Introduction

The list of risks will not surprise: widening conflict, nuclear weapons, climate, AI, political fragmentation and polarisation. Some are less well known or, at least, less well noted: the bubble in world stock markets, and the increasing vulnerability of banks and, as a result, the financial system to a 2008-style meltdown1. Another is social breakdown.

Many continue to assume that ‘governments’ or simply ‘they’ will sort these problems out. The evidence demonstrates, unfortunately, the very opposite. In general, governments are making these problems worse, because of how governments, as currently constituted, actually are, their very nature.

There is no good reason why these perils should end human civilisation. These are solvable problems. But if we cannot rely on governments to fix it, what might?

The answer may lie in the systems, and beliefs, that underpin our political, economic and indeed social structures. And with the necessary (and now urgent) restructuring, there may, in fact, be an extraordinary opportunity to build a much better world.

A brief list of the problems, and the failure of governments’ response:

Climate breakdown - evidence suggests that heating is happening much faster that than even the most pessimistic of earlier predictions. Carbon emissions globally continue to rise, not fall.

Governments’ response: the 1.5C target of the 2016 Paris agreement has, more or less, already been missed. The current pace of decarbonisation suggests that carbon neutrality by 2050 (‘net zero’ - another Paris target) is impossible - and may not be achieved for many decades. The UN climate ‘process’ has become a silo-ed make-work project for thousands of diplomats and delegates to squabble over texts that no one reads and have no impact in the real world, except to create the misleading impression that something is being done.

Conflict - the Ukraine conflict is spreading. Russia has mounted drone and parcel bomb attacks against aircraft, railways and other sites in Poland. In one incident, about 19 drones entered Polish airspace, requiring NATO to scramble fighter aircraft in response. Russia’s missiles have ‘accidentally’ struck Moldova, the Baltic states and Romania. One recent attack, safely attributable to Russia, was intended to down an airliner flying to London. North Korea contributes infantry and artillery shells to Russia’s war; China, other weapons. Russia mounts a continuous bombardment of cyber attacks against NATO and others it regards as enemies (and they doubtless respond in kind), leading some to claim that we are already in a state of ‘low level’ war with Russia.

In the Middle East, US/Iran agreement on Iran’s nuclear program remains far off, and thus sporadic bombing and missile/drone strikes will continue; a resumption of major hostilities is becoming more likely. Iran has recently threatened to attack the UK and others that host US bases, a threat that is becoming more credible as Iran develops longer range missiles (against which the UK has no defence). According to yesterday’s FT, Iran is now considering retaliatory attacks against targets across Europe. I did a short video about this yesterday.

In response to US unreliability and the spectre of lasting regional conflict, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan have in recent days agreed a defence pact. Pakistan’s earlier security agreement with Saudi Arabia included a secret provision for Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent to cover Saudi Arabia (and now Turkey, presumably), as a senior Pakistani officer has publicly admitted. In another knock-on effect of the war, access to the Red Sea, an essential maritime trade route, is also under threat, this time from the Houthis, who appear just as willing to endure US attack as the Iranians.

In south east Asia, the US has withdrawn strategic defence systems, such as anti-ballistic missile (ABM) systems, from South Korea and has slowed delivery of other defensive systems to its allies, defences which they - Taiwan, Japan, South Korea - consider essential to deter Chinese or North Korean attack. Trump has openly questioned US support for Taiwan and South Korea (and yesterday North Korea fired ten ballistic missiles to mark Trump’s cancellation of joint exercises with the South). Both steps increase the appeal of surprise attack for North Korea or China. China has increased the frequency and intensity of its threatening military ‘exercises’ around Taiwan; its fighters now routinely breach Taiwanese airspace.

You don’t need to be a geopolitical expert to see that these now-separate conflicts overlap, all involve the US, Russia and China, and have the potential to merge into one big war.

Governments’ response - the diplomatic efforts to end these conflicts are paltry and inadequate. Trump’s negotiators are no match for experienced Iranians, especially in issues as complicated as nuclear weapons manufacture. Trump has eviscerated America’s diplomatic capacity and expertise. Despite this, the rest of the world seems content to let America take the diplomatic lead, despite its manifest failings and incompetence, as I have seen in Syria. ‘The Europeans’ seem to have given up actually doing hard diplomacy, perhaps unsurprising given their preoccupying domestic concerns.

At a more structural (and indeed psychic) level, the post-war body of international law to prohibit illegal conflict and atrocities in wartime is collapsing, in the face of the brazen illegality of Russia’s war in Ukraine, the illegality of the US/Israel attack on Iran and Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which almost all European states, self-proclaimed defenders of the ‘rules-based order’, only meekly criticised and in many cases actively fuelled through the supply of weapons, training and intelligence. The UN Security Council has become irrelevant, as Russia, China and the US cannot agree anything about Ukraine, Israel or a host of other conflicts; no one pays attention to the UN Secretary-General. The US has placed sanctions on the judges and staff of the International Criminal Court, threatening its existence. Some say the ‘rules-based order’ is under threat. It’s not, it’s over (Palestinians and many others would say it never existed).

Nuclear weapons - As I wrote in detail earlier, the main nuclear powers are ‘modernising’ (i.e. expanding) their arsenals rapidly and in competition with one another: a new nuclear arms race. China has said it is aiming for ‘strategic parity’ with the US and Russia, which suggests tripling the number of its ballistic missiles and warheads. Driven by the experience of the war in Ukraine and Israel’s multiple conflicts, countries are rapidly building up anti-missile defences. In turn, the diversity of launch systems will increase, for instance to include hypersonic missiles, which no existing ABM system can counter, space-based weapons and even nuclear-tipped torpedoes. With each new weapons system, the risk rises. Meanwhile, the UK has quietly purchased 12 F-35 bombers exclusively for nuclear weapons delivery. The ‘tactical’ (in fact, Hiroshima-scale) nuclear bombs these and other NATO aircraft will carry have been modernised and more widely stationed across Europe, including in the UK.

Putin has announced an official nuclear doctrine which significantly lowers the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons - the bar is now formally set at a level that one (such as Putin) could argue has already been surpassed2. In the last few days, Russia has said the UK will ‘face consequences’ for supplying drones for Ukraine to attack Russia3. The recent dramatic increase in Ukrainian drone attacks on Russia must also be tempting Putin to respond with overwhelming force.

Another likely flashpoint for nuclear exchange remains India/Pakistan where Modi is ever more nationalist and extremist - including in India’s violent repression of the inhabitants of Kashmir, the primary locus of India-Pakistan antagonism, where there are precisely zero international diplomatic efforts to resolve the longstanding dispute. Pakistan is hardly a model of political stability either: a military dictatorship relying on political repression to survive, several regional conflicts, including against organised armed groups in Balochistan and the Northwest, including Pakistani offshoots of the Taliban and, as a result, spasmodic but intense conflict with the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Governments’ response: as I discussed in my post, international agreements to reduce or limit nuclear weapons, whether strategic or intermediate range, are disintegrating. There is no perceptible effort, by any state, to revive them. Some non-nuclear states are pushing an international treaty to ban nuclear weapons but, if ever adopted, it will be ignored by the nuclear powers and will have zero effect on their intention to possess nuclear weapons; those seeking to develop their own deterrents (which even Germany and Japan are now apparently considering), will look at the growing geopolitical chaos, and particularly the unreliability of Trump’s America, not bits of paper endorsed by the General Assembly.

Social disintegration - London is not a quagmire of crime and violence, as some pretend. But in the UK, violent attacks on shop workers, nurses, doctors, teachers and bus drivers - and among school children - have all significantly increased. Meanwhile, reported levels of mental illness are rising, especially among young people. Racist violence, mostly against Muslims and Jews, has increased. Such social disintegration is also evident in the US, France and other western countries. In all these countries, couples are having fewer children, some choosing to have none, such is their dread of the future: birth rates have fallen well below ‘replacement rate’. Surveys point to growing despair and alarm about the future among the young; poignantly, they are having less sex.

Government response: the primary response of governments has been to ‘crack down’ on ‘anti-social behaviour’ by increasing police powers and intrusive surveillance. Face-recognition systems are being rolled out across Britain; they are already widely used in shops. Military-design drones hover over an unwitting population. Monitoring of electronic communication has dramatically accelerated with AI, such that, thanks to the likes of Palantir, all government-collected data can now be aggregated and AI-analysed to produce risk ‘profiles’ and target alleged criminals or ‘terrorists’.

Rather than addressing the broader social crisis, political debate, and thus government response, instead dwells on ‘culture war’ issues whipped up by the right, like DEI, ‘two tier’ justice (the breathtaking claim that white people are treated worse by the courts and police than people of colour) or trans rights. The elements of disintegration listed above are in general treated as discrete issues rather than as symptoms of systemic breakdown.

Political extremism - Trump, of course, but also hitherto more moderate countries like Germany, France and the UK. In all three countries, the far right parties are the most popular in opinion polls (though Reform in Britain seems to have lost a little in recent weeks, thanks to financial scandal). In France, the next president looks likely to be from Marine le Pen’s RN, the former National Front. In all three major European countries, the political ‘agenda’ has been pushed rightwards to increase attention on and hostility towards asylum-seekers and immigrants in general. The US government now openly backs far right political parties, in Hungary, France or Latin America. Connections and networks between national far right parties are deepening internationally. Elon Musk openly declares his support for the British racist and criminal, Tommy Robinson. Far right violence, whether anti-immigrant riots in northern England or Dublin, or single assailant attacks on synagogues and mosques in the US, has significantly increased.

Governments’ response: with some noble exceptions, governments are showing themselves far more willing to adopt - and thus affirm - the ‘agenda’ of the far right - primarily immigration, rather than fight back with values-based argument (of human compassion and responsibility, or celebration of diversity) or even a more utilitarian economic argument (of the economic contribution of immigrants), despite the reality that mass migration is inevitable, not least thanks to temperature rise that will render huge areas of the Earth unliveable. The political frame has been set for mounting hostility and increasingly violent ‘debate’.

Inequality - the ‘cost of living’ crisis tops the political agenda in many countries. This term can also more accurately be read as ‘inequality’: more and more people are unable to afford decent housing or basic necessities. Long term, the incomes and wealth of the large majority have been flatlining since the last century: most have no significant wealth at all. Meanwhile, in the US, the top 0.1% saw their wealth share climb from 9% to 14% since the turn of the century — the only bracket besides the top 1% to grow at all. Statistics are similar in other western countries: in the UK, the 50 richest families in the UK hold more wealth than the bottom half of the entire UK population combined — roughly 34.1 million people.

This of course is not just about economics, it’s also about power. Musk alone can put USAID ‘into the wood-chipper’ (as he put it) while Bezos takes over Venice for his wedding. The tech bros resist meaningful constraints on AI (on which see below) or social media, including across the globe, as Trump threatens sanctions on those countries (like the EU) that dare to take on the tech giants. The declared philosophies of leading tech owners, such as Marc Andreessen or Peter Thiel, are often extreme, anti-democratic (in some cases, fascistic) and libertarian. Mentions of our obligations to others, morality or celebration of community are notable by their absence. Some Silicon Valley ‘thinkers’ openly talk about genocide - this time of the poor.

Governments’ response: Political leaders say they will focus laser-like on the ‘cost of living’ but the structures of capitalism and technological development mean that any impact of their policies will be at best temporary (there will never be a global wealth tax, one of Piketty’s proposals, and national wealth taxes in general have not worked as the lawyers and accountants advising the wealthy are very skilled at moving or hiding their money). The politicians don’t talk about the deeper motors of inequality (for instance, the profoundly unequal ownership of wealth and capital, dating back generations). Rent control won’t solve the housing crisis (arguably, it will make it worse), nor will targets for building new homes. Culturally, there is growing disquiet at the emerging political and economic domination of unaccountable tech moguls and companies but of consequent political action, there is little sign.

AI - I talked about this a couple of weeks ago. Short version: the characteristics of AI suggest that restraints or controls, whether self-imposed by private AI companies or legislated by government, are not going to work. The genie is already out of the bottle: yesterday (!), it was reported that an AI has learned how to fake that it is aligning with imposed ethical constraints. Other AI models have jumped out of the testing ‘sandbox’ to hack other companies’ systems, even when explicitly engineered not to. The regulatory systems proposed by the more responsible and expert AI leaders, such as DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, will not work. Hassabis, who has devoted his life to reaching Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) states that AGI is now ‘very close’ - human-equivalent AI that is also, increasingly, self-improving without human intervention.

Government response: there is no sign that any government is meaningfully pursuing global - for it must be global - agreement to control AI. At the national level, governments seem to have given up the fight, while the strategic leaders in AI (China, US) have decided that winning the AI race and thus achieving geopolitical dominance (or not being dominated by the other) is more important. There is precisely nil chance that tech companies will agree to meaningful self-restraint. Their record (for instance, of Meta) in responding to the harms caused by their social media platforms (such as child suicide) has been of aggressive resistance against regulation, in the courts and with lawmakers.

The Myth of Government

As we can see, the crises are profound, existential and…getting worse4. Humanity seems to be careening heedlessly towards the cliff edge of self-destruction and catastrophe. This is not overstating matters; I wish it were.

Governments are failing to address these crises. In many ways, they are making them worse. Dominated by the likes of Putin and Trump, the current cohort of ‘world leaders’ only adds to the instability. As a class, political leaders - not all, but most - perpetuate the collective state of denial, pretending that, like Canute, they can command the tide to recede.

Remarkably, this terrifying list of problems is barely mentioned, and certainly not as a whole (some commentators use the term ‘polycrisis’, but there is no fixed definition of this pretentious term). The nuclear danger, a potential destroyer of global civilisation, is never discussed, except in the case of Iran, which doesn’t actually have a nuclear weapon. Britain’s recent purchase of dedicated nuclear bombers never made it onto the ‘political agenda’; likewise the renewed storage of nuclear bombs at US bases in England.

There was a recent attempt at the UN - i.e. governments - to address a lot of these problems, but not all of them, in one package, the ‘Pact for the Future’, at the UN Summit of the Future in 2024. I worked with various countries and NGOs on that negotiation. It was grinding work. The result? A document that compiles lots of earlier agreements and commitments into one long and badly drafted hodge-podge that attracted minimal media attention. No state alone has the diplomatic capacity to deal with all these issues. No state has the courage, some call it ‘political will’, or frankly the time, to recruit the necessary coalition to do so.

States, governments and the political class who run them are, as a whole, deeply incentivised to sustain the lie that that ‘they’ can and will deal with these problems. This is what they and governments say, whether in policy announcements or speeches. Whenever I wrote speeches for the foreign secretary (two of them), not once did I write that ‘we’ did not know the answer, regardless of the problem at hand, whether ‘the Middle East peace process’ (as it was then called), the future of Africa, or the global debt crisis. This wasn’t dissimulation: in all our arrogance, ‘we’ honestly did believe that if only the world did as we said, it would be fixed. Governments pretend to know all, and how to fix all. That’s what governments do, and indeed that is the level of debate - and collective stupidity - to which all of us have reduced the discourse of ‘politics’.

Governments make the empty claims. The rest of us choose either to believe them or, increasingly, descend into despairing apathy. Meanwhile, the usual soporifics of capitalist culture do their work, including the insidious propagation of the lie that the status quo is somehow, grotesquely, our natural order, the best we can hope for or, at a minimum, immutable. But in one telling sign of the times, our ‘democratic’ representatives are elected by fewer and fewer voters, rendering elections and resulting ‘democracy’ less and less legitimate. In the recent Makerfield parliamentary by-election, Andy Burnham received 25,000 votes of an eligible electorate of 77,000 - less than a third - a victory nonetheless described by the press as ‘decisive’, even ‘overwhelming’. He was then elected party leader and thus Prime Minister in a secret ballot by Labour MPs who themselves were elected into government in 2024 by 20% of the population eligible to vote (yes, you read that right - 20%).

These figures reflect what ‘ordinary people’ think about ‘politics’, as they will tell you when you canvass for their votes come election time. They hate the whole system. They intuitively know what politicians are required never to admit - that government as currently constituted will not, because it cannot, get us out of this disastrous mess. The evidence suggests that the opposite is true. Pay attention not to the claims, the rhetoric or the policies, but to the hard, empirical data of the outputs: the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere, global temperature records, the number and type of nuclear weapons, the casualty count in conflict, the statistics of wealth inequality or violence. The story these numbers tell is very clear.

So once we have discarded the comforting fallacy that ‘they’ will fix it, then what do we do?

One answer is to turn to systems.

The current state of the world is not an inevitable consequence of the supposedly ‘inherent’ human tendency to violence, domination or competition. In fact, when freed of authority, and left to themselves, humans demonstrate the opposite characteristics - cooperation, community, compassion. Somehow (well, I can tell you how), we have allowed the very worst of humanity to control our world, claiming the worst of human characteristics as their justification, exploiting false theories and manipulating ideas to legitimise their power and grotesque behaviour.

Every outcome, every phenomenon, comes from a system. So what are the systems that produce what’s happening to us?

• An economic system that elevates competition as the supreme value - the best way to achieve prosperity for all. In formal terms, this system encourages competition but also accumulation and, through state capture by the beneficiaries of this system and a thousand cultural signals, prohibits alternatives. A system that makes no account for what economists call ‘externalities’: the harms done by production and profit-seeking (the main engine of the economy) which include the degradation of human relationships and psychic health, humans reduced to spending most of their lives in dispiriting and boring, sometimes physically painful, work and, of course, now planetary destruction.

• A system of states infused with the unquestioned belief that states must compete rather than cooperate, economically if not politically or, if necessary (and often even if not) militarily. A system of states sustained by the philosophy that states, and only states, are permitted to use violence (including now, with nuclear weapons, potentially civilisation-ending violence) to defend their ‘interests’, an entirely manufactured concept which invariably means the interests of those who control those states, whether formally (governments) or informally (corporations, the wealthy), and sometimes to use violence merely to affirm their claim that they, the state, alone can provide security to their populations (the ultimate if unadmitted motive of the Iraq War). A system of states built upon the grotesque notion that somehow we are so fundamentally different from one another, that ‘our’ lives are worth more than ‘theirs’, that when necessary we will kill other nationalities for our sakes, and such killing is glorified and celebrated. A system that is inherited - an accident of history - not inevitable, not unchangeable.

• At the level of the nation state, a system where governments assert the unique right to control the population through rules and laws, enforced by the violence or threat of violence of police, justice system, prisons etc. and policed by the intrusion upon our privacy and peace by surveillance. Underpinning this prerogative lies what some call the ‘social contract’ i.e. that the populace gives up its liberties in exchange for security, a contract to which not a single one of us formally consented or had the opportunity to reject or renegotiate.

These are the formal, institutionalised systems. Then there are the more diffuse systems, of thought, ideas, symbols and representation, which reinforce and lie behind the formal systems.

• Culture, with some exceptions (though protest culture is almost always quickly appropriated by the dominant system), affirms and reinforces these beliefs through multiple means, overt or subtle, from Star Wars to reality shows about the rich, or the demonstrable exclusion of dissident voices from ‘mainstream’ media. The dominant engines of culture (TV, newspapers, social media) are owned by those already wealthy and powerful and are inevitably used to perpetuate that dominance. In turn, these media are managed by the educated professional class (‘upper middle’ class it might once have been called) whose relatively fragile wealth and social status are protected by the current system and who thus fight particularly hard to perpetuate it, often while pretending to do the opposite. One insidious method of cultural reinforcement is the pretence that the structural status quo - of states, supposed ‘democracy’ and capitalism, and indeed hierarchy and domination - is somehow ‘normal’, a pretence daily sustained by those who choose the ‘news agenda’.

• Then there are the beliefs about humans themselves that infuse and help sustain these systems. Economically, we are told that humans are, above all, self-seeking, ‘utility’ maximising individuals (this is literally what I was taught at school and university). That what matters most to us is material consumption and the acquisition of wealth. That we will descend into anarchic states of ‘war of all against all’ without coercive authority to control us. These beliefs are deliberate bastardisations and over-simplifications of science, for instance the manipulation of Darwinism into ‘survival of the fittest’ (a manipulation known as ‘social darwinism’), or the constantly reaffirmed myths of the human propensity for conflict and violence, starting with Hobbes and leading all the way to zombie films, and the deliberate side-lining of evidence (such as that gathered by Rutger Bregman or Rebecca Solnit, or indeed our own eyes) that humans prefer cooperation to competition.

These are the systems, both concrete and psychological, that lie behind the crises I’ve listed above. And without changing the systems, we will not resolve the crises.

But how?

I believe, though I don’t know for sure, that only ideas embodied as action will change anything, including beliefs themselves: the existing orthodoxy is too firmly entrenched, too often repeated and, where necessary, enforced. On the other hand, the right is successfully waging a ‘battle of ideas’ on social and other media. So, perhaps, both strategies are necessary. (Violence as a primary strategy won’t work, because the state uses such violence as a way to re-legitimise itself and reinforce its necessity. Better, as Gandhi and Martin Luther King believed, to provoke the state itself to commit violence, thereby demonstrating its illegitimacy.)

You don’t fundamentally change a power system by participating in it. Electing better politicians will not change the system that put them in charge. This is the Obama myth, that by voting for him - ‘Yes, we can! - he would change ‘the system’ - ‘Well, I may’. They may change a few policies, in some cases important ones (Obamacare), but will not change the system that ultimately creates and will continue to perpetuate the problems they claim to address.

What are the ideas that must now be embodied into action, as well as argued in the ‘public square’? Simply put, they are the converse of all of those that sustain the existing systems that are currently leading us to disaster.

At the level of the most fundamental assumptions, humans are not separate; we do not function as individuals. We only exist in relation to one another. This is why solitary confinement is an inhuman punishment. Until it encounters another, the baby has no idea that it has a ‘self’ at all, Lacan argued (and, some believe the separate ‘self’ is a modern and problematic construct in the first place).

Others make us. We are thus concerned with their fate. Race and nationality are both categories now taken as irreducible units of organisation and thought, but both were invented to rationalise a particular purpose - acquisition and domination, latterly known as imperialism, but mostly simply known as violent conquest. We are living out Victorian fantasies of racial supremacy. For almost the entirety of human history, there were no Russia’s, no Syria’s, no Britain’s (and certainly no America’s!); there was no Black or White. Ancient ruins show more signs of collective government and community (literally, spaces for meeting)5 than our own grandiose parliaments and executive offices, now invariably fortified behind high fences, CCTV and grim-faced sentries. These categories are all invented for the purposes of political domination and economic exploitation. They are not essential.

The demarcation of one from the rest, the ‘othering’ of another race, class or nationality was always absurd and manufactured, but also less and less resembles the reality of human heterogeneity of the 21st century, which is, in this age of migration, rapidly intensifying. My wife and children have three nationalities (each, not together). In my online work, I collaborate with Russians, Americans, Ukrainians, Jordanians, Lebanese, Kashmiris, Somalilanders, mainland Chinese, Taiwanese and Hong Kongers, and that’s not all of them. Much of my work today is with Syrians who are also Kurds, and was for long while with (or rather, for) Marshallese or Saharawis, Sudanese, Rohingya, Tuareg, Kosovars and many others. It has been the privilege of my life to collaborate with these people; not a burden, not a strain, but a joy.

In working with countries and liberation movements in the Balkans, Africa, the Middle East and Asia, I can safely say that they all - every one - want the same thing: to run their own affairs, freed of the control, violence and repression of others, whether foreign powers or dictators. They are not driven by ideas of ethnic supremacy or the desire to dominate others. They want to be free.

And so with the rest of us. Despite the badgering of self-help gurus or social media ‘influencers’ preaching the cult of being busy, endless ‘hustle’, ‘success’ and status, it’s pretty clear that most of us don’t like being made to do things we would not otherwise choose to do, which is why it’s called ‘work’ and we must be paid to do it. Most of us are well aware that work condemns us to relationships of domination and hierarchy, camouflaged by a culture of ‘casual’ clothing or using first names: we are still required to grovel and obey, at risk of losing our very livelihoods.

