Imagine a group of castaways stranded on an island. The group staggers toward the shade of a few crooked palms, their clothes soaked with sweat. Some begin muttering prayers of thanks, others only stare, numb, at the endless blue horizon. Some want to stay put and hope for rain, or for rescue. Others, more desperate, point to the lush interior and insist on looking for water.

At last, the decision is made to split into groups, to search in every direction, lest they waste what strength they have left. One party, five strong, sets off along the curve of the beach, their bare feet leaving a wavering trail in the sand. Another band turns inland. Every rustle of lizards in the underbrush makes them halt, straining their ears, hearts beating too hard in their chests, hoping for the sound of running water.

The last group circles toward the rocky outcroppings at the northern tip of the island. Once or twice they see a glimmer, but each time it is only sunlight caught in the mica of the rocks. Hours pass. One by one the searching groups begin to return. Each carries stories: the beachcombers found a patch of reeds where the ground was damp; the jungle explorers glimpsed a dark ravine that promised a hidden stream; the climbers discovered caves going deep into the rock. No one found flowing water yet, but the hope of it is tangible in their words. Plans are whispered of venturing back out at dawn, farther and deeper. For now, though, they huddle under the palms, their throats sore, waiting for the island to reveal its hidden spring...

I want to interrupt the story before its happy or unhappy denouement both because it is used here only as a metaphor and because the metaphor is more exact if the ending is left open. We might never know if our castaways will find water or die a terrible death, but their strategy seems eminently sensible. There is limited time and a vast space to explore, so separating into groups maximises the chances of finding water. What sense would it make to look for it in a single direction? Even those who are certain that water can only be found in their chosen location lose nothing by allowing others to look for it elsewhere. And yet…

And yet, when it comes to intellectual pursuits, human beings behave very differently. The situation may be even worse in the case of political pursuits. In these cases, they often get angry if others decide to pursue diverging paths. The European wars of religion are a prime example, but the liberal revolution that succeeded them showed, if anything, even more zeal against those it regarded as stragglers. Why would that be? Why would someone object if others look for truth elsewhere? Division of labour increases the odds of finding the object of a quest, in these matters as with the castaways we just left, again stranded, in their island.

Imagine, however, if one group of castaways on the deserted island convinced itself that the only way to find water would be through some kind of manufacturing process, perhaps a primitive desalination factory. In that case, they might argue that everyone needed to work together on the same project; they might regard those wanting to search for water in their own way as an obstacle to salvation for all. They could promise everyone on the island a solution to all their future needs. If that was not enough, force might have to be used.

In this book I want to defend a different vision: a world of civilisation states looking for truth or justice in their own ways.

Every empire eventually discovers the same inconvenient truth: it is mortal. The Americans are discovering it now. The Chinese, to their credit, discovered it long ago. They know there will be no Chinese century in the way there was an American one, because the age of world order is finished. We have entered the era of ordering, world building without e…

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You pounce when the enemy is weak and that is what Israel and the US did. There was no immediate security threat from Iran. Rather the opposite. The threat had never been smaller or more negligible. But the absence of a threat also made the possibility of war a lot more attractive.

The disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan taught one lesson: don’t try to reb…

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Difference between Europe and the United States is civilisational. In Europe, the state has been replaced by the improvisation of collective action in the face of historical change. In America the state is now a collective fantasy, inescapable from the moment it is taken for reality. What looks like weakness and irresolution in Europe is merely the culm…

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Artificial intelligence will not replace human intelligence. It does not operate on the same plane as human intelligence. It will replace the world.

For many, intelligence seems to mean something close to ratiocination or a set of operations within the constraints of a given physical world. But we know things are more complicated. In the Western traditio…

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I don’t remember exactly when I first thought something was seriously wrong with the transatlantic relationship. Over the years, particularly in my time at the Hudson Institute think tank in Washington, I had many opportunities to meet and talk to the young conservatives coming through the ranks of the Republican Party, the group which has now taken ove…

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Remember those loony conspiracy theorists who saw oil behind every invasion and every war? Follow the pipeline, as they liked to say. Well, we now have conspiracy theorists that insist on seeing democracy as the secret reason for the American operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on January 3. Even as Trump explained in a live press c…

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We all have a sense that the Western or American order is coming to an end, but there is much less clarity on what might follow. A Chinese world order? Not even the Chinese authorities believe in that. They at least have internalised the contemporary moment, a moment of radical scepticism and pluralism. There will be no univocal order. We live at a time…

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The debate on whether Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute a genocide is now closed, and has been closed for a while. The International Court of Justice, all the major historians of genocide, the United Nations, all the major human rights organisations, the mainstream Hollywood star Jennifer Lawrence and even a former Israeli Prime Minister all call the Gaza “war” a genocide. Public opinion across Europe and even the United States increasingly agrees. Israel supporters such as Representative Hank Johnson in the United States Congress now prefer to argue that a genocide has indeed taken place, while blaming Hamas for provoking it.

