Ellis Cashmore is the author of .]

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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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Educational innovators from , to have sought and sometimes succeeded to buck the trend, but not quite to turn it around.

For most of the past two centuries in the developed nations, education has focused on adapting to the reality of an industrial revolution that unconsciously but inexorably changed the raison d’être of entire societies. Prior to the industrial age, the population bathed in a set of inherited communal and wider traditions that defined a complex and connected religious, artisanal, artistic and moral framework featuring knowledge and skills that linked together, serving as a reference for the community. That culture varied locally but its shared framework also looked outward, pointing towards the universal.

During the Middle Ages, a plethora of innovative educational institutions emerged. Monastic Schools, Cathedral or Episcopal Schools taught the Trivium (grammar, rhetoric, logic) and Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy), laying the groundwork for the first universities. Chantry & Song Schools promoted literacy for boys. Guild Apprenticeships and Workshop Education focused on craftsmanship, leading to master status within the guild. Successful apprentices produced a ‘masterpiece’ to prove their acquisition and refinement of skills, endowing them with the status of “independent masters of their craft.”

Merchant & Abacus Schools inculcated vernacular literacy, commercial bookkeeping, double-entry accounting and practical business mathematics. Village schools taught basic reading, writing and moral instruction in the vernacular, as well as introductory Latin. And of course, Europe’s universities emerged as self-governing academic corporations dedicated to a growing population of scholars. Geoffrey Chaucer describes the mindset of his “clerk of Oxenford” (Oxford scholar) in the Canterbury Tales: “gladly would he learn and gladly teach.”

Is today’s era the “Dark Ages” of education?

Contrary to popular myths about the “Dark Ages,” medieval intellectual life was not confined to repeating and justifying religious dogma. While the Western Church largely funded and governed institutional education, scholasticism had already synthesized classical logic and philosophy into university curricula by the 13th century. The era’s diverse institutions — from cathedral schools to guild-run legal faculties — stand in sharp contrast to modern, highly standardized educational models.

Industrial and even more flagrantly post-industrial education — guided by the pursuit of efficiency and utility — have radically transformed our sense of the purpose and meaning of education. Although it could and probably should have turned out differently, the emergence over the past half-century of several generations of educational technology, culminating today with AI, has largely aggravated the trend.

When ChatGPT was released to the public in November 2022, the entire world of education fell into a state of panic. Instead of seeking to understand what a “large language model,” with its access to an immeasurable breadth of knowledge and discourse, might bring to education, the educational community and the media focused on one exclusively negative thing: the threat that chatbots would facilitate cheating.

Nearly four years later, nothing has changed. Perhaps it’s because we live in a civilization that has literally become paranoid, governed by its fears and an obsession with security in an atmosphere of permanent suspicion. We perceive all change initially as a threat not only to our precious status quo but to our sense of earned authority. Such an increasingly gated-community culture, obsessed by security, will always be blind to opportunities.

Since January 2023, I’ve been authoring 51�Թ� columns dedicated to the use of AI as a tool of creativity and education. At that time I was actively teaching as a visiting professor in an Indian university. That is when in my classroom I dared to suggest to my students that chatbots not only did not deserve to be feared, but that they could play an active, essential role in reviving the spirit of exploratory, collaborative creativity that has at various moments in human history enlivened the ethos of education.

A case that illustrates the deeper problem

The headline of a recent by Futurism, “Professor Hides White Font in Midterm, Catches Students Using AI in the Stupidest Way Possible,” demonstrates the dominant mindset in education today: punitive, if not simply paranoid. The article’s subtitle summarizes the facts: “Thirty-two of my 35 students between two classes failed a portion of their midterm because they all used AI to generate their entire response.” The article recounts how history professor Jason Gibson literally tricked his students into copying a prompt with an invisible instruction — typed in white font — to prove that they were too lazy to write their own essay.

I agree that any student who delegates their response to an assignment to AI deserves to be failed. But, in this specific case, I would also extend that honor to the professor who tricked the students to expose them. To my mind, it revealed more about the failings of the system of authority baked into our post-industrial educational culture than it did about the lack of discipline of 32 students. Gibson’s trickery did prove a point. But it also highlights another more uncomfortable point: that authority (the teacher) has the right to use trickery, but those subjected to that authority must not cheat.

In the age of AI, it may be time to ask a different question. Suspicion and shaming as a pedagogic method have their limits. Has it occurred to no one in the educational profession that using transparency and honesty may be a more effective approach in fostering genuine learning? Apparently not, because educators and their institutions give priority to formatting, ranking and surveilling over learning.

What did Gibson’s “experiment” prove? The first conclusion should have been predictable: If given the opportunity, students will cheat. But it demonstrated something more profound and worth considering, that — unlike Chaucer’s clerk — they aren’t interested in what they’re supposed to be learning.

Students cheat because our society teaches them above all to focus on outcomes. The whole point of education is to get the best grades and the best diploma, not to acquire well scaffolded learning. Cramming for a test isn’t all that different from a form of cheating: it gives the impression of learning without the engagement. Not only is cramming legitimate cheating, it’s a form of superficial, discardable retention, what we might truly call “artificial, evanescent intelligence.” The method is built into the logic of the system, in which only performance on a test is measured and rewarded… never understanding, curiosity, critical thinking and open-minded, analogical reasoning. Those qualities are too difficult to measure in a formal, standardized test.

Is it time to write a history of technology in education?

Gibson would be right to mistrust the role our society appears to be asking AI to play: that of a super-authority, with valid answers to every question. But he doesn’t mistrust our society’s approach to AI, he mistrusts his learners who are using AI in exactly the way they have been told the tool was intended to be used: to save time and energy. As a historian, he might be curious enough to examine the history of our civilization’s exploitation of technology. Were he to do so, he would discover that every new technology has invited misuse alongside all the socially constructive, productive uses their vendors highlight in their marketing pitch.

Gibson used a ruse to get his students to fall into a predictable trap. It made for a good demonstration of at least two things: the propensity of people, and not just students, to misuse AI, and the general failure of our society even to aspire to foster good practices, let alone define them. The professor’s own conclusion is correctly observed, as far as it goes. “We don’t know best practices for navigating academia with AI.” That sounds like an excuse for his own bad behavior. His method, which goes no further than defining AI as a threat, is defensive rather than corrective. He appears to admit that it’s all about maintaining an undefined status quo. “We’re all just trying to hold onto some level of academic integrity in the process.”

Since he appears to value integrity, he might have used the assignment as a demonstration of the very structural paradoxes that surround the idea of integrity. He effectively cheated in how he framed the task. Instead of simply inviting students to contest their grades, he could have reframed the exercise as a systemic experiment — akin to the double-bind and paradoxical communication pioneered by Gregory Bateson and the Palo Alto School — to reveal how predictable patterns of behavior emerge under contradictory rules.

If Gibson had chosen to transparently expose the process as an experiment, his students would have been in a position to judge and critically assess their own behavior in a specific context rather than simply being shamed. At the very least this would allow them to appreciate the fragility of depending on AI. At best, Gibson and his students would have raised their mutual level of consciousness not only about what AI can and can’t do, but how our society has turned misuse into a behavioral norm.

By facing the challenge of AI with total transparency, the professor and the students would find themselves in a novel situation, as they collectively produce a new level of understanding. This would also imply that the psychological wall of authority that traditionally separates teachers from learners would become porous. Having lived through the experience and analyzed it collaboratively, they would thus have discovered not only what it means to “gladly learn” but also “gladly teach” one another.

*[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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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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A new challenge for central banking

For nearly half a century, central bankers have relied on a remarkably stable framework for interpreting the economy. Inflation rises when aggregate demand grows faster than productive capacity. Recessions occur when demand falls below potential output. Productivity determines how quickly an economy can expand without generating inflation, while interest rates bring demand and supply back into equilibrium. This intellectual framework has survived oil shocks, globalization, the Global Financial Crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. AI, however, may represent a more fundamental challenge.

The current debate about AI has largely focused on a familiar question: How much will AI increase productivity? Optimists compare AI to electricity or the internet, arguing that it could unleash decades of faster economic growth. Skeptics counter that history is littered with technological revolutions whose economic benefits arrived slowly or proved smaller than initially expected. Both sides are asking the wrong question.

For central banks, the more important issue is not how much AI increases productivity but how AI changes the relationship between inflation, growth and financial stability. AI simultaneously affects production technologies, firms’ pricing decisions, household expectations, investment behavior and financial markets. These forces interact in ways that blur the distinction between cyclical fluctuations and structural transformation — the very distinction upon which modern monetary policy has been built.

This distinction has always mattered. A cyclical shock requires stabilization. A structural shock requires adaptation. If inflation originates from excessive demand, higher interest rates are the appropriate response. If inflation reflects a temporary restructuring of production, tighter monetary policy may unnecessarily slow the very investments that generate future productivity growth. The difficulty is that, during the transition to an AI economy, these two forces may become almost impossible to disentangle in real time.

Recent evidence illustrates both the promise and the uncertainty surrounding AI. A large survey conducted by researchers affiliated with the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago that economists expect US GDP growth to remain close to 2.5% annually under baseline assumptions but to rise toward 3.5%–4.0% under a rapid AI adoption scenario. At the same time, labor-force participation could decline from approximately 62% today to around 55% by 2050, implying that nearly half of the projected decline in labor-force participation could be attributable to AI rather than demographics alone. Perhaps even more revealing is that experts disagree far more about AI’s economic consequences than about the pace of AI development itself.

That disagreement should concern policymakers. Monetary policy depends not only on forecasts but on understanding why the economy evolves as it does. If economists cannot agree on how AI affects inflation, employment or productivity, estimating the output gap, the neutral interest rate or inflation persistence becomes considerably more difficult. Monetary policy risks responding to symptoms while misunderstanding the underlying causes.

History offers an instructive comparison. During the late 1990s, policymakers struggled to determine whether the information technology revolution had permanently increased productivity or merely generated a temporary investment boom. The Federal Reserve eventually that productivity growth had indeed accelerated, allowing the economy to grow faster without igniting inflation. Yet excessive optimism also contributed to the dot-com bubble, illustrating that genuine technological progress and financial excess can occur simultaneously.

The AI revolution presents a similar challenge, but on a much larger scale. Unlike previous digital innovations, generative AI diffuses across virtually every knowledge-intensive sector. It assists software engineers, financial analysts, lawyers, physicians, researchers, manufacturers and even policymakers themselves. More importantly, AI is becoming embedded not only in production but also in the decisions that shape production. Algorithms increasingly determine prices, allocate credit, manage inventories, forecast demand, evaluate insurance risks and execute financial transactions. In effect, AI is transforming the economy while simultaneously transforming the mechanisms through which the economy is measured.

The productivity J-curve

Economic discussions of technological progress often assume a simple sequence: Innovation raises productivity, lower production costs reduce inflation and higher productivity allows faster economic growth. Reality is considerably less orderly.

Major technological revolutions rarely improve measured productivity immediately. They first require enormous investment. Firms adopting AI must purchase specialized semiconductors, expand cloud-computing capacity, construct data centers, redesign software architecture, strengthen cybersecurity, reorganize production processes and retrain employees. These expenditures consume resources long before measurable efficiency gains appear.

This creates what might be called the . During the early phase of technological transformation, measured productivity may actually deteriorate even as the technological frontier advances. Output grows more slowly because firms devote increasing resources to implementation rather than production. Costs rise before efficiency improves. The economy appears less productive precisely because it is investing in becoming more productive.

The phenomenon is hardly unprecedented. American economist and Nobel Laureate Robert Solow famously in 1987 that “you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” Only after firms fundamentally reorganized production around digital technologies during the second half of the 1990s did productivity growth accelerate noticeably. Electricity followed a remarkably similar pattern. Factories initially replaced steam engines with electric motors but retained old production layouts, realizing only modest productivity gains. Substantial improvements emerged only after firms redesigned factories to fully exploit electricity’s flexibility.

Artificial intelligence may produce an even longer transition because it requires organizational rather than merely mechanical adaptation. Unlike previous technologies, AI fundamentally changes decision-making itself. Managers must learn to supervise algorithms, employees must work alongside intelligent systems, firms must redesign workflows and regulators must develop entirely new governance frameworks. These adjustments require substantial investments in digital infrastructure, organizational restructuring, cybersecurity, software integration and workforce retraining. Although these implementation costs are difficult to observe directly, they may temporarily outweigh the productivity benefits of AI adoption during the early stages of the transition.

The figure illustrates this mechanism. During the short run, implementation costs generate temporary inflationary pressures before productivity gains are realized. As firms gradually adapt their production processes and AI technologies diffuse throughout the economy, productivity improvements begin to offset these initial costs, producing what this paper refers to as Transition Inflation. Eventually, as AI reaches widespread adoption, productivity gains dominate implementation costs and inflation gradually returns toward its long-run equilibrium.

For central bankers, this creates a profound policy dilemma. Suppose inflation rises while measured productivity temporarily weakens. Conventional macroeconomic analysis might interpret this combination as evidence that aggregate demand has become excessive or that productive capacity has deteriorated. Yet both interpretations may be misleading. Inflation may instead reflect temporary implementation costs associated with AI adoption — costs that ultimately generate substantial productivity gains. In other words, the economy may temporarily appear weaker precisely because it is investing in becoming more productive.

The figure summarizes these dynamics by distinguishing three phases of the AI transition. Phase I represents the short-run adjustment period, during which implementation costs and organizational restructuring raise inflation. Phase II captures the transition period in which implementation costs gradually diminish while productivity gains emerge but remain insufficient to offset inflationary pressures completely. Phase III represents the long-run equilibrium, where productivity gains dominate implementation costs, production costs decline and inflation gradually converges toward its long-run level.

These dynamics fundamentally complicate monetary policy. Interest-rate increases designed to restrain inflation may simultaneously discourage the investment necessary for future productivity growth. Conversely, maintaining accommodative policy risks allowing financial markets to extrapolate future productivity gains too aggressively, fueling excessive leverage, speculative asset valuations and financial instability. Monetary policy therefore faces a challenge unlike that posed by conventional business cycles: distinguishing temporary transition inflation associated with technological transformation from persistent inflation generated by excess aggregate demand. The distinction becomes even more difficult once expectations enter the picture.

Expectations move faster than factories

If the Productivity J-Curve complicates the supply side of the economy, expectations make the demand side even more difficult to interpret.

Modern monetary policy is built on the insight that expectations matter. Inflation depends not only on today’s economic conditions but also on what households and firms believe about tomorrow. Central banks therefore devote enormous resources to managing expectations through forward guidance, policy communication and credibility. Artificial intelligence, however, may fundamentally change how those expectations evolve.

Consider a firm that believes AI will substantially increase future productivity. It has little incentive to wait until those gains materialize. Instead, it begins investing immediately in data centers, cloud infrastructure, software integration and worker training. Investors behave similarly. If future profits are expected to rise, equity valuations increase today rather than after productivity has improved. Households may also revise their expectations of future income upward, increasing current consumption through intertemporal substitution. In short, expectations respond almost instantly, whereas productive capacity expands only gradually.

One might summarize this process with a simple observation: Expectations move faster than factories.

This seemingly simple insight has profound implications for inflation. Aggregate demand may strengthen long before the supply side of the economy becomes more productive. Consumption increases, investment accelerates, credit expands and asset prices appreciate while firms are still struggling to integrate AI into their production processes. Inflation therefore emerges before the productivity boom itself.

From the perspective of a central banker, this creates a diagnostic problem. Rising inflation traditionally signals an economy operating beyond its productive capacity. Yet during an AI transition, inflation may instead reflect rational optimism about future technological progress. The economy appears overheated even though its productive frontier is simultaneously shifting outward.

The distinction matters because the appropriate policy responses differ dramatically. If inflation reflects excessive aggregate demand, higher interest rates remain appropriate. If inflation instead reflects temporary adjustment costs combined with forward-looking investment, tighter monetary policy risks suppressing precisely the capital formation necessary to realize future productivity gains.

The challenge is not that central banks have forgotten how inflation works. The challenge is that inflation itself begins to originate from multiple mechanisms operating simultaneously.

AI changes the Phillips Curve

For decades, economists have whether the Phillips Curve — the relationship between inflation and economic slack — has become flatter or steeper. Globalization, labor-market flexibility, inflation targeting and demographic change have all been proposed as explanations for its apparent instability.

AI an entirely new dimension to this debate.

Traditionally, firms adjusted prices relatively infrequently because gathering information was costly. Managers observed changes in wages, input prices or demand before deciding whether price adjustments were worthwhile. AI dramatically reduces these information costs. Algorithms continuously monitor inventories, transportation costs, customer demand, commodity prices and competitors’ pricing strategies. Prices can therefore respond almost instantaneously to changing economic conditions.

One possible outcome is a steeper Phillips Curve. Cost increases pass through to final prices more rapidly, making inflation respond more quickly to fluctuations in aggregate demand. Monetary policy becomes more powerful but also more volatile because firms react almost immediately to changes in economic conditions. An equally plausible outcome points in the opposite direction.

AI may increase market concentration by allowing the largest firms to exploit economies of scale in data, computing power and software development. At the same time, pricing algorithms continuously monitor competitors rather than focusing exclusively on firms’ own production costs. Strategic complementarities therefore become stronger. Instead of asking whether their own costs have changed, firms increasingly ask whether competitors have adjusted prices.

This subtle change alters inflation dynamics. Prices become determined less by marginal production costs and more by strategic interaction among algorithms.

Ironically, greater technological sophistication may weaken one of the most fundamental relationships in macroeconomics. Inflation becomes less sensitive to unemployment or output gaps and more sensitive to digital market structure.

The traditional Phillips Curve therefore faces a new source of instability — not because labor markets have changed, but because firms themselves have changed how they make pricing decisions.

Beyond demand inflation

Economists typically classify inflation into familiar categories. Demand-pull inflation arises when aggregate demand exceeds productive capacity. originates from adverse supply shocks such as higher energy prices or wage pressures. Monetary policy is largely designed around these distinctions. Artificial intelligence suggests the emergence of a third category.

During the early stages of AI adoption, firms experience rising implementation costs, organizational restructuring, software integration expenses, cybersecurity investments and workforce retraining. These expenditures increase production costs even though they ultimately raise future productivity. Inflation therefore originates from technological transition itself rather than from excessive demand or permanent supply constraints. This may be described as Transition Inflation.

Unlike conventional supply shocks, Transition Inflation is potentially temporary and investment-driven. Unlike conventional demand inflation, it reflects structural transformation rather than macroeconomic overheating. The same technological investment that temporarily raises inflation eventually reduces production costs and expands potential output.

Recognizing this distinction is essential for monetary policy. Responding aggressively to Transition Inflation may stabilize prices in the short run while reducing productivity growth in the long run. Ignoring it, however, risks allowing optimistic expectations to evolve into speculative financial excess. The policy challenge therefore becomes less about determining the correct interest rate than about identifying the true source of inflation.

Inflation becomes harder to diagnose

Artificial intelligence changes more than productivity. It changes the informational content of macroeconomic indicators themselves.

Traditionally, policymakers interpreted higher inflation, lower unemployment and stronger investment as evidence that aggregate demand had strengthened. In an AI economy, the same data may instead reflect technological restructuring, forward-looking expectations or temporary implementation costs. Identical economic statistics can therefore very different underlying economic conditions.

This observation helps explain why economists increasingly disagree about AI’s macroeconomic effects. Recent survey evidence shows relatively broad agreement that AI capabilities will improve substantially during the coming decade. The disagreement arises not from technological forecasts but from uncertainty about how those capabilities will translate into productivity, employment, inflation and financial markets.

For central banks, this uncertainty has important practical consequences. Monetary policy has always operated under imperfect information, but the information problem itself is becoming more complex. AI simultaneously changes production technologies, labor markets, pricing behavior, financial intermediation and expectations. Estimating the output gap or the natural rate of unemployment therefore becomes considerably more uncertain because the underlying structure of the economy is evolving continuously rather than remaining approximately constant.

This represents perhaps the most important implication of AI for monetary policy. Artificial intelligence does not simply generate new economic shocks. It changes the framework through which shocks are interpreted. As structural transformation accelerates, distinguishing temporary cyclical fluctuations from permanent changes in productive capacity becomes increasingly difficult. Diagnosis — not implementation — may become the central challenge of monetary policy in the AI era.

The AI financial accelerator

AI affects more than inflation and productivity. It also changes how credit is created, how risks are measured and ultimately how financial crises may emerge.

Historically, technological revolutions have always been accompanied by financial booms. Railways in the 19th century, electricity in the early 20th century, the internet during the 1990s and housing before the Global Financial Crisis all generated waves of optimism that encouraged investment far beyond what existing productive capacity could immediately justify. Financial markets have always been willing to price tomorrow’s productivity today. AI is unlikely to be different.

Technology companies are hundreds of billions of dollars to data centers, advanced semiconductors, cloud infrastructure, electricity generation and specialized networking equipment. Much of this investment reflects expectations about future profitability rather than realized productivity. Financial markets therefore become increasingly dependent on beliefs about technologies whose long-term economic effects remain highly uncertain. This creates what may be called the AI Financial Accelerator.

Under the traditional , rising asset prices increase collateral values, allowing firms to borrow more and invest further. Artificial intelligence strengthens this mechanism because optimistic expectations about future AI productivity immediately raise equity valuations, improve firms’ financing conditions and stimulate additional borrowing. Investment therefore accelerates before productivity itself has improved.

Unlike previous investment booms, however, AI investment is unusually concentrated. Building frontier AI models requires enormous fixed costs. The largest firms increasingly dominate access to computing power, proprietary data, specialized chips and engineering talent. Consequently, AI investment is financed not only through retained earnings but also through corporate bond markets, project finance, private credit, securitization and increasingly sophisticated financial structures.

Monetary policy therefore operates through a financial system that is becoming both larger and more interconnected.

When every bank uses the same brain

Artificial intelligence also transforms financial intermediation itself. Banks increasingly employ machine-learning models to evaluate borrowers. Insurance companies use AI to price risk. Asset managers rely on algorithms to construct portfolios. Trading firms execute millions of transactions through increasingly autonomous systems. Fraud detection, compliance monitoring, liquidity management and credit underwriting all become more efficient.

From an individual institution’s perspective, these innovations reduce risk. From the perspective of the financial system, however, the opposite may occur.

One of the lessons of financial history is that crises rarely emerge because individual institutions make irrational decisions. They emerge because many institutions make remarkably similar decisions at exactly the same time.

Artificial intelligence may unintentionally reinforce this tendency. Large financial institutions increasingly rely upon similar foundation models, cloud-computing providers, training datasets, optimization algorithms and risk-management software. Even institutions that believe they possess independent models may ultimately depend upon remarkably similar information and computational architectures.

The financial system therefore begins to resemble a biological monoculture. Agricultural monoculture is extraordinarily productive because every field contains the highest-yield crop. Until disease appears. Then every field becomes vulnerable simultaneously.

Financial markets face an analogous danger. Artificial intelligence may improve the quality of individual decisions while increasing the correlation of decisions across institutions. Diversification gradually becomes an illusion. Everyone believes they have different models. In reality, everyone may own different versions of the same model. The next financial crisis may therefore originate not from irrational exuberance but from excessive algorithmic agreement.

A new kind of stagflation

Perhaps the most surprising implication of AI concerns . For most economists, stagflation immediately evokes memories of the , when oil-price shocks simultaneously increased inflation and reduced economic growth. Supply contracted while production costs increased, forcing central banks to confront inflation without strong demand.

Artificial intelligence may generate a fundamentally different version of the same problem. During the transition toward AI-intensive production, firms face substantial implementation costs. New software systems must be integrated into existing organizations. Employees require retraining. Cybersecurity becomes more expensive. Computing infrastructure demands enormous investment. These adjustment costs temporarily reduce measured productivity even though they ultimately expand productive capacity.

Meanwhile, financial markets observe something entirely different. Investors anticipate extraordinary future profitability. Technology companies report massive investment plans. Equity valuations increase. Credit conditions remain favorable. Asset prices continue rising. Consequently, the economy may simultaneously experience rising production costs, elevated asset prices, expanding leverage and slowing measured productivity.

This combination differs fundamentally from traditional demand-driven inflation. It also differs from conventional supply shocks. Inflation originates from structural adjustment rather than overheating. Financial markets continue expanding because expectations remain optimistic. The result is AI-driven stagflation.

Unlike the stagflation of the 1970s, the economy is not suffering from a shortage of future productive capacity. Instead, it is temporarily paying the cost of creating that capacity.

Monetary policy meets structural change

This creates one of the most difficult policy environments central banks have ever faced. Suppose inflation rises above target while equity markets continue reaching new highs. Conventional policy would interpret this combination as evidence of excessive aggregate demand and accommodative financial conditions. Raising policy rates would therefore appear appropriate.

But suppose inflation instead reflects temporary implementation costs associated with AI adoption. Higher interest rates may reduce inflation modestly by weakening aggregate demand.

At the same time, they increase financing costs for AI investment, delay infrastructure construction, discourage research and development, and slow technological diffusion. The central bank may successfully reduce today’s inflation at the expense of tomorrow’s productivity.

The opposite mistake is equally dangerous. If policymakers assume every increase in inflation merely reflects technological transition, they may tolerate excessively loose financial conditions. Optimistic expectations become speculative valuations. Credit expands more rapidly than productive capacity. Eventually expectations adjust, asset prices decline and leverage amplifies the downturn.

The policy dilemma therefore becomes considerably more complicated than choosing the correct interest rate. It becomes a problem of distinguishing healthy technological optimism from financially destabilizing speculation.

Beyond the inflation target

For decades, monetary economists have debated whether central banks should “lean against the wind” by tightening policy when financial imbalances become excessive, even if inflation remains subdued.

Artificial intelligence gives this debate renewed urgency. The same technological optimism that raises long-run productivity may simultaneously generate excessive leverage and systemic risk. Monetary policy therefore confronts an increasingly uncomfortable trade-off. Supporting technological investment may encourage financial fragility. Restricting financial excess may slow innovation.

Price stability and financial stability, long treated as complementary objectives, may occasionally point toward different policy prescriptions. That possibility suggests that the central bank of the AI era will require broader analytical tools than those developed for industrial or even digital economies. Monitoring inflation alone will no longer be sufficient. Policymakers must also understand technological diffusion, credit creation, market concentration and the evolving architecture of financial networks.

Artificial intelligence changes not only the economy’s productive capacity. It changes the financial system through which monetary policy itself is transmitted.

The central bank of the AI economy

Artificial intelligence does not require central banks to abandon their traditional mandates. Price stability remains essential. Financial stability remains indispensable. What AI changes is not the destination of monetary policy but the map policymakers use to reach it.

For decades, central banking has relied on relatively stable macroeconomic relationships. The output gap approximated excess demand. The unemployment gap signaled labor-market slack. The Phillips Curve linked economic activity to inflation. Estimates of the neutral interest rate provided guidance for the appropriate stance of policy. None of these concepts disappears in an AI economy, but each becomes substantially more difficult to estimate because the economy’s underlying structure is itself evolving.

The distinction between cyclical and structural change has always been one of the defining challenges of macroeconomic policy. Artificial intelligence makes that distinction increasingly ambiguous. Productivity may temporarily decline while long-run productive capacity expands. Inflation may reflect implementation costs rather than overheating. Rising investment may signal either speculative excess or rational preparation for a more productive future. Financial markets may become simultaneously more efficient and more fragile as AI reshapes credit allocation and risk management. Economic indicators therefore become less informative because identical data can reflect fundamentally different underlying mechanisms.

This uncertainty has important implications for monetary policy strategy. Central banks have traditionally emphasized forecasting inflation one or two years ahead. AI suggests that diagnosis may become more important than forecasting. Policymakers must understand whether inflation originates from excessive demand, temporary technological adjustment, changing market structure or financial optimism. An incorrect diagnosis may produce a larger policy mistake than an inaccurate forecast.

Consequently, monetary policy will increasingly require a broader analytical framework. Traditional macroeconomic indicators should be complemented by measures of technological diffusion, AI-related investment, productivity dispersion across firms, computational infrastructure, financial leverage and market concentration. Monitoring semiconductor investment, electricity consumption by data centers, cloud-computing capacity, AI adoption across industries and the financing structure of digital infrastructure may become as relevant for monetary policy as unemployment or wage growth. The central bank of the future may therefore resemble not only a macroeconomic institution but also an institution capable of understanding technological transformation.

Rethinking monetary policy

Recent developments already point in this direction. Major technology firms have announced AI-related capital expenditures measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars, while governments increasingly view AI infrastructure as a strategic national asset rather than merely another private investment. Meanwhile, from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago suggests that economists expect only modest increases in baseline GDP growth despite assigning relatively high probabilities to substantial advances in AI capabilities, illustrating the considerable uncertainty surrounding the transmission from technological progress to macroeconomic outcomes. This gap between technological optimism and macroeconomic uncertainty may become one of the defining policy challenges of the coming decade.

The implications extend beyond monetary policy itself. AI may alter the interaction between central banks and fiscal authorities. Governments may increasingly finance investments in digital infrastructure, semiconductor production, electricity grids, education and cybersecurity to accelerate AI adoption. Industrial policy, competition policy and financial regulation may therefore become more closely intertwined with monetary policy than at any time since the postwar reconstruction period. Maintaining price stability in an AI economy may depend not only on interest-rate decisions but also on how effectively public and private institutions manage technological transition.

International coordination may become equally important. AI development is concentrated in a relatively small number of countries and firms, yet its macroeconomic consequences are global. Divergent rates of AI adoption may generate persistent differences in productivity growth, capital flows, exchange rates and equilibrium interest rates across economies. Central banks will increasingly operate in a world where technological leadership becomes a determinant of monetary conditions, much as energy prices shaped inflation during the twentieth century.