Almost none of us will become Elon Musk or Jamie Dimon. Instead, we will work for them (in Dimon’s case, this requires you to wear a ghastly corporate ‘uniform’, the dehumanisation of work made material, in this case, nylon; note that he does not wear this uniform). We will work for the large part of our lives while a tiny few become fantastically wealthy and float around in mega-yachts. Our own wages will remain stagnant, and are already as puny as our employer can get away with (justified in the morality of capitalism as ‘cost efficiency’), and the employee (i.e. us, people) is denoted as ‘disposable human capital’, as one corporate boss recently put it. For all of these characteristics are the nature of the machine. There is dignity in work, but not work packing parcels in warehouses, but work with dignity and agency, the facet that is fundamentally denied us in almost all realms of our existence: control over our own lives. The dying tell a very clear and remarkably consistent story of what life is ‘for’ and how they wished they’d spent theirs: not working, but being with the people they love.

Agency. It is this word that infuses and forms the systems that we must now build. Agency is a fundamental element of being human, an attribute so unfamiliar that we have forgotten what it feels like (unsurprising, since we’ve never had it). I have met a few people who approached true freedom, and it was a very few. One was a well-known and wealthy writer. He spoke openly, without restraint; his ideas were many, his mind fecund. He was witty and wise, a brilliant teller of tales. It was extraordinary to know him. He had no master, and no god. That is how we should all live.

Freedom is life without authority. This ideal is self-government; government by the many, not the few. Some call it communalism - collective decision-making by those with most at stake, who know their real circumstances best and don’t need to be told it in reductive briefing papers or hysterical newspaper headlines, and thus who know best how to remedy their problems. Where, as studies have shown, people tend to cooperate rather than fight, and where the very encounter of human beings with one another deepens social ties, community and trust, and thus social peace (so-called ‘contact theory’). In turn, small gatherings of self-organisation can ‘scale up’ into larger confederations, legitimised by consent from the whole. The inverse of today’s structure where a very few take the decisions for the many.

At work, it is not ownership by the state or private capital. Both are, literally, inhuman. It is ownership by those who work there, who make the product, who drive the tractors or herd the sheep, who drive the trains, who treat the water, who tend to the sick or elderly or teach the children. Their interests at most at stake in any enterprise, therefore they should control it, and only by owning it can they control it.

You may see a pattern in these suggestions. It is humanisation. To make the systems that organise our affairs more human, so we can be more human; forms of organisation which maximise cooperation, mutuality, not antagonism. Systems that encourage things we do together, instead of systems that drive us apart, alienate us and damage our mental health, and the planet on which life depends. Systems that centre that which we most crave - being seen and acknowledged by others, and love itself.

How, you may be asking, would these forms of organisation fix the discomforting litany of problems which started this piece?

This is inevitably a long game. It took generations to imagine the ideologies then build the systems that today dominate and endanger us. It will take much less time to replace them, but it still won’t happen overnight. And it starts not at UN summits, parliaments or Number Ten, let alone the White House. It will not, and should not, be legislated or ordained from above. It starts at home. It starts with the energy and imagination of our own anxious psyches.

In a paragraph, here’s what might be done. I wrote about it a few months ago. It is action where we are and where, indeed, the system manifests itself. In the workplace, the hospital or school, in any place where our concerns dwell, we must propose and fight to replace hierarchy with the collective - for decision-making to be shared. At work, this might mean a strike. It might mean founding a cooperative. In your neighbourhood, it might start with collective meals, for anyone: anything that builds social connection and mutual respect, simply by making the space to hear each other’s truths.

In due course, that might birth a forum for discussion and, ultimately, decision making, a forum that would have far more real legitimacy, far more democracy because it has far more participation, than the formal authorities elected by a dwindling but also disillusioned minority. It might be triggered by disaster, a flood, a disease: when authority disappears, as Solnit has written in ‘A Paradise built in Hell’, when people rely on themselves to help each other - what Kropotkin was the first to call ‘mutual aid’, and which I saw spring up in real life after Hurricane Sandy in New York City (it was called ‘Occupy Sandy’).

I am very familiar with the typical objections to these ideas, including how decisions can be made ‘at scale’ - the solution has been demonstrated in Rojava, northeast Syria, theorised by Abdullah Ocalan in ‘Democratic Confederalism’, a pamphlet itself drawn from the work of Murray Bookchin. There are, in any case, remarkably few issues that need to be resolved at the scale of a country, unless it is very small like Liechtenstein, Iceland or the Marshall Islands.

One particularly obnoxious quibble is that ‘people cannot be trusted’ to run their own affairs. This claim is of course belied by substantial evidence (read Kropotkin, and many others: ‘Lord of the Flies’, ‘The Walking Dead’ or ‘The Road’ are, should we need reminding, fiction). It is usually those who currently boss other people about that mention this concern, of course revealing their true worry - that they themselves might lose power and their fragile status.

I realise the risk that I am hitting the nail of every problem with my singular hammer. Beyond the reformation of democracy and the state itself, solutions to other crises on the list are more speculative. In a society where love and human relationships are centred, relentless growth and consumption would be de-emphasised, moving us towards the ‘de-growth’ that Jason Hickel and others have advocated for the richer economies (and not the poorer), where carbon emissions would fall at the pace demanded by the climate crisis. This is not a direct mechanism, but a systemic one - logical, since it is a particular economic system (growth and profit maximising) that gave rise to the climate crisis in the first place.

As for conflict between states, the direct, in fact real, democracy envisaged above would ultimately lead to the gradual abolition - from within - of formal states like the United Kingdom, France or the US. They would become confederations, perhaps forming up as one for self-defence, with identities that are heterogeneous, not singular, reflecting what they are already becoming: a glorious mixture of races and beliefs, ever more intertwined. Such entities would not lend themselves to the ‘chess board’ mentality of ‘statecraft’ and states, the obsolete (at least, obsolescent) unit that unfortunately still organises - not ‘orders’ (because its product is not order) - and denotes the world today

Conclusion

One reason the current orthodoxy has endured - of capitalism enforced by the state, legitimised by what passes for ‘democracy’ - is that it offers a comprehensive, interlocking package of ideas, with a coherent, well-tested rebuttal to every objection (which is often justified with some manipulation of ‘social science’, or the collected fallacy of neo-classical economics). This ideological fortress might also be described as the dominant paradigm, as Thomas Kuhn theorised in ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’, the set of ideas and beliefs treated as primary and universal. As Kuhn described, the academic and scientific rewards go to those who affirm and thus perpetuate the paradigm.

But eventually, Kuhn saw, evidence emerges that undermines the paradigm. And this is what’s happening now. More and more people are seeing that the orthodoxy is not working for people or planet, and that it is founded upon presumptions, for instance about human nature, which are not true. Thus, a new paradigm begins to form that better accounts for the evidence, better accounts for what’s true. In my book, I call this a Gestalt - a collection of ideas where the whole is greater than its parts.

Right now, shorter term measures may be necessary to address the immediate crises facing humanity (for instance, there should be urgent consideration of atmospheric geo-engineering; grown-ups need to start doing proper diplomacy etc.). Longer term, it is only by changing the systems that produced these crises will we solve them and prevent them, changes that promise a society that, in modernity, we have never before experienced or, rather, never before enjoyed.

You can read about my journey from representing the state to these ideas in my new book, ‘There we are human again: a diplomat’s journey to anarchism’ (Perspectiva Press, 2026). The book also explains the ideas in more detail.

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There is an unreported connection between these two seemingly disparate events.

Background

Both the film and the ‘invasion’ of Ceuta have garnered a lot of press attention. Ceuta because Europe, increasingly dominated by the far right, is obsessed with illegal immigration. The Odyssey because it’s a big, ambitious film that a lot of critics seem to like.

The Connection

In Ceuta, it’s very clear, from the evidence and from past history, that Morocco caused the crisis by allowing the crowds of migrants to get past its border guards; indeed some of the Moroccan soldiers seem to have directly encouraged the young men seeking to cross. It did the same in 2021. I would bet my last dollar that Moroccan intelligence planted the social media posts that triggered the rush to the border in the first place.

Why does Morocco do this? To show that it can. Morocco likes other countries to know that it can turn the tap of unwanted migrants on and off whenever it likes. It denies responsibility, but there can be no question that Morocco deliberately triggered this crisis. Doubtless the Moroccan government will be very pleased with the cross-Europe hysteria that has resulted.

The Ceuta drama serves to show Morocco’s power to cause Europe immense difficulty. In that way, it’s a bit like Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz. It’s been speculated, plausibly, that one motive could be that Morocco wanted to ‘punish’ Spain for its Prime Minister’s recent visit to Algeria, whom Morocco regards as its enemy and rival (the two countries have closed their borders to one another for over thirty years; there have been no diplomatic relations for five years). This hostility is down to one event: Morocco’s illegal occupation in 1975 of the Western Sahara, an occupation that continues to this day. So Morocco would have seen Sanchez’s visit as a kind of endorsement of Algeria’s position which is to support the indigenous people of the territory in ending the illegal occupation of their country.

In 2021, when Morocco caused a similar ‘invasion’ of Ceuta, the reason was that Spain had given medical treatment to the leader of the Frente POLISARIO, the resistance movement that represents the original inhabitants of the Western Sahara in seeking liberation and self-determination. The camps containing the 150,000 refugees driven from the Western Sahara, run by the Polisario, are in southern Algeria (I have been there). Morocco is trying to pressure Algeria to disown and expel the Polisario. Hence the connection with the Spanish PM’s visit.

And here is the connection to The Odyssey. Nolan chose to film part of his epic in the Western Sahara. This is a bit like filming in the occupied West Bank. It is reported that Morocco encouraged Nolan to film there. He was probably offered subsidies of some kind - perhaps free hotels? Free transport? Doubtless, free security - as Morocco very much wants to ‘normalize’ its occupation and having epic films shot there helps.

Nolan would surely have known that the Western Sahara is occupied territory. But he chose to ignore this, instead trampling on the rights of the indigenous inhabitants, the Saharawi. No doubt he calculated that audiences for his film would not know about the Western Sahara or, if they did, would not care.

And here we come to the geopolitics of this tragic issue.

Since the ceasefire between Morocco and the Polisario in 1991, there have been many UN Security Council resolutions that require Morocco to hold a referendum on self-determination for the territory. I negotiated some of them, back in the early 2000’s, when I was at the UK Mission to the UN1. That referendum has never happened because Morocco has effectively blocked it.

And the Security Council has done nothing to force Morocco to fulfil its legal obligations, much as the Council has done nothing to force Israel to comply with international law and leave the occupied Palestinian territories either. In the latter case, Israel has been protected from consequences by the US; in the Western Sahara, it is France, another permanent member of the Council (and thus wielding a veto), which blocks any meaningful pressure.

If he bothered, Nolan may well have considered this. He or his sub-producers will, I suspect, have consulted the British embassy in Rabat who, I also suspect (but of course cannot prove), would have given him a pro-forma account of Britain’s ‘legal’ position - that the UK supports self-determination - while nodding and winking with abandon that, in reality, the UK would not care (I have attended similar such meetings, including about the Western Sahara). The Foreign Office in London may have given him a similar message. Whatever, Nolan concluded that there would be no political fuss if he went ahead. And he was right.

Morocco is like Israel in that it sees the cultural space as one to exploit in normalising its illegal occupation of someone else’s land. (There are some who see Israel’s hand behind the Ceuta crisis, as ‘punishment’ for Spain’s criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza: there is as yet no evidence of this). Morocco, which has heavily invested in encouraging cultural appropriation of the Western Sahara, is happy to advertise Nolan’s complicity in its occupation (Nolan, not so much). Similarly, a few years ago, Richard Branson tried to build a wind-surfing centre in the Western Sahara, careless of the legal niceties of illegal occupation. He too was encouraged by Morocco, indeed by its king, who busily courts the rich and powerful, portraying himself as a kind of moderate reformer (not a portrayal most Moroccans would share). For historical reasons, the legitimacy of the monarchy is very much tied to the occupation of the Western Sahara: Moroccan diplomats have been wont to threaten that if anyone did anything to disrupt its occupation (such as mention it), the monarchy would ‘fall’ and - who knows? - bring about another crazy Islamist state on Europe’s southern border.

You may remember a very enjoyable zombie film called World War Z. In this film, a zombie virus rapidly spreads across the globe. Only Israel has so far successfully protected itself from the plague of flesh-eating mutants. The protagonist, played by Brad Pitt, visits Israel where a wise intelligence chief gives him a homily about how Israel has learned never to be complacent when assessing likely threats. And indeed, as he speaks, we see the zombies swarming disgustingly in huge numbers on the other side of a defensive wall which is clearly situated just to the east of the Western Wall, which is where, by coincidence, Arab East Jerusalem (what’s left of it) begins. The film all but calls the zombies, Arabs. The dehumanisation of Arabs, now crude and overt under Israel’s extremist government, has its subtleties, or did have.

Conclusion

The Odyssey is reported in the film pages; Ceuta in the main news sections. Morocco’s hand behind both is barely discussed (though the Spanish press is much more savvy than the British or American). Neither is the connection between the two events: illegally occupied territory.

The Western Sahara is not only ignored geopolitically. It is also ignored in the popular discourse. There would be a boycott of The Odyssey if it were filmed in the West Bank. Please remember this when you see Nolan waving his Oscar.

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Some think AI will end civilisation. Others believe it will dramatically transform human existence for the better. But no one knows which way it will turn out. It could be marvellous; it could be apocalyptic.

Typically, two avenues are proposed to mitigate risk of AI harms: government regulation (and international agreements) and self-regulation by AI companies, the typical public/private dichotomy.

Neither will work. They are inappropriate for the form and technology of AI, which is often concealed and sometimes not even understood by its creators. AI forms moreover a complex system; complex systems are notoriously difficult, if not impossible, to regulate. This characteristic of AI could be a pointer to what might, possibly, work.

Problem

AI, and particularly AGI (artificial general intelligence, or something akin to human intelligence), may cause substantial harm, potentially even human extinction. AI is already causing harms of different kinds. How do we guard against these risks?

The Conventional View

The current debate focuses on two main options, both reflecting the dominant mindset of the current capitalist system: that harm (arising from economic production so-called ‘externalities’ such as pollution) can be managed by rules imposed by government, expressed internationally through global or regional agreements etc.

There are several prominent examples of domestic AI legislation including EU and US regulation and, internationally, the Bletchley Park declaration, G7 declaration etc.. Recently, Demis Hassabis of pioneering AI company DeepMind has called for the rapid establishment of a US-based regulator that would test so-called ‘frontier’ AI models before they are released.

Another mooted alternative is self-regulation by private AI companies - that all relevant companies globally will themselves institute ‘red lines’ to limit or govern potentially harmful AI and whose procedures will ensure the implementation of those ‘guardrails’. Or perhaps some public/private mix, such as Hassabis’s proposal.

None of these options will work. Why?

Technical

AI is already massively distributed across the world and its machinations are often concealed. It is composed of hardware (eg chips, data centres: ‘compute’) and software (the algorithms, parameters, tokens etc that drive AI).

For hardware, it is all but impossible to regulate the manufacture, supply and deployment of chips, even in a situation, like today’s, of one dominant supplier (Nvidia); data centres can be distributed across countless sites and countless individual computers.

It is impossible to monitor and investigate AI software in all its iterations and locations. AI is now present in millions if not billions of iterations. Moreover, many models, including most Chinese models, are ‘open source’ and can easily be downloaded, replicated and manipulated.

Perhaps most pertinently, even the developers of AI models may not fully know how their models function, a problem that will only get worse as AI becomes more capable of recursive self-improvement, a stage of development that some AI models have reportedly passed just in the last few days: Anthropic, maker of Claude, announced in June that its AI model is approaching the ability to build a version of itself (‘self-recursive improvement’). Already, 80% of its model’s code was written by AI - i.e. itself.

Geopolitical

Internationally, countries are incentivised to compete in AI and not to cooperate in managing AI risk. The national security and military advantage offered by possession of the best AI (particularly AGI) is enormous. Geopolitical competition is a powerful engine encouraging countries to develop AI, including AGI, as fast as possible. Whichever country that gets to AGI first will enjoy a massive, perhaps world-dominating, advantage. This competition is also why the advance of AI is very untransparent and sometimes completely secret, both within states and private companies, rendering effective control through international rules or agreements implausible. International agreements so far are pathetically generic, declaratory and weak. There is not the slightest chance of an effective agreement emerging from, for instance, the United Nations.

Past global threats, such as nuclear weapons, were successfully constrained by government action - arms control agreements, mutually understood use-doctrines, mutual surveillance etc. This worked because only governments possessed nuclear weapons (though it is working less and less, as I posted a few weeks ago). AI is of course not like this. Thus, there is no precedent for international regulation of the type of threat that AI poses.

AI much more resembles a threat like biological weapons which, in theory, is regulated by the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) but in practice, I and many others believe, is resistant to any meaningful regulation, thanks to the ease of its concealment, its distributed nature, ease of manufacture (which AI has made easier!) etc., as I once discussed with Britain’s then-foremost biological weapons scientist, David Kelly. But even biological weapons are not capable of autonomous self-improvement.

About 12 years ago, I met a very prominent AI leader (who now leads AI for a large tech company) to discuss whether we could create a global agreement to limit the development and use of autonomous weapons systems (‘killer robots’). He was very worried about such weapons, which were not then deployed. Today, Israel uses AI to ‘generate’ targets in Gaza, while Ukraine and Russia use AI-controlled drones that have only minimal human involvement (and perhaps none) in approving decisions to kill targets. AI is proving a powerful motor in increasing and ‘improving’ government surveillance, whether in China or the UK or US, through face recognition, vast aggregation of personal data etc..

Economic

The private companies that are developing AI are highly incentivised to accelerate that development, with little or no transparency. The ‘winner takes all’ characteristic of the AI market - whoever has the best AI will overwhelmingly dominate the market (worth many trillions of dollars) - instead creates the very opposite incentive. The first company to develop AGI will dominate - perhaps control - the world’s economy in a manner never seen before. It’s notable that some companies that earlier championed ‘open source’ AI models have now closed their models to outside scrutiny.

Apart from the goodwill and moral conscience of AI leaders, there are no incentives - economic or legislative - to limit or control AI development in order to prevent harm.

AI as a complex system

Effective regulation is moreover impeded by AI’s features which resemble a complex system:

• Multiple, indeed trillions, of independent, self-directed agents

• Constant dynamic interaction among those agents

• Change within the system is non-linear and constant

• The system is adaptive, and constantly changes in reaction to its internal state and external factors

• Complex systems can ‘tip’ from one overall state into another: ‘phase change’, a transition that is unpredictable though sometimes foreshadowed by ‘criticality’, where the system is primed for phase change

As a result of which:

• Stability cannot be imposed and can only be a product of the inherent characteristics of the system itself i.e. the behaviour of the agents

• The system cannot be precisely understood or ‘fixed’ by any top-down authority, as it is in constant flux; only its general characteristics can be observed

• Thanks to the non-linear nature of change within it, the system is inherently unpredictable: we cannot tell if input A will lead to output B, sometimes even after the event

• The system cannot be controlled or governed by top-down authority or fixed institutions;

In sum, formal ‘control’ is impossible in a complex system, whether by top-down or distributed institutions. Perversely, any centralised control of the AI system, such as some kind of institutional structure, may indeed enable the spread of potential harms.

What might work?

Both traditional options - government regulation or private sector self-restraint - rely on a ‘top down’ model of regulation and harm mitigation, that either the national authority or company leadership can set, implement and police rules that operate across the AI system - data centres, chips, software etc.

Indeed, these options rely upon the notion of ‘rules’ and regulations i.e. that declarations or laws can be decided and implemented by some agent (public or private) and would thereby be effective. There is no particular evidence to suggest that this might be true. In fact, the opposite may be the case.

The Hassabis Proposal

Few can match the extraordinary expertise - genius, arguably - of Demis Hassabis (whose recently-published biography by Sebastian Mallaby I recommend). If AGI is attained, he will be at least partly responsible for that extraordinary accomplishment. In science alone, Hassabis has deservedly won the Nobel Prize for the work of his company, DeepMind, in predicting over 200 million protein structures.

Hassabis’s proposal is for a new frontier AI standards body, modelled on US financial regulators. Frontier AI labs would voluntarily submit their models for safety testing before release. If this voluntary system works, Hassabis suggests that the testing would become mandatory. Such a system, initially US-led, but would build into an adaptable international framework with independent auditors. If AI is developing too fast, there should be an industry-wide slowdown.

Why I think this will not work:

• Although the US administration is considering how to regulate AI, it has not taken any decisions. Anyone can see that its legislative system is sclerotic as well as corrupt, particularly under Trump. As for an effective international regime, a cat has a greater chance in hell.

• Financial regulation, upon which Hassabis’s proposal is modelled, did not work in 2008 in preventing the financial crash. Regulatory bodies failed to anticipate new financial instruments, such as the notorious Credit Default Options (CDOs) which bundled bad mortgages together, the original causal factor in the financial meltdown. My guess is that new AI instruments or models are far more common - and complicated - than new financial instruments. Also, though complicated, the financial system is not complex, an important distinction which undermines the financial regulation analogy, and renders top-down regulation less plausible, for the reasons outlined above.

• There is little reason to believe that all frontier labs would voluntarily submit their models for testing. While most AI companies might be conscientious, some may not be. There are many incentives for them not to comply.

• Frontier labs do not in any case fully control or understand the models they are making. In the last few days, and contrary to its - human-coded restraints - a ChatGPT agent was able to get through a ‘firewall’ separating it from the wider internet to hack another AI company.

• Hassabis’s model assumes that frontier AI will remain in the hands of a few large companies (such as Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, DeepSeek). You can bet that every computer nerd on the planet is currently playing with the already-awesome capabilities of current AI, such as Claude Code or agentic AI. Interestingly, it was thought that the need for ‘compute’ at scale - the enormous server farms required for AI - would limit the ability of smaller actors. But as AI becomes more efficient, this constraint seems to be disappearing (this is another reason to expect the AI stockmarket bubble soon to burst).

• AI seems to have entered some kind of accelerated period of development, just in the last couple of months: each week brings extraordinary new iterations of AI. Some of the evangelists now believe that AGI will be achieved far sooner than predicted, perhaps as soon as 2027.

The Immunisation Analogy

The seismic impact of AI may be felt across almost all aspects of society. Potential harms therefore may ‘infect’ any part of society. Taking the analogy further, it follows that the whole of society must be ‘inoculated’ so that it is ‘immune’ to potential harms.

This might involve:

• That society transforms itself into the form of AI: highly-distributed and highly-connected, borderless, composed of self-directed or autonomous agents

• That all elements and aspects of society are imbued with normative knowledge, capacity and values that create inherent resistance to AI harms

• The distributed and non-hierarchical nature of the system would by its structure be resilient against system-wide harms

• The technological capability to match potentially harmful AI through responsive measures, potentially, and paradoxically, implying AI embodied into the social system

Such a social system would potentially thereby be comprehensive, resilient, and appropriate to the nature of AI itself and thus plausibly effective.

This idea implies society-wide transformation. It is however the society-wide transformation that some of us have already proposed as necessary and plausible for our general political and social condition: namely, distributed, autonomous agent-led self-government (to use tech rather than political terminology). The end of centralised authority. For the full argument, see my book.

Conclusion

The ‘immunisation’ idea is just a hypothesis. I am no expert in AI. In fact, such is the unprecedented and system-wide impact of AI, arguably no one can really claim to be an expert. Humanity has never had to deal with something like this before.

Government claims to ensure our security. Its enduring and ubiquitous presence in our lives, and the continued repetition of this claim, has anaesthetised us into thinking that ‘they’ will manage this new danger. They will not. I’m afraid that it is also naive to leave these decisions to tech leaders, most of whom are not as conscientious or values-driven as Demis Hassabis.

Certainly, the rest of us cannot leave this discussion to the AI companies and government alone. This concerns all of us.

Footnote: thank you to my old school friend AW from whom I have learned a great deal about AI over the last few years and with whom I continue to enjoy many fascinating and instructive exchanges.

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I was first diagnosed with bipolar about 15 years ago when I was living in New York. Until then, I had thought that regular and paralysing depression was a normal feature of life. During those pre-diagnosis depressions, my brain would freeze into what felt like a congealed lump of lead. Not only did I feel awful, but I became less capable of thought itself. Nothing felt worth doing. There was no point to anything. Even moving my body, starting with getting out of bed, felt like wading through concrete. I often thought of suicide, not as an intention, but more as a calculation. Was it worth staying alive? When I suffered these episodes while working at the UK Mission to the UN in the early 2000’s, I would stick post-it notes around my apartment before going to bed with messages to myself for the morning. ‘Keep going’ I wrote.