The important question is not whether a genocide has been taking place in Gaza, but how it happened and how it was allowed to happen. Whether we are able to stop it and whether accountability is more than a mirage critically depends on a full reckoning with the enormity of what Western democracies have brought about in Gaza.

I write “brought about” advisedly. What distinguishes the Gaza genocide is the West’s direct responsibility. These were not events happening far away, barely reported in the global media, or of little interest to citizens of Western democracies. No, they were and remain the focus of intense interest. The killing in Gaza continued when the focus was on Iran, when the focus was on a hundred other things, when the focus was on nothing at all and even when the focus was on the killing in Gaza. Information about Gaza was not censored because people were distracted. It was censored because people were laser focused on censoring it. More than two years after the bombs started to rain on Gaza, Western reporters are still banned from the Strip. This is not through lack of interest but through a sense that an accurate coverage of what has happened would have unpredictable political consequences and undermine many of the narratives dominant in Western democracies.

The main way the genocide has been actively supported by our democracies is less the flow of weapons and intelligence to Israel, important as these are, than the organised repression and punishment of everyone who dared to call attention to events in Gaza or offer criticism of Israel and its conduct. For the duration of the Gaza “war,” there has hardly been a week when I did not hear from a journalist or writer or politician confessing his or her fears of speaking their mind about Gaza. For two years, attention has been singularly focused on Gaza, not to prevent what happened but to bring it about.

The difficulty is to recall all the gruesome atrocities that together give shape to the Gaza genocide. I will start with those I wrote about in the New Statesman: young children deliberately shot in the head by Israeli snipers or the young girl who saw from Cairo as her classmates, young girls like her, were killed in Gaza. There were the poets and journalists assassinated by Israel. The photos of endless and hellish landscapes of rubble where not a single building had been spared. There was Hind Rajab, trapped in a car under fire, asking for help, surrounded by bodies of her relatives. And then killed. 355 bullets were fired at the five-year old. There was the food aid program turned into a death trap. Israeli soldiers told Israeli media it had been intended as a death trap. There were the children dying of hunger, a hunger imposed by Israel, and openly defended by Israel. There were the reports that children in Gaza now face “genetic harm” for generations to come. Yes, the war has also been a genetic experiment. There was the general in charge of the first two years of the war who told an audience in Israel that more than 200,000 Palestinians had been killed or injured, and that “not once” in the course of the conflict were military operations inhibited by legal advice. I could very easily fill dozens of pages with equally shocking facts. Throughout the whole process, Western democracies did all they could to protect Israel and ensure Gaza’s complete destruction. Even after the current formulaic ceasefire, atrocities continue more or less unabated. On December 18, a young baby died at Nasser hospital, southern Gaza, from hypothermia, amid harsh winter weather and Israel’s continuing refusal to allow tents and shelters into Gaza.

How and why was this possible? I have spent many days trying to answer this question, in a way that can at least help me process the horror. I have concentrated on three explanations.

Propaganda is no doubt part of the explanation. In case we did not know that already, Gaza has once again proved what propaganda can accomplish in a modern society. In the case of Israel and Palestine, we are witnessing the effects of decades of propaganda. Excluding those who have visited Gaza or the West Bank, everyone is more or less vulnerable. Childish tales and empty sentences are regularly repeated. Every victim of propaganda immediately becomes its tool by repeating those same inventions and sentences. And propaganda also makes life harder for those who want to provide an accurate account of the facts. When propaganda is present everywhere, those speaking the truth risk sounding crazy themselves. And that makes them vulnerable to attack. Which takes me to my second explanation.

The images of destruction in Gaza were a mirror. What they reflected back were glimpses of destruction in Europe and the United States: images not of physical rubble but of destroyed democracies. How were the horrors of Gaza possible? Quite simply, because those who tried to stop or expose them quickly discovered that our political systems were committed to the genocide and there simply was no way to give voice or power to a different politics. Often, one person would be ritually punished for their dissent in order to intimidate everyone else. In my visits to American universities during the genocide, I discovered that almost everyone was too afraid to mount a decisive opposition. Those who were not afraid were quickly punished or silenced. Today, in Western societies, democracy stops when an issue becomes too central to the political regime. Unconditional support for Israel just happens to be one of those issues.

I wish I could stop here because my third explanation is even more troubling. Slowly, however, I have come to think that the first two accounts are not sufficient. After all, propaganda can be fought. Why does it feel like a lost battle? And why is the sense that our democracies no longer work not giving way to a general movement of citizenry resistance?

My sense that something deeper is at play first arose in the few debates on Gaza that I accepted to join. Often I would get distracted contemplating the people in front of me. They seemed like children. People thirsting for authority, they needed only an implausible story to believe what they were told about Israel. It seemed that the most absurd the story, the better for them. The story could even change, and it did. Israel would never bomb a hospital. Or maybe it would if it had some tunnels underneath. Or maybe no tunnels were needed, just the presence of some presumed Hamas fighter, or a camera, even if it was a Reuters camera. By the end, Israel had destroyed every single hospital in Gaza.