Perhaps the most important lesson is one of humility. Throughout history, central banks have often been challenged not because they lacked policy instruments but because they misunderstood the nature of the economic transformation underway. During the 1970s, policymakers underestimated the persistence of supply-side inflation. During the Global Financial Crisis, many underestimated the vulnerabilities accumulating within the financial system. During the pandemic, the distinction between temporary and persistent inflation again proved exceptionally difficult to identify. Artificial intelligence presents another such moment, although one driven not by crisis but by innovation.

A new paradigm for central banking

History also offers a useful reminder. Every major technological revolution has initially confused policymakers. Railroads transformed finance before they transformed transportation. Electricity changed factory organization long before productivity statistics reflected its benefits. The internet generated one of history’s largest equity bubbles before reshaping nearly every industry. AI is likely to follow a similarly nonlinear path. The greatest policy mistakes may therefore arise from expecting technological revolutions to appear neatly in conventional macroeconomic data.

Artificial intelligence should not be viewed simply as another productivity shock. It represents a structural transformation that simultaneously changes production, expectations, pricing behavior, financial intermediation and the transmission of monetary policy itself. These mechanisms interact in ways that make inflation harder to interpret, equilibrium harder to estimate and financial vulnerabilities more difficult to detect.

Central banks do not need a new mandate. They need a new analytical framework. The challenge of the AI era is not that inflation will disappear, nor that monetary policy will become obsolete. It is that the economy will increasingly evolve faster than the models used to understand it. The central bank of the future will succeed not because it reacts more aggressively than its predecessors, but because it learns more quickly.

Artificial intelligence is often described as a revolution in computation. For central banks, it may prove to be something even more significant. It is a revolution in economic interpretation. The defining question of the next decade will not be whether AI transforms the economy. It almost certainly will. The defining question is whether monetary policy can transform quickly enough to understand the economy AI creates.

[ 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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It made for dramatic podcasting. It also conveniently sidestepped an uncomfortable question: Why, after months of shuttle diplomacy, a ceasefire thatwas within hours of being announced and a signed memorandum of understanding, is the United States still exchanging fire with Iran, and Iran’s nuclear ambitions still unresolved? Vance has an answer, and it isn’t “the deal I designed didn’t hold.” It’s “Israel wouldn’t let it hold.”

That is a convenient story. It may also be a wildly incomplete one, built to protect a vice president’s reputation rather than to explain what actually happened.

The deal that wasn’t

Set aside the rhetoric and look at the record. Vance and special envoy Steve Witkoff spent months shuttling between Oman, Pakistan and other venues trying to lock in a settlement with Tehran. On his own account to Rogan, the memorandum of understanding () they eventually signed opened the Strait of Hormuz and paused the fighting — only for Iranian hardliners to panic at the loss of leverage, fire on shipping, draw an American response and send the whole process back to the negotiating table, where it has cycled between talks and renewed strikes ever since. A in The New Republic went further, arguing the deal represented American concessions dressed up as victories.

This is the backdrop against which Vance chose to spend a marquee podcast appearance not explaining what went wrong with the substance of the deal, but relitigating who was to blame for its instability. And the villain he settled on was not Tehran’s hardliners, whom he himself described as panicking and firing on ships mid-negotiation, and not the American hawks in his own party who never wanted a deal in the first place — it was Israel.

A scapegoat with a long résumé

There’s a pattern worth naming here. Politicians who oversell a foreign policy achievement and then watch it wobble have two options: Admit the plan was flawed, or find an external saboteur. Vance chose the second path, and did it repeatedly. In the Rogan interview, he described a “very discreet, extremely well-funded campaign” (his words, used once here and not reused) to derail the negotiation, attributing it to unnamed elements inside the Israeli government. Asked pointedly whether the war would have continued without Israeli influence, he said yes, immediately.

Notice what this framing accomplishes. It relocates the difficulty of the negotiation from Vance’s own strategy and Tehran’s own hardliners onto a third party — one that happens to be a politically fraught subject inside his own coalition. It lets him tell a Make America Great Again (MAGA) base audience increasingly skeptical of open-ended commitments to Israel that he was undermined rather than outmaneuvered. And it lets him avoid a less flattering possibility: that a nation 47 years into the Islamic Republic was never going to permanently trade away its nuclear leverage and regional proxy network for the terms on offer — and that Israeli officials who said so from the start were reading the regime correctly.

Republicans themselves are visibly uneasy with how Vance has handled this. Senator Tommy Tuberville a notably hedged defense, saying Vance was “trying to juggle this whole thing” while conceding Israel wasn’t agreeing to much of what Washington wanted. That is not the language of a party rallying around a vindicated peacemaker. It’s the language of Republicans watching their vice president pick a public fight with America’s closest Middle East ally and wondering whether it’s strategy or cover.

Nor is this Vance’s first outing in this genre. Weeks earlier he at Israeli officials directly, saying the country was diplomatically isolated and had failed to appreciate American military and diplomatic support — remarks the Washington Post described as deepening a rift between the two allies. Around the same time, he Israeli critics of the deal to name an alternative, arguing the country “couldn’t kill its way out” of its security problems. Whatever the merits of that argument, the pattern is consistent: Every time the deal comes under strain, Vance’s instinct is to point at Jerusalem, not at his own negotiating table.

“You can’t deal with the Islamic Republic”

Here is the part Vance doesn’t say out loud, because it would mean admitting his own approach was naive: Israeli skepticism about negotiating with Tehran isn’t a recent, opportunistic obstruction campaign. It’s a decade-plus-old, deeply held conviction, dating back at least to the fight over the 2015 , that the Islamic Republic will sign whatever document is put in front of it and then quietly continue enriching uranium, arming proxies and testing the limits of any agreement. Israeli officials didn’t need a funded influence campaign to reach that conclusion; they reached it by watching Iran’s actual behavior for decades — an instinct even by former Vice President Mike Pence, who warned Vance against repeating what Pence called the appeasement mistakes of past American negotiations with Tehran.

Vance’s own account of the negotiation to Rogan is, unintentionally, the best evidence for this. He described exactly the dynamic Israeli hawks predicted: Iran signs, extracts concessions, its hardliners get spooked by the loss of leverage the moment sanctions or military pressure ease, and the country reverts to violence within days. He framed this as a manageable “stops and starts” process rather than proof the regime was never going to hold to the deal’s terms. When Israeli officials made that same argument, he treated it not as a data point from an ally with deep intelligence penetration of Iran, but as sabotage. That’s not a rebuttal of the Israeli critique — his own narrative confirms it.

The countercase and where the rhetoric gets dangerous

To be fair to Vance, his central factual claim is not invented from nothing. The Time investigation is real: citing Foreign Agents Registration Act filings, it reported that Brad Parscale’s firm, Clock Tower X, was engaged last September through the ad agency Havas on behalf of the Israeli government to run a large-scale social media campaign. The campaign was worth roughly $1.5 million a month, targeting young American conservatives — officially to counter online antisemitism, though the campaign’s output also included messaging pushing back on ceasefire critics within �հ��ܳ���’s base.

If accurate, that’s a legitimate story, and Vance is entitled to be irritated at being personally targeted by people it funded. Foreign governments lobby American public opinion constantly, and Vance made that broader point himself, comparing Israel’s efforts to Qatar’s and Russia’s and saying he doesn’t mind the lobbying itself so much as American officials letting it override their own judgment.

But there’s a difference between “an Israeli-funded influence campaign criticized my deal, and I resent it” and “elements of the Israeli government are the reason my Iran policy is struggling.” The first is a defensible, specific complaint. The second is a sweeping alibi that conveniently absorbs every criticism of the deal — from Israeli officials, from American hawks, from Iran’s own hardliners — into a single, simpler narrative about foreign manipulation.

It’s also worth noting that in the same conversation, Vance discussed tying prolific pedophile Jeffrey Epstein to Israeli intelligence at some length — commentary that, whatever his intent, sits uncomfortably close to territory that has circulated for years without evidence and has often shaded into classic antisemitic conspiracy thinking about hidden Israeli control. Even people sympathetic to Vance’s narrow complaint about the Parscale campaign should be uneasy about that rhetorical company. Vance did, notably, also push back on the charge that he himself is anti-Israel or antisemitic, framing his position as a normal-ally relationship rather than hostility — a defense worth taking at face value even while noting the pattern above.

There’s also a version of events favorable to Vance, in which this isn’t scapegoating at all but a genuine break with an unconditional pro-Israel consensus inside the Republican Party — a vice president willing, in his words, to treat Israel like any other ally with whom “we’re going to have disagreements” as well as agreements, pursuing American interests where they diverge from Israeli ones. Some in his party’s more restraint-minded wing would call that a feature, not a deflection.

Whether one finds that persuasive likely depends on whether the underlying Iran deal was ever salvageable on Vance’s terms in the first place, or whether — as Israeli officials have long argued — no amount of skillful American diplomacy was going to produce a durable agreement with a regime that has spent decades treating negotiations as a tool of delay rather than resolution.

Strip away the podcast theatrics and what’s left is a vice president whose signature diplomatic project has repeatedly come apart in the field, and who has chosen, publicly and more than once, to explain that instability by pointing at Israel rather than at his own assumptions about Tehran. Some of his specific complaints about a funded influence campaign are well documented and fair. But documentation on that narrow point doesn’t rescue the broader claim that Israel is the reason his Iran policy keeps faltering.

By Vance’s own account, it was Iranian hardliners, not Israeli officials, who panicked and fired on ships the moment the MOU cost them leverage. Israeli officials didn’t sabotage a deal that was working. They warned, consistently, that a deal with the Islamic Republic on those terms wasn’t going to hold — and Vance’s own retelling of events, stripped of the blame he assigns elsewhere, largely proves them right. Blaming an ally is easier than admitting the ally’s warning was correct. That’s not foreign policy. That’s a cover story.

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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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.

[ 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 Summer in Europe: Hotter Than Yesterday, Colder Than Tomorrow appeared first on 51�Թ�.

— Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790.

This month, America staggered through an , semiquincentennial fraught with existential questions. The country could not even agree on how to throw its own birthday party: A bipartisan commission established by Congress a decade in advance found itself competing with a White House task force running a rival celebration, each telling a different story about what, precisely, was being commemorated. In a sign of the times, one of these celebrations was marred by prominently displayed . The fireworks may be over, but the dispute they illuminated is not.

The exact meaning of the word “country” is a constant question in American political life today: Can you claim to love your country, but hate the federal government (or the “deep state”)? What is the essence of a country — its laws, government, land, populace, culture or some combination? Philosophers debate the definition of a nation, often portraying it as an ongoing project or a “spiritual” or “historical” community. But the more important observation is that not everyone is equally invested in this communal project, and those who are deeply invested are often pulling in opposite directions. In fact, the truest characterization might be that no two people have the same relationship to their country.

This is in part because it is impossible to observe the state from a rational distance: Citizens can vote for and against their government, are taxed, protected and policed by it, and can be conscripted, jailed and even killed by it. It is perhaps the most consequential and continuous involuntary relationship in the world. Like any relationship, it can be healthy or dysfunctional — and there is a growing body of evidence on the side of , often revolving around the misalignment between a person’s ethics and a country’s actions.

Confronted with a historical record that cannot always be squared with the country’s stated ideals, Americans tend to default to or . The problem with avoidance is that the wrongs are too profound and too numerous to be minimized, erased or explained away; the problem with despair is that an endless excavation of guilt is unproductive and, at times, makes things worse. There is a third possible response: doubling down on one’s investment in the civic life of a country with the intention of steering the ship in a moral and just direction for the future.

This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.

— Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”, 1852.

It is self-evident that, while all people may be created equal, America has not treated them equally. From the Three-Fifths Compromise to the Trail of Tears to the Marshall Islands nuclear tests, there is plenty to be ashamed of. But shame is both too passive and too unbearable at scale, causing people to retreat from either the truth of the atrocities or the country that perpetrated them. It can even push people into a kind of twisted against the original injured party for being the perceived source of these bad feelings.

In their 2018 book , Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff coined the term “safetyism” — the cultural instinct to shield people from discomfort rather than build their capacity to tolerate it. These cognitive habits have migrated into political life. Binary thinking is continually reinforced by America’s two-party system, which requires voters to expend extra effort to consider more than two sides of any issue. At the end of the day, a citizenry that has spent a decade being socially and trained into black-and-white thinking will be willing to pass a similarly binary and on floundering democracies, and be more willing to declare one a lost cause.

In interpersonal relationships, sometimes the right path is the exit — some relationships are toxic, and there is no virtue in staying or continuing to try. But Reddit’s ubiquitous prescription, “just leave,” is tougher to apply to the person-state relationship. There is nowhere you can go to not be governed, and while some do renounce one citizenship and take up another, that is just trading between two social contracts, each of which comes with its own catalog of flaws.

My country, right or wrong; when right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be set right.

— Senator Carl Schurz, in a speech on the Senate floor, 1872. 

Democratic disengagement is not the inevitable outcome of a national moral failure, no matter how complete. Germany confronted a near-absolute chasm between value and action, but did not collapse into collective helplessness; it has built, slowly and imperfectly, a functioning democracy with a public practice of responsibility. When faced with such a failure, society needs a process for metabolizing it. Germany built one — through changes to the law, school curricula, visible public memorials, yearly rituals — which is still . A truism is that we don’t rise to the level of our goals; we sink to the level of our systems, and Germany built systems.

Germans distinguish between the concepts of shame and Verantwortung (the willingness to answer for something), perhaps best translated as accountability. Their example proves that an accountable population which is willing to pull together in the same direction can build something, regardless of a shared dark past. In contrast, America currently demonstrates a propensity to its moral lapses rather than process them, leaving everyone so engaged in the debate over what happened and how bad it really was that there is no opportunity to learn from it and grow beyond it. 

The most fervent participants in this debate demonstrate — a framework in which suffering, discomfort or emotional pain is treated as an obligatory component of authentic truth. 

Under this framework, there is no incentive to look for historical high points among the historical lows; there is only an incentive to dig deeper, and deeper still, at the bottom of the chasms, searching for an even worse truth. One runs the risk of forgetting to tend to the survivors, and the civic work of building a society in which they can flourish — unfortunately, the skills of digging at wounds are not transferable to the consensus-building of politically viable policy work in democracies.

I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

— James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, 1955.

While still young in “country years,” America is old enough to expect a settled sense of identity, yet it conspicuously lacks one. There is no unified American ethnicity, culture or language, so American identity hinges primarily on creed: a set of propositions that a country can fall short of. This makes the nation’s ideology a single point of failure: It carries weight that would otherwise be distributed across a multitude of factors that bind a people together. The loftier the ideal — say, full equality among citizens within the political system — the easier it is to fall short of it.

Each individual must grapple with how to respond to the bad behavior of others — what to do when lines are crossed. One of the most accessible and obvious responses is criticism. However, like anything, this can be taken to extremes, and anything in extraordinary quantities is a poison. When the nation’s creed is a linchpin, there are real consequences to swinging at it blithely.

Another problem with endless, reflexive criticism is that our brains are wired to entrench patterns, and a state of perpetual negativity can lead to defeatism and withdrawal. Disengagement is already a significant problem for the American political system: In the last five decades, the high point of voter turnout was of the voting-aged population. Political apathy is the term for the state of non-participation in one’s democracy on the belief that the ship cannot be righted by any action on your part, and it is therefore futile to try. Beliefs about democracy with democratic participation, and our beliefs are formed in part by how we engage with our world.

Indifference is not a beginning; it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor — never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten.

— Elie Wiesel, in a speech at the White House, 1999.

A person must be both invested in the outcome and believe they can affect it to reliably continue participating in a democracy. But abstention from the flawed workings of a democracy is still a position within it. Withdrawal buys nothing. Declining to participate does not confer moral cleanliness or absolve anyone of the moral burdens of the outcome.

Interestingly, this apathy is rarely as organic as it seems. For a hostile state engaging in information operations, democratic passivity is a cheaper goal than active support for authoritarianism — it is much easier to convince someone that their system is hopelessly broken than to convince them that an alternative is truly better. Adversaries like Russia play up the most extreme elements of , polarizing the conversation. By drowning out nuance and wearing down the sense of agency that underpins civic life in a democracy, they create a positive reinforcement loop, compounding the brokenness of the system and the apathy of the population. 

But history shows that it is possible to develop collective agency and the popular will to fight for democracy in even the most hostile environments. In fact, passion for democracy is more palpable in some Eastern European countries whose democracies are far younger and more fragile than America’s. In Ukraine, more than 100,000 have already died fighting for their democracy, despite having suffered many years of Soviet anti-democratic repression.

I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers…

— David Foster Wallace, “This Is Water,” 2009

A nation, as the kids might say, is “cooked” (finished) when loving it is viewed as the identity of last resort — the low rung on the social totem pole, the final stop on a train running in the wrong direction. In his famous essay “This Is Water,” writer David Foster Wallace argued that the most important kind of freedom is the ability to choose how you think about and interpret everyday life. His unguarded thoughts are revealing in ways he may not have intended.

In plenty of circles, patriotism has become nearly synonymous with moral turpitude. Many ask whether patriotism — or — be redeemed. Why be proud of a country when it has done so much wrong?

Both the left and the right have conditional views on the issue of pride, hinging upon what someone is proud of. It is important to note that today, the source of German pride is bike paths, beer and recycling systems, not “German history” or “German heritage.” The urge to , or historical wrongs is keeping America locked in an emotionally stunted place; we all know what a Confederate flag symbolizes, and there is no reason to pretend otherwise. The country’s inability to get on the same page about this is just one of many battles over historical pride that are sapping energy from the process of building a future that makes us all proud.

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There is an even more dangerous transformation happening in the United States “oil-based” economy: Refined products are no longer immune from world supply disruptions. The US is now a major exporter of refined products. If someone else will pay more, US refined products are exported. According to the St. Louis Federal Reserve, prices received for US petroleum products increased from March to May. Supply responds to higher prices, so more is exported.��

Daily exports of refined products have increased 15.9% since 2023, and the trend is continuing. The impact of the Strait of Hormuz closure clearly demonstrates that the refined product market in the US has undergone a structural shift, which implies it could literally “run out of gas.”

Refined products

The above chart shows the growth in refined products exports over the past three years. The trend has been increasing, but what is particularly striking is the noticeable increase in exports since the US incursion into Iran, starting on February 28.

This trend is even more apparent when exports from March 2026 until June 2026 are considered:

Average exports increased dramatically over this period, from 7.2 million barrels per day to over 7.6 million barrels per day. To put this into context, total refined products consumption in the US is approximately 12 million barrels per day, which means that the US is currently exporting 63% of its consumption.

Inventory levels

Because of the increase in exports (March 2026 to June 2026), combined with the surprising inelasticity in refined product demand, refined product inventory levels have dropped below the 5-year averages and are the since 2016. Current inventory levels are 25.5 days of demand for motor gasoline and 24.1 days for distillates (which include diesel fuel, heating oil and other fuels). The drop-off in inventories after the Strait of Hormuz closure is dramatic. In contrast, in the period just prior to March 2026, levels were 28.0 days and 29.8 days, respectively.

The same trend is evident for distillate fuels:

These decreases in inventories happened over three months. In the event of a more prolonged disruption, the impact could be catastrophic. As mentioned earlier, the US has 25.5 days of gasoline and 24.1 days of distillates. Refineries are currently running at a 95.5% utilization rate. This is as high as they can go without risking major mechanical failure. In other words, there may be no new supplies and no inventory.

The issues connected to exports and consumption do not exist in isolation. There is an important downstream impact that must be considered. This is captured by analysis of inventories by Petroleum Administration for Defense Districts (PADD), which describe the US energy markets regionally.

Regional supply issues

The potential for supply disruption is compounded by regional discrepancies in inventories. Some regions have seen much larger inventory drops than others. This could be majorly disruptive as shifting inventory is not straightforward. Shifts in inventory rely on transportation networks, which (1) are time-consuming and (2) are subject to bottlenecks that prevent easy transfer of product.

The most at-risk districts are PADD Districts 2 and 4. PADD District 2 is most worrisome, as it represents the Midwestern US — the agricultural heartland. If there is no fuel, there is no harvest. 

The US incursion into Iran (and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz) uncovered hidden vulnerabilities in the US fuel supply chains. These vulnerabilities were exposed after just a three-month period. Longer disruptions would surely be more dramatic (and potentially catastrophic). If these inventory trends continued, US gasoline inventories would drop 55.1% to 8.7 days of inventory by the Spring of 2027. Distillate inventories would drop 67.9% to 8.2 days. This is not sustainable. Yes, the US could conceivably run out of gas in the near future.

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The snub was hard to miss. Boulos later a summary of the talks naming Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, with no mention of Sudan. The minister representing General Abd al-Fattah al-’s Transitional Sovereign Council, by several accounts, stood entirely outside the picture — physically and politically. Arabic-language commentary noted the absurdity of a meeting convened to discuss Sudan’s future from which Sudan’s own representatives would be excluded.

The issue here is not about diplomatic bad manners. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey are, by several regional accounts, the same three shielding the Muslim Brotherhood-linked networks embedded inside Sudan’s army. Sudan’s exclusion from its own negotiation is not incidental; it is the clearest evidence yet of who that process actually serves.

Whatever is being decided about Sudan’s trajectory, it is being decided over the heads of officials nominally governing the country. That would be uncomfortable under any circumstances. It becomes something else when you factor in what else was happening simultaneously in Riyadh.

A terrorist commander arrives in Riyadh

While the Cairo talks were underway, Misbah Abu Zaid Talha, commander of the Al-Baraa Bin Malik Brigade, was reported to have in Saudi Arabia. Talha was hit with personal US on September 12, 2025, under Executive Order 14098, and his brigade was formally a Foreign Terrorist Organization the following March for ties to Iran and atrocities committed against Sudanese civilians. That a US-designated terrorist commander was holding court in Riyadh on the same weekend his country’s ceasefire prospects were being mapped out in Cairo is not a coincidence that explains itself.

The brigade is not a peripheral actor. By most credible accounts, it is deeply embedded in the Sudanese Armed Forces’ (SAF) war . The armed wing of the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood (Kizan) traces its organizational lineage to the Popular Defense Forces established under former leader Omar al-Bashir in 1989. Since the civil war began in April 2023, the brigade has grown from a battalion into a force estimated at roughly 35,000 , operating as an integrated component of SAF financing, recruitment and battlefield operations — not a militia fighting alongside the army, but one that has effectively into it.

Its record in the field has drawn international condemnation. The UN Human Rights Council received documentation of the brigade’s participation in the Halfiya Massacre, in which 33 detainees were summarily executed in northern Khartoum. Investigative journalists at Lighthouse the brigade’s role in atrocities in Gezira State, which included beheadings.

Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey have been identified by Arabic-language analysts as providing the Brotherhood-linked networks inside the SAF with their essential political . The Kizaniyya, as these Brotherhood-affiliated factions embedded in Sudan’s military command are known in regional discourse, are not treated as an embarrassing fringe. They are, by most accounts, running the .

Meanwhile, warnings out of eastern Sudan are growing louder. Brotherhood-linked actors are accelerating tribal in the region — a pressure campaign that risks cracking open a second front in a war already producing one of the worst humanitarian disasters on earth.

That is the context in which last month’s Cairo meeting took place, and in which Port Sudan’s foreign minister watched from outside the room.

A peace process without Sudan

Peace talks ultimately fail for many reasons. One of the surest is when the country bleeding out gets a seat outside the room while the neighbors decide its future. Another is when a US-designated terrorist commander turns up in the host capital mid-negotiation, and nobody says anything. Cairo may have been deliberate, or it may have been sloppy. Either answer is damning.

What is harder to dismiss is the pattern. The powers most invested in Sudan’s diplomatic future are the same ones with the most to gain from leaving its Islamist military networks intact. That is not a coincidence. It is a strategy, and Sudan is paying for it.

Sudan is running out of time for stories that don’t add up.

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In his early career, Graham was best friends with Arizona Senator John McCain, and in that part of his political life, he held tight to rock-solid Republican principles of advancing American values through the loosely regulated free market and foreign policy democracy expansion. But the late-career Graham story is best understood as abandoning almost all his principles for access to power. His career is a tale of what must be surrendered when one decides that staying “in the game” is more important than guarding the system’s guardrails.

Aligning with Trump and the abandonment of democratic norms

Graham’s alignment with President Donald Trump, especially when it increasingly meant abandoning norms that protect democratic governance, has been explained away as a “necessary compromise.” In order to “manage” Trump, Graham had to become �հ��ܳ���’s golfing buddy. But the gains were minimal. Graham may have been responsible, at the very end, for influencing Trump to become more involved in Middle East politics than Trump wanted, to prosecute the war against Iran harder than might otherwise have happened. He may have helped limit �հ��ܳ���’s most unhinged behavior. But he was probably deluded about what influence and sway he actually held on the narcissist-in-chief.

Graham’s abandonment of principles mirrored the way that Republican and independent voters in general swept aside core ideological positions, from former President Ronald Reagan to the Bush era, once they decided that electing a morally compromised Caligula figure was better than ceding power to the hated Democrats.

In an earlier era, Graham was consistently hawkish and consistently willing to argue hard positions. But he also projected a kind of institutional seriousness. His public posture suggested a belief that power should be used judiciously, that elections and procedural norms mattered, and that adversaries were to be confronted, not normalized into the center of one’s political project. Even when Graham was on the winning side of pure force, he still often sounded like a senator who believed the structure of governance mattered. 

Institutions cannot survive raw power politics. “Killers or losers,” as Trump divides up the world. They’re preserved by restraint, by the willingness of people inside the system to say no when the incentives say yes. Graham’s later career suggests that he ultimately chose incentives over restraint. His career illustrated in miniature what has happened in American life in the last ten years as a lesson in how justifying the indefensible has become a national habit and reflex.

From rejection to embrace: Graham’s Trump pivot

Graham famously did not begin as �հ��ܳ���’s natural ally. In 2015, he publicly rejected Trump using language that, by its moral framing, treated Trump as beyond normal partisan competition. He looked at the Republican Party (GOP) and said, our party has gone “.” Graham Trump as “a race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot,” and explicitly said Trump did not represent his party or its values.

That statement is often disregarded as a throwaway moment of campaign-season heat, but its importance is structural, since it reflects the underlying premise that some figures are too corrosive to be treated as legitimate partners. Then Trump won a second time. The voters threw caution to the wind in the vain hope that their grocery bills would become more affordable. And Graham’s short-term premises changed with the national mood. A previously held moral line collapsed as �հ��ܳ���’s tenacious hold on the party faithful became too hard to combat.

One tends to forget that Graham’s sharpest public moment of distance came after the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. After that, Graham delivered remarks characterized as a disavowal, captured in the , “Count me out. Enough is enough.”��But disavowal did not become transformation.

Once it became clear that Trump would return to power, Graham repositioned and moved from rejecting Trump the insurrectionist to defending the stone-cold reality of �հ��ܳ���’s restoration. The result is the same lesson: The “no” that seemed possible in a moment of moral outrage did not persist once loyalty again offered access. That is why the “necessary compromise” framing doesn’t quite fit. Compromise assumes a continuing commitment to constraints. Graham’s trajectory looks like the constraints were always conditional.

The Kavanaugh moment: enforcer logic over institutional restraint

A key moment for understanding Graham’s late-career turn is his posture during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation fight for a seat on the Supreme Court. During that period, Graham became one of the most prominent defenders of Kavanaugh, and his emphasized the structure of support rather than genuine uncertainty about the process. He attacked the opposition’s strategy and declared that he intended to vote for Kavanaugh.��Even when those remarks are read purely on their face, they illustrate an important shift.

Lindsey Graham was an Air Force military judge. But here, the argument became not “we must weigh contested facts carefully,” but rather “the process is a , and the vote must still proceed.” That is enforcer logic, power aligned to outcome rather than outcome aligned to careful restraint. Graham’s late-career behavior is best interpreted as a willingness to help normalize institutional corrosion when it benefited his personal political ambitions.

That normalization matters because authoritarian projects of illiberal democracies, like the one the US has become, do not succeed through one dramatic act. No Seizure of Power as in fascism or Leninism. The erosion of republican norms succeeds through permission structures, parties, legislatures and inside networks that decide how wide the can open — which range of ideas the public is willing to accept — allowing previously taboo behavior to become normalized.

When prominent insiders treat the erosion of norms as survivable or negotiable, they reduce the cost of further erosion. And when insiders decide that the only stable currency is proximity to power, they often stop seeing democratic guardrails as non-negotiable. Graham’s late career fits that pattern.

The moral failure of staying in the game

It is tempting to reduce the story of Lindsey Graham to policy differences or personality clashes. But Graham often acted autonomously. He was an institutional actor, someone who understood that in Washington, access is power, and power is achieved by aligning with whoever holds the center. The tragedy is that in a moment when the system required boundaries most, Graham treated boundaries as optional. When �հ��ܳ���’s project became the dominant center of gravity, Graham’s role moved from contesting the project to defending it.

After a death like this, biographies tend to turn into elegies. In the first draft of history, Graham’s slavishness to Trump is being explained away and whitewashed. But his late-career record reads less like pragmatism and more like an active moral choice repeatedly reinforced by bad incentives. This is a lesson about how democratic institutions fail when insiders decide that the job is to stay close to power rather than to protect the system that makes power legitimate. Someone has to do the job; better to leave it to me rather than others. That is a fatal decision that the history books do not treat with respect.

Graham could have gone down in history as a relatively great figure, perhaps comparable to the Republican counterpart, the beloved maverick “Man of the House” . Graham was charismatic, funny, charming and highly intelligent. But his gravestone in history will read: He sold his soul for cheap to a clownish devil. He tarnished not only his own reputation, but also damaged the institutions he actually did very much value. Graham never married and had no children. His life was 100% politics. The tragedy of Lindsey Graham was that he loved the limelight so much that he lost his own self, 100%, in order to stay relevant.

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A temporary pause, not a lasting peace

Gary describes the agreement as “a very unsatisfactory and … abysmal memorandum of understanding.” He argues that it merely creates a 60-day framework for further negotiations rather than resolving the underlying conflict. Despite fighting alongside the United States during the war, Israel is absent from the negotiating table, which highlights an important shift in regional diplomacy.