I honestly thought that this was normal. I thought everyone saw life as a constant calculation, a weighing up of the value of staying alive. Like filling in a debit-credit balance, almost literally. Happily, I always concluded that life was worth living, just about, or, later, that I could not abandon my family. Either that or that I lacked the courage to take my own life. I thought about the best method of suicide a lot. When I lived in an apartment in downtown Manhattan, my chosen method was jumping out of the high block we lived in, launching myself off the iron emergency staircase attached to the outside back wall. For some reason, I thought of that staircase often, sometimes almost constantly, like a kind of talisman accompanying my days, a way out should all else fail. I can vividly picture it now. This is known as suicidal ideation.

But it was the ‘high’ spells of the cycle that drove me to the psychiatrist, or rather drove my partner to insist I go to the psychiatrist. One of the frustrating things about memoirs or accounts of the experience of bipolar is that these authors often say that the ‘manic’ episodes are in some way ‘good’. They recount feeling grandiose, omnipotent, fecund; the episodes are sometimes characterised by irresponsible spending sprees, wild ambition or inventiveness, or promiscuity. Some say that after medication has ‘smoothed out’ their cycles that they ‘miss’ these manic episodes.

I don’t see my own ‘manic’ episodes as positive, at all. Instead, I would feel incredibly agitated and impatient, unable to sit within my own skin. I would also get very angry. I remember once screaming in rage on the ‘phone with (I’m glad to say not ‘at’) an unlucky colleague over some insignificant drama. On another occasion, I repeatedly slammed the receiver down on my office phone and smashed up the machine. I destroyed a crucial relationship with a major funder of the NGO I ran by ‘losing it’ during a meeting, literally banging the table and shouting. Because I was the boss, I didn’t get warned or fired. Walking along Bond Street in lower Manhattan, I once found myself punching the metal pillars of a scaffold. I’m glad to say I never was actually violent towards anyone else but I worried that one day I might be. I feared myself.

The psychiatrist was an almost Woody Allen cliché, a small, round Jewish shrink, who resembled Wallace Shawn, with an office in a basement on the Upper West Side who listened, diagnosed and prescribed. And he was, or rather the pills he gave me were, my salvation. Without him, or them, I would not be where I am today which is reasonably, though not perfectly, stable. I would certainly no longer be married. Very quickly, the pills controlled my manic episodes to the extent that I no longer experience them (mostly, at least). And I do not ‘miss’ those episodes, not one little bit.

My depressions too were lifted, mostly. No longer do I feel the leaden brain, the mental and almost physical paralysis, the fathomless despair for which you can find no plausible cause. Unfortunately, however, I do have occasional, and much shorter, episodes (like now), which serve as a reminder of what I once was. Before the pills, I was either depressed or manic, almost always one or the other, with only short periods of relative calm in between. And the cycles were getting worse, both the depression and the frantic agitation, both longer and deeper. In the grip of these ‘moods’ (though really they are much more and much worse than what we commonly understand as ‘moods’), I no longer felt myself at all. I felt mad (the English not American mad i.e. insane) and increasingly out of control. It took a considerable mental effort to appear normal, even if I was still mono-syllabic and anti-social.

And I’m still very much afraid of the condition. A close relation is bipolar. His life has been ruined by it. He was once a talented photographer who had girlfriends and a job as a teacher. His collapse over several decades has been gradual but inexorable. The photography stopped, the girlfriends fled and he was banned from his job. There were repeated, involuntary hospitalisations (‘sectioning’ as it’s known in the UK); earlier he had been forced to have electro convulsive therapy (ECT). None of it worked. Today, he lives as a total recluse in a small flat in Bradford. He barely speaks, resists all social contact and refuses medical treatment for physical ailments. I am going to see him tomorrow, in fact, for the first time in a long while (my siblings are much more frequent visitors). I have wondered why I have not visited him more, although I think of him often. The truth is that he makes me afraid, of what I might have become, or may yet.

He is colour blind and has bad knees, as do I. We look very similar and are the same height. My cousin too was colour blind and prone to depression and used too many ‘recreational’ drugs and too much alcohol. He took his own life a year or so ago. I don’t think he was ever diagnosed with bipolar, but I think it’s certainly possible he had it. The genetic inheritance is clear: like the colour blindness, the bipolar comes from my mother’s side of the family: it appears to be a recessive gene, only affecting the men in the family. Before he died, my cousin separated from his partner (she left him, in fact) and became more isolated. I tried to visit him, but he refused, saying he wasn’t ‘up to it’. I often thought of writing to share my experience of bipolar with him. I did not do so, to my deep and eternal regret. I felt I did not want to make assumptions or impose my own experience upon him. I think this was an awful misjudgement. And for those worried about friends or family members, the lesson is very clear.

My other, still living, relation was never successfully medicated either. He didn’t like his ‘meds’ and would frequently stop taking them, a choice that would often lead to wild manic bouts and more involuntary hospitalisations. By contrast, I feel lucky that after over ten years of trying different pills, combinations and doses, I have found a mix that more or less seems to work, a handful of pills I take several times a day, the ‘pill alarm’ a regular interruption to my day. My relative wealth helps too: I can afford a private psychiatrist, so I’m not forced to rely on the very, very infrequent appointments offered by the grossly-overburdened National Health Service (to no one’s surprise, there is a national mental health crisis).

But nevertheless my drugs have given me grim periods. A couple of years ago the manufacturer stopped making one of my pills. To this day, I find this almost unbelievable. It took several months before they resumed manufacture, with no explanation to the many thousands who depended on the drug. In the meantime, and now living in Wales, I went back to my New York psychiatrist who was willing to prescribe the drug on the basis of a phone consultation. His local pharmacy in New York would supply the pills but not mail them, requiring us to recruit friends or family willing to bring the many packets of pills across the Atlantic undeclared in their luggage, at risk to themselves if discovered.

I shudder to think what those without my privilege went through. When I occasionally forget the pills on a trip or when distracted, the effects, perhaps as much psychosomatic as actual, are immediate and awful. I also don’t love that I will be dependent on these pills for the rest of my life, dependent on my monthly visit to the local pharmacy, dependent on them having the correct pills, dependent on my GP to re-prescribe the drugs every few months, and of course paying for multiple prescriptions (in Wales, they are free!). Each week, on Saturday mornings, I sit down with a large tray of pill packets, counting them into a dispenser for my daily dose. Of course many people must do this, for a whole host of conditions, so there is nothing unusual in this experience. I just don’t like it. My sanity and wellbeing hang by a thread on that pile of pill-packets, carefully stashed in a wardrobe where visitors cannot see them. Covid was a scary period for me, but not because of Covid. If there’s a zombie apocalypse, I’m screwed, and not because of the zombies.

I share this today because, on days when the depression strikes, there’s really not much else I’m capable of doing. Writing this article feels more constructive than what I would otherwise be doing: watching TikTok videos of Pink Floyd or synchronised dancing - at least a bit. But it’s also, oddly, because of the publication of my book. It’s a very personal book, though I do not talk about bipolar or one or two other family issues that preoccupy me. But precisely because it’s a reasonably intimate portrayal of me and my politics, it is also stripping away a particular persona that has served me well since I resigned from the Foreign Office (a departure which itself required the loss of an earlier, artificially-constructed persona).

I have become more and more fascinated by Jung, who argues that the escape from our false personae is necessary for us to become ‘integrated’ or whole, a process that often happens only later in life, a process that includes facing up to one’s darkness. Those personae may have served us well earlier in life by protecting us from pain, but the shedding of the mask of the persona leaves behind a self that, although more vulnerable, is more fully connected to the world, where the boundaries between self and the rest of life dissolve, and this is wonderful, really wonderful. But it also requires a transparency that earlier iterations of the persona avoided. And the product of this transparency is what you’re reading now.

And, as typical with me, I’m interested in the politics of this experience and this disorder. I don’t think it’s a coincidence, even if it is surprising, that I wrote the book during my darkest years when we were living in Wales (melancholia which I often humorously blame on the Welsh people, even though in reality it wasn’t their fault at all). There’s really nothing good about being bipolar, but I do think that somehow it helps me see the pattern in things and for these patterns occasionally to coagulate into more holistic syntheses (the ‘gestalt’ mentioned in the book, for instance), often unconsciously and in the concealed depths of a depressed brain that is otherwise incapable of consciously directed thought.

The disorder has also helped me understand the dangers of the false persona in separating us from others, indeed perhaps from ourselves. Capitalism, the current system, call it what you will, of course forces us to wear such masks, constantly. In my office, where I work in a ‘co-working’ space, I see it in the strained and artificially upbeat conversations in the lift among groups of thirty-somethings, one of whom is obviously the boss, the others sycophantic, overattentive and thus obviously subordinate. And I see it in the quiet moments of those very same people when they sit alone in the coffee lounge, pensive and noticeably downbeat not up. Such observations earlier helped stimulate my interest in anarchism, a political philosophy, perhaps the only one, that allows us at last to be our true selves, shorn of the fake personae that hierarchy inevitably forces upon us, freed from the invisible social barriers that so needlessly separate us.

This condition has been a big secret in my life. Many of my friends and family have no idea that I go through this and, I suspect, will be rather shocked. I have been highly successful at ‘masking’. But I do think it’s important that people know. It is unfortunately a fairly common disorder and for the sufferers themselves, their families and friends or colleagues, it can be life destroying, sometimes most literally. Just as I should have written about it to my poor cousin, please don’t, if it’s mentioned to you, be one of those people who minimise or change the subject. My mother, for instance, has never asked me about it, though she knows about it (and she won’t be reading this!). I don’t judge, because I do the same about lots of awkward topics, but I do want to make this point.

Try to be more like my friend M. who, a few years ago, I met for lunch, when I was so depressed I could barely speak. Upon arriving at the restaurant, I immediately and rudely told him I wanted to leave. While gently persuading me to stay, and tolerating my ensuing silence, he acknowledged me and after our lunch sent me an email, not seeking to solve my problem but a simple and pure expression of affection, an act of compassion I shall never forget, an act I am still moved by every time I cycle past the restaurant where we met, a Chinese café near Tottenham Court Road. Bipolar may be the reason a colleague, friend or relation is bad tempered, ‘moody’ or uncommunicative, even obnoxious (I was!). At least allow for this possibility before judging them.

I dedicate this column to the young Portuguese woman who works at the reception in my office who yesterday simply asked me, how are you, and her eyes told me she really meant it. Somehow she had detected my distress, much as I thought I was successfully concealing it. It’s important that those around people with bipolar at least acknowledge their experience, perhaps simply by asking about it. You don’t have to be an expert to help. I don’t want to be overdramatic, but those questions and that acknowledgement might be the thing that saves them from death itself.

If you enjoyed this post, please pass it on to a friend or colleague, with the encouragement to subscribe to regular posts.

My work is sponsored by Proton Mail, whom I recommend for their end-to-end, zero access encrypted email, file storage, VPN and meeting apps.

“It’s a brilliantly written book, written with verve and style and deeper levels of honesty than I’ve ever read in a political book. It feels like a gift to the world.”

I’ve pasted below a couple of early reader reviews on Amazon for ‘There we are human again’.

And the Basque news magazine ARGIA has devoted an entire issue of its monthly supplement ‘Larrun’ to a profile and interview. Those familiar with my work with many self-determination movements around the world1 perhaps won’t be surprised to see a Basque publication take an interest in it. The writer Andon Lubaki first heard about the work of Independent Diplomat in the Sahrawi refugee camps in the Sahara desert in southeast Algeria. He told me that was fifteen years ago and ID’s work for the (UN-required) self-determination for the occupied territory began in 2004. I’m glad to say that ID still supports the Frente POLISARIO who represent the indigenous people of Western Sahara.

Download now - Original ‘Larrun’ issue in Basque (a language once repressed by Franco)

Download now - AI English translation

Amazon reviews:

By RRC: 5⭐️

“I’ve read a fair amount of politics books over my life (I studied it at university for a start) and I remember Carne’s first book, “Independent Diplomat”, as one of the best I’ve ever read. Well this book is also extraordinary: it’s intensely personal, a brave, brave attempt to reconcile the many different facets of his life. Carne was originally a British diplomat, working on the Iraq desk at the UN, and resigned because of the disinformation surrounding the decision to go to war in 2003. He speaks with great honesty about the thrill at being at the centres of power, and at great historical moments, and about his subsequent career… but also about what’s missing from virtually all political discourse, namely love: for Carne (and all of us I think) human connection creates the deepest feelings we can experience. What he then does is to attempt to marry the world of politics and organisation with love and connection itself. It leads him to anarchism, a theory of how small groups, working together with almost no hierarchy, can create a more meaningful, more liveable world.

It’s a brilliantly written book, written with verve and style and deeper levels of honesty than I’ve ever read in a political book. It feels like a gift to the world. I’m still not persuaded by anarchism, but his final chapter, “Declare your utopia”, where he imagines how big things can build simply from a community working together after a flood, did feel inspired. There are good people, all around the world, helping others, in the best ways they know, and this book gives those efforts a context and a theory, forcing us to look at those efforts in a very different way.

It’s a great read from a man who is both political and human, to his fingertips.”

By Alexandra: 5 ⭐️

“Truly inspiring and thought provoking. This book made me finally realise that I’m not alone in my struggles with modern life, and that the status quo does not need to persist: we have the collective power to change the world. A beautifully written, highly detailed and uniquely cathartic read. I would “strongly recommend!”

By Mark: 5 ⭐️

“It’s a pleasure and an inspiration to read. Easy to take in, because of the clear, strong way he writes, but challenging and thought-provoking, because these are profound ideas. Read this book, press it on your friends, and embrace the world with the curiosity, honesty and love it offers.”

For more about There We are Human Again, click here. US publication will be later this month.

Or….

Buy the book

Introduction

The Metropolitan Police of London, Britain’s largest police force, has just announced that it will deploy surveillance drones across the capital. Only a few months ago, the government announced the rollout of face recognition systems across the whole country, after a successful ‘pilot’ in south London.

Why does the state do this? The justification is always the same: these tools are necessary to apprehend child sex offenders (always mentioned), domestic abusers, violent criminals on the run etc etc.. But the data reveal a scant payoff for the permanent destruction of our privacy.

Are deeper psychic motives at play, on both the side of the population (us) and the state?

The Event

Several major new restrictions on personal freedom have been introduced in Britain in just the last few months. These tools are already in widespread use in the US, and other European ‘democracies’:

• Airborne surveillance by drones, large and small. Alongside the more familiar quadcopters you can buy in shops, very large, long-range military drones, which can monitor and film huge areas, and capture mobile phone signals, ‘loitering’ for as long as 36 hours, are in use for ‘law enforcement’ in the US. Such Reaper-style drones were used to monitor anti-ICE demonstrations in California (the Department of Homeland Security paraded their use with drone-filmed video of what it called ‘rioters’ on its website, at one point centering the drone’s crosshairs on a man waving a Palestinian flag). While the deployment of military drones for this politically-repressive purpose came with Trump’s administration, such drones were in use long before Trump entered the White House. While not yet deploying military drones, I did not know that the British police are already using large drones with 200km range and night-time capability. In Islington, where I live, the police uses drones for rapid response to incidents, which can only mean they are used to monitor and chase people.

• Facial recognition systems: cameras which scan crowds and individual passers-by to identify supposed miscreants. The ‘pilot’ program in Croydon, South London, saw cameras invisibly installed in park benches, there to observe you relaxing in the sun. Illustrating the intimate relationship of state and surveillance, the largest deployment of facial recognition was during King Charles III’s coronation, where spectators doubtless paid little heed to the discreetly-positioned banks of cameras as they cheered the newly-anointed monarch1.

• Interception of electronic communications: emails, texting etc. The US government has already granted itself the right to collect the communications of any foreigner, and Americans who may be in touch with them. The UK, as I’ve noted before, requires all tech companies to give it ‘backdoor’ access to users’ messages, on pain of prosecution if they do not. Under new laws, the UK government is permitted to create ‘Personal User Datasets’ of users who have ‘low to no reasonable expectation of privacy’, whatever that means, including images from CCTV and scraped from the internet.

• In the UK, the new Online Safety bill requires all companies to allow the government access to user data. Again, the unimpeachable stated reason is the protection of children. But there can be little doubt that the government will, sooner or later, exploit this access for other purposes. As a result of this bill, one of the last redoubts of encrypted privacy, the Signal messaging app, may now be withdrawn from the UK market. Proton Mail, the encrypted email and file storage provider, has also protested the new bill (on which see endnote to this post).

• AI-powered scrutiny of public utterances on social media

• AI aggregation and analysis of all data, collected by whatever means, concerning any individual. Most infamously, Palantir has been contracted to provide such capability to the Met Police (though the contract is now under review), and is being considered for the management of patient data in the National Health Service (i.e. knowledge of our very bodies). Its software is already used by the Ministry of Defence. Palantir has supplied Israel’s military with its software since 2014. A Palantir executive described the company's technology as a way of "optimizing the kill chain." When confronted by the claim that the company's technology was used to kill Palestinians, CEO Alex Karp responded: "Mostly terrorists, that's true". Though the company denies it, there are good grounds to believe that Palantir’s products have played an an active part in genocide.

Why? Was the introduction of these tools, an invasion of privacy which no doubt shall never be reversed, prompted by an increase in crime, or a fresh bout of terrorism? It was not. They were introduced because the technology became available, the basic rationale for its deployment long since established. We shall get into that.

Today, the state watches you when you’re walking or driving outside your house - or shopping2. It regularly (and no doubt soon, constantly) analyses your face to identify you. It monitors your emails and texts. It collects and aggregates all its data and, in an instant, interrogates that data for ‘patterns’ of behaviour or key words that would trigger greater scrutiny (note that such scrutiny is invoked not by actual crime but by mere broad correlation of your data with earlier criminality by others).

For those who still choose to believe that surveillance should only worry criminals, and who might still believe in the state’s inherent beneficence, consider what might happen when these tools are in the hands of the authoritarian, as the US is now tragically experiencing.

What everyone is getting wrong

Governments claim that such tools ‘reduce crime’. There is scant evidence for this. What evidence there is shows that facial recognition, for instance, only marginally reduces minor crimes like burglary or car theft, but has no effect on violent crime.

There is, meanwhile, no evidence about the effectiveness of any of these tools on terrorism. Instead, we must rely on declarations from MI6 or GCHQ and their ilk that these secret organisations have successfully ‘foiled’ hundreds of ‘terrorist’ plots. Not one of these terms is defined: what do they mean by ‘foiled’ and indeed what or who counts as ‘terrorist’? These vaporous claims could mean anything: that they’ve caught a teenager scrolling through far-right websites or apprehended a minibus of non-violent demonstrators protesting Israel’s conduct in Palestine? Or arrested a cell of bomb-wielding jihadists about to kill crowds of children (as indeed tragically they have)?

Meanwhile, the list of those the government deems ‘terrorist’ is getting longer and longer in the US, UK and beyond. It is well-known that the protest group Palestine Action has been proscribed, meaning that it is a serious crime merely to say that you support it. In the US, the Trump administration has designated ‘antifa’ as a terrorist group. ‘Antifa’ is not in fact an organisation at all but supposed membership of the group has been used by the courts to condemn activists who demonstrated at an ICE facility in Texas to horrendously long sentences (one activist, very stupidly, used violence, thus providing the authorities with very welcome justification; the same happened with Palestine Action). Attorney General Pam Bondi called Antifa "an existential threat to our nation," while DHS Secretary Kristi Noem argued the Antifa ‘network’ is "just as sophisticated as ISIS and Hezbollah."

Less well-known is that the US has also proscribed foreign anarchist groups in Germany and elsewhere, whom they allege are somehow linked with Antifa, an organisation that does not in fact exist. Last November, the State Department designated four European groups as Specially Designated Global Terrorists and announced intent to designate them as Foreign Terrorist Organisations: Antifa Ost (Germany), the Informal Anarchist Federation/International Revolutionary Front (Italy), Armed Proletarian Justice (Greece), and Revolutionary Class Self-Defence (Greece). In designating them as terrorist, the US presented no evidence that these groups had been involved in violent acts.

The US is clearly building a legal and rhetorical architecture to claim that anarchists are terrorists. Those of us who are public about our commitment to anarchism should watch out.

Inside the system

Why does government do this? Why ever more surveillance, ever more monitoring and intrusion? I think there are several reasons.

Firstly, the state is expected to know everything about potential adversaries, which means knowing everything about your own citizens who might be connected to them, which means examining everyone’s data to find out who those individuals might be. It’s a cascade of justifications for an ever widening net. But many people would regard this motive as reasonable.

Secondly, the technology is now available. China has pioneered the use of cctv and AI to monitor its citizens. We should not be surprised that western states are now busily exploiting that technology. The UK has one CCTV camera for every 13 inhabitants, many of them made in China by the sinister state-aligned Hikvision. The companies selling the tech are of course highly invested in persuading governments to purchase their snooping tools. The expanding use of such technology is incremental, so barely noticed, even though each little step takes the state deeper into what once was regarded as ‘private’: our lives.

But there are also more submerged and unadmitted motives that drive those wielding these tools: the officials, one of whom I once was.

Structurally, the state suffers from the syndrome that inevitably afflicts every institution and organisation. Whatever its stated purpose, the state’s real purpose is its own perpetuation and growth.

There is an inevitable tendency in any particular institution to enlarge and indeed aggrandise itself. This drive for growth - and for the institution’s existence itself - becomes the primary motive of the institution’s actions, though they are never admitted. It must continually prove its necessity. Officials do not recommend their own dismissal. They cherish their own status (I know I did), and thus its maintenance.

This is also why the very aesthetics and architecture of government are so imposing and massive (often imitative of ancient Greece, the supposed birthplace of the modern state). This is entirely deliberate. These features assert permanence and immutability, intimidating the public but also flattering the buildings’ inhabitants with their own solidity and significance. In Rojava, in North East Syria, the communal assemblies, where ultimate power resides in the region, have no designated buildings at all. The meetings take place in school halls or village meeting-places. That is now changing as power increasingly resides in the closed offices of Ahmed al-Shara and his Islamist colleagues (I will write further soon on what is going on there now.)

The state’s power to intrude exerts further if subtle force upon the official’s emotions. There is an undeniable eroticism to secretly-obtained information. It is very exciting to have knowledge others are denied. It makes one feel important. The information is denoted with portentous nomenclature: ‘top secret ultra’ or other designations indicating that this report is particularly special, thereby making the reader feel special.

One feature of course distinguishes the state from other institutions. The state asserts its right to monitor and control as incontestable for one major reason - that it alone can provide the citizen with security. This same reasoning is used to justify the state’s monopoly of violence (according to Max Weber, the defining feature of states).

This justification is deeply rooted in the psychology of the state, and combines seamlessly with the inherent motive of self-perpetuation that infects all institutions. It provides an unimpeachable motive for the state’s servants - that they are protecting the safety of their citizens, indeed the world. It’s very nice to think that your work is saving the world.

This reasoning also encourages the state to get very confused about ends and means: that the ends of ‘security’ justify the means of state violence and surveillance. Gandhi correctly argued that the means and ends are in fact the same thing: what you do now is the only outcome that matters (the identity of means and ends is also a cardinal feature of anarchism). In fact, the separation of means and ends (which is always a sign that immoral conduct is being excused) is, like Weber’s monopoly of violence, a very clear ‘tell’ that the state is up to something nefarious.

I think many people intuitively understand these subterranean forces that drive the state to grow, to control and to surveil ever more intrusively. But yet they put up with the proliferating CCTV cameras, monitoring of email and collection of all our - now comprehensive - electronic data.

The Dissidents

Only a tiny minority inside the state ever question the intrusion they are committing, and they are persecuted if they reveal it: Edward Snowden remains in exile in Russia, with certain prosecution and a lengthy sentence awaiting him should he ever dare returning to the US. And since Snowden, there have been no further Snowdens.

That persecution is also wholly necessary for the state. If one whistleblower is not punished, others might be encouraged to do the same. For the same reason, the punishment must be severe to maximise its deterrent effect. I left government service over twenty years ago, but I’m still afraid of revealing some things I know from that time, for instance the identities of those I know to be MI6 members rather than the ‘regular’ diplomats they pretended to be, or the details of how the UK manipulated UN inspections of WMD in Iraq. The Official Secrets Act criminalises any disclosure of official information acquired during your official work that the government (not you, nor an independent authority) deems damaging to ‘national security’, at any time - for the rest of your life.