Those people were also singularly devoid of empathy. Worse, it seemed that they prized cruelty as a kind of status signifier: to enjoy cruelty was a sign of belonging to the strong, the winners, while sympathising with the children in Gaza just indicated, as Trump likes to say, that there might be something Palestinian about you.

They are people obsessed with their careers, their professional success, but they are also obsessed with having their opinions coincide with the social consensus. In their pursuit of these goals, they accept no moral restraints of any kind. Their psychology is the psychology of the mob, willing to do anything provided their leaders assure them they are good little boys and girls. Those defending Israel have no courage, no curiosity, no sense of duty, no character. They are far from adults or fully formed individuals. And they are infinitely proud of that. Their personality leaves no room for intellect or superego. I noticed the pattern where, like the television star Van Jones, they laughed happily when talking about dead children in Gaza.

If there is a collapse in Western societies, it is not merely a collapse of media or political structures. It is much worse. It may well be a collapse of the human personality. Human beings do not emerge fully formed from the earth. Always and everywhere, they are social creations, but what our societies are creating no longer seem like human beings.

Often during the last two years I felt that to point out the facts was to miss the point. I felt like someone in a movie theatre who insists on noting the physical impossibilities in some science fiction movie, while everyone simply wants to enjoy the thrills, all the thrills of violence and cruelty. Gaza has become our Westworld: the place where hidden fantasies of violence and cruelty are given free rein. What are these personalities, who are these monsters we seem to have created all around us, people so ready to use other human beings as objects for their most primal and animal desires, having previously transformed them into videogame characters? What has gone wrong in our societies that we no longer seem able to create or raise human beings? That is the most important question we can ask in the world we now inhabit, the world after Gaza.

Geopolitics has taken over the energy transition. I write energy transition advisedly. Since geopolitics is now the main driver of change, it would be odd to still talk of a green or a climate transition. To be sure, new sources of energy may well address the climate crisis, but it now seems they will do so as a side effect of the race to build a new en…

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Europe played two distinct roles, I think. First that of destroyer or iconoclast. European thought was profoundly revolutionary or even anarchist. The overthrow of the traditional order was complete and few would want to reverse it. It was not just a political victory but also an intellectual one. That victory brought with it enormous power: the defeat …

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1. Jorge Sanz, former president of the Commission for the Energy Transition in Spain, argues that fifteen gigawatts were suddenly disconnected from the energy system because of an increase in the grid frequency resulting from too much energy generation from renewables. When generation exceeds consumption the frequency rises and in this case it exceeded the…

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1. One of the topics in World Builders that needs development is the notion of a spectrum of dominance. A lot of geopolitics is still committed to the notion that power is by nature monopolistic. So you can have a unipolar system with only one superpower or a bipolar system with two superpowers but in the latter case there has to be two separate spheres. W…

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1. You have to admire Trump’s peculiar genius. Like the hedgehog he knows only one thing but he never forgets it. He knows how to run away from reality and thus how to avoid the dangers of clashing with reality. There he goes again: Trump built an improbable fantasy - bringing the whole world to heel with his tariff plan - but rather than taking the plan t…

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Toynbee remarks in one of his essays that for an Englishman in 1897 history seemed to have come to an end. Everything he knew was there to stay, in home as well as in foreign and imperial affairs. To someone considering the question from the historical vantage point of 1947, as Toynbee was, the belief seemed sheer lunacy, and yet this is a kind of lunac…

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Among the once unquestionable beliefs that may now take a new meaning is the idea of the economy as a living organism. It is not an insignificant idea. Modern economics has been based on the notion of an autonomous economic sphere: markets capable of creating innovation by their own power and resistant to outside manipulation. Without this concept, West…

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We recently attended a workshop on the future of Taiwan with a delegation of very senior scholars from China coordinated and led by Tsinghua University. While stressing that China has been relatively consistent in its policy towards Taiwan, these scholars pointed out a number of fundamental changes impacting the Taiwan question.

Two major influences were…

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I argued in Geopolitics for the End Time that what we saw during the pandemic, a race against every other country, often drawing a form of perverse political pleasure from comparative tables of success and failure, that logic will be embraced once again during the long climate crisis. Wealthier countries and cities will be able to invest resources in ad…

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This is a conversation space in the Substack app that I set up exclusively for my subscribers — kind of like a group chat or live hangout. I’ll post short prompts, thoughts, and updates that come my way, and you can jump into the discussion.

To join our …

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In the twentieth century, “increases in all forms of energy use made the United States the most highly powered society in world history” (David Nye). The old world had been left behind and with it the old hierarchy vanished as well. Within a decade or two, the energy inputs from hydrocarbons transformed American agriculture, with gigantic farms increasi…

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