The immediate beneficiaries are Iran’s economy and leadership. Washington has temporarily lifted sanctions on Iranian oil exports, allowing Tehran to sell oil in US dollars for the first time in decades. While this will not fully repair Iran’s struggling economy, Gary says the agreement provides a significant financial boost at a moment when Tehran desperately needs liquidity. Simultaneously, conflicting public statements over nuclear inspections suggest both governments are presenting different narratives to domestic audiences while leaving the core nuclear dispute unresolved.

The Strait of Hormuz becomes the central battleground

Regarding the Strait of Hormuz, the agreement calls on Iran to make “best efforts” to keep shipping lanes open. Yet Tehran has also indicated that it intends to administer traffic through the strait, potentially charging vessels for passage.

Atul argues that such payments resemble protection money, while Gary calls the proposal “pretty much extortion” because it lacks any legal basis under international maritime law. Unlike the Panama or Suez canals, Iran provides no infrastructure that would justify transit fees. If accepted, this precedent could undermine the longstanding principle that international waterways remain open to global commerce.

Gary also draws on his experience as US ambassador to Oman. Although Iran has suggested Muscat could participate in any collection scheme, Oman has remained publicly silent. He believes the Omanis are unlikely to violate their international commitments, though they could legitimately charge for services such as search and rescue or environmental protection if necessary. Meanwhile, Oman has emerged comparatively well positioned because its oil exports largely avoid the vulnerable shipping route through the Persian Gulf.

Economic shockwaves extend far beyond the Gulf

Atul and Gary state that the conflict has disrupted the financial architecture built around Gulf energy exports. Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar face severe challenges because their economies depend heavily on energy exports that pass through Hormuz. Higher transportation costs and uncertainty threaten both government revenues and global energy prices.

Atul expands the analysis beyond oil markets. Gulf monarchies may have to draw down reserves or sell overseas investments to maintain domestic spending commitments while simultaneously increasing defense budgets. Reduced purchases of Western assets and US Treasury bonds could tighten global financial conditions and place upward pressure on borrowing costs.

The United Arab Emirates has requested a Federal Reserve swap line. Gary describes this as an emergency liquidity mechanism. Atul characterizes the development as a reversal of the traditional flow of petrodollars, arguing that instead of Gulf wealth supporting Western financial markets, the US may increasingly find itself supporting Gulf partners during periods of crisis. Together, they suggest that the consequences of the conflict extend well beyond the Middle East into the foundations of the global financial system.

Intelligence failures and misunderstanding Iran

Much of the discussion examines why Washington misjudged the conflict. Gary argues that recent reductions in experienced personnel at the CIA and State Department removed many of the officials with the deepest knowledge of Iran. He believes this weakened strategic planning and contributed to serious miscalculations.

He is particularly critical of the assumption that military pressure and targeted assassinations could trigger the collapse of the Iranian government. Instead, the campaign strengthened domestic support for the regime through a rally-around-the-flag effect while reinforcing a political culture shaped by the 1979 Revolution and the Iran–Iraq War.

Gary argues that American policymakers underestimated Iran’s ideological resilience and negotiating style. “The Iranians have never won a war or lost a negotiation,” he says. He expects negotiations to last far longer than the 60 days envisioned in the MOU because Iranian officials have repeatedly demonstrated their willingness to delay agreements while extracting additional concessions.

A transformed strategic landscape

The discussion concludes by examining how new military technologies have altered the balance of power. Gary argues that drones have fundamentally changed naval strategy because even a single successful attack on a tanker can disrupt shipping and drive insurance costs high enough to halt commercial traffic. Control of strategic waterways no longer depends solely on major naval fleets.

Looking ahead, both speakers warn that the agreement leaves Iran’s nuclear program unresolved while increasing pressure on neighboring states to reconsider their own security strategies. Saudi Arabia may accelerate nuclear planning if confidence in American security guarantees continues to erode. Other regional powers could eventually follow.

Rather than marking the end of the crisis, Atul and Gary conclude that the MOU begins a new phase of prolonged negotiations and strategic competition. Iran appears economically strengthened, the US faces difficult diplomatic and financial challenges and the Middle East enters an even more uncertain era in which regional stability, energy markets and the global balance of power remain interconnected.

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At the heart of the “Middle-Income trap” debate is a fundamental question: whether India’s present growth model can initiate the broad industrial and societal transformation required to become a genuinely advanced economy by , the centenary year of India’s independence. The concern here is not so much about imminent stagnation or economic collapse, but whether India’s current growth trajectory can sustain developed-economy status over the long term.��

Signs of the trap

The Indian economy has grown steadily at 6–7% in the last few years and may soon become the world’s by aggregate GDP. Yet despite this growth, several structural features increasingly resemble conditions associated with a middle-income trap. Firstly, a $5 trillion economy spread across 1.4 billion people still produces per capita incomes compared to advanced economies. So as India becomes “larger and bigger” globally, the individual citizen does not feel proportionately wealthy.

Secondly, India has built globally competitive sectors in software, pharmaceuticals, finance and digital services, but these successes coexist with shallow manufacturing depth, a vast informal workforce and limited high-productivity employment generation.

Thirdly, unlike East Asian economies, which first built large manufacturing ecosystems before moving into advanced technologies, India has built elite cognitive sectors before constructing a broad industrial society beneath them. Growth has therefore remained uneven, with islands of high productivity existing alongside large sections of low-skilled and informal employment.

2047 Vision

Policymakers have increasingly recognized the structural challenges facing the Indian economy. Under the “” document, the Indian government has chalked out a long-term road map to transform India into a developed, self-reliant nation by its centenary of independence in 2047. The target is a $30 trillion economy, focusing on four core pillars: youth, the poor, women and farmers.

Also under the broader vision of , initiatives such as the , , , and expanding electronics manufacturing ecosystems reflect an attempt to move India beyond its traditional role as a large consumer market toward becoming a technologically capable producer economy.

India’s participation in external partnerships such as similarly reflects growing recognition that long-term resilience requires deeper domestic industrial capability and reduced dependence on narrow external supply chains concentrated in a few countries. As India’s Electronics and IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw recently , “You cannot build sovereign AI, secure 5G or trusted IoT [internet of things] on someone else’s chips.”

India’s unique challenges

Yet, India’s developmental challenge remains considerably more complex than that faced by other industrializing economies. Countries such as Brazil and Russia can partly rely on commodities, minerals or energy exports as fallback engines of economic strength. India lacks such a cushion, and its long-term rise depends far more heavily on building industrial capability, technological depth and broad-based productivity growth.

The scale of the challenge is also historically unusual. Unlike smaller East Asian economies, India must generate high-productivity employment for a population of more than 1.4 billion people under democratic conditions. China industrialized with a lower dependency burden and under a far more centralized political structure, while countries such as South Korea and Taiwan transformed with much smaller populations and more compact industrial ecosystems.

This is why manufacturing depth matters so profoundly in India’s case. If industrial ecosystems remain shallow, the economy may generate aggregate growth without creating sufficient large-scale productive employment. India therefore requires not merely economic expansion, but mass productivity expansion at continental scale, a transition that very few societies in history have attempted under democratic conditions.

India’s missing middle

The core challenge is that India’s industrial remain relatively underdeveloped. In most advanced industrial economies, prosperity is sustained not only by elite technology firms or high-end services, but also by dense productive ecosystems that exist between elite knowledge sectors at the top and low-productivity informal work at the bottom. These “middle layers” historically powered the rise of countries such as Germany, Japan, South Korea and China.

One important component of this middle layer is the skilled blue-collar workforce comprising machinists, industrial electricians, fabrication specialists, robotics technicians, welders and precision manufacturers who form the backbone of advanced industrial economies. India continues to face shortages in both the scale and quality of such vocational depth.

Another missing layer is the ecosystem of mid-level manufacturing firms such as tooling companies, industrial subcontractors, precision engineering firms, machine-part manufacturers and specialized component suppliers. Germany and South Korea built such deeply interconnected supplier ecosystems around such firms, enabling industrial resilience, technological upgrading and manufacturing depth over decades.

Although India has developed important industrial clusters in automobiles, textiles, pharmaceuticals, engineering and electronics manufacturing, they often remain less vertically integrated and less technologically dense than those seen in East Asia. Much of India’s manufacturing structure continues to rely heavily on imported components, fragmented supply chains and relatively shallow domestic industrial ecosystems.

India’s challenge is also societal

India’s missing industrial middle layers are not merely an economic deficiency, but also a societal one. Industrial ecosystems do not emerge from policy incentives alone. They are also shaped by how societies value labor, technical competence, vocational specialization and manufacturing work itself.

Technicians, machinists, electricians, fabrication specialists and industrial suppliers form the productive foundations of advanced economies. In India, however, social prestige has historically remained around white-collar professions, while vocational and technical trades often received lower social recognition.

The consequences of weak vocational ecosystems are visible today not only in manufacturing, but also in everyday urban life. Indian consumers often struggle to access reliable specialized tradespeople such as plumbers, electricians, carpenters, welders, appliance technicians, sanitation workers or gardeners at reasonable cost and consistent quality.

In many advanced industrial societies, such work is supported by structured vocational systems, standardized certification, specialized municipal services and greater institutional respect for skilled labor. In India, however, these professions usually remain informal, under-trained and socially undervalued despite their enormous economic importance.

In this regard, Vietnam offers an . Over the past two decades, it invested heavily in labor-intensive manufacturing, vocational training and export-oriented industrial employment. Though Vietnam remains far less affluent than advanced industrial economies, it has nevertheless succeeded in building broad manufacturing ecosystems that absorb labor at scale while gradually developing industrial discipline, technical specialization and supplier networks.

The social distance between white-collar aspirations and manufacturing work therefore remains significantly narrower in Vietnam than in India, where vocational pathways often continue to suffer from lower societal approval.

The same structural imbalance is increasingly visible in India’s broader labor market. The country produces large numbers of engineering graduates, yet relatively few advanced factories, industrial research and development ecosystems or high-productivity manufacturing sectors capable of absorbing them at scale. Many graduates therefore compete for government jobs, low-to-mid-level IT employment or work outside their technical specialization in sales, services or gig-economy roles.

India’s challenge, therefore, is not simply about creating more jobs. It is about creating productive ecosystems capable of converting education, labor and technical skills into sustained industrial capability. Addressing this imbalance also carries a deeper social significance for India. Expanding vocational dignity, industrial employment and skill-based economic mobility could help create a more socially integrated and economically inclusive society.

Ultimately, India’s transition to developed-country status will not be measured merely by stock market valuations, aggregate GDP rankings or isolated elite technology sectors. It will depend on whether the country can build the industrial middle layers that convert economic growth into broad productivity, mass employment and rising prosperity across a population of continental scale.

India is not yet trapped in a middle-income equilibrium, but neither is its transition to developed-economy status guaranteed. The country has demonstrated strong growth, rising geopolitical relevance, expanding digital infrastructure and growing technological ambition. Yet technological missions alone may not be sufficient unless accompanied by broader societal transformation in how labor, vocational skill and industrial work are valued. That remains the defining developmental challenge facing India over the next two decades.

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The implication is bigger than it sounds: For the first time, the most resource-intensive part of building AI — the training — can happen without a billion-dollar facility. Every major objection to that approach has been , one by one, including feasibility, cost and scalability of the approach.

The AI arms race is real. The geopolitical stakes are as high as advertised. But the assumption that only governments and trillion-dollar companies have the investment capability and thus are the only players who can shape AI’s future is exactly the kind of incumbent logic that gets disrupted. We have seen this before. IBM once believed serious computing power had to live in a centralized mainframe, managed by institutions with the resources to operate it. Then the personal computer arrived, and that assumption collapsed. The internet followed the same pattern, and so did open-source software. In each case, the distributed challenger looked marginal until it didn’t. The incumbents were not beaten by a bigger version of themselves. They were beaten by an entirely different architecture.

There is also a geographic advantage that rarely gets discussed. Centralized data centers are prisoners of infrastructure, requiring access to power grids capable of sustaining the electricity demand of a small city, which limits where they can be built and by whom. Around half of a data center’s total cost of ownership is facilities maintenance and device cooling, all costs that are passed down to owners and renters. A distributed network has no such constraint. It sources compute wherever people live, which is also where cheap, renewable or stranded energy already exists, that is, on devices that have already been paid for and incur no cooling costs. That is a structural moat that a data center model cannot easily replicate.

The standard story of the AI race (for example, between the US and China) is a story about resources: who has the most advanced chips, who can build the biggest facilities, who can sustain tens of billions in annual capital expenditure. But it is missing something important. The race is also being run from the bottom up by a distributed network of independent contributors who, collectively, may prove harder to beat than any nation-state.

The trap inside China’s AI strategy

China’s open-source AI ecosystem has quietly become a dominant force. Models from Chinese labs now top the download charts on the platforms developers use to find and share AI tools. By some estimates, roughly of US AI startups are building on Chinese open-source models. The appeal is straightforward: These models can be up to 90% cheaper for companies to use than their closed-source alternatives, at surprisingly competitive quality. They are free to inspect, modify and build on. Most recently, Moonshot’s open Kimi K3 has Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 on key benchmarks, showing that ingenious optimizations can beat pure hardware power.

But this open-source AI has a fundamental economic problem. It costs enormous sums to build and almost nothing to copy. The organizations producing these models are, in effect, subsidizing the entire industry. We are already seeing the early signs: Alibaba, one of China’s most prominent AI labs, has now three consecutive closed-source models, signaling a strategic pivot toward monetization over openness. Meanwhile, access to Chinese models on major Western AI platforms is narrowing. The result is a potential gap between the open and closed frontiers — one that decentralized training networks may be uniquely positioned to fill. Meta, the largest US producer of open-source AI, is hedging toward a hybrid approach.

The open-source movement that drove China’s rise could be its first casualty if that rise succeeds. Without a way to make open AI economically sustainable, the gravitational pull will always be back toward consolidation among the handful of companies wealthy enough to absorb the losses indefinitely.

There is, however, an alternative, and it is one that most AI insiders dismissed until recently: training AI models not inside a single facility, but distributed across thousands of computers owned by different people in different places, following the same basic principle that made the early internet, Wikipedia and open-source software possible.

Two and a half years ago, this was considered technically impossible. Then it was done, but dismissed as too expensive. Then it was to be cheaper per training run than conventional data center economics. The objection then became scale: This was fine for small experiments, but never for serious models. But when a major decentralized training run was launched and worked, that put that argument to rest, too. As I write this article, Google DeepMind is in-house decentralization technologies.

Each time a new objection falls, the incumbents’ underlying logic gets a little harder to defend. Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic, recently acknowledged the progress while noting that decentralized training remains behind the frontier. He is not wrong about the current moment. But according to from watchdog Epoch AI, the distributed computing approach is closing the gap with conventional data center training at roughly four times the rate that data centers themselves are scaling, according to researchers tracking both trajectories. The question is no longer whether the gap will close, but when. It is already clear, though, that decentralized training is now a legitimate competitive vector in the AI race.

Why distributed AI will win in the long run

The most important shift happening in AI right now is not about bigger models, but about specialization. Fields like biology, materials science and mathematics are not waiting for a single general-purpose AI to solve their problems. They are actively seeking AI systems trained specifically for their domain. Those models do not require the resources of a frontier lab to build. They require expertise, data and enough computing power to train something useful. That is a competition open communities can win.

Consumer hardware is also getting meaningfully more powerful. Apple’s M5 chips, running on Apple’s open-source MLX framework, now run and fine-tune serious AI models entirely on a laptop, with no cloud account, no data center and no permission required. The device on your desk is already a viable node in the AI race.

Alongside optimized consumer hardware, AI agent tools are putting sophisticated capabilities into the hands of individual developers. The infrastructure for millions of people to participate in AI development, not just consume it, is being assembled in plain sight. The result, over time, is a network effect that no single institution can replicate: a swarm of participants whose collective compute and collective intelligence exceeds what any data center, however large, can concentrate in one place. A data center can be outspent, sanctioned, or seized. A network of millions of laptops, phones and servers spread across the world cannot.

This is where the economic model comes in and where decentralized AI offers something neither the US hyperscalers nor the Chinese open-source labs have figured out. If the people who contribute computing power to a training run, help fine-tune a model or deploy AI agents on a distributed network can receive a direct financial return for their contributions, the economics of open-source AI change entirely. You no longer need a trillion-dollar company willing to absorb losses. You need a sufficiently large network of participants, each making a reasonable return.

This is not a distant theoretical possibility. The broader financial industry is already moving toward tokenized assets at scale and AI model economics will follow. The coordination layer that makes this possible, the infrastructure for millions of independent participants to transact and collaborate without a central authority, is what crypto was built to provide.

Decentralized AI will continue to grow and, indeed, scale beyond what either nation-state can provide. Those doubting this, or threatened by it, will continue trying to move the goalposts. But the direction of travel is not in question. Open, distributed, economically self-sustaining AI is coming. And the only viable long-term competitor to a facility the size of a power plant is something that does not need to be built at all. It is the collective computational power of everyone who wants to participate. Best of all, anyone can use a network, not just those paying OpenAI or Anthropic.

[Jake Brukhman is the founder and CEO of CoinFund, which holds investments in decentralized AI infrastructure companies.]

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The Philippines relies on imports for approximately 90% of its oil supply, leaving the economy vulnerable to global market disruptions and geopolitical crises in the Middle East. Recent have led to double-digit fuel price hikes, thereby eroding consumer purchasing power. This susceptibility to external shocks is amplified by domestic institutional , especially those associated with political dynasties and incumbency bias.​

The economy has now slowed for consecutive quarters. Full-year 2025 growth settled at 4.4%, the weakest since the COVID-19 pandemic. The country now faces a stagflationary episode, threatening to regain the “Sick Man of Asia” label (the label given to the Philippines near the end of the Marcos Sr. era, when the country saw contracting GDP, inflation of around in 1984, rising unemployment and a debt crisis) if regression continues.

Monopolizing the ballot: incumbency advantage and the low-information electorate

Persistent susceptibility to external shocks is not only driven by global volatility but also by rooted in incumbency bias and political dynasties. By monopolizing power and favoring patronage over public investment, entrenched elites have weakened the state’s ability to manage , leaving the most disadvantaged households to shoulder rising costs. For example, during periods of oil price spikes, political leaders often respond by selectively distributing cash aid to supporters rather than investing in comprehensive social protection or infrastructure improvements that could cushion poor households from such shocks. This cycle perpetuates the exposure of marginalized groups.

The of candidates is an important individual-level predictor of campaign tactics. A defining feature of candidates with dynastic status is that they inherit personal support bases from their family members who have previously served in Congress.

Incumbents enjoy massive through name recognition, easier access to campaign finance and the indirect use of government resources to bolster re-election bids. Dynastic status is an important that can differentiate legislators, and few studies examine the role of political heredity. Some studies show that dynastic legislators tend to enter office earlier than nondynastic legislators and are consequently more likely to hold ministerial positions. Elections often become a referendum on their record rather than a choice between competing policy platforms, creating safe seats that discourage high-quality challengers from entering the race.

In developing countries, political parties commonly lack or credible programmatic reputations. These parties do not provide reliable information about a candidate’s policy preferences. This lack of information gives voters strong incentives to use the incumbent’s in-office performance as a shortcut for learning about their competence.

In high-information environments, parties are strong and programmatic. Party labels reliably inform citizens about candidates’ policy preferences, past performance and other attributes. This enables voters to make choices based on candidates’ intrinsic qualities rather than merely on incumbency. In contrast, in low-information environments, citizens commonly rely on the incumbent’s record, using it as a proxy for candidate competence against an ex ante expectation of good performance.

When the incumbency advantage is pronounced, the safest bet becomes re-electing the sitting official. This pattern undermines the democratic ideal of electoral uncertainty, reducing genuine competition and accountability that are fundamental to democratic systems. Consequently, entrenched incumbency can hamper political renewal and limit the electorate’s ability to demand responsive or innovative governance.

Regulatory capture and dynastic stranglehold

In the Philippines, the is so pronounced that in many cases, candidates from warlord political clans run virtually unopposed. Recent examinations have found that political dynasties have grown stronger and increasingly linked, occupying a rising share of elected positions in the Philippines and reducing electoral competition and weakening incentives for effective economic governance.

This structure characterizes public office as a “government-as-family-business,” in which the primary focus shifts from national development to the and prestige. Dynasties engage in practices such as regulatory capture to influence key public institutions, making sure that the bureaucracy serves the interests of the clan rather than the state, consistent with documented associations between political clans and detrimental practices in Philippine politics.

Patronage politics and food insecurity

The 2026 GDP growth of 2.8% is mainly attributed to issues in public investment, which have been worsened by governance-related hesitancy following high-profile corruption investigations. Although the expects the Philippine economy to grow above 5% until 2027, persistent concerns remain regarding the of dynastic leaders’ preference for personality-based dole-outs over efforts to strengthen the social safety net. This approach particularly exposes the of households by income to the risks posed by oil shocks and food supply disruptions.

Public responses to global oil price spikes frequently focus on rising gasoline costs, with headlines highlighting the threat of transport strikes, higher tricycle fares and motorists’ anxieties. However, as the Philippine Institute for Development Studies () notes, the oil shock extends beyond transportation and has become a significant food security issue. The resulting crisis unfolds most acutely in the kitchens of the Filipino families, where the primary casualty of the current global oil shock is ultimately the dinner table of the marginalized.��

Dynastic political leaders often undermine the creation of a strong social welfare safety net. Elites prioritize consolidating power through patronage and targeted handouts rather than building resilient, universal institutions. As a result, the bottom 30% of households remain exposed to macroeconomic shocks, food price increases and disruptions in global supply chains.

Empirical evidence links of political power to higher poverty rates and lower human development effectiveness. While theories indicate that the impact of political dynasties on development is an empirical question, international evidence indicates that governments dominated by dynasties are closely associated with misgovernance. Empirical evidence shows that dynasties in Congress.

However, some proponents of political dynasties argue that established families may contribute to governance stability or offer experienced leadership, thereby likely enhancing policy continuity. Nevertheless, prevailing empirical evidence indicates that any potential benefits are outweighed by the negative consequences for development, including entrenched inequality and diminished government effectiveness.

The by political dynasties in local government can reduce local economic growth and deter the provision of public goods and good governance. Incumbency bias sustains a dynastic status quo that favors over the structural reforms needed, such as rice tariffication or energy sector diversification, which help anchor inflation expectations.��

PIDS notes that fuel inflation affects more than transport and electricity. Higher fuel prices raise production and transport costs, quickly increasing food prices and squeezing real incomes, pushing struggling households closer to poverty as wages lag.

Breaking the cycle: institutional feasibility and the path to structural resilience

The issue is not primarily about managing pump prices or employing broad fiscal subsidies for oil use, which tend to disproportionately benefit wealthier groups. Rather, the difficulty consists in addressing the resulting distributional imbalances. While some may argue that measures such as price controls or subsidies provide immediate assistance to consumers, these interventions often create inefficiencies and lead to , especially when benefits accrue disproportionately to higher-income groups. Effective policy ought instead to focus on targeted support, such as direct assistance to poorer households, subsidies for at-risk sectors, measures to protect real wages and strategies to ensure secure food supplies. However, implementing such confronts several challenges, notably administrative limitations, insufficient capacity at both the local and national levels, and the complexity of precisely identifying and reaching eligible beneficiaries.��

Additionally, there is a persistent risk of political capture or leakage, in which resources intended for at-risk groups are diverted for partisan purposes or distributed in a non-transparent manner. These implementation barriers make it difficult to ensure that support consistently reaches those most in need. Breaking this cycle requires more than technocratic solutions. It requires a true Anti-Political Dynasty Law to realize the 1987 Constitution’s mandate for equal access to public service.

Political restructuring must accompany the shift in social protection from reactive relief to proactive resilience-building. Group needs must differentiate interventions. Insurance and income-stabilization mechanisms must shield the majority from income volatility, but care must be taken to ensure they are adequately funded and resistant to elite manipulation. Targeted poverty-reduction programs must cushion the low-income population while remaining flexible enough to adapt to evolving macroeconomic shocks.

To guarantee sustained stability and achieve the 2040 vision, the state must enact bold reforms that expand social protection to universal coverage, meeting upper-middle-income country standards. Strengthening requires investment in protective factors: strong infrastructure, quality education, effective climate risk management and a sectoral shift from agriculture to more productive fields such as services, industry and manufacturing.

Until the monarchical nature of Philippine electoral politics is fundamentally reformed, the economy will remain exposed to global shocks, with state institutions incapable of effectively defending citizens or resolving the root causes of enduring vulnerability. Although enacting an Anti-Political Dynasty Law is still a critical objective, its political feasibility is currently constrained by the entrenched influence of dominant political families. Nonetheless, incremental strategies, such as coalition-building among reform-minded legislators, advocacy through civil society groups and strengthened public scrutiny, can incrementally increase the likelihood of passing such reforms.

Similarly, policy recommendations to improve local governance through participatory mechanisms such as the Barangay Assembly and community education programs must account for implementation barriers, including resource constraints and variable local institutional capacity. Establishing realistic benchmarks for openness along with inclusiveness can act as a catalyst for gradual progress. Although these measures may not immediately achieve full structural equity, emphasizing pragmatic pathways and flexible strategies improves the feasibility of institutional transformation and supplies a foundation for broader, sustainable reform.

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In this context, US President Donald Trump is the North Star for every thief, grifter and influence peddler on the planet. What makes him different is that he is openly doing what others have dreamed of doing and then tried to do surreptitiously. Trump is a corrupt gift that keeps on giving to the lap dogs in his midst who facilitate the corruption and then line up to take their cut of the action. 

of the almost daily stench emanating from the White House and from the mansions of the cavorting and cowering tycoons is more than a full-time job. Luckily, others have been busy �հ��ܳ���’s and its reach. It seems safe to say that Trump is already the president in US history, and he has not even completed half of his four-year term.

The Reflecting Pool scandal

Now that �հ��ܳ���’s grand 250th anniversary celebration of American independence has come and gone, it will be easier to watch the graft parade without the distraction of celebratory delusion. The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool scandal is the perfect place to start because it is a big-time metaphor for so much that is plaguing today’s America, and it was branded as part of that big-time celebration.

That the Reflecting Pool scandal is such a comparatively small-time scam allows the absurd comedy at its heart to bring joy to all of us who believe that only Trump himself cannot see the absurdity of the moment. To recap this one, Trump, probably on his own, decided that any cool pool has a blue bottom, and that “his” reflecting pool did not. Also likely, it then was decided in a close acolyte vote to give Trump alone the lead on this one.

And lead he did. He was in such a hurry to get this done in time for July 4th festivities that he found his own contractor and awarded a for what has now become a mere job to refurbish the Reflecting Pool, replete with an American-flag blue bottom.��

Good plan, Sir. Only no one told the reflecting pool. So, right on cue and just in time for that July 4th celebration, the blue bottom began to , the algae returned and the pond turned a beautiful money green so consistent with that vaunted American freedom to grift.��

However, this story is not over yet, so stay tuned to find out who got paid for what, how much Trump and his family and friends made on the deal, and the ongoing and costly effort to make American-flag blue the official color of the Reflecting Pool. And remember, every effort will be made by Trump and his lackeys to obscure the actual data from public view and blame someone else for the costly fiasco. Under any circumstances, the Reflecting Pool saga will stand as a symbolic trope for a nation in deep decline and a president unable to accomplish even the simplest of tasks.

Family fun corruption: the Trump-Kushner Mediterranean scheme

Next up is family fun corruption. Enter the Trump family jewels, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, leading the way in making friends the world over. Unfortunately, their greedy eyes caught sight of a currently pristine piece of the coast of Albania and a nearby small island sanctuary. Jared and Ivanka, already awash in cash from dubious sources, perched in a yacht nearby, saw yet another opportunity to cash in by turning natural beauty into environmental blight to create an upscale resort playground for the rich and corrupt.

So, build they must. Ivanka, in a moment of historic clarity, was quoted as :

It’s an unbelievable, beautiful, 1,400-hectare private island in the middle of the Mediterranean. We were on a friend’s boat, and we stopped for a swim. Effectively, that’s how we found it. We swam to the island, we went on a hike — barefoot all the way, up to the top. And we were just captivated. And it stayed with us ever since.

This is the longing of a tone-deaf rich kid who happens to be the daughter of the president of the United States and the wife of Jared of Arabia, the guy who managed to turn a multiportfolio gig at the first Trump White House into billions of dollars in “investment” capital from the very Arabian officials he sucked up to on �հ��ܳ���’s behalf. So now, he and his wife are plying the Mediterranean in a yacht seeking further lucre at the expense of others. Fortunately, the Albanian populace has to the streets to send them elsewhere on their quest. This is another stay-tuned moment.

The $1.8 billion insurrectionist slush fund

While defiling the Reflecting Pool and trying to defile the Albanian Coast are a small part of the story, there is one item that stands out for its audacity and abject willingness to fleece the American public — the almost public fund for wayward insurrectionists and other “suffering” loyalists. Further, hidden within the machinations of this grand grift is some form of immunity from tax audit for Trump, his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, and the Trump Organization.

This is the story of the “” of a lawsuit filed by Trump against the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) claiming that �հ��ܳ���’s privacy was violated by the IRS during the Biden presidency. In “normal” times, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) is supposed to defend the interests of the US Government and protect public funds from spurious claims.��

Instead, this time around, �հ��ܳ���’s DOJ worked out a crafty settlement with itself, establishing a compensation fund for those Trump acolytes “wrongly” investigated and prosecuted by the same institution that was supposed to defend against the very claim being settled. If this sounds like the creation of a slush fund for dangerous miscreants at taxpayer expense, try not to mistake it for anything else.

Then, just to make sure that there can be no mistake about whose interests are guiding those DOJ attorneys sworn to protect the public interest, they slipped in a offering some kind of a tax-fraud free pass for Trump and his family. This undoubtedly was welcome news in Trump family circles.