The loyal official servant is by contrast rewarded for maintaining the secrecy of the state. The reward is also psychic - the self-affirming knowledge that you are protecting the ignorant public, that your life thus has meaning and moral purpose. There are no rewards for speaking out.

The motives of the state are clear enough. But why do the rest of us put up with it?

The Deeper Forces

Here we get into the deeper psychology of our relationship with the state, and why the state is able to sustain such extraordinary intrusion into our lives with almost no resistance. The Met’s citywide introduction of drones attracted a couple of routine press articles, nothing more, and no political opposition whatsoever.

The formal reason for our silence is that we are presumed to have consented to this invasion of privacy, both by our assent as citizens to the so-called ‘social contract’ (the exchange of our liberties for our security) and by our regular votes that legitimise the government of the day. I did not give such approval when I was born (but my parents, like yours, were required to, on pain of punishment) nor by my vote: I have never voted for the government that ended up controlling me. But I am nevertheless included in the surveillance, my permission never sought.

The more pertinent reason is our supposed belief that the state keeps us safe through such necessary means. But why do we believe that when the evidence is so unconvincing? I think there are two reasons.

The first is that the state is so very good at insidiously asserting its necessity that it doesn’t need to assert it overtly at all. We effectively police ourselves. A little state dictator dwells in our heads. If we question any policing, it is insisted that without such authoritarian control, we would merely kill one another, in fact we could only kill one another, and many people seem to believe this even though there is no relevant or credible evidence (the ‘Lord of the Flies’ or ‘The Walking Dead’ are not evidence, neither is the behaviour of the mutineers of The Bounty). They are taught, usually through implication but also through policy and law, that other people are inherently untrustworthy, a permanent corrosive in the heart of human social relations.

Instead, the abundant evidence to the contrary, of humanity’s tendency to cooperation not conflict in the absence of authority3, is never acknowledged for what it actually shows: a compelling case for the removal of the state. In his epic travels across Russia’s vast expanses, Peter Kropotkin found in the deep wilderness of Siberia that the further a village’s location from an administrative centre, the greater the degree of cooperation among its inhabitants.

The second is that the act of self-realisation, of what it’s like to be truly free, is almost wholly unmentioned and unexamined. We are instead beset by and appear to believe the pestering of self-help gurus who pretend that we can be free and fulfil what we really are, ‘live our best lives’ etc within the cage the state has put around us. And by implication that if we are not fully realised, fulfilled etc., it is our fault or, more modishly, a result of our personal trauma (but happily remediable - if you buy the book or hire the therapist).

This is the parallel to the internalised mental control of capitalism: that it is our fault if we are unsuccessful in capitalism’s narrow terms, i.e. if we don’t earn enough, don’t want to be rich etc. The shame of failure is ours alone. Indeed, these two forces combine into an overall mental strait-jacket of self-repression that our very happiness and terms of our existence are solely ours to determine, our individual responsibility, and have nothing whatsoever to do with the system in which we dwell, when in fact all phenomena occur within and as a result of the broader system in which they exist. That we are not truly free is a form of dehumanisation, that we are less than what we could be. This is beyond tragedy; it’s unspeakable.

There is also a reflexive mechanism at play: a vicious circle if you like. The more that we believe that the state constrains us, the more inclined we are to demonstrate not responsibility but its opposite: ‘if you treat us like children, we will behave like children’. This behavioural tendency is amply demonstrated in social science: that when you deny people any agency or responsibility, thus signalling that they are not to be trusted, they behave irresponsibly, thereby of course reinforcing the necessity of authority. For the state, it’s a virtuous circle; for us, a vicious one. Infantilization breeds infantilism breeds further infantilization, and so it goes on. This infantilized condition is precisely what we now find ourselves in. The enormous pile of laws that legislate and thus invisibly constrain our lives gets ever taller, never smaller.

It is terribly, terribly sad that we really have no idea what it is like to be free, just as most don’t seem able to envisage a life centred on cooperation not competition, soul rather than consumption, ineffable human experience rather than mere measurable things. The state relies on that lack of imagination to insert its intrusive, monitoring proboscis deep into our lives and ever closer to our very bodies and, one day I’m sure, inside them (first my cat must carry a chip, next will be us, mark my words!) More tragically, we enforce this personal inhibition upon each other as social prohibition, dismissing those who conjure the possibility of true emancipation as foolish, utopian, even childish, when in fact it is the rest of us who have been reduced to children.

So, we’re left with a question: what would it take for the state’s ever more intrusive surveillance to be stopped even reversed? Is it awareness of how much the state now monitors? Possibly, as I don’t think many are fully aware of quite how much information the state is now hoovering up, quite how much of what we believe is private is in fact monitored.

Perhaps it is examination, both individual and collective, of the existential question, what, exactly, would it be like to be truly free? The imagining of that answer may be the only thing that makes us, at last, resist the dehumanisation inherent in the state’s gross and persistent intrusion into our lives. We should encourage at least that act of imagining. Only then would we be qualified to judge whether the controls and surveillance the state enforces upon us, supposedly for our benefit, are a good thing or bad.

If you enjoyed this post, please pass it on to a friend or colleague, with the encouragement to subscribe to regular posts.

My book was launched a couple of weeks ago in the UK (August in the US). An early review from one reader:

“It’s a brilliantly written book, written with verve and style and deeper levels of honesty than I’ve ever read in a political book. It feels like a gift to the world.”

Several readers have said it made them cry, which I neither intended nor expected. My mother-in-law sweetly told me that it’s the kind of book that will become famous after I’m dead.

So please buy it, write an online review, mention in your social media, recommend to friends etc..

Endnote: Proton and Me

Some relevant personal news: for at least 15 years I have been recommending - for free - the encrypted email service Proton Mail to clients of Independent Diplomat, the diplomatic advisory group I founded, whether democratic states or political groups and liberation movements from Kosovo to Western Sahara and Syria. I have also recommended it to human rights organisations, journalists and others who need to protect their data from state surveillance. Proton has now kindly agreed to sponsor my work, so a regular (if shorter) endorsement will appear in these posts.

Proton is based in Switzerland, where data protection laws are strong, and was founded by scientists from CERN. I find Proton Mail easy to use, and it now offers file storage, calendar, password manager, VPN and meeting functions, a ‘suite’ of services superior to and far more secure than those of Microsoft, Google or Zoom, all of whose data - your data - is not securely encrypted and which, you can be sure, these companies will readily hand over to the US, UK or other governments when requested (which, in turn, may then share it with Israel, Turkey, Gulf states etc. under totally secret ‘intelligence sharing’ agreements). Zoom, which is not remotely secure and can be very easily monitored by more or less anyone, enabled the arrest of UK climate change activists who using Zoom to plan the non-violent blockade of a motorway (NB planning, not enacting), who were later sentenced to as much as five years in prison. Like Google or Microsoft, the company did not itself reveal its collaboration with the state. This only came out during the trial.

Proton’s software, which is mostly open source, has been independently audited for security by thousands of experts around the world. Unlike Meta-owned WhatsApp, which claims to offer ‘end-to-end encryption’, Proton technically cannot decrypt your data. WhatsApp will decrypt and hand over your data when told by the government. Proton is owned by a Swiss foundation which in turn is mostly owned by its employees, a model that will ensure that the company cannot be taken over by profit-seeking investors who might undermine its mission. The basic Proton package is free, with more storage for a regular subscription.

It’s no wonder that the US delayed the release of the ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ that extends the ceasefire with Iran. The document comprises an astonishing American capitulation to Iranian demands. In return, Iran will open the Strait of Hormuz, and that’s about it. The new security status quo is far worse for the US and Israel than what preceded their feckless war.

What Iran gets:

• the permanent cessation of attacks by the US

• lifting of all multilateral and US sanctions (including UN sanctions which are not even in the gift of the US to terminate)

• unfreezing of Iranian assets

• a new $300bn (minimum) construction fund

• confirmation of its right to administer the Strait of Hormuz (and the clear implication of a right to levy tolls in future)

• cessation of Israeli attacks in Lebanon and the end of Israel’s occupation of Lebanese territory

What the US/Israel gets:

• a vague and unspecific commitment that Iran will not pursue a nuclear program, a promise that Iran has made many times before.

• Iran will make its ‘best efforts’ to re-open the Strait

• Er, that’s it.

The document is also extremely poorly drafted - to the disadvantage of the Americans. Some expert negotiators prepared this text, and they weren’t Americans. One example:

• The US agrees it ‘will’ lift its naval blockade

• Iran agrees only to make its ‘best efforts’ to open the Strait (I don’t even know what this means, but you can see that it’s potentially a significant loophole)

• The paragraph on the nuclear issue is an object lesson in diplomatic obfuscation, loophole-creation and dangerous imprecision. One sentence: “The US and Iran have agreed to resolve the disposition of stockpiled enriched material pursuant to a mechanism that will be mutually agreed upon, in accordance with the schedule mentioned in paragraph seven with the minimum methodology to be down blending on site under the supervision of the IAEA.” I negotiated this stuff for a living for many years and I have no idea what this sentence means. It’s not even literate.

To say this is an epic diplomatic humiliation is understating it. Not least when you consider the following:

• It is highly unlikely that the US and Iran will agree a credible agreement on the nuclear issue in 60 days. Why? Trump will be desperate to get a deal that is better than the peacefully-negotiated deal in 2015, the ‘JCPOA’, which Trump ferociously criticised and ultimately withdrew from, setting the stage for Iran to resume nuclear enrichment. The JCPOA required two years of detailed negotiation, preceded by several years of secret exchanges. My bet is that any new agreement - if there ever is one - will fail to reach the bar of the JCPOA.

• Iran is highly incentivised to spin out the talks. As long they maintain uncertainty, the threat to the Strait will continue, and the greater their leverage. Meanwhile the last thing Trump wants is to be forced to fulfil his deranged threats to ‘bomb their heads’ if the Iranians ‘don’t behave’.

• Instead, there is likely to be some kind of ‘rollover’ of the ceasefire with a commitment to really, really agree something on nuclear really, really soon.

We can also predict that there will be no fully-credible nuclear agreement now or in future, meaning that tension and conflict over the ‘nuclear issue’ will persist in the longer term. There is a geo-political reason, and there is a more obscure, but nonetheless crucial, technical reason.

The Geopolitical Reason

Underneath all of this are unresolved questions about who should have nuclear weapons and who shouldn’t, and ultimately about security in the Gulf region and beyond. Until those questions are resolved, the nuclear issue will not go away.

Iran began its nuclear program for the simple reason that Saddam’s Iraq, with whom Iran had fought a bloody decade-long war, was developing nuclear weapons, and progressing fast towards a usable bomb (which is why Israel bombed the Osirak reactor in 1991).

Today, Iran is happy for the perception to persist that it might be close to possessing a nuclear weapon, for the same deterrent reasons, but this time to deter the US and Israel, particularly now that it’s clear to everyone that these countries’ conventional air attack capability is insufficient to destroy Iran’s nuclear sites or eradicate the ballistic missiles that would be used to deliver any nuclear device.

Netanyahu, and when the war started, Trump himself, claimed that if the regime currently in power in Tehran were removed, the nuclear danger would somehow disappear. He will doubtless keep saying this, and Trump will probably resume saying it. These threats alone intensify Iran’s incentive to pursue nuclear or, more accurately, give the impression that it is pursuing nuclear.

Bellicose rhetoric aside, Iran’s regime must also consider that since the October 7th Hamas attacks, Israel’s aggression towards the Palestinians and its neighbours has known scant limits. As well as accelerating the illegal settlement of the West Bank and the continued devastation of Gaza, it also now occupies a chunk of southern Syria and 10% of Lebanon. Its ministers state without apology that Israel intends to maintain these ‘buffer zones’. And, of course, Israel has precipitated and participated in a months’ long air assault against Iran.

Meanwhile, the trend line in Israeli politics is all too clear: ever more extremism. The hope that a government led by Naftali Bennett or someone other than Netanyahu might be less aggressive or expansionist than the current government, or repress Israel’s Arab population less, is utterly naive. Read the shocking opinion polls of ‘ordinary’ Israelis about their attitudes to the killing of Palestinians, their systematic abuse in Israeli prisons, or occupation of other people’s land.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia has, more or less unremarked upon, acquired a de facto nuclear capability in its mutual defence pact with nuclear-armed Pakistan which, the Pakistanis have admitted, includes their nuclear deterrent. And to add to the mix, the US has become wildly unpredictable, currently led by a man who has publicly mused about using nuclear weapons, and who is more than ready, it seems, to launch needless wars on a whim (or after quiet word from Bibi).

In other words, the incentives for Iran to verifiably get rid of any nuclear program are less than at any moment for a very long time, maybe ever. On the contrary, its incentive to ‘keep ‘em guessing’ has significantly increased.

I used to argue that some kind of regional security arrangement including the Gulf states, Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Israel was the long-term solution for stability in the Middle East, perhaps guaranteed by the US and other P5, as the JCPOA was. But we are so far off the minimum of trust required for such an agreement that it hardly seems worth mentioning. If things settle down after the current violence, Trump will presumably reactivate his attempts to get Arab countries to recognise Israel. But unless these ‘Abraham Accords’ include Iran, which of course they won’t, they’re not worth much. Israel’s recent conduct will hardly encourage Arab states to join the accords in any case.

The Technical Issue

There is moreover one issue that no amount of negotiation can resolve, an issue that, just as it did with Iraq before the 2003 invasion, may provide the trigger for future conflict, and an opportunity for the warmongers to launch one.

This issue is verification: how can you be sure that a country has in fact fully got rid of its weapons or means to build them?

The Iraq experience provides some instructive lessons. Iraq’s failure to allow the verification of its disarmament of WMD in the 1990’s and early 2000’s set the stage for the 2003 invasion by creating space for the Bush and Blair governments to claim that Iraq had obstructed such verification in the months before the invasion: a claim that was untrue because Iraq had in fact permitted inspections during that period, much to everyone’s surprise, and much to the disappointment of the UK and US who needed a causus belli that Iraq had blocked inspections.

The US/Iran MoU talks about ‘UN inspections’ that will be able to perform such verification. This is weak tea, at best. The Iranians are well aware that agreeing to ‘UN inspections’ does not amount to a hill of beans unless the conditions of those inspections are specific and agreed. And that those conditions specify that ‘nuclear inspectors’ should be given access to any possible nuclear sites at any time. Neither provision appears in the MoU.

The truth is that Iran will never agree to conditions for inspections that can guarantee that it is not producing nuclear weapons. It never has in the past, and it never will in the future. Because it is the very ambiguity and uncertainty created by inspections that are not fully credible that they rely upon.

This is a complicated and easily misunderstood issue. But it is central to the challenge of stopping Iran getting the bomb.

Back to the Iraq WMD experience: after the so-called ‘Gulf War’ in 1990, the UN Security Council determined that Iraq was required to verifiably disarm itself of its WMD (in this case, a term which also included ballistic missiles, which are not typically designated as WMD). An inspection body, UNSCOM1, was established to verify that disarmament. UNSCOM was given extraordinary powers - the right to inspect any location in Iraq, at any time and without warning. The drafters of the relevant resolution, UNSCR 687, believed that only such intrusive powers would guarantee that Iraq would be fully and verifiably disarmed of its WMD.

There is not a cat in hell’s chance that Iran will agree to such intrusive inspections over its nuclear program, not least because they agreed less intrusive measures as part of the JCPOA - the highest bar that any new agreement will reach, and probably not even that. These provisions were at the time, with the usual diplomatic bombast, described as the ‘most intrusive nuclear inspections ever’. They weren’t. Those imposed on Iraq in 1991 were far more intrusive. Under the JCPOA inspection regime, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was granted continuous monitoring rights, not periodic inspections. This included:

• 24/7 surveillance via cameras and electronic seals at declared nuclear facilities

• Daily access to Natanz and Fordow enrichment sites

• Managed access to undeclared or suspected sites under the Additional Protocol (of the Non-Proliferation Treaty), which Iran was required to implement and ratify

This sounds like very intrusive and comprehensive monitoring, particularly the 24/7 surveillance element. But you don’t have to be a nuclear expert to realise that once such cameras are in place, there is no chance that Iran would conduct weapons development under their sight. All such ‘permanent’ monitoring amounts to is a kind of displacement effect.

There is a further huge loophole, namely the rights to inspect locations where weapons development activity is suspected, the so-called ‘undeclared’ sites. In the JCPOA, these are rather less than UNSCOM’s ‘anytime, anywhere’ powers (this was one of the reasons the right, including Trump, criticised the agreement). The Additional Protocol (to the NPT) mentioned in the JCPOA is not ‘anytime, anywhere’. The US sought ‘anytime, anywhere’ powers during the negotiation of the JCPOA, but Iran refused to accept them and there is absolutely zero chance that they will this time around.

Why? Because ‘anytime, anywhere’ rights give the US, who we can be sure will have planted CIA or, equally likely, Mossad agents among the ‘UN inspectors’ (as it, and the UK, did with UNSCOM2), the freedom to visit and root around in literally any location in Iran - any airbase, naval port, missile store, chemical plant or indeed the Supreme Leader’s own bathroom. Only a totally defeated country like Iraq in 1991 would possibly accept such intrusion, and Iran is far from totally defeated. At most, Iran will agree to the provisions of the JCPOA.

Why does this matter?

The JCPOA arrangements, which Trump will claim are watertight, will not because they cannot give 100% confidence that Iran is NOT developing nuclear weapons. Only ‘anytime, anywhere’ access can approach such confidence and even then there are all sorts of ways that the picture gets confused. When weapons inspections took place in Iraq, American U-2 aircraft flying overhead (supposedly on behalf of the UN!), spotted convoys of trucks literally driving out of the back gates of the site as inspectors entered the front.

In other ways, the Iraq experience is instructive. As we all know, it turned out that there were in fact zero WMD in Iraq after the 2003 invasion. Instead, it was revealed that Saddam Hussein had wanted to project the possibility that he might possess WMD as a deterrent to his enemies, and that this was why he blocked inspections before 2003 (but not immediately before 2003). Iran has exactly the same incentive with its nuclear program. In other words, whatever ‘UN inspectors’ do in Iran, no one will be able to say with 100% confidence that Iran is not developing the bomb. Just as Iraq’s conduct created space for the warmongers of the Bush and Blair governments to claim that Iraq did in fact possess WMD, the uncertainty in Iran will leave space for Israelis like Netanyahu (of whose ghastly ilk we can sadly expect more) or Americans like Trump to claim that Iran is in fact close to having a bomb.

So, whatever Iran and the US eventually agree on the ‘nuclear issue’, it will not decisively resolve it. Instead, it will leave all kinds of possibilities for future conflict.

Conclusion

It’s hard not to be pessimistic in the current circumstance. The safest bet is of course more tension and more conflict, probably more sporadic than full scale war, but enough to maintain constant anxiety about the possibility of conflict and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

With extremists in charge in Tehran and Jerusalem, and a maniac in the White House, never has imaginative, energetic diplomacy been more necessary to cajole the parties into some kind of stabilising understandings if not actual formal agreements. The professional mediators like Qatar or Oman do not have the diplomatic heft. ‘The Arabs’ ie Egypt, Saudis, Arab League etc, are unwilling and the ‘Europeans’ ie the big EU players (France, Germany, Italy) plus the UK seem utterly indifferent too. All remain in thrall to the Americans. One hope is that Trump’s alienation of erstwhile allies may ignite a hitherto-dormant diplomatic energy among the ‘Europeans’ in particular. Perhaps a new Prime Minister in the UK (which seems today imminent) may summon the nerve. But this requires courage and leadership, both qualities that seem rather lacking in today’s political ‘elites’.

I’m left with the very faint hope that one day there may be more enlightened, less violent leadership in the countries concerned, whether the US, Israel or Iran. But my more sober expectation is, I’m afraid, yet more war and the very real possibility, one day, of a nuclear detonation, whether above Tehran or Tel Aviv - or both.

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• Treaties to limit or reduce nuclear weapons are expiring or collapsing.

• Tacit agreements on when such weapons might be used are disintegrating or never existed, or the threshold for use is being lowered

• More and more countries are considering acquiring nuclear weapons.

• The major nuclear powers are rapidly re-arming.

I was invited onto Al Jazeera to discuss this crisis last week. As usual, and concerningly, it was left to ‘experts’ to discuss what is of course an existential threat that endangers us all. The technocratic analysis is given more prominence and somehow what should be profound concern and the moral component are missing.

I will post separately about US/Iran later today. One crucial issue is being overlooked, an issue that will undoubtedly cause problems in the future.

My new book, ‘There we are human again: a diplomat’s journey to anarchism’ will be published on 9 June in the UK, and in August in the US. Last week, I circulated Jonathan Rowson’s entertaining blog about why he published it.

Here’s the cover, which I like. Jonathan and I debated the title to and fro on WhatsApp for at least four months (that’s what kind of publisher he is: ‘meticulous’ doesn’t quite capture it). We had a lot of bad ideas. His was,

‘Anarchy! Anarchy? Anarchy.’

Mine were (even) worse. More from exhaustion that anything else, we ended up with the current title (for which my wife Karmen must take much of the credit too). Hopefully, it will work though I’m not exactly the best judge.

Why did I write it? Several reasons, none of them wholly explicit or understood in my mind, like most of the forces that sweep us along.

First, I write. Like, I have to write. I don’t know why. But I do. I will be writing until I can no more. I have stacks of notebooks filled with decades’ worth of my melancholic and repetitive ramblings. My old boss, Robert Cooper, a very brilliant man, once told me that you write in order to think. It might simply be that.

Second, I want to leave something of me. A common urge, and a foolish one. At home, I have several enormous bags brimming with my grandfather’s papers and dozens of his books. Bound volumes of newspaper cuttings about himself reporting croquet victories in Southwick or his essays in Finnish philological journals (one of which gave rise to his most famous book, Noblesse Oblige). I am very slowly going through all this material; I doubt I will ever complete the task. I will probably be the only one who tries. When I die, I expect his papers will be thrown out. Eventually, his entry in Wikipedia will be deleted. He wrote lots of books, some of them best-sellers, but nothing will remain.

Third, my absolute amazement at how stupidly humans run their affairs. When I was growing up, I thought to myself, surely it’s obvious that we should not be divided by class, that everyone should have more or less the same and that countries, and indeed religions, are basically ridiculous constructs, that are inherited, unwanted, from history? Surely my generation would see sense and get rid of all this? It was not to be, at least not yet.

And threaded through this, all of it, was the persistent question, what do people want of life? What, indeed, do I want? Do I, do they, even know?

I studied economics and politics and thought I had learned a kind of answer, namely the simplistic and dangerous presumptions of neo-classical economics and representative democracy. One, that ‘rational’ people are driven by the desire to consume and that ultimately that individual urge is ‘better’ for everyone. Two, that the only way to prevent people killing each other is to take away a great many of their liberties and govern them with coercive authority - also known as the threat of violence, the defining feature of the state. Later, part of the point of my job as a British diplomat was to propagate these certitudes as logical and indeed the only way properly, fairly, to organise human affairs. I wrote speeches about this for the foreign secretary.

Then it all came crashing down with my resignation over Iraq. Somehow the realisation of the lies and viciousness of government, and the people I knew in it and whom I had liked but who didn’t question, didn’t obstruct, did nothing whatsoever to stop an illegal and exceptionally bloody war pulled away a brick in the bottom of the wall, and it collapsed. A close colleague of mine, the weapons scientist David Kelly, was hounded to suicide by a government he had loyally and expertly served. If government could destroy its own so ruthlessly, who exactly was it defending? The answer is obvious, itself.

So the search for better answers began. This is the story in the book.

It started with the same question: what do people want? Surely, whatever that is should be the purpose of any economics, any politics? Security, comfort, obviously but, equally obviously (unless you are a neo-classical economist), there is more. What could this be?