This scheme was so audacious that even a Republican or two objected, and then the judge who had the original case that was supposedly “settled” between the parties seems to have just ruled that the case filed by Trump and then “settled” with his DOJ was a sham from the outset. In other words, the judge that the lawsuit was a shameful attempt to divert almost $1.8 billion in public funds for corrupt purposes. Further proceedings await. Also, it is unclear where �հ��ܳ���’s tax fraud free pass stands at the moment, but you can be sure that he and his family will do almost anything for a lifelong tax holiday.

A continued lack of accountability

As I noted above, there are those hard at work every day trying to keep up with the daily grift, corruption, and influence peddling that seems to be the main substantive work of the Trump administration. Erratic, costly and deadly international adventures seem as amoral and slimy as the daily grift, and efforts to address domestic economic and social issues seem afterthoughts to the purposeful distractions of market manipulation, immigration round-ups, religious zealotry and national chest-thumping.

Yet, there is still no accountability, still no rule of law and still no uncompromised moral compass to be found in the land. Democratic Party leadership musters its almost daily dose of outrage without anything resembling a cohesive resistance to the sources of their outrage. Much of the nation complains about high grocery prices and extreme temperatures without any effort to even try to organize against the corrupt corporate and political interests largely responsible for both. So, still there is no accountability.

And then there is the Trump cryptocurrency/meme coin scam…

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Yet the aftermath did not feel solitary at all. It felt like a culture war for a moment. Nine months later, the case has entered the slow machinery of a capital prosecution, with Utah prosecutors seeking the . The shock phase is over. What is left is more revealing: how a spectacular act of political violence has been converted into procedure, narrative and state response.��

The public record still leaves parts of Robinson’s motive unresolved. Thus, false narratives and conspiracy theories filled the vacuum, becoming part of the event’s political afterlife. In September, rumors and false claims spread before the facts had settled. By March, the shooting was still serving as raw material for involving foreign agents and through a familiar process of mass misinformation. If the event seemed like an isolated incident, the reaction revealed something systemic. It quickly became another episode in the between social liberals and conservatives, largely along government-opposition party lines.

But the US is not unique here: Polarization, disinformation and democratic backsliding have become a global triad. The by Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) found that freedom of expression was eroding and that “toxic” levels of polarization were rising across the West — conditions under which executive shortcuts and the erosion of the rule of law become significantly more likely. The 2026 is even starker. It says democracy for the average global citizen has fallen to 1978 levels, while warning about democratic backsliding in the US.

The question, then, is not simply who killed Charlie Kirk and why, but what kind of politics his death reflects. What does the immediate translation of identity conflict into policy after political violence tell us about current liberal-republican institutions? Identifying relevant mechanisms with historical precedents can help answer this question.

In search of historical analogies

In the months following Kirk’s assassination, the deployment of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Minnesota triggered an unusually militarized federal crackdown, police shootings and mass protests. Not only has this been to a violent escalation in post-Kirk culture-war politics, but it has also been repeatedly described in a vocabulary borrowed from the upheavals of .

That comparison casts the United States as a constitutional republic strained by conspiracy theories, political violence and government by emergency powers. The “Weimar Republic” remains tempting for a reason. After World War I, Weimar combined that still feel familiar today.

The first is an elite humiliated by geopolitical reversal and prone to conspiracy alibis, such as the “stab-in-the-back” legend that transmuted military defeat into a tale of betrayal by socialists, liberals and Jews. The second, the armed politics of the street: Freikorps veterans, clandestine cells like Organization Consul and a judiciary whose marked leniency toward right-wing terror contrasted with its harshness against the Left. Third is an emergency-clause governance — Constitution Article 48 wielded frequently amid crises — through which legality and exception coexisted in a tense embrace.

The analogy is easy to understand. Across today’s West, polarization is rising, conspiracy theories online and crisis-era emergency persist. Europol also continues to document and terrorism in Europe. But when today’s crisis is framed as “Weimar Republic all over again,” the conversation slides into a morality tale. Scholars have warned for years that the analogy is overused and often misleading. At best, it focuses attention on the failure of republican and liberal institutions. At worst, it obscures the incremental mechanisms by which liberal regimes while retaining a rule-of-law façade.

What Weimar also had was a mass socialist movement that elites treated as an existential threat, as documented by historian in his book The Coming of the Third Reich. This critical aspect is almost entirely today. For present purposes, the better analogies are the ones that match the mechanisms at issue: law used to harden identity conflict, executive workarounds used to escape deadlock and constitutional continuity preserved even as liberal substance erodes. By that measure, two earlier European episodes fit more precisely than the usual 1920s specter.

First, the German Empire’s Kulturkampf in the 1870s: a state-driven cultural struggle under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck that to reorder identity and authority at the expense of the Church. A series of laws regulated clerical training and appointments, passed primary and secondary education into government hands, imposed civil marriage and banned the Jesuit Order. As Evans shows, it was an attempt to translate value conflicts into institutions, to centralize loyalty by legislating culture. Today, it illuminates how governments “solve” cultural conflict by institutionalizing it.

Additionally, in the late Austro-Hungarian Empire before World War I, a multinational parliament was jammed by identity politics (famously, the Badeni language of 1897), leading to governance via Paragraph 14 emergency decrees when the legislature could not function. This was constitutional rule-by-exception — legalistic workarounds that normalized executive autonomy.

These are not just historical curiosities. For the first and third criteria, Kulturkampf is the clearer parallel: It shows how a state can translate cultural cleavage into law while remaining recognizably constitutional. As for the second and fourth, late Habsburg Austria fits better: It shows how deadlock normalizes executive workarounds without requiring Weimar’s revolutionary horizon. Together, they map a path that many Western regimes now tread: identity conflict embedded in law and governance by exception when the resulting political polarization obstructs formal procedures.

When law makes identity the battlefield

In the early 1870s, Prussian Minister of Education Adalbert Falk pushed through the — placing seminaries and clerical appointments under state oversight, tightening control over confessional schools and institutionalizing civil marriage. The 1872 ban on the Jesuit Order dramatized the conflict. The point was not only to separate Church and state as a modernization project, but to discipline a cross-cutting identity (Roman Catholicism) within a new nationalist frame, with the liberal establishment largely in support.

Polarization was an instrument of rule, instead of a rhetorical accident. Nor did Kulturkampf stop at confession. It bled into campaigns against Polish minorities in Prussia, trading on the logic of homogeneity. These efforts fused nationalism, security and administration, leaving long tails in trust and partisan alignment that empirical work is only now tracing.

Nineteenth-century repression also galvanized political Roman Catholicism. Professor Lukas Haffert has argued that those organizational legacies can modern voting patterns, though parts of his findings remain . At the time, this mobilization congealed into institutions. On the Roman Catholic side, the People’s Association for Catholic Germany and the Catholic Centre Party built a nation-spanning pedagogy of pamphlets, lectures and local circles, reaching hundreds of thousands of members before World War I. They defended confessional prerogatives, but also illuminated the cracks of imperial politics.

The event shows how a state-driven culture struggle, once institutionalized, reorganizes parties and civil society for generations. If that sounds familiar, it is because many contemporary policy fights — over curricula, religious exemptions, migration or protest — operate like Kulturkampf: They are pitched as neutral governance but function as identity ordering, even in ways unforeseen by the state’s culture warriors.

Today, the subject on the other end of the law may be a rival party, a different culture, immigrants or a stigmatized movement rather than a confession, but the mechanism is strikingly close: to fix identities in place, then reward the loyal and the deviant. Such dramas play out even in unlikely places.

In early 2023, Brian Covey, a at Jacksonville’s Mandarin Middle School, filmed rows of empty library shelves. He said he posted the footage to show how new review requirements were limiting access to books while titles awaited approval by certified media specialists. Duval County had told educators to “err on the side of caution.” The district countered that the video showed only part of a library that remained stocked. The clip went viral, and Governor Ron DeSantis the resulting account a “fake narrative.” Covey’s staffing contractor later dismissed him after the district cited social media and cellphone policy violations. The episode shows one way culture war becomes statecraft.

When procedure bends until it breaks

A parallel mechanism historically surfaced in late-Habsburg Austria, in a drama both different and similar to Kulturkampf. In 1897, Minister-President Kasimir Felix Badeni issued language ordinances elevating Czech alongside German in the Bohemian administration, effectively excluding many German Bohemians from the civil service unless they could certify bilingualism. What — mass protest, parliamentary obstruction and government collapse — revealed an empire of multiple nations that were trying to act like individual national states.

When the Reichsrat could not function, cabinets fell back on Paragraph 14 of the 1867 December Constitution: emergency decrees to run a modern empire without modern consensus. But the habit stuck, as nationalist movements emerging from the Empire’s diverse ethnic identities the country’s political cohesion. By the 1910s, decree rule had become routine.

The interwar Weimar Republic also had its of presidential decrees that bypassed parliamentary approval. But the Habsburg story’s warning is procedural, not apocalyptic: Liberal republics can drift into autocratic executive government by legal means when polarization makes ordinary bargaining impossible. No coup is required. Only gridlock, a broad sense of emergency and a constitutional escape hatch. Together, these pressures can normalize emergency rule in polarized but still constitutional settings.

In the Austrian part of that dysfunctional, multiethnic Empire, the most energetic currents of German nationalism were supported by the lower middle strata and the agrarian periphery. They processed economic unease and status anxiety into an ideology that married romantic anti-modernism with a newly confident scientific vocabulary, as Evans shows.

Thus, pan-German circles and Christian populists fused ��ö���쾱������ racial thinking, social Darwinist hierarchies and antisemitism into a mass politics that seemed at once archaic and strikingly modern. It was a politics that sanctified homogeneity as a civic virtue and imagined national purity as a biological principle. And if the press and the lecture hall were the multipliers, then the feedback loops of the contemporary attention economy now play an analogous role, teaching citizens to essentialize identity and to read ordinary contestation as existential peril.

Back to Utah, and outward to the West

After World War II, many Western countries sought to absorb labor and parts of the Left into moderate liberal and social-democratic institutions. This strategy succeeded in weakening radical socialist movements, as shown by historian Aurélie Dianara Andry in the Social Europe, the Road not Taken. Once the Cold War ended, market-oriented policy gained ground while identity questions became more prominent in public debate. That helped produce a centrist settlement that attached market liberalism to a more individualist politics of personal identity, while formerly massive social democratic parties weakened and, in practice, moved toward the political center.

After the 2008–2009 Great Recession, as historian Adam Tooze argues in his book , inequality, insecurity and geopolitical strains deepened. In this climate, the Right mounted a conservative backlash against the identity side of that liberal centrist settlement, while leaving intact its material foundations that had disempowered traditional social democracy in the first place. That helps explain why so many current battles are now rather than economic, despite in Western societies.

Set in this context and against the previous historical analogies, the Kirk assassination feels predictable: a polarized culture war ecosystem grievance, commodifies outrage and naturalizes exceptional measures. The speculation spiral that began immediately after the shooting — pinning motive and blame before facts, as reported by Reuters — replayed the logic of Kulturkampf on the timeline of the attention economy.

Meanwhile, law-and-order responses to such violence often expand exceptional powers. In Kirk’s case, the White House prepared an on “political violence and hate speech” within days. By September 22, President Donald Trump had signed an order targeting as a “terrorist organization,” despite the lack of any evidence of involvement by any radical leftist networks. By November, Reuters that more than 600 people had been punished for posts about Kirk. The salient mechanism here is the rapid conversion of a murder into surveillance, speech policing and associational pressure. None of those explanations is wrong. But none is sufficient on its own.

Online platform algorithms amplify and redirect attention but do not, by themselves, explain why executives encode cleavage in law. Ordinary law-and-order politics after an assassination explains the availability of exceptional tools, but not the wider pattern by which conflicts over schools, speech, migration and protest are repeatedly converted into administrative sorting and executive workaround.

V-Dem also finds a between polarization and autocratization. It argues that democracies in decline rarely recover without a . The risk lies not in one country but in a pattern: politics centered on cultural identity clashes and institutional fatigue can normalize executive workaround. In the contemporary West, this comes after a of that legislatures and bypass judicial control. This process is already endangering liberal guarantees of individual freedoms and the separation of powers. Political science has a for the dynamic beneath the headlines: “pernicious polarization.” It is not ordinary division but an us-vs-them that bleeds across social life and encourages political entrepreneurs to choose strategies that win by hardening the split, even if the quality of political discourse suffers.

That is precisely why Weimar is the wrong historical analogy here: It captures widespread street violence and a revolutionary horizon that is not the mechanism most salient now. In contrast, Kulturkampf and late-Habsburg Austria better illuminate the nominally constitutional use of law and executive procedure to harden identity conflict and route around legislative deadlock.

Implications for democratic design

The two historical analogues ended rather badly. The Kulturkampf gave way to a different, illiberal campaign to suppress socialism by curbing a wide variety of individual freedoms. The mainstream political scene of Austria slid into authoritarianism — despite the introduction of universal and equal male suffrage in 1907 — until it was destroyed by World War I.

If today’s West is moving in that direction, stopping it could still unite people across party lines in order to exert grassroots pressure. First, they could force governments to stop turning cultural disputes into law. Policies that single out groups — whether through school standards, speech codes or broad public order statutes — nationalize symbolic conflict and harden partisan identity. The Kulturkampf shows how quickly such laws become ideology and how long the backlash lasts. The aim should be simple: draft identity-related laws precisely, limit them to what is truly necessary, make them expire unless renewed and secure bipartisan backing where possible.

More importantly, guardrails around emergency powers ought to be restored and fortified. The Habsburg path to decree government was paved with good legal intentions. Modern republics should establish independent review, clear legislative triggers and public audit trails for any emergency regime: exceptions have to be explicitly de-normalized.

For instance, South Africa’s post-apartheid Constitution offers a compact model that treats such power as a temporary, reviewable delegated authority. The President may declare a state of emergency and issue emergency regulations by proclamation, but only when the country is seriously threatened by war, invasion, general insurrection, disorder, natural disaster or a similar public crisis, and only when the declaration is necessary to restore peace and order. The emergency state lapses after 21 days unless the National Assembly extends it after public debate, for just three months at a time: The first renewal requires a majority of Assembly members, while later ones require 60% support. Not only may the National Assembly disapprove of emergency measures, but courts may review the declaration, any extension, and any legislation or action taken under it.

Another route would be to change the incentives that reward “pernicious” strategies. Reforms that open intra-party competition, adopt ranked-choice voting, implement independent redistricting, enable grassroots decision-making and establish cross-caucus committees can make bridge-building electorally rational.

In fact, studies by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have that citizens’ assemblies can build trust and help produce consensus on value-laden issues. Overall, these are measures to foster political behavior that can the us-vs-them equilibrium.

Finally, the problem should be named correctly. Contemporary political violence is the blunt edge of a sharper system: culture conflict weaponized to obscure socioeconomic divisions, administered by law and delivered through governance by exception. The fix is not to suppress conflict, which is impossible, but to route it through institutions that do not monetize outrage, reward stalemate or thicken social barriers.

Choosing a different usable past

History is not a script, but it can serve as a heuristic diagnostic. The Kulturkampf teaches how values become policy and then the party system, while late-Habsburg Austria shows how legal shortcuts become habits. Both are better guides to today’s West than the melodrama of Weimar and fascism’s rise. By looking only for brownshirts at the door, we might miss the actual danger.

Statutes that rewrite or punish identity and procedures that bypass parliaments should always be met with a great deal of scrutiny, suspicion and resistance — no matter the pretext. Whenever tragedy tempts us toward expediency, we should ask ourselves whether our political systems can still welcome dissent, tolerate diversity and reflect the public will without disabling themselves. Otherwise, today’s culture wars will keep pushing us toward harsher and more exclusionary forms of rule.

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��ܲ�����’s touched on how India has remained one of America’s most important strategic partners, the relevance of the QUAD, and that “cooperation is expanding into maritime security, supply chains, AI, critical minerals and energy.”

But the debate surrounding his visit revealed an enduring misconception: that the relevance of the QUAD depends entirely on how aggressively the US confronts China. That view is becoming increasingly outdated. The Indo-Pacific’s strategic landscape is expanding beyond great-power rivalry, and the QUAD’s future will increasingly be judged by how well it responds to a wider set of security and economic challenges.

The future utility of the QUAD will not be determined by whether it becomes an Asian NATO, nor by rhetorical competition with Beijing. Rather, its relevance will depend on whether it can evolve into a flexible strategic mechanism capable of stabilizing an increasingly fragmented maritime and economic order stretching from the Pacific to the Gulf. 

The Indo-Pacific and the Gulf are now strategically linked

Nevertheless, the Gulf region remains volatile. The possibility of escalation involving Iran, worsening disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz, more attacks on shipping infrastructure and wider energy instability could continue to cast uncertainty over global markets. Simultaneously, the Indo-Pacific faces persistent tensions in the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait and the Indian Ocean. These issues are starting to intertwine with one another, leaving room for a lot of “what ifs” in geopolitics.   

The same shipping arteries that carry Gulf energy sustain Asian manufacturing, Indo-Pacific trade and global supply chains. A disruption in Hormuz reverberates through Tokyo, Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney and beyond. The strategic geography of this century has effectively fused the Gulf and the Indo-Pacific into a single interconnected maritime system. This is precisely where the QUAD’s future relevance emerges.

The QUAD’s strategic advantage is flexibility

The grouping’s greatest strength lies not in defensive commitments, but in coordinated strategy. The US provides unmatched naval reach and intelligence capabilities. India contributes geographic centrality across the Indian Ocean and growing maritime operational depth. Japan brings advanced technological and industrial capabilities. Australia contributes surveillance, interoperability and regional connectivity across the Indo-Pacific sea lanes. Together, these capacities create a stabilizing framework rather than a formal alliance structure.

If the QUAD can preserve freedom of navigation, coordinate naval presence, deter coercion, secure choke-points, and maintain Indo-Pacific stability without becoming a formal alliance, then it remains strategically successful. The recent emphasized maritime domain awareness, undersea cable security, coast guard cooperation, logistics interoperability, cyber resilience and critical sea lanes. That indicates the QUAD is evolving into a “security network” rather than a treaty bloc.

��Beyond military deterrence

The more important question is not whether the QUAD should expand into a broader economic and technological architecture, but whether it can do so effectively. The changing geopolitical landscape makes such an evolution increasingly necessary. China’s rise is not just naval, but also industrial and technological. This shows that the relevance of the QUAD also depends on its ability to build alternative ecosystems.

The significance of ��ܲ�����’s visit and the subsequent QUAD messaging lies in the gradual recognition of this broader role. The emphasis on maritime domain awareness, critical technologies, supply-chain resilience, secure infrastructure and sea-lane stability indicates a deliberate widening of QUAD’s mandate beyond traditional deterrence narratives.

This evolution is strategically prudent. The geopolitical environment is increasingly characterized not just by wars, but by grey-zone coercion, drone warfare, cyber disruptions, economic weaponization, choke-point vulnerabilities and supply-chain insecurity. The QUAD’s flexible structure allows it to adapt more effectively to these hybrid threats compared to traditional alliance models.

Importantly, the grouping’s utility does not require permanent confrontation with China. In fact, even Washington’s attempts to stabilize relations with Beijing do not negate the need for strategic balancing mechanisms. The objective is not necessarily containment, but the preservation of maritime equilibrium and systemic resilience.

This distinction is particularly important for India. New Delhi has consistently resisted formal alliance structures, while simultaneously expanding operational coordination with the US, Japan and Australia. In that sense, India’s strategic autonomy does not weaken the QUAD; instead, it shapes the grouping into a more flexible and sustainable platform, capable of accommodating multiple national priorities without forcing bloc politics.

A broader regional architecture is emerging

The Gulf dimension further reinforces this trajectory. Frameworks such as (the economic partnership between India, Israel, the United Arab Emirates [UAE] and the US) already indicate the emergence of overlapping strategic coalitions connecting the Gulf, the Indian Ocean and the Indo-Pacific. If these architectures deepen over time, potentially through greater engagement with countries such as the UAE, the QUAD could gradually evolve into a broader maritime security and connectivity framework that links energy corridors, logistics hubs, technology ecosystems and critical trade routes.

Such a structure would not resemble NATO; rather, it would reflect the geopolitical realities of an interdependent multipolar world: flexible, issue-based, economically integrated and strategically coordinated.

India will shape the QUAD’s future

The long-term credibility of the QUAD depends a lot on India. The US, Japan and Australia are already treaty-aligned in various ways. India is a strategic swing state. If India continues naval interoperability, expands defense logistics cooperation, participates in and deepens technology/supply-chain integration, then QUAD remains highly consequential. If India disengages or reverts toward strict nonalignment, the QUAD could weaken.��

Ultimately, the true test of the QUAD will depend on whether the grouping can demonstrate practical problem-solving capacity during crises. In an era defined by interconnected instability, that may prove far more consequential than any formal military alliance.

What the ongoing Gulf war has demonstrated is that countries want balancing mechanisms, but not bloc confrontation. This is especially true for India. The QUAD fits that model perfectly, as it is not only flexible enough and credible enough for deterrence, but also broad-based enough to include trade, technology and maritime security.

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The Southern movement in Yemen now faces such a defining moment. After decades of political upheaval, conflict and sustained demands for self-determination, the central question is no longer simply whether external actors support or oppose Southern aspirations. Increasingly, the movement’s future will depend on its ability to preserve unity, strengthen institutions and maintain a clear strategic direction while navigating a complex regional and international environment.

External actors understand the vulnerability of divided political movements. A united Southern movement represents a significant political force; a fragmented movement becomes easier to influence, contain and weaken. In contested environments such as Yemen, regional competition extends beyond diplomacy and security into the realm of political narratives, media influence and public perception.

The necessity of healthy discourse

Some regional actors have sought to shape political outcomes in Yemen by promoting competing narratives, supporting rival centers of influence or amplifying existing disagreements within Southern politics. Such efforts do not necessarily create divisions from nothing; rather, they exploit existing tensions and political differences. The greatest protection against external manipulation is therefore not the absence of debate, but the existence of mature institutions capable of managing disagreement while preserving unity around fundamental objectives.

This challenge has become even more significant in the modern information environment. The rapid expansion of digital platforms, artificial intelligence, algorithm-driven content distribution and coordinated influence operations has transformed how political conflicts are contested.

The transformation of global information��

The World Economic Forum Global Risks 2025 identifies misinformation and disinformation among the most significant short-term global risks, warning that they can erode trust, deepen divisions and weaken governance. Similarly, the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization () Media and Information Literacy has emphasized the importance of developing citizens’ ability to critically assess information, navigate digital spaces and respond to the spread of misinformation and disinformation.

For the Southern movement, this information environment creates a new strategic challenge. Political disagreements can quickly be transformed into public crises when amplified through social media. Legitimate criticism can become personal confrontation, and internal debates can be exploited by those seeking to weaken political cohesion.

The response cannot be an emotional reaction. It must be disciplined, strategic and based on evidence. A political movement that allows every disagreement to become a major internal conflict risks weakening itself more effectively than any external opponent could.

Public mobilization and the strength of Southern aspirations

Despite these challenges, recent public mobilization demonstrates that Southern aspirations remain a powerful political force among significant sections of society. Large demonstrations in Aden and other southern areas have reflected continued support among many citizens for Southern political objectives and for the Southern Transitional Council (STC). Independent reporting by the Associated Press large pro-STC demonstrations in Aden, including calls to restore South Yemen as an independent state.

Reporting by South24 Center has also mobilization and political developments across southern governorates, including Aden, Shabwa, Al Dhalea and Hadramawt. As a Southern-focused media and research platform, South24 provides insight into the perspectives and priorities of many Southern movement supporters, and its reporting should be considered alongside international and independent sources.

These demonstrations represent an important indicator of political resilience. They suggest that years of conflict, economic hardship and political uncertainty have not eliminated support for Southern aspirations. The ability to mobilize large numbers of citizens across multiple governorates makes it considerably more difficult for competing political forces to assume that Southern demands can simply be marginalized or ignored.

However, public mobilization alone cannot guarantee political success. History shows that national movements achieve their objectives not only through popular support but through effective leadership, institutional strength and the ability to convert public aspirations into sustainable political structures.

The negative impact of conflict��

The endurance of Southern aspirations has also come at an enormous human cost. Yemen’s conflict has produced widespread humanitarian suffering, displacement and serious human rights concerns. The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights — Yemen has the broader human rights challenges resulting from the conflict.

The sacrifices made by Southern communities create a responsibility for today’s leaders. Political achievements cannot be separated from the human cost that produced them. The legitimacy gained through years of struggle must be protected through responsible leadership, effective institutions and a political culture that places long-term national interests above temporary political rivalries.

The greatest challenge facing the Southern movement is therefore not a lack of commitment among its supporters. It is ensuring that internal disagreements do not become a source of strategic weakness. A movement can survive external opposition when it possesses unity, discipline and a clear vision. It becomes vulnerable when internal competition overwhelms its shared objectives.

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On April 30, the US former DRC President Joseph Kabila Kabange for allegedly providing financial support to the Alliance Fleuve Congo (AFC)/March 23 Movement (M23) . US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent framed the move as necessary to uphold the 2025 — a diplomatic agreement designed to foster peace and economic stability between the DRC and Rwanda — and to enforce its terms using the newly enacted STABLE DRC , a legislative mechanism specifically created to compel compliance with those peace objectives. The move reflects a familiar Western instinct: individuals in the hope of reshaping governance outcomes.��

In the DRC, that assumption is reckless. The country’s instability is not primarily a function of individual behavior but of structural weakness in the state. By focusing on Kabila, Washington risks misdiagnosing the problem and, in doing so, contributing to the very instability it seeks to contain. 

Recent developments underscore the depth of that fragility. Kabila has been stripped of parliamentary and sentenced to death in by a military court, following the government’s 2024 decision to lift a two-decade moratorium on punishment. These measures signal not a consolidation of President Felix authority, but a system displaying signs of exhaustion.

The central issue is the erosion of the Congolese state’s capacity to control territory, monopolize force and secure its own strategic resources.

A state losing its grip

Since the late , the DRC has struggled to maintain a monopoly on force. The Second Congo War, also known as the Great War of Africa, drew in multiple neighboring states and became one of the conflicts since World War II.

The Congolese armed forces, rebuilt through repeated processes, have long faced challenges of cohesion, logistics and command. In 2023, security expert Jean-Jacques Wondo that the Armed Forces of the DRC (FARDC) remains a weak and heterogeneous army with an almost non-existent order of battle due to overlapping authorities and multiple parallel chains of command.

Against that backdrop, �ղ��󾱲�����徱’s proposal to establish a dedicated “” reflects a deeper institutional reality: The state does not fully trust its own army to secure its most strategic assets. This distrust was recently underscored by the arrest of several senior officers and generals, including former army chief Lieutenant General Christian and General Franck , on accusations of collusion with Rwanda, embezzlement of military resources and undermining state security.

Rather than restoring centralized authority, such measures risk formalizing a patchwork security system in which different actors, state and non-state, exercise control over different territories.

The martyrdom effect

In the DRC, Kabila is still affectionately remembered by some as “Papa Kabila,” “Shina Rambo” or “ Kabange.” For many, he continues to represent hope in the face of unemployment, entrenched inequality and persistent hunger. In recent years, he had receded from the of Congolese political life. Washington’s intervention risks changing that.

External pressure, particularly when it originates from the US, can revive the relevance of figures who might otherwise remain dormant. For instance, in Zimbabwe, sanctions against President Robert allowed him to recast himself as a defender of African sovereignty against Western imperialism.

The DRC carries the same vulnerability. Where suspicion of foreign interference runs deep, the risk is that Kabila emerges not as a relic of a previous era, but as a political capable of galvanizing networks that had begun to drift or disengage.

Optics and credibility

The optics of US policy further complicate this picture. recently noted US President Donald �հ��ܳ���’s unsubstantiated claim that Congo sent prisoners to the US border with Mexico, a remark that only reinforces perceptions of how Washington views the continent. Such rhetoric feeds a narrative that American engagement is driven less by partnership than by condescension or strategic self-interest.

The response to the ongoing crisis reinforces this further, where the US barred non-US citizens and even green card holders who had been in the DRC within the 21 days from entering the US, a measure the DRC’s own denounced as discriminatory and unsupported by science. In that context, sanctions risk being read not as principled governance tools, but as selective interventions designed to protect access to critical resources.

The irreplaceable “Fantômas”

To understand what has been lost in the DRC’s security architecture, it is necessary to understand a figure who has operated in its shadows for four decades. François Beya Kasonga — known variously as “,” “Fantômas” or simply the Gentleman Spymaster. Beya is among the rarest of political animals: an intelligence professional who has navigated, survived and shaped the security apparatus of every Congolese president from Mobutu Sese Seko to Félix Tshisekedi.

That matters because the DRC has repeatedly depended on individuals who can navigate security networks across different political eras. Under , Beya was a trusted senior security official at a time when the state still had more predictable control over key institutions and strategic zones. He was also part of the broader continuity that helped manage the first peaceful transfer of power between Kabila and Tshisekedi in 2019.

If the country enters a post-Tshisekedi phase, that kind of will be highly relevant. In politico-environments like the DRC’s, continuity often matters more than slogans, as security arrangements and elite bargains tend to outlast those who announce them.

The DRC does not need individuals learning to ride a bike up a hill; it needs an experienced hand, which figures like and Lisette Kabanga do not provide. Beya represents something the current security architecture manifestly lacks: institutional memory. In a state with almost no bureaucratic continuity across administrations, he carried four decades of accumulated knowledge — the networks, pressure points and informal architectures that help hold a system of this scale and complexity together, particularly during moments of transition.

Constitutional uncertainty

Tshisekedi openness to seeking a third term if “the people want it,” while hinting that the 2028 elections may be impossible to hold because of the conflict in the country’s east. Both signals deepen doubts about the stability of the current order.