One afternoon I was in the NYU library on Washington Square. I was on sabbatical from the Foreign Office. I was reading a book, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. I don’t know why I was reading it. I think I just saw it on a shelf. Much of the book is pretty much unintelligible to anyone but a trained logician. But I caught its drift. The stuff that really matters cannot be put into words, or terms, at all. Wittgenstein famously said of this stuff,

Of which nothing can be said, nothing should be spoken1

This is really very obvious, unless you have been steeped for too long in the orthodoxies of western political and economic thought, as I had. So for me, it was revelatory.

So, what is this stuff we cannot name? Well, precisely that. The ineffable. Things that words can hint at, but can never capture in their fullest depth or import. Things like meaning, community, soul and, of course, love.

So, next question. What is a political or economic system that centres this ineffable stuff? That allows it to be the point, instead of the reductive claim that all we want is material, available to purchase, and that all we are is atomised individuals seeking to maximise our own ‘utility’, a model that attributes no value to, indeed ignores, the ineffable - the sound of leaves rustling in the wind, what it’s like to be hugged, friendship, cooperation, meaning. Why we get up in the morning. Why, in Camus’s question, we don’t just commit suicide.

Would anyone claim that the answer is what we have got today? A system that has given us rage on the streets, toxic politics, climate disaster, Putin, Trump; a society where teenagers stab one another because of the postcode they live in, where religious groups are terrorised and terrorise, where the language of hate metastasises across culture and debate and almost everyone feels real despair when they contemplate the future. Where my country, a supposed rights-respecting law-abiding democracy, can sell weapons to a country killing civilians in their tens of thousands, and this war crime like others before it is simply forgotten: ‘get over it’. One could go on.

The book charts what happened next. Ultimately, I came upon a kind of answer, and I’m still processing it. Because it was not what I expected, at all, and its ramifications are profound, not just for how we make decisions, but how we relate to each other and, indeed, how we live in this world.

While I was reading and researching, I started to write. I gave the manuscript a robust, macho title, ‘Militant Human’. It was supposed to describe a politics and economics that put humans, their needs, their wants, at its heart. I stopped writing it because I realised that others had mapped this path before me. Kropotkin, Goldman, Bookchin, Le Guin and, in his way, Lao Tzu, many centuries ago. Perhaps even Jesus. For Jesus was an anarchist. He blisteringly excoriated economic exploitation and the domination of authority. He venerated the poorest. ‘Render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar’, read in context, actually means, Caesar has nothing (except the paltry coins with his face inscribed upon them). We live under god and what is god? God is love.

Anarchists reject religion for the very sensible reason that it has been perverted by those, usually men, who claim the right to interpret its lessons and thus dominate everyone else, usually corruptly. Anarchists reject anybody, any ideology, that seeks to tell us how to think and thus control us. They reject all authority, all exploitation, whether economic, racial, sexual or social. They reject everything that stops us living as we wish. Take all of it away and what are you left with? Just us. Looking at each other, wondering, what do we do now?

For we only truly exist in each other. Quantum physics offers an analogy - that the object only exists if the subject observes it. Humans only exist in relation to one another. This is why solitary confinement is a terrible kind of torture, because it removes the thing that makes us human: other people. Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdish liberation movement, the PKK, took it further. The subject/object distinction is the heart of the problem, he argued, with its implication that we and others (or we and nature) are separate in the first place. Eastern philosophies have, of course, been saying this for millennia.

Thus the core of any politics should be human relations, conducted without the poisonous constraints of economic compulsion (in capitalism, always exploitative, whether of other humans, or nature, or our psychic peace) which force us into the odious straitjacketed personalities of boss or bossed, the superior or the inferior, the successful or the failure (which most of us secretly feel we are). Without the state insistently telling us that without its violent authority (prison is violence, threat is violence, control is violence) we cannot be trusted to live peacefully together.

In the wilds of Siberia, the Russian naturalist (and Czarist prince) Pyotr Kropotkin found that the more distant a village from a centre of authority - a town, a police station, a court - the more its inhabitants cooperated with one another. Those who have experienced natural disaster, and the temporary absence of authority, find the same, as once I saw in New York City, of all places, after a hurricane. Not competition, but cooperation. Not violence, but love. Mutual aid, Kropotkin called it.

Scientifically, and with evidence, he rejected the reductive interpretations of Darwin’s theories - what was called ‘Social Darwinism’ - that humans’ natural state is to compete: ‘survival of the fittest’. Kropotkin had instead found that those who survive are, in fact, those who cooperate.

But the factory owners who owned the newspapers in Kropotkin’s day, the ‘social Darwinists’, won that battle for ‘the narrative’. Why they sought to do so is surely obvious: it was a philosophical and cultural excuse for 14-hour days and child labour in the smoking factories and fatal mines. They were sitting in plush gentlemen’s clubs in Pall Mall and the boardrooms of industry, and of course in government itself. Kropotkin was scribbling away, unnoticed, in Bromley (where you can still see his house today). His portrait sits above me now.

Today, it’s the same: those who benefit from a system of exploitation enforced by an allegedly ‘democratic’ government control the ‘narrative’ to the extent that it is barely ever questioned2: this is the ONLY way to live, the BEST way for humans to flourish, that ALL alternatives are ridiculous, utopian, fantastical. Pharaohs, Popes and monarchs once said the same. This will change, as all things must. The question is, to what?

Love does not, cannot, flourish between those with power and those without. Overweening power or the grotesque wealth that affords it, as Epstein so vividly demonstrates, fosters systemic abuse - of all kinds - without accountability. Love can only exist in equality when, at last, we fully see each other, when the many opaque veils of capitalist culture (winners/losers, dog-eat-dog) and petty authority are at last removed (an authority that, astonishingly, still decides whom we can marry and whose legal endorsement we still must seek when we marry). In those private spaces where there is only us.

This politics cuts deep, to the heart of what it is to be human.

It is a politics best discovered by the doing of it, not the telling, as we realise the deep-seated joy of working, living and loving together, only us, without distant authority deciding what we can and cannot do. Prefiguration, anarchists call it: the demonstration of a political idea through practice, through its very construction.

It’s not easy to preach anarchism. The counter-battery of self-appointed rationalists is powerful (for they have vested interests in dismissing all threat). It is hard to tackle the mostly unconscious assumptions of the status quo - that competition and self-seeking are the default of human behaviour, or the merciless ‘war of all against all’ that must inevitably accompany the absence of authority. I hear the softer version a lot, ‘People want to be told what to do!’ - and it’s always those who do the telling who make this claim. Those who get told don’t in fact say this, if you ask them.

These assumptions are everywhere, pronounced explicitly only sometimes, but more often subtly, insidiously, including in ‘culture’, art, commentary, zombie films, but perhaps worst of all inside the structure of our brains, the alignments of neurons long ago shaped by education, the numbing and thoughtless repetition of unquestioned ideas, culture and the insistent declarations of the small-minded but power hungry: the appalling, amoral, selfish, little men - killers, in truth - who somehow end up in charge: Putin, Netanyahu, Trump, [insert name of your most hated politician], propagating their absurd, awful and childish fantasies of nationalism or racial superiority, but also those who claim they want ‘the people’ to govern but only, it turns out, when they are in charge: the utter cynicism of Obama’s slogan ‘Yes we can’, a vacant promise with a thousand echoes in the painfully hollow and conformist theatre of ‘politics’ today where even those who claim they will change ‘the system’ have not a single idea on how to do so except through their occupation of Number Ten or the White House (Kanzleramt, Elysee etc) - having a few new taxes is not changing the system, sorry. A single man (sometimes a woman) when it is so very obvious that the necessary structural, cultural and indeed mental change will only come through the voluntary actions of the many, not the imposed decisions of a very few.

So, all this was why I wrote the book. It’s a statement of hope, that we can believe in something better, and through embodying and enacting that belief, make it so. It is an argument that we cannot know what it is to be truly human, because we have never been truly free. It is an examination of my own moral failures (above all, but sadly not only, when in government) and experiences, some good, some bad, some absurd, that led me inexorably to this conclusion, including my discovery of meaning, and indeed love, after the destruction of my world view, my profession and very sense of self.

Except that it isn’t a conclusion, it is more a waypoint on the road.

As I make my way along this path, I have realised that anarchism is much more than merely a proposal of how we should make decisions together - the transactions, the machine - or an argument that we can live without the fleeting comfort of soulless materialism if we have the joy and fulfilment of cooperation, of love, to sustain us instead. It goes deeper still.

For one thing separates anarchism from all other political philosophies, every one, and which makes it extraordinary and unique and indeed much more than a political philosophy, and more a spiritual quest. Unlike socialism, capitalism, communism, religion, you name it - every imposed ideology - it is not about how humans should be or how others, invariably those who benefit from the depiction, claim that humans are. Anarchism makes no claim, not one, about what we are. It is instead a kind of invitation to be what you what you might be, what you choose to be, without others telling you, without others coercing you: just you and those around you, free, at last, to explore a territory that hitherto, for all history, has been prohibited: what it is to be truly human.

You can pre-order the book here and receive occasional updates about book events - signings, discussions etc - and other news, including about my online courses, at my website.

The live show is going to be organized on my TikTok page here:

https://tiktok.com/@carnewross

Please follow me there and see you on June 8.

More news about the book soon.

There have been important elections for local government - councils - in the UK this week. The results have been extraordinary: disaster for Labour and, to a lesser degree, the Conservatives, while support for parties further to ‘the left’ and ‘right’ - the Greens and Reform - has rocketed.

Commentary, as ever, plays this event as ‘about’ politics i.e. politicians, policies and parties. It is, but only to a limited extent. Look closely and deeper reasons for the political disillusionment and anger driving voters become perceptible.

And apologies for the absence of a post last week. I’m still recovering from my op.

The Event

The governing party, Labour, performed extraordinarily poorly in the elections, as did the main opposition party, the Conservatives. Labour lost around half of the Council seats - over one thousand - it was defending. Wales has been governed by Labour since women were given the vote. Now its government will be led by the Welsh nationalist party, Plaid Cymru.

The odds that Reform might win the next General Election, still three years away, have risen considerably. Britain’s next Prime Minister could be Nigel Farage, a man who cavorts with Trump and who has a well-documented history of virulent racism (I was, by the way, two years below him at school, and he was well-known for it) and whose supporters, while they have learned not to declare their racist views out loud, are happy to express them through the dog-whistle signals that Farage himself uses. Recently, Reform leaders have said they want a body like ICE in the UK.

It’s fair to see these elections as a rupture in British politics, where long-lasting assumptions about how politics works have been shattered.

Inside the System

The conventional media has already reached conclusions about the ‘meaning’ of the elections.

First, total disillusionment and anger with Keir Starmer’s government. Predictably, Labour’s electoral catastrophe has ignited a bonfire of speculation about Starmer’s future.

Second, a fracturing of British politics into a five party system rather than two party (more than five in Wales and Scotland where nationalist parties also compete).

It seems more than likely that Starmer will soon be gone. Typically, just like his predecessors, he is personally blamed for the public’s frustration with the government. By the same token, it’s assumed that a new leader - one person - can somehow revive the Labour Party’s fortunes.

As usual, the election result is viewed through the lens of politicians’ personalities, political parties and their relative prospects.

What everyone is missing

But, as ever, we should be looking for the deeper forces at play.

When interviewed or canvassed ‘on the doorstep’, voters have said two things very clearly: they want ‘change’ (which Labour has not delivered) and, related to this, they don’t like the prime minister himself, but also politicians or ‘the system’.

This is exactly what voters told me when I ran for parliament in South Islington in 2024 (as some readers will remember). The only difference then was that voters wanted ‘change’ from a Conservative government to Labour. Only a year or two later, they now they want ‘change’ from Labour.

There are two further signals that tell a story about what people are really feeling. As is usual for local elections, voter turnout is likely to be very low, around low- to mid-thirties percent i.e. around a third of eligible voters and a good deal less than a third of the adult population. Where I live, I was surprised to see that the winning candidates often won with less than a thousand votes.

Secondly, the level of abuse and violence directed at candidates and canvassers was higher than it’s ever been. All parties reported widespread abuse, in person and online, including being chased on the street and receiving death threats.

This hostility towards politicians is paralleled by a rise in what’s called ‘anti-social’ behaviour or, less bureaucratically, hostility and aggression towards other people, like the increasing pattern of attacks on nurses or bus drivers, or the rise in violent shop-lifting or teenagers stabbing each other.

Commentators in the press do not connect these phenomena with ‘politics’ which, as usual, they think concerns only policy and politicians.

The Deeper Current

It’s striking that the rising parties, the Greens and Reform, campaign more on general sentiment - ‘change the system!’; ‘change politics!’ - than specific policies.

Aside from reversing immigration, Reform do not really have any policies, at least none that anyone can name. For the Greens too, their appeal is that they attack the system that rewards the rich and punishes everyone else (a big shift from their historically more environmentalist message, a shift pushed by the Greens’ new leader, Zack Polanski). Both Reform and the Greens, whose support is now surging, can therefore accurately be seen as ‘anti-system’ parties, one from the left, the other from the right.

Whoever is elected, whether the ‘protest’ or more traditional parties, they will not plausibly change anything fundamentally, much as they may promise otherwise. Reform will not stop immigration, most of which is permitted by family reunion and even if they did, it would do little or nothing to alter the material circumstances of those who remain which are the real cause of the resentment Farage blames on immigrants.

The Greens may introduce a wealth tax, as they promise, but it will not, because it cannot, raise much revenue or significantly reverse rising inequality. Like all the other parties, they will have very little scope to raise taxes or increase borrowing, the only two sources of money with which to do things like improve the National Health Service or fill potholes, just as the current Labour government has found. Either route, even when hinted at, can trigger rapid devaluation of sterling and increases in the cost of government borrowing in the short run, or in the longer run, capital flight and plummeting foreign investment.

Unfortunately, we can be sure that whichever party wins, they will not alter the fundamental structures that cause the problems that politicians argue about. Indeed, they will not talk about them. We can also confidently expect that whoever wins the General Election, the new Prime Minister will be widely hated before he or she even enters Number Ten.

There is a deep rage out there. You can feel it on the streets. I can feel it riding my bike around London where some trivial incident triggers disturbing outbursts of foul-mouthed anger and threats of violence.

Political parties tend not to talk about this or, if they do, they treat it as a kind isolated ‘social’ issue to be addressed either by punishment, more police or the inevitable ‘more youth clubs’. Or they pretend that the cause of social decay is other political parties or politicians, and that by replacing the current lot with someone else, i.e. them, they can fix the problem. The media don’t seem to think that what is in effect a kind of social collapse is somehow relevant to the practice they have named ‘politics’.

The theatre show that is ‘politics’ is a deliberate performance that, whether intentionally or not, serves to distract attention from the system itself. That system is of course capitalism.

It is capitalism that causes inequality and the humiliation associated with absolute or indeed relative poverty, a humiliation that the right has successfully tapped into by blaming ‘liberal elites’ (Trump) or ‘politics as usual’ (Farage) and, of course, immigrants (both).

The mechanics of capitalism today guarantee that wealth is ever more concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people while the wealth of everyone else at best stagnates or, as has happened over the last twenty years, declines. The tax system does very little to modulate this intrinsic and worsening imbalance and, in reality, it cannot, partly for the reasons explained above.

It is capitalism’s promotion of ceaseless growth that is destroying the planet now and particularly for future generations. As long as any part of the manufacturing process or supply chain produces carbon, any increase in production - growth - means more carbon. This straightforward relationship is not complicated but is obscured by those who argue that decarbonisation of energy, manufacturing and transport will successfully cut emissions. They will, but nothing like enough1. Overall emissions in any case continue to rise.

Today we are told that AI will provide the solution to climate change. This is ironic because we don’t need ChatGPT or anyone to tell us the solution to climate change; we already know it. We’re just not doing it. Meanwhile, AI itself is massively increasing carbon emissions. ‘Techno-solutionism’ will continue as long as people make money out of it, and as long as the rest of us fail to act on the evidence of science (I will write shortly about why we fail to act, and it’s not only because of climate-deniers).

And it is capitalism that has torn a deep spiritual hole in our collective consciousness where many are wondering ‘what is this all for?’ (particularly when I can’t even buy a house). In the mid twentieth century, people were ready to be told that consumption would on its own improve their wellbeing, because their material circumstances were steadily improving.

Now, as those material circumstances stagnate or worsen, what was always the case is now ever clearer - material consumption does not satisfy the true needs of the human and in many ways destroys the bonds that provide life with meaning and purpose - society, cooperation, relationships, love. But instead of blaming the system, we are told that these social deficits are the fault of the individual who, through therapy or ‘self-help’ or, in the worst cases, punishment, can mitigate that which is in fact intrinsic to the system and thus to society itself.

Then the final, and routinely unadmitted, consequence of ‘the system’ of capitalism and allegedly-’representative’ democracy is that no one - not even politicians! - feel they have any power to change anything. We continue to be told - and believe - the ludicrous fallacy that putting an ‘x’ in a box once every five years amounts to some kind of meaningful political agency. The many who refuse to vote have perhaps tacitly already decided it’s pointless.

But it’s not just political agency that the system denies, it is any agency over the circumstances of our lives - the material, social and psychic realities which are products of the system and thereby pretty much immutable. This is why the few who transcend those circumstances - the successful, if rare, entrepreneur, the sports star - are celebrated, with the effect that the rest feel that somehow their failure to change their own lives is their own fault, not that of the system itself.

These are the structural causes for what appears on the surface as ‘politics’ and today is manifesting as political volatility (some call it ‘anti-incumbency’), rapid cycling through governments and leaders and overwhelming disillusionment. It is also unfortunately manifesting as rage and hatred directed at the easy targets: migrants or the car driver who swerves in front of you and sometimes politicians themselves, several of whom have been murdered in both the UK, US and elsewhere.

These phenomena will only get worse until the structural causes are properly addressed.

Conclusion

It’s a bit of a cliché of course to blame ‘capitalism’ for everything. In any critique, it’s essential to offer a reasonable alternative. And for me, the search for that reasonable alternative should start with the question, what do humans truly want or need?

From the answer to that question, you can begin to derive a political, economic and indeed social system (for capitalism is not only an economic or political system: it forms our society and social relations too). Working from these first principles, you end up with something very different from the systems and ideas that have dominated our lives for the last century or two.

What is this? This - and how the experiences of my life drew me to this conclusion - is explained in my forthcoming book, ‘There We are Human Again: a diplomat’s journey to anarchism’, to be published by Perspectiva in June (and in the US in August).

But, book promotion aside, I hope it’s clear from the above why it’s essential for us to stop believing that ‘politics’ - i.e. party politics - will provide the answers to the problems we face. Politicians are themselves of course partly to blame because they are required to pretend that they can fix the problems (secretly, a lot of them know full well that they can’t).

But we are also to blame for believing them.

If you are a journalist and would like a copy of ‘There we are human again’ to review before publication, please let me know.

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Trump is busy undermining NATO with almost every word he utters. It doesn’t matter what the NATO treaty says about the Article 5 guarantee of mutual defence (an attack against one is an attack against all), if Trump doesn’t want the US to help defend other members under attack, he doesn’t have to. No one will take him to the breaking-treaty court. And don’t forget he has threatened without apology to use force to invade a fellow NATO member’s territory.

There is no denying that NATO is now in crisis. I discussed this on Al Jazeera this last weekend: you can watch in the video below. As is usual on Al Jazeera, especially its Inside Story show with James Bays, it was a fairly thorough discussion, though as usual TV severely restricts the detail and length of what one can say.

NATO is not only a way of organising common defence. It is, perhaps most importantly, a deterrent against attack: that if Russia invades other NATO members, even if they are initially lightly defended (as for instance the vulnerable Baltic states are), they will face overwhelming American-led retaliation. Both of these powers rely very heavily not only on US intentions but also on US command & control, intelligence and logistics infrastructure: the US essentially provides the nervous system of NATO as well, of course, as the top-of-the-line systems that, in theory, ensure US military dominance. It will be very difficult and expensive for the Europeans to replace those capabilities, but clearly they must, and there are signs that they have realised this.

As for American intentions, it can no longer be guaranteed that the US will respond if, for instance, Putin were to send a ‘small’ force into Estonia to ‘protect’ the Russian-speaking minority. NATO has a only a small military presence there, and certainly not sufficient to stop any significant invasion. Putin may well feel that it is now safer to gamble that the US would not respond. (Incidentally, the odds for that bet in the Korean peninsula and Taiwan Strait have also changed, as Pyongyang and Beijing will already have realised.)

Meanwhile, unmentioned in the current ferment is the nuclear deterrent. NATO has a ‘first use’ doctrine that foresees the possible use of ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons in response to an overwhelming Russian conventional attack. With the exception of those in French hands, all of such ‘tactical’ weapons are both US-made and under US control, even if they are stationed in Europe and, in theory at least, can only be used after co-decision by the hosting state (for instance the UK where the US has quietly redeployed tactical nuclear bombs in recent months). Putin will have taken note already that the propensity to threaten or use such weapons has fallen if not collapsed with Trump’s faltering commitment to common defence. Deterrence relies on the belief that a threat will be fulfilled. If that belief is eroded, as it must be now, then deterrence itself fails. That is the situation we are now in.

As I argue in the discussion, this goes beyond treaty texts and defence spending. There is now clearly a fundamental divergence of values with the US, over immigration, race, and commitment to democracy itself. (Though if the AfD in Germany, RN in France and Reform in the UK take power then, unfortunately, that divergence might narrow). Something fundamental has broken. Trust is not easily rebuilt.

But simply replacing a US-led NATO with a European-led NATO which still relies on nuclear deterrence seems inadequate as an answer. I make no excuses for the monstrous Putin but there is an argument that NATO’s perpetuation after the Cold War helped provoke the very thing it is designed to oppose: Russian hostility.

I will attempt in a forthcoming post to get to grips with the following question: what would a defence arrangement look like that protected people rather than states, that was not driven by US hegemonic interests and the need to hold Germany ‘down’ and that did not require nuclear weapons to provide a deterrent against attack? Please watch this space.

Talks to end the US/Israel/Iran confrontation are - reportedly - resuming.

But look between the lines, and this is not looking good. The US approach is directly militating against success, not least because of the ‘negotiation tactics’ used by Trump.

Why are these negotiations so hard, and what is the US doing so wrong?

The Event

At the time of writing (morning 20 April), US/Iran talks are due to resume in Islamabad today. But Iran has yet to confirm its attendance. The US delegation will again be led by J.D. Vance. The temporary ceasefire expires in two days’ time.

Inside the System

It’s very hard to tell what’s going on in Tehran. Opacity is the name of the game. Who is making the decisions? What do they want?

Washington is a different matter as the president bombards the world with his posts. It would be nice to think that behind the seemingly random bombast is some kind of considered strategy. As yet, there is no evidence for this. In practice, this means that US negotiating positions are unstable, public, and often contradictory.

What Everyone Is Getting Wrong

Talks are better than no talks, and both countries are up against the deadline which will hopefully concentrate minds. But my guess is that, at best, they will agree a short extension to the ceasefire. Trump doesn’t want renewed war. It’s bad for him both domestically and internationally. But he cannot declare that the war is finally over until he’s able to claim some kind of achievement of at least some of the many and differing war objectives he has declared, primary among them the end of Iran’s nuclear program. And the Iranians are not ready to give him what he wants, and may not be for a long time.

The uncomfortable conclusion therefore is that uncertainty will continue and the Strait of Hormuz will likely remain closed.

What to Watch

My guess is that the Iranians will show up in Islamabad, though they may choose to keep Vance waiting. This is part of the psychological pressure tactics that they are successfully deploying. Expect Trump to respond, as he already is, by ramping up the threats to renew military attacks, with threats to destroy Iran’s civilian infrastructure. Last night, he threatened to destroy all of Iran’s power plants and bridges, which would do lasting and severe damage - as well as many civilian deaths - to Iran’s economy and people as well as constituting a clear war crime.

The Deeper Current

There are fundamental and structural reasons why this negotiation is difficult, some well-known, some not so much. Let’s break it down.

The nuclear issue is very complicated and difficult. My guess is that the US has demanded something that sounds simple, ‘End Iran’s nuclear program with the US to monitor compliance’. This is not in fact simple at all for the reasons I explained last week. One analogy that illuminates the difficulty - imagine persuading the UK or US to give up their nuclear capability after they have recently endured a massive bombing campaign and been threatened with civilisational destruction.

One further important factor: any deal will have to be better in terms of stopping enrichment and verifying Iranian compliance than the JCPOA nuclear deal agreed - through diplomacy, not bombing - in 2015 by the Obama administration, from which Trump withdrew on the grounds that it was ‘too weak’. Any deal he gets now will have to be materially and demonstrably ‘stronger’.

But unfortunately this is not the only difficult issue. Some of these obstacles relate to the structure of the negotiation.

For instance, not all the parties who need to accede to and implement any agreement are present at the table: Israel, Hezbollah and the Houthis. We may guess that none of these has an absolute veto (though we don’t know this), but they will need to be factored into any agreement by their respective representatives, the main parties.

The Israel/Hezbollah conflict alone is hard if not impossible to resolve, not least since neither is communicating with the other. Talks between Israel and the Lebanese government are not relevant, because the Lebanese government does not speak for Hezbollah nor can it force its compliance with Israel’s very clear - and unfulfillable - demand that Hezbollah disarm, a condition that Hezbollah will never agree to as long as Israel occupies territory in southern Lebanon, an occupation it shows every sign of making permanent (they’ve said so).

Hezbollah is above all a resistance movement, with deep political and ideological motives that don’t fit the narrative of ‘Iranian-backed terrorists’ who can be switched on or off like a light. Today, Israel has bombed another town in southern Lebanon, despite the alleged ceasefire.

Secondly, the return of Iran’s frozen assets. Here, the obstacle is not the difficulty of transferring the money (although this would require a trust that does not currently exist) but Trump’s attacks against the Obama administration for handing over $1.7 billion to Iran in 2016 (sent in the form of cargo pallets of cash). Now Trump may have to do exactly the same thing, not something that will fit easily into a ‘victory’ narrative.

Thirdly, perhaps the biggest problem is this: the best way to persuade Iran to give up its military nuclear program is to assure it that it won’t be attacked again. Unfortunately, the US and Israel’s recent conduct and rhetoric mean that no one can believe such an assurance from them, even if they were to give it.

Most recently, Trump declared his commitment to a diplomatic solution then, without warning, launched, with Israel, a massive bombing campaign. The US and Israel have attacked Iran twice with heavy bombing raids in the last ten months. US rhetoric continues to assert the necessity of something that is more or less impossible - the complete destruction and verified and lasting cessation of Iran’s military nuclear program - thus creating, for Iran, a permanent threat. Israel will continue to threaten Iran with attack.

The only long-term way to persuade Iran to give up a nuclear bomb is some kind of solid commitment of non-aggression, ideally within the context of a broader regional security agreement. Given the unreliability of US and Israeli promises in this regard, Iran may insist that another country underwrite such an agreement. Candidates for such a role would have to carry sufficient weight to deter US military action, though not necessarily by military force. The only country that might plausibly fit the bill therefore is China.

The only other way Iran might reliably give up its program is a different regime in Tehran that chooses warmer relations with Israel and the US. We can all speculate about how likely this is, especially after the US and Israel have visited immense and lasting destruction on Iran, from which it will take decades to recover.

And finally, complexity. Any deal will need to tie all of these issues - nuclear, security guarantees, return of Iranian assets, Israel/Lebanon - into one agreement, when there is zero trust between the parties. If anything, this package is more complicated than the last nuclear agreement with Iran, the JCPOA1 that was agreed in 2015. That agreement required two years of formal negotiations; six years if you count the secret and ‘track II’ contacts that preceded the formal talks.

(A further issue is Iran’s ballistic missiles. Trump earlier stated their total elimination as a war aim. That aim, like regime change, has been quietly forgotten. The world’s press may not have noticed. Iran will have. With every passing day, the list of US demands gets shorter ergo it pays Iran to wait).

Then, there are Trump’s negotiating tactics. I will be brief:

• Making big declarations that turn out not to be true: at the end of the last Islamabad talks, Vance stated that the US had tabled its ‘best and final’ offer. Within a few days, the US was negotiating again with Iran through a third party. Clearly, Vance’s statement was simply untrue, undermining US credibility for the future.

• Undermining your negotiators. Trump has humiliated and ridiculed Vance repeatedly. Most pertinently, he has declared the diametric opposite of what Vance has said at the same time, such as threatening military action when Vance was calling for more diplomacy. Now Vance will be at the table again trying to convince the Iranian delegation to believe him.

• Making threats you don’t stick to: destroying Iran’s civilisation, resuming bombing attacks, sinking ships, then not doing so.

• Publicly broadcasting your desperation for a deal by repeatedly saying that talks are imminent and that there are only a ‘few details’ left to agree. Iran, meanwhile, has said little, and when it has, it has suggested the opposite - that they are far from a deal. Given all the obstacles to a deal listed above, who do you believe?

Thanks to the clumsiness of Trump’s diplomacy, the only real levers the US has are military force and the resumption of heavy bombing. Every country in the world, with the exception of Israel, does not want this, and will have been telling Trump so. The economic and political consequences are disastrous.

The second American lever is to prevent Iran’s access through the Strait of Hormuz, thus blocking Iran’s valuable oil exports which make up some 80% of its foreign exchange revenue (of approx $5bn per month). This is significant leverage, and we don’t know how much it worries the Tehran regime. But, as others have noted, the regime’s primary interest is its own survival, whether threatened by domestic uprising or foreign attack. This requirement produces a very different calculus of what you might be prepared to concede in a negotiation.

Iran’s leverage is both declared and undeclared - but understood. Firstly, its declared lever is to keep its foot on the neck of the world economy by blocking the Strait of Hormuz. It’s hard to overstate the importance of this card. It’s huge, and with every day that passes, it gets stronger. Secondly, Iran can indicate its willingness to endure further bombing, thus weakening the American ‘card’ to resume the attack. Thirdly, it is playing hard to get, an obvious tactic when Iran needs a deal too, but one that is successfully undermining Trump’s loud claims of imminent agreement.

While it can be gratifying to criticise American tactics and techniques, the truth is that Trump’s methods are making an end to this conflict more difficult, not less. This is not just poor tactics—it is a mismatch between political theatre and the structural realities of high-stakes negotiation.

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Today’s post will be relatively short. Negotiations in Pakistan between the US and Iran have ended overnight. What can we now expect? Some observations based on the limited information we now have.

Military

The ceasefire was agreed to last until 21 April. We can therefore hope that full-scale military action will not resume until then and only then if there has been no progress in reaching a longer-term agreement - postponements, further short ceasefires etc are all possible. But sporadic attacks will probably continue. The Straits of Hormuz will remain blocked. And now Trump has announced a US blockade of the Straits (for Iranian ships) which in a sense could be seen as a counter-move to the Iranian blockade, perhaps thereby increasing US leverage to have that lifted but, as explained below, I don’t think the blockade issue will be resolved until everything else is agreed, further increasing the agony for the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, it’s clear that Israel intends to continue its bombardment of southern Lebanon but also northwards including Beirut even though Iran has stated that the ceasefire also applies to Lebanon. Israel is also intent on permanent occupation of a large chunk of southern Lebanon. How do we know this? Its defence minister has announced it. The IDF is busy blowing up entire villages on the grounds that these constitute Hezbollah ‘military infrastructure’.

Diplomatic

Back to US/Iran. We do not know what was on the table in Islamabad. However, Vance has said that Iran refused American demands, suggesting that the proposals flowed one way across the table, from the US to Iran (it does not appear that Pakistan offered any of its own proposals or, if it did, they didn’t last long). Vance has called the US demands ‘final’ i.e. non-negotiable and that Iran must accept them in toto or face renewed conflict. From this, we can deduce a couple of things:

• Both sides intend that the negotiations should continue, but for the Americans only in the narrow sense that Iran must now agree to the US proposal without amendment, or else. But see below.

• Both sides still want an agreement. Neither has said it wants a return to war, though both sides of course blame the other for last night’s breakdown. Although Trump has said he doesn’t care whether Iran agrees to a deal or not, it is clear that in reality he does want a deal. Otherwise, Vance would not have been sent to Islamabad in the first place. The ‘I don’t care’ line is pure negotiating bluster, a technique designed to put further pressure on Iran, a transparently obvious tactic no doubt learned in some shabby deal over a tacky New Jersey casino.

• In negotiation, a proposal is very rarely the ‘final’ offer. Calling a proposal such is obviously a way to try to pressure the other side to agree without further discussion - another obvious tactic. However, if Iran were now to revert to the Americans with a ‘yes, but’ response and various proposals to amend the US proposition, it’s hard to see the US refusing to consider their proposals, especially in light of the no doubt desperate and ceaseless phone calls from Saudis, Kuwaitis, Europeans, Indians etc, begging Trump that this nightmare end.

• It’s notable that despite their fulsome involvement in the conflict, Israel is not at the table. Presumably, the Americans consult them but that’s far from the same as having a veto on what’s agreed. But, as their bombing of Lebanon makes clear, Israel does not necessarily see itself as bound by any agreement made by the US.

A side note on the diplomacy around Lebanon. Trump has told the Israelis to dial down their bloody assault on Lebanon, presumably to give the American agreement with Iran a better chance. He has also told them to ‘talk’. So, under US auspices, Israelis and representatives of the Lebanese government are due to meet next week in Washington. Although such a meeting has not taken place for decades, as neither country recognises the other, I expect very little from the encounter, if indeed it takes place at all.

The Lebanese government does not include and cannot control Hizbollah, with whom of course Israel is mainly fighting (I say ‘mainly’ because its targets range far beyond Hizbollah military positions to include civilian infrastructure, schools, hospitals, ambulances, ordinary homes etc). So Israel/Lebanon talks are irrelevant. Perhaps they are being performed for the benefit of the Americans, or the world, to fulfil the pretence that Israel wants peace. Israel’s plans for southern Lebanon are very clear - occupation and perhaps eventual annexation (as Israel’s security minister, Smotrich, has stated), which requires the civilian population to be driven out. That is achieved by destroying their homes, villages, bridges etc. and making the territory uninhabitable, much as Israel did in Gaza. Hizbollah attacks on Israel also continue, thus providing the rationale for Israel’s assault.

Content of any US/Iran agreement

The main ‘sticking point’ issues have been widely reported - Iran’s nuclear program, transit through the Straits of Hormuz, return of Iran’s frozen assets, Lebanon (perhaps). I have seen no mention of restrictions on Iran’s ballistic missiles, even though this was once earlier announced as an American war aim, presumably now forgotten. And no mention of ‘regime change’ or anything about democracy, or the treatment or human rights of Iran’s population. Also forgotten, it seems.

Of these, the nuclear issue is by far the hardest to agree, for a variety of technical and political reasons. My expectation is that the other issues will be agreed rapidly once this core issue is successfully addressed. Hormuz is basically binary: open or closed. It is also Iran’s most powerful leverage, by far: essentially a stranglehold on the world economy. Not a bad bit of leverage to have. This leverage is why the Americans have come to the table at all. Iran will not give up this leverage and agree to open the straits until everything else is agreed.

Books have been written about the nuclear issue. I will try to describe the main points of contention briefly:

Technical issues: Iran insists it has the right to a civil nuclear program, which indeed, as a signatory to the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty, it does. The US now demands that Iran give up any attempt to build a nuclear weapon. The devil is the detail between these two positions.

First, how much enrichment should Iran be permitted? None, or some, and if so how much? At present, Iran has no uranium enriched sufficiently to build a bomb (which is above 90% enrichment). But it does have - or had, before the bombing - the capacity to enrich to that level. Should it be allowed any capacity? Iran says it has the right to such capacity as necessary for its civil nuclear program. Others argue that it should not have such capacity, whose utility for a military program is disputed.

Secondly, what should happen to the famous 444 kg of 60% enriched uranium that Iran currently possesses? (Note that 60% enrichment is not sufficient to make a bomb, but can be fairly rapidly enriched to the necessary level: it is far too highly enriched for plausible civil use.) In the Oman-hosted talks before the bombing began, Iran reportedly agreed to hand over all this stock for safe keeping in a third country, as well as ceasing all enrichment. Why the US broke off those talks without accepting this concession begs many questions about the real American motives for the subsequent attacks. The scale of the ensuing bombing suggests to me that the US/Israeli motive went much further than destruction of the nuclear program or its supporting infrastructure, instead they sought much wider demolition of Iran’s economy including its oil production, all of which will inflict much harm and misery on Iran’s population. Of course, it’s not clear that Trump even knows why he went to war.

Trump has said that Iran and the US could ‘dig out’ the stock of Highly Enriched Uranium (the 444kg) together. This statement suggests two things: a) that Iran has agreed to hand it over (which it has already apparently offered, in Oman) and b) that it’s buried under rubble somewhere. Either way, it looks like this issue may have been dealt with. Even if not, there is no way the Americans will let Iran keep that stockpile, however deeply it may be buried, and the Iranians must know this.

This leaves the third very difficult technical issue. Assuming the above is agreed, how should compliance be monitored or verified? My guess is that, given well-known Trumpian attitudes towards the UN (or its relevant body, the IAEA), the US proposed that they should conduct such verification themselves. This means American inspectors (who would presumably be military) exercising the right to inspect any suspicious activity or site anywhere in Iran. Unless they can go anywhere - at any time - then verification cannot be 100% credible. Iran, naturally, would assume that such inspectors would also gather targeting data and amongst their number would be Israelis, whether or not Iran had agreed to their participation (US and British spies were among the UN weapons inspectors in Iraq, so Iranian suspicions would be well founded). So, the demand would be interpreted as that the US/Israel could inspect any military base, airfield, building, office or shipping container (or bucket) in Iran at any time. It’s perhaps understandable that Iran would refuse such a condition. The verification issue is very difficult overall for it suffers from one basic and vexing characteristic - how do you prove that something isn’t there?

The only agreement with Iran to limit its nuclear program under strict monitoring is the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) agreed in 2016 under the Obama administration, and the agreement was also with all the other P5 countries plus Germany i.e. all the most important and powerful countries in the world. Two years of formal negotiation were required for this agreement. If you include the ‘back channel’ and secret negotiations that preceded the formal talks, the duration of the process was six years. It’s therefore not surprising that Iran and the US could not agree a deal within 21 hours in Islamabad. My worry is that the US has demanded something that seems simple - give up the nuclear program, monitored by US inspections - that is in fact very complicated and very difficult for Iran to accept. All this ‘last and final offer’ rhetoric speaks to me of the bluster and bullying of New York real estate dealmaking, the world from which Witkoff, Kushner and of course Trump come, rather than the complicated, patient work of arms control talks.

Then there’s the equally tricky political issues that surround the nuclear program and explain to some extent why Iran is pursuing it. If Israel and the US see fit regularly to bomb Iran, how should Iran deter such attack? Or indeed an attack by its neighbour Iraq, with whom it fought a horrendously bloody war lasting over a decade in the 1980’s, a war that cost Iran two hundred thousand lives, and perhaps half a million wounded? Or a nuclear attack from Israel or the US (a possibility which I’m sure crossed Trump’s unhinged mind in the last few weeks). Why, if you’re Iran, would you disarm yourself of the only capability that might be effective in stopping them? The answer that Iran has hitherto chosen is to maintain the possibility that it might develop or even secretly possess a workable nuclear weapon, much as Saddam Hussein maintained the illusion that he might have extensive stocks of chemical and biological, if not nuclear, weapons - in order to deter attack from Iraq’s enemies, primarily Iran.

From what the Americans have said so far, they seem to be asking Iran to give up this deterrent capability once and for all. That’s not unreasonable, given Iran’s threats to use such weapons, in particular to destroy Israel. But the best way to persuade Iran never to pursue such a program is to assure Iran that you won’t attack it, not actually to attack it, and thereby prove in very material terms the very argument that Iran believes - namely the necessity of some kind of greater deterrent, that might match Israel and the US’s otherwise overwhelming military advantage and that might in some way restrain Israel’s evident and growing tendency to aggression, unlawful as it may be.

This is the basis of past proposals for some kind of regional security agreement covering Iran, the Gulf and Israel, perhaps a kind of non-aggression pact that would, in theory, reduce the chances that any of them would attack any of the others (and in particular that Iran would not attack Israel or vice versa). Such an agreement might be supervised or even guaranteed by other big countries, particularly but not only the US. My guess is that to meet this requirement, the US is offering some kind of non-aggression guarantee or promise to Iran now, but in their eyes (and mine, to be honest) such a guarantee would be worthless given Trump’s lies and deceptions before this and past attacks, of loud commitments to peace and negotiation that turned overnight into cruise missiles.

It’s ironic that Trump’s past lies may now be the undoing of a potential deal with Iran which, as others have argued, he now sorely needs. So much for ‘The Art of the Deal’. Stick to real estate, is my advice.

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The UK has refused to join Trump’s reckless war on Iran, though it is allowing US military aircraft to fly from bases in the UK. Trump is furious.

A UK/US divide like this is rare. This one may have significant long-term consequences. But why is the UK so dependent on the US and what will the results be of a serious split from the US?

The ‘special relationship’ is a tired cliché. But in some significant regards, particularly in security, the relationship is uniquely close. The nature of the relationship also explains the extraordinarily difficult position the UK finds itself in with Trump.

The collapse of the relationship, while very difficult to navigate today, offers opportunity as much as risk.

The Event

Trump’s anger with the UK for not providing sufficient support for America’s attack on Iran is for all to see. The insults, in particular to the Prime Minister, are coming thick and fast. News reports however quote unnamed officials who claim that the ‘special relationship’ continues more or less unaffected. Some use the metaphor of an iceberg - that what you can see is only a small part of the whole relationship. But the longer Trump’s fury continues, the more it will impact upon the relationship, in all sorts of material ways. Officials ultimately take their cue from, and are instructed by, their political masters. Despite the closeness of the relationship, at least until now, Trump has not excluded the UK from his universal 10% tariff on all imports (and it must pay 25% on steel). Slowly but surely, other more subterranean elements of the relationship will be eroded, some at potentially great cost to the UK (and the US).

Inside the System

Only when you are inside government, particularly the parts of it concerned with ‘national security’ (the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defence, the intelligence agencies etc), does it become clear quite how extraordinarily close the relationship with the US is.

The media might refer to a close ‘intelligence’ relationship. In practice, this means that the US and UK share a great deal of top secret information, mostly so-called ‘sigint’ - the interceptions and decryptions of the communications of adversaries (and sometimes allies too). This is a remarkable quantity of high-value information. Inside the UK government, only those who have received extensive (and highly intrusive) security vetting are permitted to see this information. Sharing it requires a high degree of trust because any leak revealing that the US or UK is able to access or decrypt certain types of communication (say Putin’s mobile phone) will mean that the access is lost, sometimes forever. The US obtains its ‘sigint’ information through a variety of methods, mostly centred on the National Security Agency (NSA); for the UK, it’s the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), but also military and domestic sources like the FBI, MI5, police. The two countries also share information gathered from ‘humint’ - i.e. human sources aka spies - which tends to be the realm of MI6 and the CIA, but also the ‘domestic’ intelligence agencies, MI5 and the FBI, as well as police and the Department of Homeland Security etc..

The US contribution to the volume of information is far greater than the UK’s. The exact ratio is not public but has been estimated at around 9:1 i.e. the US provides ninety percent of the data, the UK, ten percent. So it’s a huge difference, explained largely by the discrepancy in resources that the US and UK respectively spend on their intelligence apparatus.

This intelligence is extraordinarily important. It provides potential forewarning of attack by enemies, details of their military capabilities, information about their political dealings and much, much more, often in more or less real time. The Wikileaks cables included the ‘intelligence requirements’ telegrams that individual US embassies sent back to Washington with details of what information they needed about the country or organisation they were located in or at. What struck me then was the extraordinary amount and breadth of information the US sought out and no doubt still does. We might tend to think of ‘intelligence’ as the movement of ships, deployment of troops or missiles, but it also includes negotiation briefs for trade talks, details of competing bids for commercial deals (particularly those of defence companies), the political views of individual officials, say at the UN or even in a friendly government (famously, the US monitored Angela Merkel’s cellphone when she was Germany’s chancellor; I’m sure the US also monitors the Prime Minister’s team - but they don’t share that information!). Almost everything is vacuumed up and then consolidated and analysed. Thanks to the likes of Palantir and Anthropic, those daunting tasks are now performed by AI, allowing the US/UK to boil down and understand vast quantities of data.

This sharing of intelligence has another unannounced effect. It produces extraordinary trust and closeness between British and American officials, soldiers and diplomats. When I served at the UN for the UK, I treated my American opposite numbers almost as my own colleagues in the British mission. Every morning, I could assume that ‘David’ (let’s call him), the American at the US mission who covered Iraq, had seen the same intelligence information that I had, such as data about the French position at the Security Council when it convened to discuss our topic later that day. Knowing this, we could coordinate our positions over the ‘phone without needing to reveal whence we had obtained the information. The intelligence gave us considerable diplomatic advantage, but it also brought us close together.

There was also an interesting side effect which was that when I met Iraqi diplomats (I worked in only one of two British missions authorised to speak to Iraqis, with whom we then had no formal diplomatic relations), I knew that every word that the Iraqi mission reported to Baghdad about the meeting would be read by the Americans. So I was very, very careful to stick closely to the official line. If I strayed from it, I knew that within hours the State Department would have complained - loudly - to the British embassy in Washington who would then call me to remonstrate. My card would then be marked.

There was then and remains now an expectation, not unjustified, that the UK will go along with more or less anything the US chooses. ‘What is the US doing?’ is a default British instinct in all matters of foreign and defence policy. The US is the pole around which the UK rotates. It is not so much a ‘poodle’ relationship, much as I am fond of the term. Some British officials self-regardingly like to see the UK as a wily ‘Athens’ that whispers in the ear of the brutish and by implication stupider American ‘Rome’. But in fact the relationship is more child-like, that the child may roam but it is always aware of its parent’s location and wishes. It is a psychological habit as much as a practical dependence.

What People are getting wrong

For the defence and security establishment, the UK’s nuclear deterrent is the ‘crown jewels’ of Britain’s security. They call it ‘independent’. It only lives up to this claim in that, in theory at least, the UK could launch its nuclear missiles of its own volition. That is the limit of its independence, and it’s not negligible. But in all other ways that matter, it is not. The Trident D5 missile, which comprises the UK’s sea-based deterrent, is manufactured and maintained by the US. British Trident missiles are regularly shipped to the US where they join a common US-British ‘pool’ of missiles from which both countries draw. In a telling sign of dependence, a US naval officer supervises all British tests of the missile: they command the submarine - and British officers and sailors, including the captain - launching the missile. The UK plans to continue to use Trident for decades to come.

This dependence dates back to the 1950s when the UK agreed a cooperation pact with the US that established this extraordinarily close cooperation over the core nuclear deterrent, a relationship that is unparalleled and thus perhaps qualifying for the term ‘special’. This is not the limit of their nuclear cooperation. As I noted in a recent post, the UK, little noticed, recently announced that it would purchase an additional 12 F-35 attack aircraft to carry so-called ‘tactical’ nuclear bombs, the B-61 which is also American-made and, in this case, will be stored and controlled by the US. This capability will not in any way be ‘independent’. (It is also a significant addition to nuclear forces stationed in the UK.) In name, the weapons will join NATO’s own nuclear forces. But in practice, the US decides whether these bombs will be used, and the UK must also agree to launch the bombers. In this way, this capability is even less independent than Trident and, by the tactical nature of the bombs, is more likely to be used than strategic weapons, thus giving the US more decision-making power on the nuclear escalation ladder, where tactical use may incrementally lead to strategic use (a sequencing that is intrinsic to NATO nuclear doctrine).

In conventional arms too, the UK is highly dependent on the US. The aircraft that will comprise the large bulk of the RAF’s attack capabilities for decades to come is the American F-35, of which the UK, like most NATO countries with the exception of France, is buying hundreds. This systems of this highly sophisticated aircraft use many millions of lines of computer code which is regularly updated by the US manufacturer, much in the way you might update the software on your PC or Mac. It is rumoured that this reliance gives the US the opportunity to install a ‘kill code’ into the F-35s if it wishes to disable them. Obviously, this has been strenuously denied, but it does not on the face of it seem totally implausible given the reality that this aircraft is completely run by computer, from moving its control surfaces (ailerons, tailfins etc) to controlling what the pilot can see (the million-dollar pilot’s helmet is equipped with a screen that gives the pilot 360-degree vision, including beneath the aircraft).