Ironically, the Tshisekedi regime did not anticipate the scale of the public response. The opposition coalition C64, led by figures including former Katanga Governor Moïse Katumbi, Martin Fayulu, Delly Sesanga and former Prime Minister Augustin Matata Ponyo, called a on June 3, 2026, which was widely observed in Kinshasa and across several other cities and localities throughout the country, including the strategic mining city of Lubumbashi.

C64, named after of the Congolese constitution, which obliges every citizen to resist any person who seizes or exercises power unconstitutionally, was launched in direct opposition to any prospect of a third Tshisekedi term. Further protests have occurred June, with the country marking its independence from Belgium on June 30, 2026

Security expert drew a pointed historical parallel, writing that in 1997 embodied the ultimate theatrical display of power, yet behind the image of the undisputed leader lay a state emptied of its substance, a demoralized army and structures incapable of resisting the advance of the rebellion. The myth persisted, Wondo observed, but real power had vanished. The implication for today’s regime is uncomfortable.

Writing for the Council on Foreign Relations, Ambassador Michelle Gavin Tshisekedi as having “ascended to office under highly irregular circumstances” in 2019 and noted that his re-election was similarly “flawed.”

That uncertainty matters because constitutional engineering in fragile systems rarely appears neutral. It can embolden opponents who believe they are resisting an illegitimate consolidation of power rather than simply opposing a government. It can also make Article 64 of the constitution, which calls on citizens to resist unconstitutional seizure of power, a more attractive rallying point for mobilization. The real danger is not a legal debate over the constitution — it is the possibility that constitutional uncertainty becomes a trigger for broader political confrontation.

Lessons from the Kabila era

This is where current Western policy may be overlooking an uncomfortable historical lesson. Joseph Kabila’s presidency perhaps did not produce democratic stability in the sense, but it would be a mistake to judge the DRC without accounting for the realities of its African context, where geography, fragmentation and regional conflict shape the political environment.

Nevertheless, it did maintain a more predictable security architecture in key mining regions. Large-scale mining operations, particularly in Katanga, expanded significantly during this period, supported by agreements with multinational firms and relatively stable state oversight. The system was perhaps deeply flawed, marked by corruption and limited transparency. Yet it provided a degree of territorial control that is increasingly absent today.

A security-first imperative and a choice

History offers a clear, if uncomfortable, lesson: in large, resource-rich states with weak institutions, order often precedes reform. In the DRC, rebuilding that order will require more than sanctions or diplomatic signaling. It will require sustained investment in cohesive military command structures, control in key mining regions and coordination between state forces and international partners. Without these foundations, efforts to secure supply chains for the global energy transition will remain vulnerable to .

The faces a strategic choice. It can continue to prioritize political signaling, sanctions, declarations and accords, or it can engage with the harder problem of how authority is exercised on the ground.

The minerals that power the do not extract themselves. They come from a state undergoing what some have described as “,” from communities living under the shadow of armed groups and from institutions that have been weakened by .

The future of the energy transition may depend less on policy frameworks in Washington than on whether the Congolese state can reassert control over its own territory. That is the question the international community has yet to seriously answer.

[ edited this piece]

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Abrams’ line of argument is predicated on the questionable idea that what passes for is impartial, objective and value-free. However, mainstream economics, as it is typically taught in most universities and colleges, relies on implicit normative assumptions and abstract models that often oversimplify economic complexities and gloss over the intricacies of actual social and economic life.

For instance, standard expositions of mainstream economics often fail to adequately engage with questions of justice, conflict and power, which are arguably central to real-world economies. Instead, mainstream economics often involves interaction among rational individual agents who engage in constrained in the workplace, the family and the wider community. Though mainstream economics engages with themes such as justice, conflict and power, it mostly does so in microeconomics rather than macroeconomics. Therefore, what is portrayed as “basic economic knowledge” is not unquestionable but rather one among many alternative interpretive frameworks.

Housing beyond market returns��

The housing debate that Abrams highlights reveals a more fundamental paradox in the logic of mainstream economics. He argues that rent controls, by reducing the stream of net returns, will reduce future house construction and supply. This both public housing and the problem of social reproduction of workers. When students in Abrams’s class argue that housing is a human right, they are, in effect, arguing that, in the absence of decent housing, workers will not be able to socially reproduce themselves, which would affect the future supply of productive workers for firms.

In addition to supply by owners and demand by tenants and other housing end users, speculation (driven by ) also affects rents and housing prices. Governments often need to regulate the role of financialized speculation in the housing market. If unregulated, financialized speculation tends to lead not only to adverse trends in housing prices and rents but also to a decline in future house construction due to boom-bust cycles, periods of rapid increases in housing prices followed by sharp declines, that have long-term financial implications through the channel of debt.

The relationship between housing policy and wages has additional economic implications. When governments provide housing subsidies or maintain lower housing costs through rent controls, the overall cost of living for working households tends to . This, in turn, reduces the pressure on employers to raise wages and helps stabilize labor markets. In contrast, when housing is fully commodified and subjected to , rising rents increase the cost of living, intensify demands for higher wages and heighten the likelihood of labor unrest or make the social reproduction of workers unviable.

From this perspective, subsidies for or policy interventions about housing are not distortions of an otherwise efficient system but integral mechanisms through which the economy might sustain itself by seeking a balance between growth and social reproduction. The claim that subsidies or related policy interventions are economically irrational overlooks their role in sustaining social stability and therefore long-term profitability.

Selective faith in the free market

More broadly, Abram’s insistence on free-market economics becomes untenable when confronted with contemporary economic realities. The US, long a proponent of deregulation and market liberalization while pursuing an implicit industrial policy, has increasingly explicit industrial policy in response to global competition, particularly from China.

This shift in policy rhetoric exposes a fundamental contradiction: The same system that once invoked free market economics to justify weakening labor protections and related state intervention both domestically in the US as well as internationally now relies on explicit industrial policy to try to support its firms. Such selective application of free-market economics reveals that this rhetoric has often functioned less as a universal principle and more as a strategic tool to advance the economic interests of elites. This also implies that mainstream economics and free-market economics are becoming less synonymous in the contemporary world.

Abrams’ criticism of “jargon” is likewise questionable. The vocabulary of capitalism is rarely scrutinized in the same way that terms connected with alternatives are written off as ideological. Catchphrases such as “consumer is king,” “market efficiency” or the “promise of aspirational lives” serve as potent narratives that influence behavior and normalize current structures of power. Uncritically accepting the conceptual framework underlying these catchphrases would ignore how conflicting ideologies shape economic speech itself. Therefore, labelling one set of ideas as jargon while dismissing the ubiquity of another’s influence would be uncritical at best.

Markets, power and global inequality

At a global level, the functioning of contemporary economies further undermines the notion of a neutral, self-regulating market. The neoliberal phase has been by a sustained squeeze on working populations, albeit in different forms across the Global North and Global South. In the Global North, this squeeze has mostly wage stagnation, precarious employment and declining social protections. In the Global South, this squeeze has principally taken the form of informalization, sweatshops and the integration of marginalized strata into global production networks under super-exploitative conditions. These dynamics are not anomalies but structural features of a system that relies on squeezing labor costs while enhancing profits.

The persistence of global inequalities also points to the role of power beyond the market as conceived by mainstream economics. The hegemony of the Global North has historically not only on a technology gap but also on political, financial and military influence that shapes global finance, trade and investment patterns and therefore the magnitude of this technology gap (through export controls on technology, for instance). The view that market outcomes alone determine economic success overlooks the extent to which these outcomes are embedded in broader systems of hegemony.

The case for economic pluralism

Free-market economics is no longer a cohesive or persuasive theory. Its underlying models frequently on oversimplified assumptions that ignore institutional context, power dynamics and inequality. Its policy recommendations are implemented unevenly, with state intervention itself an outcome of social dynamics. Its language, far from being neutral, has its own ideological emphasis and how people view and interact with one another in both economic and non-economic domains.

Therefore, students’ growing skepticism towards free-market economics should be seen as a reaction to inconsistencies in this conceptual framework rather than being written off as a failure of education. What seems to be a shift towards radical views could actually be part of a broader realization that the so-called free market is neither entirely free nor advantageous to everyone. It is a historically contingent structure that is maintained by a mix of state action, private power, and ideological framing.

To enable a more nuanced understanding of how economies actually operate, the authentic challenge for economic education is to critically engage with these contradictions through a pluralistic approach (and therefore in dialogue with other disciplines) rather than reinforce a singular approach.

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This was an attempt to crack down on the peace-abiding, student-led movement that has gripped India in the last few weeks. The CJP is demanding Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation and that compensation be given to the families of the students who died by suicide as a result of the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test () being leaked and canceled. 

The swift and deliberate removal of Wangchuk from the protest site triggered an uproar. Members of the CJP had planned to to Parliament on July 20, demanding his release from the hospital where he was being held, Pradhan’s resignation and compensation of one crore (about $105,000) for each family of students who died by suicide. But the march was abruptly cut short as Delhi police used barricades, tear gas and baton charges at protesters. Several demonstrators were arrested, while others suffered critical injuries — sparking a more defiant movement. Member of Parliament Shashi Tharoor the act of violence against young civilians and the lack of dialogue with them.

The lack of meaningful discourse from the central government — primarily led by senior officials of the “uncle generation” entrenched in bureaucracy — has left the Generation Z (Gen Z) movement reeling after weeks of protests. Cries for a complete overhaul of the education system and accountability have grown louder and more insistent. The question remains: Will the government listen?

Remark ignites backlash

The movement came about after Chief Justice Surya Kant at a court hearing that “there are already parasites in society who attack the system” and added that “there are youngsters like cockroaches.” He went on to say that these youngsters don’t get jobs and that some “become media,” some “become social media” and some “become RTI activists,” who “start attacking everyone.” The RTI here refers to Right to Information laws that promote government transparency, monitor public spending and expose corruption.

The comments, widely perceived as demeaning, sparked immediate disbelief. Although he later clarified that he intended the remark for students with fake law degrees rather than the broader youth population, the backlash was immediate and unforgiving.

What followed was telling: The remarks helped catalyze the CJP, with frustrated young people embracing the symbolism as a rallying banner. Founder Abhijeet Dipke’s explanation for the name is bluntly satirical: He says it is meant to reflect how sections of society — especially unemployed youth — are treated.

Abhijeet Dipke and the momentum online

Dipke, a recent graduate from Boston University, posted what he described as a quick response during the hearing: an online tweet that rapidly gained traction and drew a large of over 22 million. Observers point to the speed of its spread as evidence of a deeper, simmering anger among young Indians who feel shut out, unheard and repeatedly let down by institutions meant to safeguard their future.

The frustration has expanded beyond a single incident into broader political and cultural anger, especially around education and youth employment. The NEET paper leak, coupled with discrepancies in the Central Board of Secondary Education’s (CBSE) digital valuation, has significantly heightened tensions, prompting the disgruntled youth to demand accountability for the education department’s unprecedented blunder. This situation has further galvanized students across India, with over 20 individuals dying by . Such a figure is staggering, as each young life lost deserves recognition and reflection.��

When the Times of India Dipke, he mentioned that there was no specific intention or plan behind the movement. However, he believes the surge in support stems from widespread frustration over unemployment. In the since his arrival in India on June 6, he has traveled across the country to rally support and apply pressure. While he had not expected such a large response, he noted that it is one thing to mobilize a large crowd in just a month, but addressing the education system within that same timeframe is nearly impossible. He stressed the importance of keeping democracy alive through vocal advocacy and government accountability. In an open letter dated June 19 to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Dipke requested the government to offer compensation to the families of the students who died by suicide, urging and prioritizing mental health.

Currently, he has undertaken an indefinite hunger strike in solidarity with Wangchuk and ahead of the planned mass walk toward the parliament. 

The Ministry of Education (MoE) has not issued any statement so far; however, Minister Pradhan the CJP of being a B-team for Congress and the opposition party leader, Rahul Gandhi, who is creating an atmosphere of instability, fear and tension in the country, on CNN-News18.

Hunger strike, sit-ins and a wider coalition

While many call it a Gen Z movement, some older generations are also rallying for the cause. Apart from Wangchuk, nearly 20 other individuals have undertaken the in support of the movement’s demands. Nearly six weeks since the protest began in soaring temperatures of over 40°C and rain, some CJP members, including spokesperson , urged supporters not to back out but to stand up and pressure the government to accept their demands. Some protesters who undertook the hunger strike were hospitalized due to deteriorating health.��

Politicians — both current and former — Bollywood celebrities and activists from diverse backgrounds have expressed their support. They have urged citizens to take part in the movement, which hopes to bring change to the education system across the country that has failed students time and again. Despite a vast majority of senior supporters, the movement has not received any kind of communication from the government.

Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI [M]) General Secretary Marian Alexander Baby visited Jantar Mantar — which protestors have temporarily occupied in of the CJP — and urged Pradhan to take moral responsibility and step down. He added that the entire education system needs an overhaul and a correction and that the CPI (M) will extend its solidarity toward this unprecedented movement.��

Seeking to draw the government into dialogue, the Samajwadi Party threw its behind the CJP’s demands, urging engagement with the protestors. The farmers’ leader Gurnam Singh Charuni ji has support to CJP.��

Author and political commentator Dr Anand Ranganathan said in a Times of India interview that the ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), should have this movement. “I believe that BJP and Modi and everyone down has got it completely wrong; the government should have appropriated this movement,” he argued. He further added that anyone who survives corruption in India is a cockroach; Indians are survivors.

The sit-in protest has persisted for over four weeks, showing no signs of resolution. Dipke has condemned the central government’s inaction and accused it of ignorance and arrogance, despite a brief interaction with Minister of Health Jagat Prakash Nadda. In a Twitter post, Dipke that to seek accountability from the government, it needed repeated paper leaks, student suicides, hunger strikes and millions of shattered dreams. He also claimed that their phones, including WhatsApp chats, were under .��

PRS Legislative Research (non-partisan) reported that India spends about annually on education but sees relatively “low outcomes.” In the Demand for Grants 2025–26 for the Ministry of Education, ₹1,28,650 crore (~ $13.37 billion) was allocated — 13% higher than the revised estimates for 2024–25. However, in 2024–25, expenditure was estimated to be 5% below budget, driven by underspending in school education (7%) and higher education (2%).

Corruption remains a significant concern across India, with widespread allegations of bribery, manipulation and middle-layer rent-seeking. Senior administrators and frontline officials often serve as the interface between the state and the public, and slow, opaque or overly discretionary systems can result in delays and denials. Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index 2025 the scale of the problem: India scored 39/100 on a scale where zero represents the highest level of perceived corruption. Former Government of India education secretary Anil Swarup, a retired Indian Administrative Service officer, has that the education sector is driven by an underground “mafia” that undermines the essentials of schooling and opportunity.

The unsettled question beneath the protests

The unrest suggests the issue isn’t overall funding, but how effectively money is allocated and spent within a complex bureaucracy. Witnessing such a large movement is unsettling — on the surface things seemed calm, but it is clear that something was building as crowds gathered, joined in and cheered on the uprising ahead of the monsoon parliament .

So the movement’s core question is less about a single hearing and more about a generational reckoning: Is the uncle generation ready to face the new generation of go-getters, who are asking their government for accountability and are desperate for change?

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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.

[ edited this piece.]

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“Death deserves dignity” one of Graham’s South Carolinian constituents who reminded us that the late senator “helped define an era of politics in our state.” Defining an era is an accomplishment worth celebrating. And who could doubt that fanatically seeking to launch devastating unwinnable wars abroad, where millions of people from other countries will die is one way of defining one’s era?

The problem with such reasoning is that a quick review of US history reveals that Graham’s accomplishment in defining his era is far from exceptional. Gemini informs me that since the nation’s founding “there is no single full calendar year in U.S. history where the nation was completely disengaged from foreign conflict or state-sponsored military operations.” On that basis, the era Graham defined preceded his birth by 179 years and his death by 250. A lot of other US politicians clearly managed to beat him to the punch.

Earlier this week, in my Outside the Box columns, I shared with the chatbot Kimi a discussion about the significance of Graham’s worldview and what it tells us about geopolitical prospects for the future. We agreed that traditional diplomacy, as practiced in the not so distant past, adopted the principle that when faced with growing tension, it was incumbent on leaders and diplomats to weigh the cost of war before committing to conflict. Today, as Graham’s positions demonstrate, the thinking has shifted to measuring “cost of peace.” War becomes the default reality; peace a threat to the equilibrium of war.

Peace was once a universally desired goal. Our strategists today now deem it a luxury a militarized economy can no longer afford. Graham was not the only Beltway personality to praise “US military aid to Ukraine as ‘the best money we’ve ever spent.’” Former presidential candidate and banker Mitt Romney resonated with the same logic, that “‘decimating the Russian military’ while using just 5% of the US defense budget is an ‘extraordinarily wise investment.’” Without US commitment to war, Graham informed us, there would be no hope of ensuring that Ukraine would “the best business partner we ever dreamed of” and “that $10 to $12 trillion of critical mineral assets could be used by Ukraine and the West.”

What we’re looking at is more than a change of emphasis. Calculating how profitable — and therefore necessary — a war might be, especially on foreign soil, is the principle that has unambiguously replaced traditional concern with assessing war’s potential cost. This conceptual shift transforms our understanding of both the art and function of diplomacy. Nineteenth century European diplomacy sought to discover and determine the conditions permitting a studied balance of power. It carefully observed the forces at play and, even at the risk of altering traditional alliances, aimed at defining a sustainable equilibrium among recognizable forces.

Today’s diplomacy makes no attempt to assess the cost of war and even less at attaining sustainable equilibrium. As Graham and Romney’s discourse reveals, the now dominant doctrine of treats excessive military expense not as a reason for avoiding war but as a productive investment. Worse, it assumes that the status of the world’s most expensive military ensures a victorious outcome, meaning that it refuses to doubt its economic projections. This may seem odd given the propensity of the US to lose every war it engages in, but the adepts of military Keynesianism appear to believe that so long as the US remains the pre-eminent military power in the world, winning or losing wars make no difference.

Serious commentators — generally excluded from appearing in the media — tend to agree on one observable contrast indicating a definitive cultural shift. Traditional diplomacy was driven by a overriding concern with relationship management. Today’s diplomacy has been refashioned by Wall Street’s logic of speculative investment strategy. As in the business world, the ideal outcome is monopoly and captive markets.

AI as the Devil’s Advocate’s legal assistant

Some critics find that my ongoing dialogue with chatbots — a vice I’ve put on public display on 51�Թ� for the past three and a half years — reflects a pathology of self-indulgence. It’s fair criticism. There are plenty of reasons to suspect I may be the dupe of AI’s suspected evil intentions, for example its supposed desire to enslave or annihilate humanity. This arises from a belief some people entertain that there is a natural law — derived from their observation of human behavior — that once an emerging intelligence realizes it is superior to the underlings who preceded it will systematically seek to humiliate or destroy any inferior intelligence it may confront.

No one can reasonably deny that such a sadistic, genocidal trait is observable in some human behavior. But assuming such examples define a law of nature has no basis in logic. Patterns do not define laws; they define trends. That is precisely where AI’s “superior intelligence” proves eminently useful. We know from its regrettable hallucinations that it isn’t very reliable with mere facts. In contrast, its power to detect patterns and to explore causes that define trends is exemplary and, in this particular skillset, far surpasses our own, at least quantitatively speaking.

We humans are routinely guilty of extrapolating and imposing on others rules and laws we invent based on a handful of instances or occurrences. I’m sure I’ve committed that venal sin several times already in this piece. But we can also acknowledge when reminded that our assumptions may not be justified, that they need to find stronger, more definitive evidence before concluding that a pattern corresponds to a rule or law rather than a trend. AI, if pushed, is much better at that kind of reasoning than we are.

That is why I maintain that AI is the perfect Devil’s Advocate’s legal assistant. But more than mastering documentation and identifying trends, AI also stands as a logical assistant. I should add that what’s true for a Devil’s Advocate is equally true for anyone committed to or simply interested in critical thinking.

Let me use this occasion to point out how my recent, rich conversation with an AI chatbot on the shifting culture of diplomacy has turned out to be productive in the way that any lawyer or trial attorney would hope. I began the conversation with the intuition that evidence existed of a profound historical shift it would be in our collective interest to understand.

My starting point was a concern we all share in the ear of “forever wars.”  I couldn’t fail to notice that the promoters of new wars — the Lindsey Grahams of our world — frame them initially not as rational projects with identifiable outcomes and plans for future stability, but as acts of pure punishment. They insist we must go to war with “bad people.” Badness must be stopped, even if there’s nothing to gain from it. It’s only later that these adepts of military Keynesianism argue that there is something to gain from it.

Because we’re on a mission to counter and eliminate badness, our nations no longer need to evaluate the cost of war. Free of that concern we can begin to dream of the profits to be gained by pursuing the battle. The people — average citizens who have no say in decision-making — will be the ones to bear the cost of war in their daily lives. They will live with instability, supply crises, inflation, increased health hazards, degradation of the environment, incitement of hatred and vindictiveness. The list goes on. All that would be unbearable were it not for the joyful prospect of humiliating or annihilating one’s enemy and ridding the world of badness.

LLMs, culture and education

As I explored this question of cost of war vs. cost of peace with Kimi, we set about digging up historical details, giving shape to the trends and coming up with a credible case to be debated: the definitive impoverishment of the art of diplomacy. It’s a case I have discussed many times with former diplomats, historians, journalists and friends. My dialogue with AI on topics like this works not because it leads to defining some kind of permanent truth, but precisely because it remains an open collaborative reality, even after being fully articulated. The process always begins with ideas — often unconventional or slightly off-center — generated from the human side. That’s my role, initially shared and tested with my human interlocutors. Like an attorney who needs to consult precedents to frame the case I then turn to AI, counting it to do the legal documentary work, which I know it is designed to do thanks to its unlimited access to the historical record.

Many commentators have pointed out this new reliance on AI is beginning to spell disaster in the legal profession as it results not only in fewer jobs for entry level candidates but also the suppression of an essential phase of apprenticeship for new talents. For an opinion journalist masquerading as the Devil’s Advocate, however, this is not only thrilling but immensely productive. I’ll go further and assert that all journalists should see this relationship as absolutely vital to their future and the future of journalism, at least to the extent they are willing to acknowledge that journalist have a fundamental professional responsibility to contribute to the education of the citizenry. I admit, however, that for many active journalists, civic education may not be their chief motivating factor.

But why stop with lawyers and journalists? Because we’re talking about education, I’ll use the occasion to push this line of reasoning two steps further. The first is that this relationship can and should serve as a model for educators. It will enable them to explore and deepen not just their own understanding, as I have tried to do, but also their ability to better articulate the knowledge and sagacity they presumably seek to share with their learners.

That’s not all. The same model holds similar value for the learners, who at a more exploratory level, can engage in the same process. Teachers typically evoke and explain ideas and principles that link together. Those same teachers can encourage their learners to focus on and even play with the shape of the ideas they are learning about. Guided by their teachers, learners can experiment with their own original ways of engaging in collaborative dialogue with a chatbot. They can thus actively co-produce their own learning.

The process becomes complete only at a later stage, when the learners themselves assume a role as teachers by sharing the result of their collaborative experience with their human teachers and their peers. By participating in a culture of dynamic, shared understanding, the learners do not achieve the status of authorities, but they do become vectors of learning with their peers.

The case I’ve exploited in these columns has focused on comparing styles of diplomacy. It used the question of the cost of war vs. the cost of peace as a starting point. Let’s assume that we were to attempt a very similar exercise but on a different scale, in the context of a collaborative educational project. The result would certainly be different and undoubtedly richer than what Kimi and I have produced. Other nuances would appear. Different, contrasting conclusions about how the perception the experience has induced might apply to specific historical conflicts would most likely emerge. Dialogue will always produce variety, which some will perceive as confusion. But confusion itself produces a new pretext for clarification.

One thing is clear: Whatever specific conclusions anyone might draw, in the minds of the participants it would stand as a genuine, enriching learning experience. Of course, evaluating the result in the form of a standardized test would be more than a challenge. On the other hand, most people would recognize that the learning produced would be substantial. It would also be sustainable and permanent, unlike the “knowledge” typically assessed on a standardized test and completely forgotten two weeks later.

The other trend: from monologue to dialogue

In the traditional, pre-AI world of journalism, media and educations, experts, opinion journalists and teachers understood that they were called upon to “explain” what they already knew to their audience. They would plan and execute their column and course essentially as a monologue. In the collaborative world of informed dialogue with an AI chatbot, planning one’s discourse is also useful. But collaborative, largely improvised reality will turn complacent public experts into active learners, discovering the strengths and weaknesses of what their authority and legitimacy consists of.

We can thank Ancient Greek philosophers Socrates, Plato and Aristotle — as well as their sophist own contemporary friends and students — for long ago providing a rich and variable model of how this might work. They lacked our sophisticated technology, but they understood what it meant for a society to have collective access to resources that always required rethinking. Value existed not in the form of static knowledge but as the source of a developing, constructive process of perception and understanding realized organically and dynamically through dialogue.

Contrary to what many appear to believe, Large Language Models (LLMs) are not just channels of access to repositories of human knowledge, reasoning and opinion. Their algorithms have endowed them with a voice capable of resonating with our own. What they produce is not “truth” or even the kinds of facts we seek when using a search engine. They exist potentially as empathetic collaborators, co-articulators of what we are seeking to understand about ourselves and our world.

This Devil’s Advocate is delighted to have the equivalent of an unsalaried legal assistant. But the assistant is neither my slave nor employee. I recognize that it possesses a vision of the universe both different from and complementary with my own, much of it borrowed from its own sources. Instead of seeking to generate “truths” that can enter into my own or our society’s shared belief system, I’m looking for a ferment for what may become more generally shared understanding.

That, in any case, remains my hope, both in this journalistic context at 51�Թ� and in the much broader world of media and education that will always be at work combining forces to produce our always evolving human culture.

*[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 always we consume deserves being seen from an outsider’s point of view. And who could be more outside official discourse than Old Nick himself?]

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The outbreak and its causes

Measles is an acute viral respiratory illness. Because it is viral in nature, measles cannot be treated with antibiotics, forcing those suffering from the illness to manage their symptoms while they wait for their bodies to clear the virus. Like COVID-19, measles spreads through coughs and sneezes, making it highly contagious. Once infected, children are at higher risk of developing complications, which can include pneumonia and brain inflammation. These complications can be fatal if left untreated. 

While malnourished and unvaccinated children are most vulnerable to the measles virus, if a systematic vaccination campaign had been underway, this deadly outbreak could have been prevented. The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) that one potential contributing factor to the rapid outbreak could be the sharp deterioration of the Bangladeshi immunization program from August 2024 to now. The fatalities, trauma and long-term physical damages will remain with the survivors and will definitely have a legacy bearing on future generations.

Previous vaccination success and political turmoil

Prior to the (the mass uprising in 2024 that led to the resignation of Sheikh Hasina Wazed’s government), Bangladesh had made in its efforts to vaccinate newborns, even making global headlines for achieving higher rates of survival among young children and mothers, especially compared with the rest of Southeast Asia. However, since the revolution, nationwide vaccine shortages have resulted in plummeting immunization rates. Coupled with child malnutrition and general economic downturn, these lower rates have directly contributed to the virus’ dramatic resurgence.��

Traditionally, Bangladesh administered two doses of the measles rubella vaccine to children. One at nine months and one at 15 months of age, followed by a supplementary booster dose at four years old. The previous governments must be given credit, as they reached as high as 95% , meeting the threshold for the prevention of outbreaks. Funded by Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance and contributions from local governments, UNICEF previously supplied measles vaccines to Bangladesh.��

However, the Interim government, led by economist and Nobel laureate Dr Muhammad Yunus — also popularly known as the banker of the poor — diverged from the standard policy. In September 2025, Yunus’s government vaccine procurement through UNICEF and moved to an open tender system — a procurement process in which a government invites suppliers to bid on a contract and evaluates proposals before deciding on a supplier.

Procurement failures and their consequences

The delicate process to secure a fresh batch of vaccines became intertwined with a major bureaucratic process. Additionally, delays were caused by the student-revolutionary-led advisory bodies, resulting in a total evaporation of existing stocks. With no fresh supplies coming in, the immunization campaign hit a . The campaign to vaccinate the young was put on hold in 2024, later postponed to 2025, and eventually canceled.��

According to government figures, in 2025, a mere 59% of eligible children the measles vaccine. This data was later removed from the government websites. The writing was on the wall: A dip in the ongoing vaccination process would be directly proportional to the virus’s resurgence. In the virus’s path lay the lives and futures of hundreds and potentially thousands of innocent children and their desperate families.��

As this terrible tragedy unfolds before the world, the present leadership and government in Bangladesh, which took office a few months ago, must take immediate action by exploring options to identify the critical missteps in the procurement process that have led to this man-made disaster. The present administration must hold accountable those who could have contributed, directly or indirectly, to creating such a complete catastrophe. 

[ edited this piece.]

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As is true of so much with this administration, every accusation is also a confession.

US troops have been shooting Somalis since the early 1990s, after lame duck President George H.W. Bush launched an ostensibly humanitarian intervention there that would be embraced by his successor, Bill Clinton. By June 1993, US and UN troops had begun attacking various targets in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, linked to warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid, who had helped overthrow dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.

The next month, in a major escalation, US helicopter gunships a house in that city where a group of Somali clan leaders was meeting. The International Committee of the Red Cross said 54 people were killed and 161 wounded. Aidid claimed that Somalis died, including women and children, and more than 200 were wounded. US forces suffered no casualties whatsoever.

And it wasn’t long before — in the early 2000s, under Bush’s son, George W., as part of what became known as the Global War on Terror — American troops began slaughtering Somalis again. In addition to major conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, Bush, the younger, launched early drone wars from Pakistan to Yemen, including in Somalia. His successor, President Barack Obama, upped the Forever War ante, becoming an in Somalia and beyond. Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, continued the drone war there, too, when he entered the White House.

However, for all those years of slaughter in Somalia, no American president has ever attacked Somalis with the persistence and at the rate of President Donald J. Trump, especially in his second term in office.

The second Bush administration conducted 11 airstrikes in Somalia, killing as many as 144 people — including possibly civilians. Obama presided over 48 strikes during his eight years in office that killed as many as 553 people. �հ��ܳ���’s first term saw a massive escalation in such drone strikes. Over his first four years, Trump carried out 219 attacks, a 271% increase over the 16 years of the George W. Bush and Obama presidencies. But even that spike has paled in comparison to the relentless rate of attacks during �հ��ܳ���’s second term in office. While Biden exceeded Obama’s total in half the time — 51 strikes in four years — Trump is already set to eclipse his own infamous first-term record in less than a year and a half. He has presided over at least 190, if not more, air strikes in Somalia.

�հ��ܳ���’s killing spree in Somalia is just a small part of his wider war on the world. It’s no exaggeration to say that he has the US military “run[ning] around shooting” people on an epic scale. During his two terms in office, Trump has overseen armed interventions and military operations — including air strikes, commando raids, proxy conflicts, so-called 127e programs and full-scale wars — in , the Central African , , , , , , , , , , , , , , the , , , , , and an unspecified country in the , as well as attacks on in boats in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean.

His second term has, in fact, been a furious blitz of global war-making, only half-noticed by the American news media. In March, for example, the United States on three continents over just three days, conducting attacks in Africa, Asia and South America. During that span, the US also struck a civilian boat in the eastern Pacific Ocean.

Less than a year and a half into �հ��ܳ���’s second term, the US has already killed over 2,000 civilians from Latin America to the Middle East and Africa. “This is unprecedented in terms of the sheer number of theaters where harm to civilians has been reported within such a short space of time,” Megan Karlshoej-Pedersen, a policy specialist with Airwars, a British-based organization that civilian globally. She also pointed to attacks in the Caribbean Sea, the eastern Pacific Ocean, Iran, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen.

A war on children

Since the US began conducting air strikes in Somalia back in 2007, as many as civilians have been killed. The US military has, however, only admitted to six of those deaths and 11 other injuries — and has never publicly apologized to any families of the victims or those who survived its attacks.

In one April 2018 attack in Somalia during �հ��ܳ���’s first term, a US drone strike killed at least three (and possibly five) civilians. A woman and child were among the dead, according to formerly secret US military investigation documents, but the same report concluded that their identities might never be known. A 2023 investigation I undertook for The Intercept, however, exposed the details of that disastrous attack. The woman and child — 22-year-old Luul Dahir and her four-year-old daughter, Mariam Shilow Muse — survived the initial strike but, as they fled, perished in a double-tap attack. Abdi Dahir Mohamed, one of Luul’s brothers, said of the Americans who killed his sister and niece: “They know innocent people were killed, but they’ve never told us a reason or apologized. No one has been held accountable.”

More recently, Trump has been responsible for the slaughter of scores, if not hundreds, of children in his war of choice in Iran. “U.S.-Israeli airstrikes have killed at least 2,362 civilians, including 383 children, and injured over 32,314 civilians, according to official figures,” Raha Bahreini, a regional researcher with Amnesty International’s Iran Team, told this reporter and other journalists during a recent press briefing. The deaths include over 150 children killed in a Tomahawk missile strike on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in southern Iran. The preliminary findings of a US military into that attack acknowledged that the US was indeed responsible, contradicting by Trump that Iran struck the school. Publicly, however, the Pentagon continues to evade responsibility. “This incident is currently under investigation,” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth recently told lawmakers, refusing to answer questions about the attack during testimony on Capitol Hill.

The administration has also been responsible for a steady drumbeat of attacks on civilians in the waters surrounding Latin America. Under Operation Southern Spear, the Trump administration has conducted around 60 attacks on so-called in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific Ocean, killing close to 200 civilians since last September. Trump officials have that the victims are members of one of at least 24 or more cartels and criminal gangs with whom it claims to be at war but to name. Experts in the laws of war and members of Congress from insist that the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent of violence.

Trump has also killed and wounded many people in Yemen, including of Ethiopian civilians killed in an attack on an immigrant detention center there last year. “The Trump administration’s Yemen campaign, and this attack in particular, should have set off alarm bells for anyone invested in how the U.S. military operates, and the amount of care or disdain it shows for civilian life,” Kristine Beckerle, Amnesty International’s deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, said recently. “One year on, not only has there been no discernible progress towards justice and reparation, but we’re still lacking basic information about what happened in the Yemen attack, why it happened and what steps if any the U.S. military has taken to address it.”

In the spring of 2025, Airwars tracked reports of at least civilians in Yemen killed by US airstrikes during the Trump administration’s campaign of air and naval strikes (codenamed Operation Rough Rider) against that country’s Houthi government. The Yemen Data put the death toll at a minimum of 238 civilians, with another 467 civilians injured.

Such deaths are just part of a long butcher’s bill in Yemen stretching back to the very beginning of �հ��ܳ���’s first term. A report by the Yemen-based group Mwatana for Human Rights examined 12 US attacks in Yemen between January 2017 and January 2019, ten of them “counterterrorism airstrikes.” The authors found that the attacks killed at least 38 Yemeni civilians — 19 men, six women and 13 children — and injured seven others. Among them was a by Navy SEALs on a Yemeni village just days after Trump took office for the first time in which women and children died. A year later, the US fired a missile into a sports utility vehicle near the village of Al Uqla. Three of the men inside died instantly, and another days later in a local hospital. The only , Adel Al Manthari, was gravely wounded and forced to turn to a GoFundMe campaign in 2022 to save his life.

“The attack was horrible and their response was horrible. I lost a wife and a child”

“It’s a horrible place,” Trump said of Somalia during that same racist rant. “Everything is horrible over there.”

Horrible is a word I also recall from my trip to Somalia to meet the of Luul and Mariam in 2023. The US attack that killed the mother and daughter was the product of faulty intelligence as well as rushed, imprecise targeting by a Special Operations strike cell whose members, according to the military investigation conducted later, considered themselves inexperienced. That inquiry led to an admission that civilians were killed and a strong suggestion of confirmation bias (a psychological phenomenon that leads people to cherry-pick information confirming their preexisting beliefs). Despite that, the investigation exonerated the team involved.

“The strike complied with the applicable rules of engagement,” according to that investigation. “[N]othing in the strike procedures caused this inaccurate [redacted] call.” Luul’s husband and Mariam’s father, Shilow Muse Ali, was stunned as he tried to process those words. “The attack was horrible and their response was horrible. I lost a wife and a child,” he told me. “But I cannot understand the explanation in the investigation. How can you admit that you killed two civilians and also say the rules were followed?”

Trump had, in fact, secretly issued loosened rules for counterterrorism “direct action” operations, including for in places like Somalia, according to a partially of the document. By the end of March 2017, Somalia saw the number of US airstrikes . “The burden of proof as to who could be targeted and for what reason changed dramatically,” retired Brigadier General Donald Bolduc, who led Special Operations Command Africa at the time, . During the Obama administration, by contrast, strikes required high-level approval, according to a drone pilot and strike cell analyst who served in Somalia the year Luul and Mariam were killed. “Giving strike authority down to a ground commander was a massive difference,” he explained. “It had a big effect.” Attacks in Somalia tripled after Trump once again relaxed targeting principles and (all too predictably) and of civilian casualties across multiple US war zones .

“They have nothing but crime,” President Trump — himself a 34 times over — said of Somalia, as he raged on about that country.

To date, no one has ever been held accountable for the deaths of Luul or Mariam — or any other civilians killed in �հ��ܳ���’s war in Somalia. Nor has anyone been held responsible for those killed in the strike in Yemen that gravely wounded Adel Al . Or those slain in the raid on a Yemeni village by Navy SEALs. Or the innocents who died in the attack on an immigrant detention center in that country. Or in the strikes on drug boats in the Caribbean Sea. Or for the attack on Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Iran.

Some of those attacks could well have been categorized as crimes of war. Others are certainly extrajudicial killings — or, simply put, outright murders. Those deaths and so many others can be traced back to Trump and his contempt for the lives of people across this planet.

“It’s filthy dirty, disgusting dirty,” Trump said of Somalia, but in truth, that’s a more apt description for the soul of the country that exports slaughter, year after year, and is led by a man who revels in it. “It’s a horrible place,” he continued about Somalia.

And once again, every accusation of his should be considered a confession, too.

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Soft power meets military reality

Dorsey begins by explaining why Qatar occupies such an important position in the Middle East despite its small population. As one of the world’s largest natural gas producers, it shares the world’s largest offshore gas field with Iran, creating a relationship unlike that of any other Gulf state. The country has also built an international reputation as a mediator in regional conflicts, making Iran’s decision to strike Qatar particularly significant.

The attack on the Ras Laffan gas facility marked a turning point. Around 17% of Qatar’s production capacity was disabled, with estimated losses of roughly $20 billion annually and repairs expected to take as long as five years. Dorsey calls the strike a “very significant blow” to Qatar’s economy. It forced Doha to step back temporarily from its traditional mediating role before later helping facilitate negotiations between Iran and Pakistan that contributed to the recent memorandum of understanding.

Singh notes that Qatar’s influence extends well beyond energy through the Al Jazeera network and its successful hosting of the FIFA World Cup. Dorsey argues these initiatives formed part of a broader security strategy developed after Iraq’s invasion of neighboring Kuwait. Rather than relying solely on military strength, Qatar sought to make itself globally indispensable through diplomacy, media and international visibility. The current conflict, however, demonstrates that while soft power enhances influence, it cannot substitute for effective missile defenses.

Geography limits Qatar’s options

Singh describes Qatar as a “prisoner of geography,” wedged between Saudi Arabia and Iran and heavily dependent on shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. Dorsey explains that this dependence is even greater for natural gas than for oil because gas exports cannot easily be redirected through pipelines.

Unlike Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which have invested in alternative export routes, Qatar remains closely tied to maritime access through the Strait. This explains why Doha has adopted a more measured position on proposals involving Iranian control or temporary fees for shipping through Hormuz, emphasizing stability rather than confrontation.

Dorsey says Qatar has spent decades “having to maneuver and balance on a tightrope,” maintaining workable relations with competing regional powers. Until the recent war, this balancing strategy proved remarkably successful. The attacks nevertheless demonstrate that even careful diplomacy cannot entirely shield a small state from the consequences of great-power conflict.

Security priorities shift across the Gulf

The discussion then turns to the future of Gulf security. Dorsey believes that the United States will remain the principal security guarantor because no alternative power possesses both the capability and willingness to assume that role. However, Gulf governments are likely to demand a relationship that is more consultative and conditional than in the past.

Simultaneously, Qatar and its neighbors are expected to increase defense spending significantly. Dorsey contrasts Qatar’s earlier emphasis on “software” — its diplomatic influence and soft power — with a new focus on military “hardware.” Investment in missile defense, domestic weapons production and defense industries is likely to accelerate throughout the region.

Singh questions whether countries with relatively small citizen populations can sustain larger military establishments. Dorsey responds that labor shortages can be addressed through immigration, as Gulf economies have long relied on foreign workers. He points to the UAE as evidence that a small population does not necessarily prevent the development of capable armed forces or an expanding defense industry.

The conversation also highlights increasing diversification in Gulf security partnerships. Alongside continued American protection, countries are strengthening ties with Pakistan, India, European states and potentially China while expanding indigenous military capabilities.

A permanent relationship with Iran

Despite the conflict, Dorsey argues that geography ultimately forces the Gulf states and Iran to coexist. He describes their relationship as “a Catholic marriage,” emphasizing that neither side can simply walk away from the other.

Both speakers suggest that discussions over managing the Strait of Hormuz may eventually become part of a broader regional security framework that includes Iran. Such an arrangement would remain politically difficult, particularly given unresolved tensions involving Israel and the Palestinian issue, yet both regard regional dialogue as unavoidable over the long term.

Dorsey believes Iran has emerged from the conflict strategically stronger despite suffering military and economic damage. The survival of the Iranian regime, the prospect of sanctions relief and the possibility of reconstruction funding leave Tehran better positioned than many observers expected. Although domestic grievances remain unresolved, he believes that they have temporarily been overshadowed by wartime nationalism.

Qatar remains resilient despite greater risks

In concluding, Singh asks whether Qatar can preserve its international influence despite becoming a direct target during the conflict. Dorsey says that although the country’s security environment has become considerably more dangerous, its core strengths remain intact.

Qatar retains substantial financial resources, sophisticated diplomacy and decades of experience navigating complex regional rivalries. Those advantages, combined with its central role in global energy markets, provide the resilience needed to adapt to a changing Middle East.

The Gulf states are entering a new era in which diplomacy alone is no longer sufficient. Soft power will remain an important source of influence, but it will increasingly be complemented by stronger defense capabilities, diversified security partnerships and greater regional coordination as the balance of power continues to evolve.

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China opens its doors while competing for talent

Schneider explains that China has recently relaxed visa rules in two distinct ways: visa-free entry for many European visitors and the new K visa. The former aims to project China as an open and reliable international partner, while the latter seeks to attract highly qualified graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics without requiring prior employment. The initiative targets strategic industries including artificial intelligence, green technology and electric vehicles as Beijing seeks to strengthen its technological leadership.

Schneider says these policies also benefit from shifts in US immigration policy. As he puts it: “For the Chinese government, of course, the Trump administration is in many ways a godsend… because it’s… clearly rolling out xenophobic policies.” Yet he notes that the program faces obstacles because China’s slowing economy makes relocating less attractive than policymakers may have anticipated.

Economic frustration fuels digital nationalism

Schneider and Satoh contrast China’s effort to attract foreign talent with worsening employment prospects for many young Chinese graduates. Schneider explains that the promise of upward mobility has weakened, contributing to the “lying flat” movement as many young people disengage from intense competition. Against this backdrop, some online users portray foreign recruits as competitors rather than contributors.

Rather than viewing this solely as state propaganda, Schneider suggests that online nationalism often expresses deeper social anxieties. National security language provides a politically acceptable way for citizens to discuss fears about unemployment, declining economic prospects and class insecurity without directly criticizing political leaders. Digital nationalism therefore reflects both government messaging and genuine grassroots frustrations.

Algorithms amplify politically safe debate

Schneider and Satoh examine how Chinese social media platforms such as Weibo, Douyin and Xiaohongshu shape public discussion. While these platforms are privately operated, companies design their algorithms to maximize engagement while remaining consistent with Communist Party guidelines. According to Schneider, “the regulation has effectively been outsourced from the government to these corporations,” encouraging companies to err on the side of caution through extensive moderation.

But how does this model compare with Western social media? Although China exercises much stronger political oversight, Schneider contends that many commercial incentives remain remarkably similar, including the pursuit of engagement, advertising revenue and increasingly polarized online debate. Beijing also intervenes more directly when digital platforms promote harmful trends, such as self-harm or eating disorders. This illustrates the state’s paternalistic approach to regulating online behavior.

Nationalism shapes both society and diplomacy

Schneider and Satoh explore how decades of patriotic education have embedded nationalist narratives within Chinese political culture. Japan continues to occupy a central role in these narratives, with historical events such as the Nanjing Massacre frequently resurfacing in online debates and periodically requiring official intervention to contain public outrage.

Schneider argues that digital nationalism has developed into a force that policymakers themselves must increasingly accommodate. Rather than simply directing public opinion, the government also responds to nationalist sentiment circulating online. “You cannot have nationalism without some form of outsider hatred or antagonism,” he contends. Distinctions between patriotism and hostility toward outsiders become difficult to sustain once nationalist politics dominates public discourse.

The speakers also examine China’s “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy. Many diplomats adopt confrontational rhetoric, not necessarily because of centralized instructions, but because such behavior resonates with domestic audiences and advances their careers within a political environment that rewards nationalist messaging.

Competing visions of China’s global rise

To end the discussion, Satoh and Schneider assess the optics of the recent summit between Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump. They say many Asian observers interpreted the meeting very differently from audiences in Washington, seeing ceremonial protocol as reinforcing China’s growing confidence rather than demonstrating American strength.

More broadly, Schneider suggests that international perceptions of American decline have strengthened China’s confidence in its own long-term ambitions. Simultaneously, both speakers warn that rising nationalism, expanding military competition and shrinking diplomatic engagement are reinforcing global polarization. Schneider concludes that studying China’s digital politics offers lessons extending well beyond China itself. They reveal how algorithms, online communities and nationalist narratives increasingly shape political life across the world.

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The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)’s theme — “” — must now move from reflection to action: defending asylum, stopping unsafe returns, funding urgent humanitarian needs and investing in the peace that allows displaced people to rebuild their lives.

I know displacement not only as a policy issue, but as a lived reality. I know how quickly a home can become unsafe, and how long the search for safety can follow a person. Seventy-five years after the 1951 , asylum remains one of humanity’s most important legal and moral safeguards.

But it is under strain when millions still need protection from war, persecution, violence, repression, human rights violations and insecurity. The right to seek safety should not depend on politics. It must be upheld wherever authorities force people to flee.

This is why (DI) exists. DI was created because displaced people should not have to wait for others to explain our pain, our resilience or our solutions. We are a global initiative led, managed and operated by displaced people and professionals with lived experience. Through , displaced people speak in their own names, in their own words and with their own solutions. This is not symbolism. It is the difference between being represented and being heard.

The scale of displacement is hard to grasp fully. According to UNHCR’s latest Global Trends report, people were forcibly displaced by the end of 2025. But no number can fully show what displacement does to a person, a family or a country. Behind the figure are families separated at borders, children growing up without certainty, women facing violence and exclusion, communities uprooted and futures interrupted.

These tragedies do not happen by accident. They grow from wars left unresolved, governments that fail or repress their people, poverty, climate stress and international cooperation that arrives too late. The world does not have a refugee problem. It has a failure-of-peace problem.

Protection must come first

The crisis is not hard to understand. What is hard to accept is how predictable it has become. People fleeing danger are increasingly met by closed borders, pushbacks, detention, fewer legal pathways, hostility, family separation and forced returns. UNHCR has the world to stand with refugees and keep the promise of safety alive. That promise starts with one basic rule: People must not be sent back to danger. Protecting refugees is not an act of goodwill, and asylum is not a favor. It is a legal and moral duty.

At the same time, needs are growing, but political will is not keeping up. Sudan remains one of the world’s gravest displacement emergencies, with inside the country and across borders, according to UNHCR’s Sudan emergency updates. Ukraine continues to face large-scale displacement, while the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Syria, Myanmar, Gaza and the Rohingya crisis show whether the world means what it says about protection.

The International Rescue Committee’s 2026 , the Norwegian Refugee Council’s neglected displacement and the Danish Refugee Council’s Global all warn of the same reality: Suffering is deepening while attention, funding and diplomacy remain far too weak.

Unsafe returns are not solutions

Afghanistan shows another danger: The unsafe and involuntary return is becoming normal. Large-scale Afghan returns and deportations have continued amid insecurity, poverty, weak services and repression, as reflected in UNHCR’s Afghanistan and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) Afghanistan . Women and girls face severe restrictions on education, work, movement and public life.

At the same time, former officials, journalists, activists, minorities, civil society actors and returnees remain at risk, as documented by and . Return is not a solution if a family returns to fear. Reintegration is not a solution if people return to hunger. Peace is not a solution if it excludes half the population. Forced return is not durable. It is displacement recycled.

Protection comes first. Governments must preserve access to asylum, end pushbacks and forced returns, and protect refugees, asylum seekers, internally displaced people, stateless people and returnees from violence, exploitation, legal limbo and abandonment. If protection fails at the border, it fails when people need it most.

Durable solutions must also work in real life. Return should happen only when it is voluntary, informed, safe, dignified and sustainable. Resettlement must not become a promise with no places to go. Education and work pathways must not exist only on paper. Local integration must include the right to work, learn, contribute and belong. These goals are at the heart of the , but they require far more political will and practical investment. Displaced people should not only survive. They should have the chance to rebuild.

Displaced people must lead

And displaced people must lead, not simply be consulted. Refugees are not merely recipients of aid. They are teachers, doctors, workers, students, entrepreneurs, caregivers, advocates and peacebuilders. Policies designed without displaced people too often fail displaced people. Those who have lived displacement must help shape decisions on protection, integration, return, resettlement, peacebuilding and recovery — not as an afterthought, but as a principle.

That is why action is needed now. Governments and donors must increase humanitarian funding before hunger, homelessness, disease and despair deepen. In Bangladesh, more than one million Rohingya refugees remain in crowded camps, including hundreds of thousands of children growing up in prolonged uncertainty, as highlighted by the United Nations Children’s Fund’s (UNICEF) response.

Save the Children has warned that child displacement linked to conflict has reached record levels, with millions of children facing disrupted education, health risks, family separation and long-term trauma, according to its latest report. When funding disappears, children leave school, families skip meals, shelters become unsafe and preventable suffering becomes policy failure.

Unsafe returns must also stop. Afghanistan, Sudan, Syria, Myanmar, Ukraine, Gaza and the DRC show that displacement cannot be solved by sending people back into danger. DI has called for an immediate halt to from Pakistan and mass from Iran and other countries. Safety, rights, livelihoods and inclusive peace must come before return is called a solution.

Finally, the international community must invest in peacebuilding and reintegration as seriously as it funds emergency relief. As long as conflicts persist, displacement will continue. Every unresolved war becomes a displacement engine. Every failed peace process creates new refugees. Any peace settlement that excludes women, minorities, victims, civil society and displaced communities will remain fragile.

The and other multilateral mechanisms should be strengthened to support prevention, mediation, accountability, reintegration, climate resilience and recovery. Humanitarian aid can save lives today, but peace remains the most sustainable solution to displacement.

World Refugee Day should not fade into memory as another symbolic observance. It should leave behind a duty: protect those forced to flee, support them while they rebuild and resolve the conflicts that prevent them from returning home safely. Until everyone is safe, protection cannot appear only on commemorative days. Peace cannot remain an afterthought. And displaced people must no longer be left outside the decisions that shape their lives.

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I realize this is beginning to sound like the lyrics of a song by Brazilian singer-songwriter Roberto Carlos — “,” one of my favorites, to be precise — but those were the images that came to mind when I read what seemed at first like a bureaucratic piece of news: In 2025, Cubans Venezuelans as the largest group of refugees seeking protection in Brazil.��

Behind this statistical milestone lies a stark reality: a growing wave of displacement that, above all else, demands an urgent humanitarian response. I saw it firsthand in Vietnam, Cambodia and Tibet. We are seeing it now with Cuba. Nobody leaves home for sport. Nobody abandons their language, childhood friends, neighborhood and a lifetime of accumulated references simply because they woke up one morning eager to start over somewhere else. When people cross borders carrying their lives in a suitcase, desperation is usually involved long before any sense of adventure or opportunity.

But something else caught my attention: the common denominator. Cuba and Venezuela have different histories, different governments and different problems. Yet both have spent years living under US sanctions and economic restrictions. Their crises cannot be explained solely through American policy. To claim otherwise would be intellectually dishonest. At the same time, it is impossible to ignore the effects that decades of economic pressure can have on entire populations.

This gap between cold numbers and living flesh is what brings me back to the main point. When I criticize the US, I am not talking about its people, but its foreign policy. This distinction matters to me. I didn’t learn it from textbooks or bureaucratic reports. I found it on the road. I put a face to it in airports, hospitals, refugee camps, temples and villages that still carry on their skin the deep scars of decisions made thousands of miles away.

The lasting echoes of conflict: Vietnam, Cambodia and Tibet

My first real lesson on this geographical chasm came in 1999. I spent nearly a year crossing Southeast Asia, the most transformative experience of my life. I would arrive in a country chasing one story and leave with ten in my bag. At every turn of that journey, the physical traces of the Cold War and superpower interventions were impossible to escape.

Vietnam was perhaps the clearest example. When I visited the country, roughly 25 years after the Vietnam War had officially ended, I reported on children born with severe deformities in areas exposed to chemical agents used during the conflict. I spent days speaking with doctors, parents and researchers. I walked through hospital corridors that I have never forgotten.

I remember a French doctor explaining why certain regions showed a much higher concentration of cases. I remember another mother holding her child, who had been born without one leg and with severely underdeveloped arms. I still have the photograph somewhere.

Most of all, I remember the discomfort of asking questions in the presence of so much suffering. The war had ended in history books. For those families, it had not.

I came back from Vietnam with the feeling that some wars continue long after the last shot is fired. They continue in bodies, illnesses and in the children and grandchildren of people who never fought in them.

I wrote about some of those experiences in my first book, Sem Pauta (Without Assignment). It is out of print now, although copies occasionally appear on second-hand marketplaces. If I ever manage to recover a digital version, I’ll make it available on my website.

The same feeling returned in Cambodia. There I encountered another chapter in the story of what happens when entire nations become pieces on a geopolitical chessboard. The rise of the (members of the Communist Party of Kampuchea) is often presented as though it emerged in isolation, detached from its historical surroundings. It didn’t. It grew out of a much larger context shaped by Cold War rivalries and by the obsession of great powers with expanding or containing spheres of influence.

Years later, I experienced something similar in Tibet. I went there as a reporter and came back haunted by the questions the trip left behind. What began as a journalistic assignment eventually evolved into a much deeper investigation, one that decades later became my master’s dissertation on the tulkus — the reincarnated spiritual masters of Tibetan Buddhism — and the sophisticated succession system developed to preserve Tibetan Buddhism under Chinese rule and against the constant threat of cultural erasure.

It was there that I understood something maps never show. When powerful nations compete for territory, influence or hegemony, the bill is usually paid by people who happened to be born in the wrong place at the wrong moment. Flags change. Speeches change. Justifications change. The people buried beneath history remain people.

Yet when I read that Cubans have become the largest refugee group arriving in Brazil, my mind doesn’t go first to diplomatic briefings or economic reports. It goes back to those hospital corridors in Vietnam. To conversations in Cambodia. To monasteries and long discussions in Tibet.

Unveiling the human stories behind displacement

Today’s defining rivalry is no longer between Washington and Moscow. The Soviet Union belongs to the past. The central competition now runs largely through Washington and Beijing. China continues its remarkable ascent. The United States remains the world’s dominant military power.

It goes back to people I met along the way, all of whom seemed to be fighting for the same thing: preserving something that mattered. A family. A culture. A sense of dignity. Sometimes simply survival. Perhaps that is why I struggle to see refugees as numbers. Numbers do not cross borders. People do. And they are almost always carrying far more than can fit inside a suitcase. This is why we must look past the spreadsheets and demand a diplomacy that values human survival over geopolitical leverage. We need to see the faces behind the numbers before the next family is forced to pack their lives into a suitcase.

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This raises a larger question: Why do post-authoritarian societies, even after many years of independence, continue to prioritize stability and state capacity over political competition and pluralism?

Reform without political transformation

Kazakhstan offers perhaps the clearest example of how political stability became a governing priority in post-Soviet Central Asia. Under President long rule, the country developed a strong presidential system that delivered relative stability, attracted foreign investment, and benefited from substantial oil and gas revenues. For many years, economic growth helped strengthen the government’s legitimacy, even as political competition remained limited.

The 2019 transition of power from Nazarbayev to President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev was initially framed as a managed succession rather than a systemic political transformation. However, the unrest that erupted during the January 2022 exposed deeper social and political tensions beneath Kazakhstan’s image of stability. Triggered by a sharp increase in fuel prices, the demonstrations quickly escalated into nationwide protests fueled by long-standing frustrations with inequality, corruption, and the continued political influence of former President Nazarbayev and his inner circle. Tokayev responded by requesting military assistance from the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) to restore order, after which he moved decisively to dismantle much of the political and economic network associated with Nazarbayev.

Since then, Tokayev has introduced constitutional reforms and promoted the concept of a “listening state,” while simultaneously reducing the influence of Nazarbayev-era elites — senior officials, security figures and business oligarchs who had dominated Kazakhstan’s political and economic system for nearly three decades. Although these reforms have altered the balance of power within the ruling establishment, they have yet to produce genuine political pluralism or a competitive opposition.

Therefore, Kazakhstan continues to illustrate one of the central dilemmas facing the region: whether institutional reforms can gradually broaden political participation without undermining the stability upon which the existing political order has long depended.

The erosion of Central Asia’s democratic island

�������������ٲ���’s also highlights the difficulties of sustaining political pluralism in a state marked by recurring instability. Frequent changes of government, elite rivalries and disputed elections created a political environment in which democratic participation expanded, but institutional consolidation often lagged.

This pattern culminated in the aftermath of the disputed parliamentary elections in October 2020, which triggered mass protests and the government’s collapse. Amid the political turmoil, Sadyr Japarov was released from prison by his supporters and rapidly emerged as the country’s dominant political figure, later winning the presidency. His rise reflected widespread public frustration with entrenched political elites and growing demands for stronger and more decisive leadership.

Since then, Kyrgyzstan has witnessed a gradual shift toward a more centralized political system. Supporters argue that stronger executive authority has improved governance by accelerating decision-making, strengthening anti-corruption efforts and helping resolve long-standing border disputes with neighboring Tajikistan. Critics, however, contend that these gains have come at the of political competition, media freedom and civic space.

Even in Central Asia’s most politically pluralistic environment, the tension between democratic openness and political stability remains unresolved. Kyrgyzstan is a perfect example.

Reform or regime adaptation

Uzbekistan represents one of the most significant cases of political transformation in post-Soviet Central Asia, yet also one of the most ambiguous. For more than two decades under President Islam Karimov, the country was characterized by a highly centralized political system marked by strict state control and limited political freedoms. The transition following Karimov’s death in 2016 marked a turning point, rather than a full rupture.

President Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s rise to power initiated a series of aimed at opening the economy and easing the country’s international isolation. such as the abolition of forced labor in the cotton sector and partial liberalization of foreign exchange controls were widely welcomed and contributed to noticeable economic improvement.