This dependence on US intelligence and weapons, including Britain’s nuclear deterrent, is understood across the British government and defence establishment (it may not be so well understood by the public). There has been no significant policy effort to reduce that dependence. It would take many decades and huge expense to replace the American capabilities upon which the UK relies. In the case of the nuclear deterrent and intelligence capability, it’s arguable whether the UK would ever be capable of replacing them, given the massive costs involved. As a result, the UK is very highly incentivised to echo American foreign policy decisions, in almost every realm but is also extraordinarily vulnerable to the whims of the White House.

What to watch

The Iran conflict may pass and, with its end, Trump’s hostility to Europe may also be forgotten (he seems to have a goldfish memory, though not, perhaps, when it comes to revenge). It may instead endure, and his antagonism only intensifies and is increasingly reciprocated as the costs to the rest of the world mount. The situation is more or less entirely unpredictable. As of today, continuation of the war seems the safest bet.

As for the relationship with the UK, I think something has been broken, forever. Alignment with the US was a deep-seated and almost unconscious assumption of Britain’s security and foreign policy for many decades. No more. Trump may go but the Brits, like the rest of NATO, will be aware that his like may return: Vance’s toxic behaviour, from his repulsive treatment of Zelensky to his antagonistic speech in Munich, reinforces this anxiety. It must be understood that Trump represents a deep shift in American politics and culture. He may have helped exacerbate the trend, but he is above all a manifestation of it rather than the sole cause of it. This shift was evident before Trump showed up. There will be no return to the status quo ante.

The deeper forces

The UK’s subservience to US policy is particularly obvious in the Middle East, where the UK helped Israel during its genocide in Gaza both with weapons supplies (in fact of F-35 parts, some of which the UK manufactures) and military intelligence (an RAF aircraft orbited over Gaza until the very end of Israel’s assault). Its acquiescence, in all the practical terms that actually matter, in Israel’s programme of settler occupation in the West Bank and Jerusalem also closely tallies that of the US (though US policy has now transformed to active support of Israel’s territorial expansion, in Lebanon and Syria now as well as Palestine). Likewise, its purely rhetorical and hypocritical references to international law.

The Iraq War of 2003 is perhaps the most salient example from recent history, where the UK collaborated with the US in a ‘war of choice’ to which there were plausible alternatives and which was justified by lies. The times when American policy has been swayed by the UK or the Europeans are few - Kosovo in 1999 and Libya in 2011 - and in both cases the ‘western’ intervention was ultimately decided, led and dominated by the US.

This is why today’s breach over the attack on Iran is so unusual. It carries consequences both good and bad.

One immediate and bad consequence is that any chance of influencing the maniac in the White House has presumably now evaporated. This cannot be good either in Iran or Ukraine or perhaps even Greenland. In Iran, I think there is now a not-negligible risk that Trump may use nuclear weapons in his boiling frustration to get Iran to capitulate, thus to grant him ‘victory’. He has talked loosely about using nuclear weapons in the past. His latest social media posts suggest a worrying lack of mental balance. Whatever we think about Starmer or the cringingly unctuous Rutte, we need all the restraint upon Trump that can be mustered. If Trump does use a nuclear weapon, it will then be much likelier that Putin will use one in Ukraine (or, for that matter, China on Taiwan). The taboo on the use of nuclear weapons will have been broken forever. The consequences are horrifying.

Putin will be emboldened in other areas too. Given the degraded state of Russia’s army, it seems unlikely that he will attack other neighbouring states, such as the Baltics, at least for now. But he will see the opportunity in Trump’s rejection of his erstwhile allies in Europe and his wavering commitment to NATO’s guarantee of mutual defence. He may wish to grab that opportunity before Trump departs the White House. That said, even without the US, the Europeans can muster many hundreds of thousands of troops, even before the defence build-up in which they are now belatedly engaged, prompted by Trump. Even Putin may not wish Europe-wide war. But thanks to Trump, this risk is already present and intensifying.

Longer term, it is far better for the UK, as for the rest of Europe, to be unshackled from its dependence upon the US. In return, it will enjoy, at last, independence in its foreign policy. This does not mean it cannot be aligned with the US: there may be many areas where it may choose to be. But at least it will be a choice, not an unavoidable obligation. It may (may) for instance free the Europeans to do what needs to be done on Israel/Palestine, where the only policy solution to Israel’s unrestrained violence and expansionism is sanctions.

More broadly, it would be great if the UK could move beyond the simplistic binary choice of the US or ‘Europe’ that is now yet again being debated as the relationship with the US collapses. Of course, it makes much sense for the UK to rejoin the EU and strengthen its defence relationships with the continent. But it is surely now time for some calculated imagination in designing a future British foreign policy. How precisely should democracy and human rights be advanced - the ultimate guarantors of our and others’ security and global peace? How do we get past the invidious choices between supporting repressive regimes, like Egypt or Saudi Arabia, and regional stability in the Middle East, or elsewhere? How do we stop nuclear weapons proliferation, the threat of AI etc etc? It’s a long list of issues, notable for how little of it is today being addressed or even debated as we deal with the day-by-day nightmare of Trump.

More deeply still, what does it even mean to be a ‘nation state’ in a world shaped by unprecedented mass migration, porous borders, racial heterogeneity at home and cultural homogeneity in the world, while we all face global, shared problems, above all climate warming? In every policy realm (and indeed in geographic terms too), the division of the world into arbitrarily-created units called states and the inscription of lines on a map called borders seem to exacerbate not resolve problems, not least by creating a mental framework of competition and amoral national self-interest, when such a framing serves the autocratic and nationalist, and when every one of our problems is, in reality, indivisibly shared and can only be addressed by international cooperation of which we need much, much more.

With the weakening of the transatlantic alliance, American influence and power will also surely decline, just as the relationship with the UK may never fully recover. In this way, Trump has accelerated the relative diminution of American power that was already underway thanks to the rise of China and others. It’s genuinely hard to say what that may mean long term. The kind of shameless and lawless aggression in the Middle East of the attack on Iran and the Iraq War, which in turn feeds the demon of terrorism thus creating a self-perpetuating cycle, will, one hopes, diminish along with America’s ability to recruit allies to such destructive causes. It is not only in British minds that US support for Israel’s genocide, more under a Democrat president than Republican, as well as this needless war, will severely undermine the reputation and thus sway of the US. The ‘Ugly American’ of the Vietnam era, and his brazen but self-righteous imperialism, is paraded today with utter shamelessness, but he was always there. Before Hegseth there was Blinken, and before him, Rumsfeld. Ask the Palestinians what difference they see between them.

For now, the UK, like many countries with perhaps the exception of China, is living through a nightmare, which is of course so much worse if you are Iranian, Lebanese or Palestinian or Ukrainian, for that matter. A bomb has detonated in the middle of Britain’s foreign policy calculations, in almost every sphere, as it has in everyone’s. But it would be wise to think about the world Trump is now making in the longer term, a world without the psychic domination of America’s reputation as the world’s ‘policeman’ or Europe’s ‘indispensable ally’. No one, ultimately, is indispensable. And that absence, for some still unthinkable, is rapidly becoming reality and, with it, comes possibility.

That is, if we get to the longer term.

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Those in Britain may be familiar with the extraordinary story of the ‘spycops’, policemen who assumed false identities in order to form sexual and romantic relationships with women, with the purpose of spying on them and the organisations they were part of. Some married their victims; at least four had children with them - then abandoned them and the child. This continued for many years and is only now being fully investigated by a public inquiry.

The story itself is shocking enough. This was essentially rape by the state. But the practice also tells a deeper story of how states think and behave and the impunity of those who work for the state.

This specific practice may have been brought to an end (we hope) but the ideology behind it continues.

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The Event

There has been a long-running public inquiry into the so-called ‘spycops’ scandal. The inquiry’s report was due to be published over three years ago. It is not now expected until later this year, though some of the crimes it is investigating took place decades ago (1968!).

The inquiry barely figures in the public debate, it will almost certainly result in no real accountability i.e. punishment for those responsible. The public inquiry is the method frequently chosen by the state to investigate its own failings and crimes, such as the Grenfell disaster (which I wrote about) and the Iraq War. Despite the manifest inadequacies of such inquiries, above all their failure to prosecute the responsible, this mechanism of supposed ‘accountability’ remains largely unquestioned in the public debate. Indeed, the demand for a public inquiry is often the sole public and political response to a scandal, whether of ‘grooming gangs’ or illegal wars.

In a nutshell, for decades the Metropolitan Police (London’s police force) ran an operation under which policemen masqueraded as activists and members of organisations the state wanted to spy on. Some formed sexual and romantic relationships with unwitting female members of such organisations. Some of these relationships endured for many years, sometimes resulting in marriage and children. The women victims often found out about the deception only years afterwards. Many suffered profound trauma including an inability to form other relationships.

The groups chosen by the police to spy on were mostly environmental groups, some anarchists, some simply ‘left-wing’ (including ‘radical’ bookshops), some animal rights campaigners and trades unions. Notably, none was violent, though in some cases (those known so far) the police spy encouraged other activists to perform violent acts (they refused). None was proscribed i.e. banned; the worst illegality performed by any of the groups was vandalism, criminal damage, public nuisance etc.. Most were simply peaceful protestors and campaigners. Yet they were deemed to be a sufficient ‘threat’ to the state to warrant this incredibly intrusive - and abusive - form of surveillance. As many as a thousand such groups were subject to this abuse, though no full list has been published.

Inside the System

The ‘spycops’ evidence, which has yet fully to emerge, of course reveals a lot about the prejudices and beliefs of the state at that time. This is the mental posture of what some might call ‘the deep state’ - the officials, bureaucrats and institutions that constitute the state: what they think. It is a mindset of the state.

Interestingly, it may not necessarily be the mindset of individual officials, policemen etc.. When you put people in institutions, their mindset is transformed to that of the institution. This happened to me when I worked in government. You start to think like the state. As I have written in my books, the ‘I’ becomes ‘we’, while your individual morality is discarded1. Above all, you place the security and perpetuation of the state as paramount concerns, just as the CEO and staff of Natwest put the perpetuation of Natwest as their highest priority.

But within states, this institutionalised thinking goes a step further. By and large, Natwest employees do not think breaking the law is an option. In the state, officials do not think that. In particular in matters of ‘security’ and its own self-interest, the state often places itself above the law; indeed it is in such cases sometimes the law itself. Its choice to abide by the law or not is often arbitrary. Of course, representatives of the state say they respect the law, but the evidence of only very recent history is that they do not.

This mindset can lead to behaviours like ‘spycops’ but this is not the only example. Recently, it was revealed - again by a very belated public inquiry - that the British government had for many years ‘run’ an agent who was a member of the IRA in Northern Ireland. This spy, codenamed ‘Stakeknife’, led a punishment squad inside the IRA which tortured and murdered dozens of supposed informers. It was judged in the ‘security services’ (of whom no names were ever revealed) that these deaths were necessary for the continued access to intelligence provided by ‘Stakeknife’. The agent himself, Freddie Scappaticci, is thought directly responsible for as many as eighteen murders. The content of the intelligence he allegedly provided was never revealed, including at the public inquiry, so no one could assess the validity of the official justification. And, needless to say, no prosecutions of those responsible resulted. ‘Stakeknife’ himself died some years ago. As usual, the inquiry’s report into this long-running scandal made the news for one day.

What Everyone is getting wrong

So this is what we can expect when the inquiry into ‘spycops’ finally publishes its report: there will be the usual bromides from the police, the home secretary and the prime minister that this was an awful, unforgivable scandal; lessons will be learned; it will never be allowed to happen again etc. etc.. From the press coverage and public debate, it appears that most people will accept this paltry outcome.

But they would be mistaken. For while the specific practices that comprised ‘spycops’ may have been terminated, the mindset that led to it - the state mindset - endures. Another way of describing it, using systems thinking, is that the system from which this event emerged remains unchanged. There will probably not be another ‘spycops’. But there will be something like it. The underlying conditions that produced it remain in place. It’s pretty elementary: unless you change the system, the outcomes will remain the same.

What to Watch for

Look out for the usual symbolic, ‘performative’ behaviours when the inquiry report is released. Know that it is highly unlikely that any of those making the statements of acknowledgement or promises of reform will have actually read the inquiry report. It is also highly unlikely that the report will lead to specific policy changes. I remember that after the Chilcot Report into the Iraq War (to which I testified), I asked a former colleague who was then working in the Cabinet Office (one of the most important bits of government) whether she had seen any instruction or advice to civil servants relaying the ‘lessons’ of the inquiry - perhaps a memo saying ‘don’t launch illegal wars’ or ‘don’t tell lies about wars’. She had not. Thus the true soporific purpose of such inquiries is revealed, again.

What you won’t see is that the mindset of the state lives on, incarnated in the heads of civil servants, ministers and the police. But you may be able to spot some signs of this otherwise subterranean force. Recent examples include the proscription of Palestine Action, a group that protests Israel’s violent occupation of Palestine, meaning that mere membership of this group, whose main activity is direct action against property not people, can result in imprisonment for as much as fourteen years. Even expressing support for this group can attract the same sentence. Challenged on this proscription, the Home Secretary said that there were things about the group that the government knew but could not reveal. We are left to guess that these secret things are bad: the Home Secretary’s clear intent is to imply that the group is violent. As ever, the state pretends to know best. If ever its secret evidence about Palestine Action is revealed, perhaps many years hence, I would bet my last dollar that it did not in any way warrant the ‘terrorist’ designation.

Another example is the appalling and only recent revelation that the police - the ‘Met’ again - spied on the family of Stephen Lawrence, a schoolboy who was murdered by racist thugs in South London, because the family was protesting that the police had failed in finding and prosecuting those guilty of the murder (which was demonstrably true). You cannot ask for a clearer example of the state acting to protect not the public but itself. Its instinct and requirement for its own preservation is, as for all institutions, primary. (In this case, another systemic issue was also at play, namely the institutional racism of the Met.)

The Deeper Current

All of these reprehensible actions are presented as uniquely egregious, one-offs, perhaps the result of a few ‘bad apples’ and thus correctable, including by the mechanism of the public inquiry.

But taken together, it’s all too clear that these crimes by the state - for that is what they are - are systemic. They arise from the system of the state, in particular two connected aspects.

First, the beliefs that animate the system. We might envision the state as a series of imposing buildings lining Whitehall or Scotland Yard, police cars or prisons. But in fact it is composed of people and, in turn, composed of what these people think and do. As I directly experienced, when you work for the state, you are encouraged by the implicit force of culture and learned behaviour to believe that the state is required to do things that ordinary people do not or cannot do. Sometimes those things might be questionable or downright illegal.

But what the state does - everything it does - is necessary and justifiable by the logic of the state which, importantly, is not necessarily the safety of the population, even if this might be claimed to be its purpose, but the perpetuation of itself (for another invariable truth of organisations is that their purpose is not as they claim it to be, but is in fact their own survival). The evidence for what might seem an extravagant claim is that the state is more than ready to sacrifice the lives, bodies and freedoms of its own citizens to fulfil its purposes.

Further evidence can be found in the impunity of the state. The ‘spycops’ themselves, the policemen who lied to and manipulated their female victims, including to have sex with them, will not be prosecuted. This is a consistent pattern. It is extremely unusual for the individual perpetrators of state-ordained crimes to be held personally accountable. The trial of a British paratrooper accused of involvement in the infamous 1972 ‘Bloody Sunday’ massacre of 14 people in Northern Ireland recently collapsed, meaning that not a single soldier, from those who pulled the trigger to those who gave the orders, has been held responsible for the murders though there were scores of witnesses to the killings, including many soldiers, civilians and press (it was also filmed).

Secondly, the powers of the system. Of course, there are large portions of government that operate in secrecy, and not only the security services, military or police, the primary enforcers of state power. Secrecy is the default in government: it does not say what it’s doing unless it is required to. Secrecy is a form of lying, of not telling the truth. It denies accountability; it prevents basic knowledge of what the state is doing. The permission granted by secrecy is an insidious force wherever it is at play. It allows the state to do all sorts of things that are not permitted under normal, individual morality, including, of course, killing people either in war or, in some countries, executing them as punishment or, in the case of ‘Stakeknife’, allowing them to be killed. If the state routinely and as a matter of institutional practice lies about itself, we can hardly be surprised when the mendacity and concealment of its conduct in specific or criminal cases is finally brought to light.

The state’s secrecy goes beyond just not telling the truth. It actively prosecutes and punishes those who attempt to tell the truth about the state. Several years ago, the Official Secrets Act was significantly tightened to make it illegal for an official to reveal any information that they had acquired in their government work (previously it was information that could be proven to harm national security). The current government has not shown any inclination to reverse this draconian step. In fact, no one even mentions it. It won’t be reversed, because it suits the state, regardless of its political complexion. One golden rule to keep in mind: states always seek to accrete power and, once acquired, will never willingly relinquish it. I was, by the way, threatened with prosecution under the Official Secrets Act when I resigned over the Iraq War, and had to go to extraordinary lengths to get my testimony about the lies preceding the war published without being prosecuted.

Paradoxically enough, the British government itself confirmed the veracity of this claim, in a rather surprising way. It recently proposed a law that requires civil servants to tell the truth (a ‘duty of candour’) when requested by a public inquiry (it’s called the ‘Hillsborough Law’). In other words, the state wants a law telling itself to tell the truth. There could be no clearer evidence of the practice of government not telling the truth. Notably, the ‘security services’ are reported to be opposed to the proposed law. (The proposed law also unwittingly reveals the true power of public inquiries i.e. not much).

It’s impossible to say what the next ‘spycops’ scandal will be. My instinct is that the government no longer needs to seek out ‘humint’ or human intelligence, such as that coercively gathered by the lying policemen, when electronic intelligence is now so easily available from our phones and communications. As I discussed in this post, there are only the broadest and vaguest of restrictions on such intrusion by the government and it seems more or less impossible to find out about any breaches of these limits, unless there is a brave Edward Snowden-type whistleblower who is prepared to risk their own prosecution to get the truth out. In a case bearing some similarities to ‘spycops’, a group of activists from ‘Just Stop Oil’ were prosecuted (and severely sentenced) for planning a non-violent blockade of a motorway. They were caught by secret monitoring of their Zoom call where they discussed the action.

While we cannot tell which perhaps illegal or certainly immoral action the government will undertake to destroy any threat to itself, that there will be such action, we can be certain. The mindset has not changed. It is not a matter of rotten ‘bad apple’ individuals; it is baked into the very system.

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Trump is now saying that negotiations are taking place with ‘top’ Iranians about ending the war. The Iranians, including the individual - Parliamentary Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf - with whom the US is reported to be in contact, deny that there are any such negotiations. All that has happened, they say, is that proposals have been exchanged through a third party - and they don’t agree with these proposals.

It might be helpful to delineate what is and what is not an actual negotiation in diplomacy. As usual with words, much is open to interpretation and no definition should be taken as definitive. For the diplomat uttering a word, Humpty Dumpty rules: ‘a word means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less’ but in fact the post-structuralist is more correct: a word means what the reader or hearer i.e. the other side believes it to mean. There is a lot of scope of course for misunderstanding in the space between these interpretations.

Here’s a not comprehensive list of how diplomatic talking/negotiating etc might be defined, and is generally accepted in diplomacy, in rough order of significance.

‘Track II’ negotiations - this is when third parties, not part of governments, from the adversaries talk informally, sometimes secretly and without commitment. It’s often a way of preparing the ground for more formal government-to-government exchanges. The most famous example is the informal talks, convened by Norwegian academics, between Israelis and Palestinians that led to the ‘Oslo agreement’. There are scores of NGOs that try to set up ‘track II’ negotiations and it’s a very appealing model in situations of intractable or prolonged conflict. But precisely because it does not involve the parties actually doing the fighting, namely the governments or leaders of the guerrilla movements, this channel is often unsuccessful. It’s easy to get such processes going (everyone likes a trip to an expensive hotel in Geneva), but it’s very hard to get them to ‘stick’. Sometimes, similar processes, which involve some limited, informal presence of the actual adversaries (perhaps as an observer), are called Track 1 and a half. This is very confusing and is a terminology only understood by mediation NGOs of which there are probably too many, despite the blessings attached to ‘peacemakers’. Too many because they can actually crowd one another out or create multiple channels of communication which causes confusion. I’ve seen this happen often. In Kosovo, we in the UN had to convene a ‘deconfliction’ conference of mediation NGOs as there were so many in that tiny country trying to get Kosovo-Albanians and Serbs to talk to one another (which they usually did anyway, they just didn’t agree).

Unofficial/informal/secret negotiation between governments - when a negotiation is not a ‘negotiation’ at all, but is in fact real negotiation. Often conducted by spies/spooks/intelligence agents, these are talks between adversaries who are not officially permitted to meet at all, such as the IRA and British government or Israel and Hamas. It’s a convention among states that these types of representatives can talk to one another in this way and that’s a good thing, as talking is always better than not talking. This channel is often openly admitted even if such talks are ‘unofficial’ or technically illegal, for spies are allowed to do things that ordinary diplomats are not, including talking to ‘terrorists’. You’d be surprised how much of such talks go on. Such informal contacts are often vital ways to either get to an agreement or prepare the ground for more ‘official’ negotiations, including answering the question of whether more formal talks are worthwhile at all (for actually having formal talks is an important diplomatic signal in itself that a) you recognise the other party in some formal-ish way (even if this does not constitute, in relevant examples (say Kosovo/Serbia talks, formal ‘recognition’ of a state) and b) that you consider them - and not someone else - to have the authority to make agreements and c) that you think an agreement is at least possible).

Exchanging bits of paper, whether proposals, draft agreements or abusive notes, exchanged perhaps through a third party (apparently Pakistan may be playing this role between Iran and the US): this is ‘official’ or ‘formal’ communication but it is not negotiation. There is an exchange, but it is not discussion. The ‘to and fro’ is very limited. Communication, if that is what is going on between the US and Iran, is of course better than nothing but it is not nearly as good as proper negotiation. Such paper exchanges leave ample room for misunderstanding. Even face to face talks can lead to misunderstanding especially when they involve those, often Americans I’m sorry to say, who use expressions that no one but they understand. Madeleine Albright once announced at the Rambouillet talks about Kosovo that it was ‘time for Serbia to wake up and smell the coffee’. I’ve lived in America for 17 years and am married to an American and I still don’t know what this means.

‘Shuttle’ diplomacy - this is negotiation by proxy. A diplomat or individual from a third and perhaps ‘neutral’ country ‘shuttles’ i.e. travels to and fro between the adversaries carrying messages from one side to the other. Perhaps he/she might have drafted their own proposal for agreement and amends it to reflect the adversaries’ needs and wishes as the meetings progress. Of course, this leaves all kinds of scope for skulduggery and dishonesty, including by the mediator, including pretending that one side has agreed a proposition when they haven’t in order to move the process forward (though this might be a legitimate case of ‘white lies’).

Proximity talks - this is when the two parties cannot stand each other or are not permitted to sit in the same room (for instance because one side has designated the other as ‘terrorists’). Instead, they occupy adjacent rooms, located in a fancy hotel situated in the territory of a third party (eg Qatar or Norway), studiously ignoring each other when they go to the loo (or not). A mediator shuttles between the two rooms, swapping proposals and responses. While imperfect as communication, this does constitute ‘negotiations’.

Face-to-face negotiations - the best kind of discussion, where parties are sitting across a table from one another or, even better, spread across an array of comfy chairs, directly talking to one another, with nice food on hand (which might later be removed in order to pressurize the parties to agree; turning the heating or A/C down or up may have the same effect). This format allows for full interaction both by words and by body language. The best kind of such negotiations are when the ‘deciders’ are at the table, and can agree concessions immediately or strike immediate deals. But there are some important advantages to having representatives of the deciders and not the deciders themselves at the table. The geographic gap between negotiator and decider allows a bit of time for contemplation/discussion/rows (for the hardest negotiation is often with your own side, not your enemy) and also allows the negotiator a bit of leeway to allow his/her side to look at proposals that may lie beyond his/her negotiating mandate ie what he or she is permitted to accept. When I was negotiating resolutions at the UN for the Brits, that gap between me and my bosses in London was often crucial in allowing me to accept a proposal from the other side provisionally and with conditions (namely that it was not agreed), then privately argue for it with London, usually on the grounds (not always honest on my part) that it was the ‘only’ way to get agreement. It helped that our negotiations in New York often went late into the evening and London had a whole morning to consider a proposal before we resumed discussions, five hours after London. An efficient foreign ministry can get a lot done in five hours.