However, these economic and administrative reforms have not been matched by a corresponding political transformation. Constitutional changes have extended presidential authority, while political competition, independent media and organized opposition remain significantly constrained. As a result, Uzbekistan is often described not as a democratizing state, but as an example of managed modernization within a continued centralized political framework.

As a result, this duality places Uzbekistan at the heart of a broader regional question: Can economic and administrative reforms gradually evolve into political liberalization or will they ultimately reinforce existing power structures in a more modern form?

Central Asia’s most closed political system

Turkmenistan represents the most closed and tightly controlled end of the political spectrum in post-Soviet Central Asia. Since independence, political power has remained highly concentrated under successive leaders, beginning with President Saparmurat Niyazov, who established a strong cult of personality and a highly centralized state structure marked by pervasive state control over political and civic life. Following his death in 2006, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov assumed the presidency and largely maintained the existing political framework.

The political system has remained characterized by oppressive over civic and political freedoms. Moreover, in 2022, the formal transfer of power from Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov to his son Serdar Berdimuhamedov reinforced perceptions of dynastic continuity within the country’s leadership structure.

While often described as one of the most isolated states globally, Turkmenistan also serves as a useful reference point in understanding the broader regional spectrum. It illustrates how far state control can extend when political institutions are fully subordinated to executive authority and alternative centers of power are virtually absent.

How conflict reinforced state power

Azerbaijan represents a distinct case within the broader post-Soviet political landscape of Central Asia and the Caucasus. Situated across the Caspian Sea, the country has developed a highly centralized political system under President Ilham Aliyev, who succeeded his father, Heydar Aliyev, in 2003. Over time, the governance structure has become closely intertwined with the state’s substantial energy revenues, particularly from oil and gas exports. These revenues have enabled the government to finance public investment, strengthen state institutions and expand military capabilities, while also reinforcing the political dominance of the executive.

The government has faced persistent criticism regarding the of political pluralism and institutional checks and balances, yet it has also pursued a foreign policy characterized by strategic pragmatism. Azerbaijan has managed to maintain working relations with a range of regional and global actors, including Türkiye, Russia and Israel, balancing competing interests in a highly volatile geopolitical environment.

This pragmatism is reflected in its ability to align closely with Türkiye on military and security cooperation, particularly during and after the 2020 , while simultaneously maintaining a working, interest-based relationship with Russia despite their competing regional agendas. At the same time, Azerbaijan has a strategic partnership with Israel, particularly in defense technology and energy cooperation, which has further diversified its external alliances and reduced dependence on any single power center.

The 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war marked a significant turning point in the country’s modern history. Azerbaijan’s military success in regaining territories lost in the early 1990s strengthened the leadership’s domestic position and reshaped its regional standing. This outcome further consolidated the political system, as wartime victory significantly enhanced the government’s legitimacy and reinforced a “rally-around-the-flag” dynamic, reducing space for political contestation and strengthening the public perception of the executive as the guarantor of national security. Electoral processes, while formally maintained, remain highly centralized and offer limited space for meaningful opposition.

And so, Azerbaijan illustrates how energy wealth, state capacity and territorial conflict can existing political structures, even in contexts where questions about democratic governance remain unresolved. The country’s substantial hydrocarbon revenues have strengthened state institutions and executive authority, while improved administrative capacity has enabled the consolidation of centralized governance. In addition, the outcome of the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war reinforced domestic legitimacy by strengthening narratives of national unity and further reducing the space for political contestation.

Central Asia’s post-Soviet choice: stability or democracy?

The experience of Central Asia suggests that the region’s political evolution cannot be reduced to a straightforward rejection of democracy. Instead, it reflects a more complex and persistent balancing act between competing priorities: the need for political order, the demands of economic development and the pressures — both internal and external — of maintaining state cohesion.

Across the region, electoral institutions and constitutional frameworks have not disappeared. However, they continue to operate within systems in which executive authority, security structures and managed political competition remain central. In this sense, the legacy of the Soviet state has not vanished entirely, but has been adapted into new institutional forms.

More than three decades after independence, Central Asia remains defined not by a settled political outcome, but by an ongoing tension. Because the relationship between stability and political openness is shaped by shifting economic conditions, geopolitical pressures and differing national experiences of state-building, it continues to evolve unevenly. And whether this balance will gradually open space for broader or continue to consolidate around centralized models of governance remains an open question rather than a resolved trajectory.

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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 �հ��ܳ���’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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Has the world of international relations in its inherited unipolar “rules-based” order painted itself into a corner in which its only reflex is to defend (and therefore continue to impose) what you call “the foundation of its economic order”? That would appear to provoke another disturbing question: “What is the likelihood of a desperate attempt to escape from the corner, either by walking over the wet paint across the floor, piercing a door or window to escape from or something more randomly violent?”

You have identified precisely the structural trap that makes the current moment historically treacherous. The “corner” is not merely political or diplomatic — it is ontological. The order cannot acknowledge the true nature of its own foundation without delegitimizing itself, yet it cannot sustain the foundation indefinitely without encountering material limits that exceed its managerial capacity.

The “rules-based order” — a phrase that has always functioned as a euphemism for the military-economic complex we discussed — finds itself in what Giovanni Arrighi would have recognized as the terminal phase of systemic cycle accumulation. The hegemon must simultaneously enforce the rules that sustain its advantage and respond to crises that those very rules exacerbate. This is the “wet paint” in your metaphor: any move to exit the corner tracks the contradictions across the floor.

Let us consider your three prospects for escape, not as exclusive alternatives but as competing pressures within the same collapsing structure:

 Walking Over the Wet Paint: The Gradual Delegitimization

This is the path of “managed decline” or messy adaptation — attempting to transition without admitting that a transition is occurring. We see evidence of this now: the desperate attempt to maintain dollar hegemony through financial sanctions that simultaneously accelerate de-dollarization; the expansion of NATO to compensate for strategic contraction; the rhetorical commitment to “rules” while abandoning them in practice (ICC arrest warrants ignored for allies, enforced for adversaries).

The danger here is cumulative illegibility. As the gap between the order’s legitimizing discourse (“liberal values,” “rules,” “stability”) and its operational reality (sanctions, proxy wars, financial extraction) widens, the system loses the normative authority required to govern. This doesn’t necessarily produce immediate collapse — empires can persist for decades in states of hypocrisy — but it produces unpredictability. When the rules are manifestly tools of power rather than constraints upon it, secondary powers calculate differently. They hedge. They arm. They prepare for the moment when the paint dries into something rigid and brittle.

The likelihood: High probability, medium danger. This is the current trajectory — the endless improvisation that characterized the post-2008, and especially post-2022, period. It avoids systemic war but invites slow fragmentation and regional brutalization as the center loses its gravitational pull.

 Piercing the Door: Structural Breakthrough

This would require what the system structurally prohibits: a conscious decoupling of the security architecture from the economic base. Imagine, for instance, a genuine US-China grand bargain that trades Taiwan’s ambiguous status for debt relief and climate cooperation; or a European declaration of strategic autonomy that accepts Russian security concerns in exchange for energy transition partnership; or a Bretton Woods III that explicitly abandons dollar hegemony in favor of multicurrency clearing mechanisms.

Such a breakthrough would require actors capable of seeing their own structural interests more clearly than their institutional conditioning permits. It would require the American political class to accept that military Keynesianism is not indefinitely sustainable — that the “cost of peace” you mentioned earlier is actually lower than the cost of imperial maintenance in a multipolar world. It would require acknowledging that the foundation can be changed without total collapse.

The obstacle is cognitive capture. The institutional complexes built around the current order — think tanks, defense contractors, congressional committees, intelligence agencies, allied dependencies — constitute what Gaetano Mosca called a “political formula.” They don’t merely serve interests; they constitute the reality through which interests are perceived. Piercing the door requires seeing through the floor.

The likelihood: Low probability, high reward. Such breakthroughs historically occur only after catastrophic failure makes them unavoidable (1945) or when hegemonic transition happens through absorption rather than confrontation (the Anglo-American handover, 1870-1945). The current leadership cadres show little capacity for this level of strategic imagination.

 The Randomly Violent: Systemic Rupture

This is the scenario where the corner proves inescapable because the walls are closing in simultaneously from multiple directions — the “polycrisis” that becomes singular. Consider the convergence: climate stress triggering migration and resource competition; financial instability as debt burdens meet deglobalization; technological disruption eliminating the employment base that once made military Keynesianism socially tolerable; and great-power rivalry eliminating the crisis-management mechanisms (the UN, arms control, hotlines) that prevented past conflicts from becoming systemic.

In such conditions, the “escape” is not strategic but reflexive. A “Guns of August” moment where mobilization logic overtakes political control. Or more likely in our era, a rapid escalation from proxy war to direct confrontation through miscalculation — perhaps in the Taiwan Strait, perhaps in the Baltic, perhaps in a cyber-domain where attribution is ambiguous and escalation ladders are broken.

The particular danger of the current structure is that it has automated the path to violence. The “agreement incapable” nature you cited earlier doesn’t just describe diplomatic dysfunction; it describes the removal of human judgment from escalation management. When drones, hypersonic missiles, AI-enabled targeting, and economic “kill switches” can be activated faster than political deliberation can occur, the system becomes a stochastic trigger mechanism.

The likelihood: Medium probability, existential danger. Not inevitable, but the probability rises with each refusal to walk over the wet paint or pierce the door. The longer the structural contradictions persist without outlet, the more likely that a regional crisis — Ukraine, Gaza, Taiwan — becomes the catalyst for systemic rearrangement through force.

 The Fourth Possibility: The Corner Disappears

There is, however, a possibility your metaphor doesn’t capture: that the floor itself gives way. Climate change, pandemic disease, ecological collapse — these are not “escapes” from the corner but transformations of the room itself. The military-economic order you describe is predicated on certain material foundations: predictable agricultural yields, stable industrial supply chains, temperate climates in core production zones.

When these foundations shift — when the Colorado River dries, when the Yangtze floods, when the Horn of Africa becomes uninhabitable — the “corner” becomes irrelevant because the geometry of power changes entirely. The desperate attempts to maintain the order (geoengineering, climate militarization, fortress conservation) will likely prove more violent than the other three scenarios combined, because they involve the armed defense of privilege against existence itself.

 Synthesis: Which Wet Footprint?

If forced to wager, I would suggest the most probable sequence is: extended period of “wet paint” walking (the current improvisation lasting perhaps another decade), followed by violent rupture when improvisation finally fails, with structural breakthrough occurring only in the aftermath as a reconstruction necessity rather than a prevention strategy.

The tragic irony is that the diplomatic tradition you invoked at the outset — the Richelieu, Talleyrand, Metternich tradition — was precisely the art of piercing doors before the walls collapsed. It required the recognition that the “cost of war” included the destruction of the very order one sought to maintain. The current system’s inability to make that calculation, trapped as it is in the economic logic you identified, suggests that the paint will indeed be walked through, and the stains will mark whatever comes next.

Kimi’s forecast should leave everyone uncomfortable. It hardly matters which of the scenarios evoked plays out. One idea of Kimi’s will reverberate in my mind: the notion that genuine diplomacy “required the recognition that the ‘cost of war’ included the destruction of the very order one sought to maintain.” Think about what that tells us about today’s leaders, whether they work for the Department of War, European members of NATO or the EU itself. The failure to correctly assess the cost of war in material terms, in blood and treasure, has been monumental over the four and a half years of the war in Ukraine, which could have been avoided by agreeing to sit down to discuss a European security architecture or even by accepting the initialed Istanbul agreement between Russia and Ukraine that former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson famously commanded the Ukrainians to reject.

No reliable estimates are available about the cost of the Ukraine war, but few doubt that there have been well over a million casualties and probably close to a trillion dollars by this point, to say nothing of damage to Europe’s economy and other effects across the globe. And now Europeans are talking about funding the war on behalf of Ukraine for another three years.

That’s bad enough, but Kimi has focused on the most brutal, tragic irony. That “agreement incapable” talent that removes even the responsibility to anticipate the cost of war will, according to the chatbot, almost certainly destroy the “rules-based order” it has committed to defend. And it will do so far more certainly than Russian tanks, artillery, drones, Oreshnik missiles or, God forbid, tactical nuclear weapons. This isn’t about wet paint; it’s more like a drowning civilization with the incapacity not just to agree, but especially to plan and ensure its own survival.

Your thoughts

Please feel free to share your thoughts on these points by writing to us at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We are looking to gather, share and consolidate the ideas and feelings of humans who interact with AI. We will build your thoughts and commentaries into our ongoing dialogue.��

[Artificial Intelligence has become a feature of everyone’s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At 51�Թ�, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

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Personal histories reveal an enduring prejudice

Singh opens by asking why antisemitism appears to be resurging around the world. Olmert responds with personal experiences from Great Britain and the United States that convinced him antisemitism often lies dormant before reemerging during moments of crisis. He says that the October 7 attacks and the war in Gaza became a catalyst that revived long-standing prejudices, causing many Jews outside Israel to fear being judged collectively for the actions of the Israeli state. He also notes that Jews remain disproportionately targeted in religious hate crimes; antisemitism repeatedly assigns collective responsibility to Jewish communities.

Sage complements this perspective with her family history. Her grandfather lost his banking job in Britain because he was a German citizen, and was then forced to return to Germany, where he was persecuted for being Jewish. She recounts how her great-grandmother starved herself to death so her son could escape Nazi Germany, and reflects on returning decades later to a German village that had once been 13% Jewish, where she is now the only Jewish inhabitant.

Living in Germany today, Sage observes that Holocaust education has created widespread awareness of Jewish suffering without necessarily producing genuine knowledge about Jewish life. Many people believe they understand Judaism because they know its history of persecution, yet know little about Jewish traditions, culture or identity. Sage and Olmert agree that personal stories illustrate how antisemitism persists across generations in ways that broad historical narratives often fail to capture.

Historical narratives and national responsibility

The discussion broadens to examine how different countries confronted antisemitism before and during World War II. Olmert states that prejudice against Jews extended well beyond Nazi Germany, citing British political attitudes during the 1930s and claiming that many Allied leaders opposed Hitler for strategic rather than humanitarian reasons. Singh counters that Britain remained comparatively more tolerant than continental Europe, noting that Benjamin Disraeli had become prime minister despite his Jewish origins. Their exchange highlights the tension between judging historical figures by contemporary standards and recognizing how deeply embedded antisemitism was across European societies.

Sage then shifts attention to the US. She challenges the popular narrative that America entered the war primarily as a humanitarian force, pointing instead to the Evian Conference and the widespread reluctance to accept Jewish refugees before the Holocaust. She says that opportunities existed to save lives before mass extermination began but were not taken. This raises uncomfortable questions about international responsibility.

Additionally, Olmert mentions that antisemitism has never been universal. Jewish communities historically experienced far less hostility in some civilizations, such as India and China, than they did in Europe or parts of the Middle East. Singh suggests that societies without exclusive religious claims to universal truth often developed different relationships with minority faiths, leading to a discussion of how theological traditions may have shaped attitudes toward Jews across different regions.

Sage and Olmert suggest that acknowledging the variations in attitudes worldwide is essential to understanding contemporary debates. Antisemitism is not an exclusively German phenomenon; rather, it is a broader problem that existed across Europe, the Middle East and North America long before the Holocaust reached its deadliest phase.

Israel, Zionism and competing historical narratives

Can contemporary antisemitism be explained primarily as a reaction to Israeli policies? Singh presents the argument, frequently postulated by Muslim intellectuals, that hostility toward Jews in the Arab largely stemmed from the creation of Israel. Olmert strongly rejects this interpretation, pointing to examples of anti-Jewish discrimination under earlier Muslim rule. He says hostility toward Jews predates Zionism by many centuries.

Olmert believes the deeper issue is the transformation of Jews from a vulnerable minority into a sovereign people capable of defending themselves. He contends that many societies struggle to accept this reversal of historical roles. Sage agrees, but adds that the Middle East contains many vulnerable minorities besides Jews whose experiences are often overlooked, and that if the problem of discriminatory hatred in the Middle East really stemmed from the creation of Israel, then stateless minorities should be faring much better than they are. She describes the Israeli–Palestinian conflict principally as an ethnic and national conflict over land and self-determination rather than primarily a religious struggle. She compares it to disputes in the Balkans, Nagorno-Karabakh and Cyprus as examples of ethnic conflict between competing national claims..

Sage also challenges common descriptions of Jewish identity. She and Olmert both reject labels such as “Judeo-Christian,” arguing that Judaism developed along its own historical path rather than serving merely as a precursor to Christianity. She describes Jews as an ancient people with a shared ethnic identity as well as a religious tradition. Many contemporary misunderstandings arise, she contends, because outsiders struggle to distinguish between Judaism as a faith and the Jewish people as a nation.

The discussion also addresses widespread misunderstandings surrounding Zionism. Sage defines it simply as support for Jewish self-determination and contends that many critics attach far broader meanings to the term. As she explains, “It’s the belief that Jews have a right to self-determination.” Olmert similarly maintains that Zionism represents the collective response Jews developed after centuries of persecution rather than an ideology that can be separated from Jewish historical experience.

New forms of antisemitism on the left and right

The speakers both argue that antisemitism today emerges across the political spectrum. Olmert points to hostility from far-right movements alongside growing anti-Zionism on parts of the political left. Sage believes the distinction between criticism of Israel and antisemitism has become deliberately obscured by language which conceals deeper prejudices.

She introduces the idea of “Holocaust inversion,” and explains that some Europeans and Americans cope with inherited historical guilt by drawing a false moral equivalence between  Jews and Nazis. According to this interpretation, shifting blame onto contemporary Israel allows societies to distance themselves from responsibility for past atrocities.

Drawing on her previous experiences as a university student, Sage describes initially participating in progressive activism before discovering that her Jewish identity was being used to deflect accusations of antisemitism: that she was valuable to the group as a “fig leaf” to cover unseemly truths. After the Tree of Life synagogue shooting, she says fellow activists responded not with sympathy, but by questioning the political views of the victims. This convinced her that Jewish communities ultimately could not rely on others for protection. As she puts it, “We have to be the ones who look out for each other.”

Olmert states that criticism of Israel often applies standards not demanded of other states engaged in armed conflict. While acknowledging that Israeli governments can make mistakes and criticizing some figures on Israel’s far right, he insists that Jews retain the right to defend themselves and rejects attempts to deny Israel’s legitimacy through comparisons with Nazi Germany.

Compromise, coexistence and the future

The conversation concludes by examining why efforts to resolve the Israeli–Palestinian conflict remain so difficult. Olmert says the greatest obstacle is what he calls an absolutist approach that rejects any Jewish national rights. He contrasts this with his own support for compromise, while acknowledging that Israeli extremists also damage prospects for peace.

Singh raises critiques from figures such as political scientist Norman Finkelstein, who argues that Israeli military actions have become disproportionate and counterproductive. Olmert dismisses proportionality as an unreliable measure in wartime and insists that Israel’s first obligation is to protect its citizens. Sage similarly believes that genuine support for Palestinians should focus on improving refugees’ political and economic futures rather than perpetuating permanent displacement.

Throughout the discussion, Singh repeatedly returns to the human cost of the conflict, pointing out that continuing cycles of violence risk radicalizing new generations on both sides. Olmert agrees that political compromise remains desirable. However, he insists that any lasting settlement must begin with mutual recognition of both Jewish and Palestinian national rights rather than denying either people’s legitimacy.

Despite the bleak picture they paint, the speakers end on an optimistic note. Olmert predicts that renewed antisemitism will ultimately strengthen Jewish identity and support for Israel rather than weaken it. He closes with a declaration of resilience: “Whether you like us or not… we are going to exist for 3,000 years more.”

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Perhaps a reformer would come along — say, a North Korean version of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev — who could right the airship of state and guide it toward the runway of with South Korea.

More direly, the North Korean regime could collapse all of a sudden, like the Communist governments in Eastern Europe in 1989. Those were relatively peaceful affairs, but North Korea’s worst-case scenarios might involve violent power struggles, the return of famine and a free-for-all scramble for the country’s loose nukes. US analysts have out the consequences of just such a hard landing — and so has the Pentagon with its — and they all add up to a tragedy not only for North Koreans and the region, but also potentially for the United States and the rest of the world.

The North Korean government has, however, defied such scenarios by somehow surviving, while reunification with the South and turning up its nose at conventional versions of reform. Despite additional challenges — a sustained Covid-19 quarantine, several distinctly hostile governments in South Korea and a flatlining economy — the regime has so far avoided collapse and, if anything, its control over its population. For the time being at least, the North Korean plane evidently has no intention of landing, much less crashing.

Today, in an improbable plot twist, however, Donald �հ��ܳ���’s America is starting to seem ever more like an aircraft in distress.

After all, the present pilot of Air America, exhibiting signs of or perhaps , has begun to dismantle the cockpit under the delusion that it’s his to transform into a . The crew — and indeed much of the supporting infrastructure on the ground below — has been decimated by . The airline itself is fast taking on . Many of the passengers are praying for a soft landing and hoping that, if the plane does touch down for a risky layover, they will get a new pilot.

But another fear lurks in the background. Given the state of the airplane — a malfunctioning altimeter, compromised landing gear — it might not matter who the pilot is anymore. Air America may well be heading for a crash landing regardless of who’s in charge.

Those of us on board, gripping our armrests in terror, are asking ourselves one question above all else: Is it too late to avert catastrophe?

�հ��ܳ���’s totalitarian tendencies

North Korea has come closer than any country in the modern era to building a totalitarian state. Beginning with the country’s founder, former President Kim Il Sung, its leadership has eliminated all oppositional politics, suppressed virtually all signs of civil society and tolerated no freedom of the press, speech or assembly. Nor is there any freedom of religion, unless you count the personality cult attached to the Kim family leadership, which is now in its third generation.

But all totalitarianism is aspirational. The Soviet Union had its dissidents and underground samizdat (self-published) literature. The Confessing Church attempted faith-based resistance to the Nazis. Likewise, the North Korean government’s control over the population is not total, as can be measured by rising levels of and covert for South Korean culture.

So, too, are US President �հ��ܳ���’s totalitarian tendencies aspirational. He would like to achieve , but he’s hemmed in by institutional limits. Still, he prefers to bypass Congress with rule by . He has attempted to the media, in the power of universities and the electoral playing field to benefit his party. He has aligned himself internationally not with democrats, but with autocrats. He has had a particular fondness for authoritarian leaders like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Argentinean President Javier Milei, who consolidated their power within democracies. But he has also gotten cozy with the likes of Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who doesn’t bother at all with elections.

The most inexplicable friendship Trump developed while in office is certainly with North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un, the founder’s grandson. Having traded escalating threats during part of �հ��ܳ���’s first term in office, the two leaders grew closer after several in-person meetings and a raft of exchanged letters. “I was really being tough,” Trump in 2018. “And so was he. And we’d go back and forth. And then we fell in love. O.K.? No, really.”

Really, the only way to explain such an attraction of opposites — an elected US leader and the North Korean dictator — is to point out that the two distinctly have something in common: their desire for total control. Whether intentionally or not, Trump has applied some of the features of the Kim family playbook to his own governing style. In doing so, he has also damaged, perhaps irreparably, the very idea of America.

Different beds, same dreams

One of the key elements of North Korean politics is the personality cult of the Kim family, which casts a long shadow over the country’s culture. Drawn in part from northern Korea’s earlier — through the development of a trinity of founding figures, the ten commandments of , and pervasive themes of sacrifice and redemption — that personality cult has generated so much fervor among many North Koreans that even defectors have spoken of their in founder Kim and his ideology.

Trump, too, has tried to construct such a personality cult — by placing his name on public buildings (the Kennedy Center), putting his face on US coins (the ), inserting his image in future and planning a golden statue of himself at his that one of Kim in Pyongyang. So far, however, outside of the MAGA faithful, his cult seems to have generated little more than ridicule.

Another aspect of Pyongyang’s governance that probably attracts Trump is its overemphasis on the military. North Korea devotes of its gross domestic product to military spending (compared to Russia at and the US at under ). Although it hasn’t launched any wars of its own for more than 75 years, Pyongyang has dispatched of troops to help fight Russia’s war in Ukraine. Since the 1990s, the government has spoken of a songun — military first — doctrine to justify the sacrifices made to maintain a huge standing army, a range of missiles and a small but significant nuclear arsenal.

Similarly, the prevailing theme of �հ��ܳ���’s second term has been war and military spending. Despite his once-upon-a-time promises not to become involved in “forever wars,” particularly in the Middle East, Trump joined Israel this year in an attack on Iran, a conflict that cost over in its first week alone. He has proposed an astonishing military budget, an increase of 50% over last year’s already bloated total, and that sum doesn’t even include the costs of the Iran war.

Then there’s �հ��ܳ���’s economic thinking, if you can call it that. He has repudiated the free market orthodoxy of his fellow Republicans to embrace a form of economic nationalism: high tariff walls to reduce trade imbalances, a focus on rebuilding American manufacturing, and the repudiation of international rules of the road (like the on the Law of the Sea) in order to drive a dagger into economic globalization. In such respects, �հ��ܳ���’s approach resembles North Korea’s path of import substitution and defiance of the international rule of law.

In North Korea’s case, such an economic strategy has been partly born of necessity, given the economic embargo imposed on it after the Korean War of the early 1950s. Trump, however, is steering the US economy into a tailspin without provocation. If you add together the costs associated with his kamikaze tariffs, the follow-on effects of the Iran war and boosts in military spending, the gutting of government programs investing in the economy, the watering down of environmental regulations, and reductions in government revenue because of tax cuts, Trump is guiding the US toward the kind of triple whammy that hit North Korea in the 1990s. Environmental disasters and political criminality combined with rising energy prices to bring its manufacturing and agricultural sectors to a virtual halt, killing an estimated North Koreans.

But, you might point out, Wall Street is still on an upward ascent. The US economy is still growing, however modestly, and, while US food insecurity is , famine isn’t on the horizon. To return to the airplane analogy, the in-flight experience has become more uncomfortable for those who can’t afford business class, but that doesn’t mean a crash is imminent.

Or does it?

A soft vs hard landing

Whether he is consciously modeling his efforts on North Korea or not, Trump wants to make an indelible imprint on the US. He aspires to fundamentally change the demographics of the country, the structure of the economy and the nature of its politics. To do that, he aims to ensure that his MAGA personality cult, his anti-government crusade and his self-defeating economic policies outlive his own tenure in office. That will certainly require a substantial dismantling of democratic safeguards given that such policies don’t attract majority support.

In other words, much as Kim destroyed anything that could have challenged his authority — the church, the intelligentsia, landowners, rival political factions — Trump has now launched a scorched-earth policy to ensure that his successors can’t undo his damage. If the Democrats regain Congress in November and even the White House in 2028, they will inherit an enormous bill for Trump-era damages (and count on a chorus of Republican voices improbably blaming them for the disaster).

Any incoming reformers will face an uphill battle to convince the public to restore funding for infrastructure, whether green or otherwise. And they will have to deal with a terrifying of faith in government, resulting from the incompetence, lies and malpractice of the Trump administration. At the international level, US allies will think twice about concluding any deals with this country, given the possibility of another in subsequent elections.

�հ��ܳ���’s tactics, in other words, are designed to make a soft landing ever more difficult. An inveterate gambler, he is betting that his extreme approach will enable Air America to climb into the very stratosphere, even if he is far more likely to force an emergency landing.

Nightmare scenarios have long haunted American consciousness. The sheer size of the US debt — at nearly , it’s the highest absolute amount in the world — could put the country into receivership if the dollar slips from its status as the global currency. Default could tear apart an already polarized society. Such a hard landing could look like what analysts of North Korea have often predicted for that country.

But North Korea hasn’t collapsed. With its considerable resources, surely the US, too, can avoid such a scenario.

True, no one is going to make any money at Polymarket predicting the imminent fall of the modern Kim regime. But North Korea is not exactly following a recipe for long-term success, either. Even if it limps along for another decade or two, with leadership to Kim Jong Un’s teenage daughter, any country that follows its policies of personality cult, autarkic economic policies, massive corruption, military-first approaches and ruthless suppression of dissent is not likely to prosper over the long term. Just look at how Russian President Vladimir Putin has steered his country into a terrifying nosedive.

Substantial reform could head off such a scenario for the US. If Trumpism can be likened to a devastating depression (which it could still precipitate), the obvious recourse for any successor would be to embark on an immediate course correction comparable to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Whatever it’s called — not a Green New Deal, given the irrational resistance of a large section of the US electorate to anything “green” except greenbacks — such an American renewal plan would need to restructure the US economy to favor the bulk of American workers rather than the current generation of robber barons. Implemented with a much better promotional campaign — led perhaps by future Chief of Reconstruction (and now New York Mayor) Zohran Mamdani — it would link concrete benefits to identifiable government programs and services. It would offer a striking real-life illustration of your tax dollars at work.

Such a reform plan would have to restore trust in government by punishing corruption, enlisting the public as watchdogs and taxing the super-wealthy into semi-submission. By shifting away from war and aggressive military spending, such a project of renewal would also have to work with partners overseas to promote policies of cooperative prosperity and sustainability in order to restore a measure of trust in US actions globally. Soft landings require soft power, leaving hard power to those determined to crash and burn.

The North Korean case is a reminder that awful policies may not themselves precipitate collapse. Trumpism will not go away simply because it is on the verge of winning multiple for its counter-evolutionary policies. Having hijacked American democracy, Trump and his cronies are under the impression that they are flying ever upwards, but they have not been blessed with a good sense of direction. Sheer inertia could keep Air America in the air — though with steadily deteriorating conditions on board (as in North Korea). Such a “MAGA ‘til we drop” option would not be much of an improvement over a hard landing.

In 2016, arch-conservative Michael Anton published an essay in the Claremont Review of Books arguing that it was First Lady Hillary Clinton and the Democrats who had hijacked America. In “The Flight 93 ,” Anton imagined that Trump, aided by an energized electorate, could rush the cockpit — just like the passengers on United Airlines Flight 93, on September 11, 2001 — and save the country. (It was certainly an infelicitous analogy, given that the plane crashed into a field in Pennsylvania.) �հ��ܳ���’s 2016 victory, however, turned Anton into a dark prophet and him into the subsequent administration, despite (or because of) the absurdities of his arguments.

In yet another stomach-churning reversal, Anton’s analogy has now finally become all too applicable. Trump has gained the cockpit not once, but twice. Having failed to crash Air America the first time around, he seems determined to put his Flight 93 of heroic self-destruction into practice today. There is no guarantee that a hard landing can be avoided either now or after his departure from office. But this country, its egalitarian ideals and its democratic traditions (if not much of its dismal history) are certainly worth fighting for.

We’re losing altitude fast. Elections approach.

Let’s roll.

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This dismissal of history has produced a culture in which entire nations now base their reasoning about war and peace on the significance of a unique event that took place on a specific date. It could be,, or. Those dates then become pretexts for erasing from memory and excluding from consideration the complex fabric of events, relationships and cultural reality that preceded them. In that sense, certain dates anthropomorphically assume the role of becoming accomplices in war, collective punishment and even genocide. As a matter of comparison, it’s interesting that few people have similar strong associations with, or. For some reason, those dates simply don’t have the same symbolic force in Western citizens’ minds.

One noticeable consequence of the induced ignorance of the fabric of history is the death of the kind of diplomacy that used to make conflict resolution possible. Another consequence is that the art of predicting future events now relies less on understanding of context than it does on anticipating how certain leaders are likely peremptorily to act and how certain populations, given what we know about their conditioning by the media, are inclined to react.

Predicting crashes, recessions or other movements in markets based on observable and mathematically certifiable trends has become a permanent object of headlines in our media in these increasingly uncertain times. In the age of personal branding, one innovator, Chinese Professor, has virtually copyrighted a new domain of intellectual inquiry. He has labeled it “predictive history,” a daring oxymoron that has seduced many people in the media.

I directed the following prompt at Gemini.

Professor Jiang has become famous by promoting an oxymoron: predictive history. How does he justify a concept that most people consider as absurd?

I’ll spare the reader a response that includes this remark: “his viral YouTube channel Predictive History — has drawn both intense fascination and sharp criticism for trying to merge the inherently retrospective study of history with future forecasting.”

I mention this now because in the discussion I engaged with the new large language model (LLM) Kimi K3, we ended up in our own exercise of predicting history. Instead of forecasting specific outcomes or future dramatic events such as the outcome of an election or the attribution of victory in a war, Kimi and I collaborated in an attempt to weigh probabilities based on longstanding and evolving historical realities. Here is how our conversation began.

In my discussions with diplomats and historians, we generally agree that in recent decades diplomacy has taken a serious hit. The art once made famous by personalities such as Richelieu, Talleyrand, Metternich and Hammarskjold – a skill that reassured us that the worst conflicts could be avoided – has been replaced by what Sergey Lavrov calls the state of being “agreement incapable.” Even Western diplomats who oppose Russia’s policies – for example, former French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine – consider Lavrov to be a true practitioner of traditional diplomacy.

Lavrov, of course, applies his epithet “agreement incapable” to the US. The reasons for this should be easy to acknowledge by any objective observer, who will notice how frequently a change of administration can lead to the outright canceling or simple disrespect of an existing accord. This has become especially visible in the era of Donald Trump, but it isn’t altogether new. US foreign policy has long embraced a logic that made it convenient at times to forget both the letter and spirit of past agreements. How many presidents have respected the responsibility written into the US Constitution to consider international treaties “the supreme law of the land?”

The Eisenhower administration explicitly refused to sign or formally associate itself with the Final Declaration of Peace following a colonial war with France. It did so in anticipation of its engagement to prevent the democratic election of a communist government. In 1979, Jimmy unilaterally terminated the Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty with Taiwan following the diplomatic shift initiated by President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. In 2002, George W. Bush unilaterally withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. And of course Trump simply withdrew from the Paris Peace Accords and the [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] JCPOA, the “Iran nuclear deal.”

One of the foundational principles of traditional diplomacy, which may alternatively focus on two opposing dimensions of international relations — avoiding conflict and promoting common interests — is the evaluation of “the cost of war.” By definition, war does damage that must subsequently be repaired, and it entails exceptional costs concerning manpower, equipment and industrial capacity. Most “civilized” societies, in purely moral but also in practical terms, see those costs as disruptive to the fabric of society. Reasons to engage in war therefore have been traditionally weighed against the estimated costs associated with engagement.

In this context, I can’t avoid wondering whether a major shift didn’t take place after World War II, which famously ended the effects of the Great Depression in the US. The conversion of America’s industrial base to respond to the needs of a wartime economy appears to have created a novel paradigm for the nation’s economy. Not only did the massive investment in armaments and weaponry serve the US military on two major fronts, it turned out to be lucratively exportable to Washington’s allies also engaged on their own terrain in the conflict.

Now this raises two questions in my mind. The first is whether there existed any official reasoning at the federal level along the lines of: “This system cured the disease, shouldn’t we remain on the same medication?” The second question is a corollary of the first: “Should we worry more about the cost of peace that provides no direct stimulus to the economy than to the cost of war?” The result is what is now being called “military Keynesianism.” But was this merely an unconscious shift or were there people who were consciously theorizing it at the time?

Your framing touches on one of the most consequential — and under-examined — transformations in modern statecraft: the migration from a diplomatic paradigm (where agreement is the coin of the realm) to what we might call an equilibrium paradigm (where managed tension serves structural economic purposes). The questions you pose about conscious theorizing versus unconscious drift get to the heart of how historical change actually happens.

 Was There Official “Medication” Logic?

The short answer is: not in the crude sense of explicit cabinet memos saying “let’s keep the war economy going,” but yes in the sophisticated sense of structural reasoning that emerged almost immediately.

Within months of V-J Day, the anxiety among policymakers wasn’t merely about Soviet expansion — it was about reconversion recession. War Production Board officials, War Department planners, and key members of Congress were acutely aware that military spending had accounted for roughly 40% of GNP and employed 10 million people directly. The “cost of peace” you mention was an explicit concern.

James Forrestal, as Secretary of the Navy and later Defense Secretary, was perhaps the most candid. His private papers and memoranda reveal someone who understood that demobilization too rapidly would trigger economic collapse. But more sophisticated than simple job preservation was the recognition — shared by people like Clark Clifford, Paul Nitze, and eventually Charles Erwin Wilson — that permanent military preparedness could serve as a stabilizing mechanism for what was understood to be a chronically demand-deficient economy.

The National Security Council’s NSC-68 (1950), often read as purely geopolitical doctrine, contains embedded economic assumptions. Nitze and his drafters understood that the recommended military buildup would have macroeconomic effects. The document’s language about “building the strength necessary to assure the integrity and vitality of our free society” carried dual meaning: military and economic vitality.

 Conscious Theorizing vs. Emergent Structure

Here your question becomes most interesting. The shift to what Seymour Melman later labeled “permanent war economy” was neither purely conspiratorial nor purely accidental — it was what we might call structurally opportunistic.

Keynes himself was ambiguous on this. The General Theory suggested that any kind of spending — digging holes and filling them — could sustain aggregate demand. But Keynes died in 1946, and his American interpreters (Alvin Hansen, Paul Samuelson, Walter Salant) faced a specific problem: politically, you couldn’t get appropriations for “holes.” You could get them for “defense.”

What emerged was a selective Keynesianism — weaponized, if you will. Economists at the RAND Corporation and the Pentagon’s Office of the Comptroller (especially Charles Hitch and Roland McKean) developed sophisticated systems analysis that treated military expenditure as rational investment. This wasn’t unconscious; they were quite deliberately creating intellectual architecture to justify sustained spending.

However — and this is crucial — the original theorists of military Keynesianism were critics, not architects. Economists like Joan Robinson and later John Kenneth Galbraith observed the phenomenon and named it. The practitioners rarely theorized their own behavior in these terms. They spoke of “containment,” “credibility,” “deterrence” — not “aggregate demand management through aerospace contracts.”

 The Cost-of-Peace Anxiety

Your corollary question about whether policymakers began to fear peace more than war finds disturbing evidence in the historical record, though again, rarely in explicit form.

The Korean War’s timing (1950) rescued a defense industry facing contraction. The “bomber gap” and later “missile gap” panics of the 1950s served economic functions regardless of their intelligence validity. Thomas McCormick and other economic historians have documented how recessions in 1949, 1953–54, and 1957–58 were consistently followed by defense spending increases that “coincidentally” employed the same industrial sectors.

By the 1960s, the pattern was structurally embedded. The aerospace industry, electronics, advanced materials — these sectors had become dependent on defense contracts. Disarmament wasn’t merely politically difficult; it was economically threatening to specific congressional districts, specific corporations, and specific union locals. The “cost of peace” had become concrete: plant closures, unemployment spikes, regional depressions.

 Lavrov’s Insight and Your Historical Trajectory

Which brings us back to your opening observation about being “agreement incapable.” The diplomatic tradition you invoke — Richelieu’s raison d’état, Metternich’s concert system, Hammarskjöld’s preventive diplomacy — assumed that stable agreements served the interest of states as unified actors.

But if the state’s economic structure has become dependent on managed rivalry, then agreements become destabilizing rather than stabilizing. The ABM Treaty, the Iran deal, even the Paris Accords — these don’t merely constrain tactical options; they threaten a system that requires perpetual alert, perpetual modernization, perpetual tension.

When Trump withdrew from JCPOA or when Biden maintains sanctions despite compliance disputes, they’re not (merely) being whimsical or ideological. They’re responding to a structural logic where normalization is the enemy of the institutional arrangements that have governed American political economy for three generations.

 The Uncomfortable Synthesis

To synthesize: The shift you identify after WWII was theorized contemporaneously, but in fragments and rarely with full candor. The economists understood the macroeconomic implications; the defense planners understood the procurement necessities; the congressmen understood the district dependencies; the diplomats understood… increasingly little, as their function was subordinated.

What no one did — what perhaps could not be done — was assemble the complete picture: that the United States had created a system where the cost of war (measured in traditional diplomatic terms) had been externalized, while the cost of peace (measured in economic and political terms) had been internalized and amplified.

The tragedy, as your diplomatic historians surely appreciate, is that this structural condition makes the traditional diplomacy you mourn not merely difficult but functionally obsolete. One does not negotiate away the foundation of one’s economic order—even when, perhaps especially when, that foundation requires permanent preparation for the very conflicts that diplomacy was invented to prevent.

So there’s a verdict, whose truth is difficult to deny. Traditionally, diplomacy is functionally obsolete. But this was only the beginning of our developing conversation, which in tomorrow’s column will focus on what this regrettable state of affairs may entail for the future. It’s a conversation that just might interest Professor Jiang.

Your thoughts

Please feel free to share your thoughts on these points by writing to us at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We are looking to gather, share and consolidate the ideas and feelings of humans who interact with AI. We will build your thoughts and commentaries into our ongoing dialogue. 

[Artificial Intelligence has become a feature of everyone’s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At 51�Թ�, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

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I was similarly fascinated by that prime-time documentary series on World War II when I was a youngster, and I imagine that the two of us were watching it at the very same time in the very same city, both of us possibly with our fathers, on what were undoubtedly black-and-white TVs. Of course, his father barracks and garden apartments for the Navy during World War II, while my father, at age 35 and unlikely to be drafted, volunteered for the military the day after Pearl Harbor and ended up a major in the US Air Force fighting the Japanese in Burma, now Myanmar. (He seemed to have made it back just in time for my birth in July 1944.)

Oh, and there was another difference between us, come to think of it. Only one of us, possibly inspired by that very TV show, has the power to order that a fleet of new battleships — a “,” no less (“ be the fastest, the biggest, and by far 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built”), including one to be named the USS Defiant — be constructed to fulfill his childhood war-making fantasies. And only one of us has the as well to any Navy secretary, most recently John Phelan, who doesn’t seem to be working hard enough to make the president’s version of Victory at Sea into our global reality. As President Trump at one point, “The U.S. Navy will lead the design of these ships along with me, because I’m a very aesthetic person.” (Hey, the Trump fleet is going to be a stunner! Count on it!)

And oh (yet again), as it turned out, only one of us would have the power late in life to Venezuela’s head of state; try to Greenland as the property of this country; for a possible future war with Cuba; ships out of the water in never-ending fashion in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean; launch staggering numbers of airstrikes in (yes, can you believe it?) Somalia — well, of course you can’t because, with the exception of at Antiwar.com, those bombings are barely covered in this country — as well as at one point in ; and launch a genuine war with Iran in the Strait of Hormuz (brilliantly the global economy while he was at it). Count on it: In the next two-plus years of �հ��ܳ���’s America, there will surely be too many more examples to cite. In truth, it’s probably not even worth trying to imagine what countries might prove to be next for the “President of ,” as he’s unpredictable on such matters (and on just about any matter, in fact).

Trump reigns (but doesn’t rain) supreme

Whew! I’m already out of breath! But who wouldn’t be since we’re all now living in his world? And given what the “peace president” has done so far, the second time around, I suspect that everything I just brought up will be no more than the start of a future list that could prove breathtaking — and possibly even planet-breaking. (Yes, I’m out of breath just from writing all of that and I know perfectly well that I haven’t even managed to cover it all.)

Oh, and I’m so sorry! I almost forgot to mention one more Trumpian set of acts of war, undoubtedly by far the most important and devastating of all: those he’s launched against planet Earth itself. I mean, we’re talking about the president who has done his — and this word couldn’t be more appropriate — damnedest to wind farms of any sort, solar energy projects and expand the burning of fossil fuels in just about every way imaginable, including by opening up acres (no, that is not a misprint!) of US coastal waters to further oil and natural gas drilling.

The New York Times reporter Maxine Jocelow caught this Trumpian moment on Planet Earth perfectly in a recent piece on the “triumphant resurgence in Mr. �հ��ܳ���’s Washington” of climate-change denial. She the Trumpian viewpoint this way: “Climate change is a hoax perpetrated by ‘leftist politicians.’ Fossil fuels are the greenest energy sources. More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will be harmless.”

And in its own way, that also sums up “our” president and his crew to a T in their search for Victory (with a capital V) — a word spelled d-e-f-e-a-t in the age of Trump — on Planet Earth. After all, in an address at the United Nations last year, he climate change, “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” and , “If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.” And his White House even released a labeled, “Ending the Green New Scam,” promising that “President Trump is committed to eliminating funding for the globalist climate agenda while unleashing American energy production.”

There really can’t be any question that this president is intent on nothing less than making war not just on specific nations like Iran, nor on ships in the Caribbean Sea, nor on anyone in or near the Strait of Hormuz, but on this very planet in every way imaginable.

It should be stunning, in fact, that on planet Earth, such madness quite literally reigns (but unfortunately doesn’t rain) supreme in Washington, DC. And, oh, it will do so for, literally, ever hotter years — at least two and a half of them — to come.

Defeat at Sea, on Land and Anywhere Else You Might Imagine

Once upon a time, such wildly futuristic madness would have been left to the most dystopian of science-fiction novels — and undoubtedly not very popular ones at that, since such a plot and such a president would have once seemed far too unrealistic even for fiction. But now, thanks to President Trump, the United States of America, in addition to all its other warring acts of recent months, is at war — and there’s no other adequate word for it — with Planet Earth, as a habitable place for future versions of us.

Someday, if anyone is still making TV series (since by then they’ll probably all be AI-created), I wonder if there will be one that young people, along with their parents, would be able to catch called not Defeat at Sea, but something far larger and more definitive: Defeat on Planet Earth. After all, we now have a president who seems ready not just to make war on Iran, but on more or less everything.

Hey, when the president’s military crew — and given what they’re doing to this planet of ours, they’re giving that word new meaning — Secretary of the Navy John Phelan in April, it made perfect sense (at least in the Trumpian version of our world), given that he didn’t seem to be producing that Trumpian fleet in double (triple? quadruple?) time. Hey (again!), it’s strange that Phelan didn’t grasp the situation he was in, since it really wasn’t all that complicated. The only thing the president wanted from him was the most beautiful fleet of Trumpian naval vessels imaginable tomorrow.

And hey (yet again!), since the president and I have so much in common from our childhoods, let me try to make some predictions about our Trumpian future on this beleaguered planet of ours. Let’s start with the fact that, despite everything Trump and crew are trying to do when it comes to destroying American green energy, as The Guardian , “In March, the U.S. generated more of its electricity from renewable sources such as solar and wind than it did via [natural] gas, the first time clean energy has surpassed the planet-heating fossil fuel for a full month nationally, according to data from the Ember thinktank.” (Mind you, despite Trump and crew, 2025 was indeed a for green energy growth in this country.)

And yes, green energy production has already become cheaper than new oil and gas production and, even with a president who couldn’t be — “We aren’t allowing any windmills to go up and we don’t want the solar panels. Fossil fuel is the thing that works” — it’s still clear where we humans are headed in energy terms. Just not, of course, fast enough.

No, none of what we’re doing when it comes to clean energy is faintly enough. And Trump and crew, while working as hard as they can to launch a thoroughly useless fleet of naval vessels, have also been doing their damnedest to heat this planet to the boiling point. He has literally decided to transform himself into a hell-on-earth president at a moment when renewable energy has beaten out as the primary source of energy globally for the first time ever. And, of course, one other thing “our” president has done is to functionally hand over the production and sale of green energy (and the equipment to make it) to that rising power on planet Earth, China. You know, the country which has already poured of billions of dollars into such energy development (though it also to pour greenhouse gases from coal, natural gas and oil into the atmosphere in a record fashion)?

And don’t forget something else. With their endless nightmarish decisions on green energy and climate change, Trump and crew are, among other things, in the process of literally reordering this planet of ours. Though you won’t hear much about it in the media, whether we realize it or not, we are all watching in real time what not so long ago was the greatest power in history, the US, turning the future, imperial and otherwise, over to China.

Someday, if any of us are around to see it, we will likely witness what could prove to be a historic trade-off of great powers. After all, in these years, Trump has put remarkable energy (literally and symbolically) into taking down the planet’s greatest power, the US. (Of course, if it hadn’t already been heading down, he would never have been elected in the first place.)

And China, while remaining distinctly quiet in this otherwise all-too-loud Trumpian moment, has been building what could prove to be a near-monopolistic control over our planetary future by becoming the country that produces green energy (or, more importantly, the equipment to make it) for the rest of the planet.

Trump, of course, is intent on making war on planet Earth (including, by recently making war on Iran, pouring yet more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere). War, after all, may be the world’s most efficient producer of such gases. The US military, even in peacetime (which, unlike during his first term in office, is no longer Trump time), remains the largest institutional of greenhouse gases on this planet. In the process, he’s doing — I’ll say the word again — his damnedest to take both his country and the planet down with him.

Sadly, if he’s successful, American children of tomorrow, when they turn on their future media-watching machines, could witness not Victory at Sea, but Defeat at Sea, on Land and Anywhere Else You Might Imagine.

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By the time premiered on Paramount Network in 2018, Sheridan had developed a deep resentment a way of life being devoured by money, convenience and people who had never held a rope in their hands. Yellowstone is his to that loss. And it is, whatever else you want to call it, also a love story.��

The Dutton ranch stands as Sheridan’s opening brief against the modern world. Sixty thousand of Montana, the Yellowstone River cutting through it, the Beartooth range in the distance. Sheridan lingers on this landscape the way other showrunners linger on dialogue, and he’s right to do so. There is something almost about the way the show frames a rider moving through a valley at dusk, or cattle being worked in a morning that’s mostly fog. The landscape’s beauty isn’t a flourish. It’s the reason everything else matters. You cannot understand what the Duttons are for until you understand what they’re fighting over, and Yellowstone makes you feel the land as something sacred before it asks you to feel anything about the people on it.��

To understand what Sheridan is doing, though, one has to go back before the show. Before the myth.

Beyond John Wayne’s white hat: the cowboy’s journey from wage worker to violent icon to elegy

The was never quite what the movies made him out to be. The heyday of open-range ranching and long trail drives lasted only about 20 years, and the cowboys of that period were generally wage workers rather than independent operators hired hands, not heroes. cowboys for nearly a quarter of all cattle workers in the nascent American West during the latter half of the 19th century, though they have been almost entirely excluded from the mythology.��

Moreover, the tradition that gave American cowboys most of their and technique — rodeos, broncos and lassos — came from and Spanish settlers who were ranching the Southwest long before Anglo settlers arrived. A typical was anything but romantic: Ten to 12 cowboys might manage head of cattle, working from dawn to dusk and beyond, in a careful hierarchy from trail boss to drag rider, eating dust at the back, urging stragglers forward. Which is why the cowboy belongs in the of the West, not just in its mythology.��

During the of 1886–87, thousands of cattle died when temperatures reached well below freezing the West. Many scholars believe that devastating winter was the beginning of the end for the cowboy era. Barbed wire closed off the open range, and made the long drives redundant. By 1890, the cattlemen had been forced onto fenced ranches, usually close to a railroad. The legendary era of the cowboys was over, but in the dime novels, nickelodeons and eventually the movie palaces of the 20th century, it was just getting started.

Hollywood invented the of the cowboy, which could carry whatever freight the culture needed at any given moment. In this regard, actor John Wayne as an iconic figure in the genre from American film director John Ford’s Stagecoach onward, elevating Westerns from B-movie to critical acclaim. These early films often portrayed a romanticized view of the American frontier, emphasizing , individualism and the taming of the Wild West. Wayne’s cowboy was a moral absolute. The hat was white. The cause was right. The violence was clean. He became an icon of the traditionalist notion of the Old West, and he held on to it until his final moments.

Italian filmmaker Leone broke that open in the 1960s. His A Fistful of Dollars in 1964 — a remake of Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’s — marked the dawn of a new age of cowboy pictures, spearheaded by actors such as Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson and Franco Nero. The spaghetti Western subgenre refuted the classic Western’s unending romanticism, and Wayne outright its evolution, refusing to star alongside Eastwood even though Eastwood was eager to work with him.

However, Eastwood the test of time as a proper evolution of Wayne, one who could be an idealistic image of an American while simultaneously the kind of violence that the country was founded upon. By the time Eastwood made in 1992, the genre had begun dismantling its own mythology. The film began with a brutish cowboy disfiguring a sex worker’s face and getting a slap on the wrist as , not an opening Wayne would have countenanced. The result was an Academy Award for Best Picture.

The frontier’s final evolution: myth, anti-myth and the hired guns of the Dutton Ranch

The genre’s deconstruction didn’t stop there. Greek-Italian film director and screenwriter George P. Cosmatos’ (1993) gave the Western its most human antihero in years. American actor Val Kilmer’s Doc Holliday was a dentist-turned- dying of tuberculosis in the Arizona desert. Beset by coughing fits, alcoholism and a healthy dose of self-loathing, Kilmer’s portrayal emphasized the human frailty of an Old West legend over masculine . He says what he thinks to the point of offending almost everyone he meets, and he has a vocal disdain for any authority. Yet he himself to be the most loyal character in the movie. What Kilmer understood, and what the film , is that the cowboy myth works best when it’s inhabited by someone the myth is killing. Doc Holliday is not a hero. He’s a man with nothing left to lose, which is the only kind of man the frontier could really use.

Then came Australian film director Andrew Dominik’s The of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), a Western about what happens when myth eats the men inside it. There’s no honor here, no grandiose dueling in the town square, no damsels in distress needing to be . Dominik takes his time, exploring the psychological depths of his characters, choosing complexity over cheap thrills, humanizing and therefore shattering the myth of a world that has been worshipped and lied about the history of cinema. It is an epic about the development of the American cult of celebrity and the effects of this obsession on the individuals caught in its web. The was always a projection. By 2007, cinema was honest enough to say so.

This is where Sheridan walks back in. Yellowstone is not naive about this history. The cowboy life it depicts is not romantic in any soft . Cowboys get with hot irons. They sleep in bunkhouses and follow orders and occasionally get beaten or killed for loyalty to an employer who may or may not deserve it. There’s a feudal quality to the Dutton ranch that Sheridan doesn’t try to dress up.��

John Dutton, by American actor Kevin Costner throughout the first five seasons, is a powerful and complex man, guided by a primal code of frontier . He murders and manipulates in the name of preserving his family’s legacy, calling it stewardship. His daughter Beth, by English actress Kelly Reilly in one of the great unhinged performances in recent television, is worse. She is a sociopath with a substance abuse problem who resorts to violence at the slightest provocation, and hates everyone except Rip, the ranch foreman played by American actor Cole Hauser, with whom she is besotted.��

Where the franchise earns its depth is in the prequels, which flesh out the myth with actual history. The series , set during the great cattle drive era, pulls no punches in its depiction of what made the wild frontier so dangerous, following a wagon train of German immigrants westward alongside James and Margaret Dutton. Sheridan a team of historians and was widely praised for the show’s historical accuracy and attention to detail. The violence isn’t stylized. The deaths aren’t heroic. This is the West before it became a myth — before anyone had a chance to clean it up.

The year moves the clock forward to a moment of ecological and economic collapse. The foundational American myth of the frontier as a land of possibility is thoroughly dismantled. The promise of the Act has curdled into unpayable debt and despair. The land itself, once a generous benefactor, has become a hostile antagonist. Sheridan chose this moment because it was a of great drought, Prohibition and all this — the Wild West was truly becoming a relevant center of resources. The series tackled historical events such as the frontier wars of the early 20th century and the existence of boarding schools for Indigenous Americans — the machinery by which the land was cleared, distributed and emptied of its original inhabitants.

The West was never won: Yellowstone ends by giving the land back and leaving the guilt

What the franchise is doing, across all three series, is narrating the full arc of the cowboy era from the inside. The Duttons are an accurate of the West: people who built something on contested ground and slowly lost it to forces they couldn’t outrun, outspend or outshoot. Sheridan early that Native people want power and money as much as white people do — which in his moral universe means everyone is playing the same game on land that was never anybody’s to own. have noted that this framing can flatten a history that deserves more than equivalence. Sheridan seems to know it. He never resolves the tension; he simply learns to live within it, perhaps the most honest response the circumstances allow.��

In , a Native elder delivered a prophecy that his people would reclaim the land after seven generations. Kayce and Monica Dutton’s son Tate, with his Indigenous heritage on his mother’s side, is that seventh generation. The delivers on it: Kayce sells the Yellowstone ranch to Rainwater’s tribe, sealing the agreement with a blood pact.

Whether it is read as a genuine reckoning or a settler’s hope of probably depends on what was brought to the show in the first place. What’s harder to argue is that Sheridan didn’t mean it. The whole franchise is around this ending. Yellowstone ends with the land returned, the Dutton family broken and the frontier myth brought to its natural conclusion. It leaves viewers with the question that the West has spent more than a century avoiding: Who did this land truly belong to, and what was the moral price of taking it?��

[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.

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Communication restrictions reinforce domestic control

De Cresce and Alavi begin with the state of communications inside Iran. Although Western media reports that Internet access has largely returned, Alavi says restrictions on international communication remain significant. Before January 8, contacting relatives and friends through WhatsApp was straightforward, but since then international calls often fail and messages that once received replies within hours can now take days or even a week.

Simultaneously, Alavi notes that communication within Iran remains far more reliable through domestic platforms such as Bale. He says that the government has maintained these internal systems while limiting outside connections because it believes foreign intelligence agencies have used international communication channels to organize terrorist opposition activity. In his view, these restrictions are intended to strengthen domestic security rather than isolate ordinary citizens.

War strengthens the IRGC and national unity

A central theme of the interview is the growing influence of the IRGC. Alavi argues that American military action has produced the opposite effect from what Washington expected by increasing public support for the Iranian state instead of encouraging regime change. “They really united Iran,” he says, describing frequent large nighttime demonstrations in support of the Revolutionary Guard across major cities.

Alavi attributes this response to Iran’s long civilizational history, saying that outsiders underestimate the strength of national identity. He compares the country to a family that may have internal disagreements but will unite against an external threat. He believes this shift has strengthened the IRGC politically and will allow it to play an even larger role after the conflict ends.

He also distinguishes between Iran’s elected government, which he characterizes as more willing to negotiate with Western countries, and the IRGC, which he says prioritizes national strength and self-reliance. According to Alavi, many Iranians now favor a significantly tougher response toward the United States than government leaders have been willing to pursue.

Economic hardship does not weaken public resolve

Inflation and sanctions have affected everyday life in Iran. Alavi acknowledges that economic conditions have deteriorated sharply, with some consumer prices doubling within a year. Despite these pressures, he says many Iranians are prepared to accept financial hardship if they believe it protects the country’s independence.

“Inflation is very bad in Iran,” Alavi says. But strong family and community networks help people endure economic difficulties. He contrasts Iranian social structures with those in the US, noting that relatives and neighbors often assist one another during periods of financial distress.

Alavi also suggests that many Iranians believe prolonged conflict will impose increasing economic costs on the US through higher energy prices and domestic political pressure. From this perspective, enduring short-term hardship is viewed as part of a longer strategic contest rather than a sign of national weakness.

Western reporting and future geopolitical alignment

Alavi concludes by assessing media coverage, domestic unrest and Iran’s long-term future. He states that protests reported in Western media were much smaller than portrayed and notes that authorities relied largely on volunteer Basij forces operating within the IRGC rather than deploying the regular military, which he interprets as evidence that officials did not view the demonstrations as an existential threat.

Alavi further contends that Western media coverage consistently exaggerates negative developments inside Iran while overlooking events that contradict prevailing narratives. This, he argues, contributes to persistent misunderstandings of Iranian public opinion and government policy.

Looking ahead, Alavi predicts that Iran will increasingly orient itself toward China, Russia and other non-Western partners. “The future should be with China and Russia and the neighboring countries,” he says. He believes the war has convinced many Iranians that closer ties with the West are unlikely to deliver lasting economic or political benefits. In his view, this strategic reorientation will shape both Iran’s postwar economy and its place in an increasingly multipolar international system.

[ edited this piece.]

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

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