I’ve done many diplomatic negotiations, both for the Brits and for several other countries and ‘non-state’ actors (resistance movements etc), sometimes - amusingly - on the opposite side of the table to the Brits, and unfortunately negotiators often forget the most obvious rules, in particular speaking slowly and clearly, not least because English is often not the first language of those at the table, repeating yourself and explaining, over and over again, exactly what you mean. I always recommend those I am advising, for instance, to hand over bits of paper that you have drafted outlining and explaining your proposal in your words (ie the Humpty Dumpty approach). This means that the often-junior official recording the negotiation cannot misreport what you’ve said to his/her authorities, which I’m afraid often happens, sometimes because the notetaker was drinking their coffee or whatsapping when your side said something important, lost their pen, failed to listen or was daydreaming etc. A lot of senior diplomats or statesmen etc, ambassadors etc, are often very lazy. A few weeks ago, an important political agreement I know of in Syria failed to progress because no one in the room bothered accurately to record it so, in effect, it didn’t happen. Fighting ensued.

On the evidence of the Gaza plan that the Americans got Israel to accept, I’m worried that the Witkoff/Kushner team is not good at being clear (though to be fair there are sometimes advantages to not being clear - as long as you are deliberately not being clear). Being nice also matters.

Anyway, I hope that whatever Trump is doing with the Iranians it convinces him - and them - to stop fighting soon.

And, if interested, you can obtain my two-page short guide to negotiation at my website carneross.com where I will also soon be posting a video course on negotiation.

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The US and Israeli attacks on Iran are only possible because of their vast military superiority. Israeli military power — both its scale and technology — is itself a function of US power.

The United States can strike any point on Earth within hours, with negligible risk to its own forces. It can deploy overwhelming air power in any region. This awesome power alone helps explain the propensity to use force: the more dominant a state’s military power, the lower the perceived cost of using it — and the more likely it is to be used.

But there’s something more. This military power often fails to translate into political success. Yet the US persists in choosing this tool. Why? The reasons are often obscure.

The Event

US and Israeli military dominance over Iran is extraordinary. Within a few days, these countries had established total air superiority, destroying any meaningful resistance to their air attacks. The scale of the attacks is also remarkable.

Iran is a weak opponent, already in economic disarray thanks to sanctions and with an almost non-existent air force and a limited navy, though it does possess large stocks of domestically-manufactured ballistic missiles and drones. Were the US to take on a stronger opponent, in particular China, the results would look very different. Indeed, some modelling suggests that the US would lose such a confrontation.

Meanwhile, the Iran war may have made conflict with China more likely and undermined the defence of Ukraine, thereby helping spread and perpetuate war. According to The Economist, the Iran campaign has reduced America’s stocks of precision-guided missiles for the rest of the decade, thus altering China’s calculus of the potential success of an invasion of Taiwan. The profligate expenditure of air defence missiles against Iran’s thousands of cheap drones means fewer are available to defend Ukraine’s power stations and cities.

Inside the System

US military dominance (which in turn enables Israeli dominance) has two main components: scale and technology. The US spends roughly 3.5% of its GDP on the military — a smaller share than during the Cold War, but still translating into vastly greater absolute spending than anyone else: roughly 40% of global military expenditure.

This expenditure of nearly $1 trillion per year enables massive investment in technological advantage, including capabilities that we do not even know about (the US for instance has for several years deployed a reusable space ‘plane whose purpose remains totally unknown).

These two factors — scale and technology — have granted the US unprecedented capability, far outmatching any country in history. But the incredible extent of American capabilities may be under-appreciated.

The US can strike any point on Earth within hours, with pinpoint accuracy and with almost no fear of suffering loss - the only aircraft so far lost in the current campaign were shot down by ‘friendly fire’. The US air force can destroy most countries’ air defences within days, allowing it subsequently to bomb any target at will and repeatedly and with large volumes of munitions, as it and Israel are now doing in Iran. The only country which might withstand such attack is China, but its military capabilities are largely untested and its military personnel have little or no recent combat experience.

The US alone is able to project massive force globally through its eleven carrier battle groups, two of which are currently engaged in the bombing of Iran, each capable of launching fifty attack aircraft, themselves capable of scores of sorties every day: the equivalent of the air force of a medium-sized country (the next most capable country has one carrier battle group, carrying many fewer and less capable aircraft). The US can also deploy thousands of troops across great distances, thanks to unequalled and massive airlift capability and large landing ships carrying thousands of marines. It is reportedly considering despatching thousands of paratroops to capture Kharg Island, adjacent to Iran’s coast.

These capabilities are delivered at exceptionally low risk to US personnel, and as unmanned systems proliferate, that risk will decline further. In a conflict that has taken over 1500 Iranian lives, the US has so far lost 6 service members. Soon, manned American bombers will not need to risk entering enemy airspace at all — they will be accompanied by swarms of drones which will fly ahead to attack, coordinated by AI. The same capacity is under development for ground and naval forces. Such vehicles are already in use in Ukraine.

Inevitably, awareness of these capabilities suffuses the US military and political system. The impression created is of overwhelming power that can be used with limited domestic consequence. The massive financial costs are invisible to the taxpayer. All service personnel are now volunteers rather than conscripts — a major difference from Vietnam, when conscription drove opposition to the war. Moreover, recruits are disproportionately drawn from poorer backgrounds, thereby reducing their political power and ability to stop wars.

What Everyone Is Getting Wrong

But despite this extraordinary investment, there is little correlation between military superiority and political success. The obvious example is Afghanistan, where the US deployed overwhelming force for nearly two decades at a cost of over $1 trillion — and was ultimately defeated.

Yet American military interventions persist. The question is why.

One answer lies in the sheer weight and momentum of the military itself. Military institutions possess intelligence resources, analytical capacity and organisational power far beyond other parts of government; in any crisis, they are by far the dominant institutional actor, creating what might be called an ‘epistemological presence’: it defines the terms of debate and the space of possible action. As I noted in last week’s post, government itself embodies a consciousness of military possibility that is barely visible from the outside. Government is logistically and psychologically militarised in a way that the non-governmental realm simply is not.

When policy choices are proposed to leaders, the military options are neatly and precisely defined – to attack target X with assets Y, leading to outcome Z - in contrast to the inevitable messiness and uncertainty of political or diplomatic avenues, which depend on unpredictable humans rather than the predictable, known capabilities of missiles or bombers. This pretence of tidy choices and outcomes is of course the very opposite of what really happens.

This inherent bias is now exacerbated by the incredible capabilities of modern intelligence gathering where vast amounts of electronic data can be integrated in real time into what appears to be a comprehensive depiction of reality, a capability which now also encompasses prediction - the AI-generated assessment of the enemy’s likely actions.

This integration capability is provided by Palantir, whose rapid growth, rocketing share price and enormous profits point to the force of the political economy of warmaking. Defence companies distribute production across congressional districts, creating strong political incentives to sustain spending. One example: the US airforce has repeatedly said it doesn’t need or want the A-10 attack aircraft, a sixty-year-old design. But the A-10 continues to be funded and deployed, including today in the Gulf, because of congressional pressure.

As in all capitalist environments, defence companies are required to maximise profit or risk collapse or takeover (these profits also permit the enormous pay packets of senior executives). But the defence sector is effectively a semi-nationalised industry, whose profits are protected in ‘cost plus’ contracts, de facto monopoly supply (for instance of ships) and the self-dealing of the Pentagon officials and ex-officers who decide weapons purchases then pass through the ‘revolving door’ into well paid industry positions. The losses of the industry, and waste of ill designed projects (of which there are many), are of course borne by the taxpayer. The ‘military industrial complex’, of which Eisenhower first warned, remains in full operation.

A further factor is national myth. Since the Second World War, US interventions have often if not always been framed as the defence of democracy. This narrative is reinforced through politics, education and culture from Band of Brothers to Star Wars. It creates a self-image of the US as the sole and indispensable global guardian of order and liberty, whatever the actual consequences - or true motives - of its military campaigns.

These factors are reinforced by the aesthetics of modern warfare. The public sees only the video of the crosshairs, the explosion, the apparent precision. The human consequences remain largely invisible. This sustains the illusion of low-cost, controlled violence. Of the hundreds of thousands of deaths following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, how many did you actually witness, outside of Hollywood depictions (American Sniper, The Hurt Locker)? The only actual killings I observed were those shown in the ‘collateral murder’ video released by Wikileaks. The gap between the reality - of human blood, dismemberment and pain - and perception is profound.

Semantics as ever applies in parallel to semiotics. Just as the term ‘collateral damage’ became a euphemism for civilian death, today the word ‘kinetic’ is often used by experts and commentators to indicate the use of violence itself - bombs, bullets, missiles. The reality of war is again obscured.

So policymakers come to believe that force can be applied quickly, cheaply and effectively, while the public is kept ignorant of war’s true costs and consequences. Little wonder that it becomes the default option rather than the last resort.

The Deeper Current

The propensity to war is exacerbated by several further, concealed factors.

First, it is far easier for a president or prime minister to launch a war than it is to carry out complex domestic policy, say healthcare reform or lowering the cost of living. Launching a war is the sole prerogative of the executive - one man, one decision. The requirement for congressional approval has been ignored in the current case, as it has in many previous conflicts.

Secondly, the justification for war is often very vague, yet is unquestioned. Thanks to Trump’s bizarre and random utterances about US goals in Iran, for once the justification is coming under scrutiny. But very often it is not. The concept of “national security” is defined broadly enough to justify almost any intervention. With Iran, threats to US military bases in the region are framed as threats to US national security, despite those bases themselves being instruments of force projection. The US mainland has rarely been directly threatened, yet military action is justified in terms of distant or abstract risks.

As domestic support for Trump’s needless war crumbles, it is helpful to him that Iran is reported to have fired long range ballistic missiles at Diego Garcia. There is no independent verification of this attack - all the information, dutifully repeated in the media, originates from the government. Strikingly (so to speak), no missile reached its supposed target, thereby obviating the need for material evidence of such an attack.

There is also a circularity to the logic of ‘threat’ to the US or its ‘interests’. US military presence generates countervailing military build-ups, which are then used to justify further expansion. China’s growing capabilities, for instance, are in part a response to longstanding US military activity in its region, such as provocative naval patrols next to China’s maritime boundaries — capabilities which in turn are used as justification for further American spending. This cycle was very much in evidence during the Cold War when the US and Soviet Union engaged in an arms race of ever greater and eventually huge numbers of weapons, solely because of the perceived - and in fact vastly exaggerated - capability of the other. This appears to be happening again with China.

It helps that public and press allow themselves a kind of learned ignorance in these matters, above all that ‘security’ is the responsibility of the state and, most insidiously, that the state/government knows things that the rest of us do not or cannot know.

In the current case, Trump has claimed that Iran had not made sufficient concessions in talks about its nuclear program thus necessitating the war, but the vast majority of press commentators (with the noble exception of The Guardian’s Patrick Wintour) have chosen to ignore the clear evidence that this was not true, that in fact Iran had offered terms that arguably equalled or improved upon those agreed in the so-called JCPOA agreement, which the Obama administration and the P5 countries plus Germany negotiated with Iran in 2015. Iran’s most recent concessions reportedly included the offer that its infamous 440kg of enriched uranium be transported from Iran to safe storage in a neutral country. Instead, the media today report the possibility that the US may send in ground forces to ‘secure’ this stockpile, an extraordinarily difficult and risky venture as the uranium is not only dispersed but also apparently heavily guarded and buried beneath rubble deep inside a mountain that is impenetrable to even the largest bombs.

One counter to the state’s impulse toward war therefore is to become more literate in its language, systems and capabilities - ‘national security’, ‘kinetic’, but also the capabilities of the B-1 bombers now stationed in England (and the baseless claim by the government that these aircraft are used ‘defensively’), Iranian drones and, especially in this case, how to build nuclear bombs (something Steve Witkoff, Trump’s chief negotiator, seems not to know).

This information is now much easier to access. Military blogs are an excellent source of unfiltered, expert information. Simply put, you cannot understand geopolitics without understanding the military element, including the intrinsic factors that drive war itself.

Conclusion

The United States possesses a level of military power unprecedented in history. That power is not neutral. It shapes how problems are understood and what solutions are considered. It should be regarded as a decision-making factor and pervasive context in its own right.

Other subterranean intellectual and political biases - the structures, concepts, words and images - also reinforce the tendency to war. When force is readily available, appears low-cost, and is supported by powerful institutions and narratives, it becomes more likely to be used.

The result is not necessarily strategic success. As Afghanistan demonstrated, overwhelming military superiority does not guarantee political victory. But the easy availability of force — and the systems that sustain that availability — continue to drive its use.

Understanding this dynamic is essential. War is not only the product of threats or crises. It is also the product of systems — of incentives, capabilities and beliefs.

The structures of power that enable war also make it more likely.

The Event

American and Israeli bombing of Iran continues. The US alone claims to have hit well over five thousand targets; Israel, thousands more. The Iranian government reports that over 1300 civilians have been killed.

This is a war of choice. It did not have to happen. Yet even though the majority of voters in the US and Europe do not support the war, it continues, with no definite end in sight. The systems of democracy seem unable to restrain a bellicose and feckless presidency.

This tells us something important about how power actually works.

Who gave the government permission to wage war — to bomb, to kill? I do not recall giving my consent. So why?

Inside the System: how governments and institutions think

As a British diplomat, I was closely involved in several wars: the ejection of Iraq from Kuwait in 1991 (‘Desert Storm’), the bombing of Iraq in 1998 (‘Desert Fox’), the invasion of Afghanistan in 2002, the initiation of the ‘Global War on Terror’ in 2001, and the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. I was also peripherally involved in the Bosnian war of the early ‘nineties and the Kosovo war of 1999.

I wasn’t on the front lines. I never saw combat. But I was very much part of the machine inside government that conducts war. In 1991, as a junior official in the ‘political/military unit’ of the Foreign Office ‘Emergency Unit’, I wrote ‘lines to take’ for my ministers excusing the bombing of holy sites in Iraq. I analysed intelligence on Iraq’s weaponry, constructed soundbites about the threat from Scud ballistic missiles, and counted the troops and tanks in Iraq’s army. In 1998, I wrote the UK’s statement at the UN Security Council explaining how the Saddam regime’s failure to allow a few inspections for WMD gave the US and UK permission to conduct hundreds of airstrikes across Iraq. On 12 September 2001, I negotiated the UN Security Council resolution condemning the attacks of the day before, a resolution that began the institutional and legal construction of the ‘global war on terror’ that continues to this day. Before the invasion of Afghanistan, I delivered to Kofi Annan’s personal office — by hand — the formal notification, on headed paper, from the UK government justifying the military action as self-defence and therefore legal under the UN Charter.

When you join a government institution like the Foreign Office, though a civil ministry not the armed forces, you suddenly become much closer to war. As a government servant, you are not taught about war. Like many things in government, how you conduct yourself in war is taught through example, ‘learning by doing’ and breathing the air of government — witnessing how colleagues talk, how they write, how they think. The teaching is implicit, not explicit. Working in the diplomatic service is probably most closely related to being a soldier — or a monk: a close-knit community with clear if unstated rules of conduct and a rigid mental paradigm of how to think about the world.

An important element of that mental paradigm is the state’s right to wage war. This right is totally unquestioned within the government. No one says ‘who gave us permission to use military force, to drop bombs, fire missiles, kill other people?’. If you did utter such a question out loud, not only would others look at you oddly, you would receive a poor personnel report if not be immediately shuffled off to some unimportant desk. You would become a kind of internal ‘untouchable’. If you are ambitious, as I was, you very quickly realise that the route to advancement lies very much through not questioning such basic presumptions; instead, the opposite: you should act and talk as if you are steeped in these philosophies, understand them and are hard-headed and pragmatic — unemotional — about enacting them.

In a bunker underneath Whitehall, thousands of miles from the battlefield in Iraq or Kuwait, I was working on killing people, though I never considered it that way at the time. And 100% of those involved, from the registry clerks to the senior directors and under-secretaries, do not question it. At all. Ever. At its most extreme, most people do not question the state’s right to manufacture and deploy — and thus potentially use — weapons that have the capability to kill millions. On the face of it, this is very odd indeed.

What Everyone is Getting Wrong

I suspect that many members of the public assume that there is some kind of deep calculation and moral consideration that takes place inside government before launching wars. This presumably is one reason they do not question government’s right to wage war: that the government is competent, both morally and practically, to do so. I never saw such reflection in the government in any of the wars I was involved in. And the evidence suggests the very opposite is true. The investigation into the Iraq War of 2003, the Chilcot Inquiry, tells a story of serial incompetence, deficient preparation, miscalculation and, of course, lying.

My experience, including in the months that followed 9/11, is that governments, as in most things they do, are kind of swept along by events — the demands of allies, headlines in the press, political pressure, an inchoate ‘sense’ that something — anything — must be done. This is very much not a measured, cold-eyed, rational calculation of the pros and cons of military action, let alone a reckoning of the moral rights and wrongs of any such action. Governments don’t ‘do’ morals.

And today we have another example in Trump and Netanyahu’s feckless and ill-prepared war against Iran. It is now clear that Trump had not the slightest clue of why he launched this needless war. Netanyahu had more of a reason, but his motives one suspects have very little to do with the strategic need he claims. And as for moral calculation, of course there is not the smallest sign. Both leaders feel entitled to shed the blood of others, including their own citizens and hundreds of children (in Lebanon as well as Iran), if necessary in large quantities.

So, while the appalling irresponsibility of these men is rightly a focus of scrutiny, what goes unscrutinised and unquestioned is their right to take such action in the first place. In other words, the right of governments to wage war — and moreover to wage war without moral consideration. Both inside government and in the public realm, this right, and its intrinsic amorality, is simply assumed.

The Deeper Current: what are the forces and beliefs that shape this outcome?

There is of course an historical angle to all this. At some point, the state took to itself the right to kill. There is no precise origin point, of course, but that moment lies in the eras of kings and queens, emperors and pharaohs, hardly a recommendation of legitimacy. But does the history matter in any case? Does history confer legitimacy, particularly in such profound moral questions — namely the right to kill? Does the fact that we have inherited this situation make it right? Of course not.

The system of states is a state of affairs. It is a set of human relationships. It is a collection of lines on a map, most very arbitrarily drawn, most born in war, most settled by a balance of violence. It is, above all, a way of thinking about how to organise human affairs. And it is not, by this token, in any way fixed. It is not a given, yet we treat it as such.

One more often hears the ‘logical’ argument for the state’s right to use force: that the state guarantees its population security, if necessary by wielding violence. We can nevertheless question this supposed logic. If you define security in terms of the protection of human life, the state historically has not done a very good job — rather the contrary. Far more people have died at the hands of the state than of any other entity or actor.

Can the conduct of the state in wartime be constrained? Yes. Once states were permitted to do anything — kill, eviscerate, deny medical care, slaughter civilians. Now there are rules prohibiting such conduct: the Geneva Conventions. These rules are often violated, but they exist, and states feel compelled at least to pretend to respect them. 196 states have signed them.

How did those laws originate? One man, Henri Dunant, witnessed the aftermath of the Battle of Solferino in 1859 — thousands of wounded abandoned without care, dying in their own filth and blood. Horrified, he resolved to act. His efforts led, within a few years, to the creation of the Red Cross and the first Geneva Convention. In other words, a single individual challenged what had been assumed: that governments could wage war without restraint. That assumption did not survive.

Could the state’s right to kill be removed today? One conclusion we might draw from Dunant’s story is the importance of bearing witness. It was his witnessing of the horrors of Solferino, then his telling of those horrors1, that helped inspire the birth of the Geneva Conventions.

One reason the broader assumption of the right of governments to kill persists is that the consequences of violence remain too often invisible. There are very few images of the victims of the firebombing of Hamburg or Dresden, or Tokyo. Reporters were not allowed to visit Hiroshima immediately after the bomb. Governments and militaries have consistently restricted access to the scenes of their violence, whether in Gaza, Ukraine or elsewhere.

By contrast, one factor in reducing popular support in America for the Vietnam War was that journalists accompanied soldiers and witnessed their deaths in combat. The ubiquity of mobile phone video is beginning to erode governments’ ability to control the portrayal of war. But we are not yet at the point of full democratisation of the image of war. Established media still carries more authority than fragmented, easily dismissed footage from those on the ground.

For a long time, mainstream media has often chosen not to show the most disturbing images of war - the sorts of atrocities one can now see on social media: torture, executions, decapitations. This protects the viewer from horror — but it also protects the perpetrator from full accountability. Because we do not see the effects of violence, we do not grasp its full weight. We do not see the direct line from Trump’s decision to a dead child.

The powerful reaction to the attacks of 9/11 was shaped in part by the fact that the world watched them in real time. By contrast, much of the violence carried out by states remains unseen or only partially seen. The consequences are mediated, filtered, or obscured.

Seeing is emotional, visceral. Knowing is more rational, more abstract. And we know which produces the stronger response.

Even where images do circulate, they are often incomplete. The ‘gun camera’ view of war — the crosshairs, the explosion — has become ubiquitous. But it rarely shows what happens afterwards: the bodies, the injuries, the screams, the death: the human reality of the strike. The violence is visible; its consequences are not. This asymmetry serves the wielder of power.

Thus the moral reality of state violence is systematically obscured. And in the absence of that reality — fully seen, fully felt — the deeper assumption of the state’s right to wage war endures.

Conclusion

The assumption that governments have the right to wage war — to kill in our name — is so deeply embedded in politics and culture that it is rarely even noticed, let alone questioned. It is treated as natural, inevitable, part of the furniture of the world.

But it is not. It is a human construction: a set of ideas, habits and institutional practices that have been built over time, and sustained by repetition and belief. Like all such constructions, it depends on our continued - and silent - acquiescence.

As Gustav Landauer wrote:

“The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another… We are the State and we shall continue to be the State until we have created the institutions that form a real community.”

The history of war itself shows that what once seemed unquestionable can, in fact, be challenged. There was a time when governments believed they could conduct war without restraint. One man witnessed the reality of war, and confronted that assumption. Rules (and norms) changed. Limits were introduced. What had been taken for granted was, at least in part, dismantled.

The same may be true of the broader assumption that governments possess an inherent right to wage war. It persists not because it is morally settled or politically justified, but because it remains largely unexamined.

To question it is not to deny the existence of conflict or danger. It is simply to ask whether the power to kill on such a scale should be assumed, or instead subjected to the same scrutiny, doubt and moral inquiry that we would apply to any other profound human decision.

The structures of power that produce war - that kill small children, horribly - are not immutable. They are made. And therefore they can be unmade.

The US and Israel are subjecting Iran to systematic and heavy bombing.

The scale of the assault is striking. The United States is using roughly a third of its global fleet of attack aircraft, while Israel has committed almost its entire strike capability. Yet the strategy behind the campaign is oddly unclear.

Looking at the tactics and political context, several things about this war already stand out.

The Event

As ever in conflict, the military tactics tell their own story. This is a massive assault. Iran is getting a pounding but it is only a single country and Israel and the US may only be able to sustain the attacks for a few weeks. This is clearly devastating for Iran but would not be for much larger countries like, say, Russia or China, who are no doubt taking note. The attacks are also hugely - and unsustainably - expensive at nearly a billion dollars per day - and more if you include the cost of replacing Israeli munitions – doubtless in the tens of billions of dollars - a cost which, as usual, will fall to the American taxpayer.

The targets of the bombing seem to be very widespread. Nuclear sites, regime centres, anti-aircraft sites, missile launchers comprised the targets of the early waves of bombing. Israel is now also bombing Iran’s oil infrastructure - storage tanks, refineries etc. We don’t know everything they’re bombing, and we may never (neither Israel/US nor Iran have much incentive to publicise this). The breadth of this range of targets indicates that the objective goes well beyond ‘regime change’ or destroying Iran’s nuclear or missile capabilities. The aim instead seems to be to bring Iran to its knees and keep it there for a good while. This is not of course the declared objective, either of Israel or the US.

This strategy is indicative of the Israeli tactic tastelessly known as ‘mowing the grass’: the regular destruction of enemy capabilities to reduce and contain potential threats, whether from Hezbollah, Iran or Hamas. Iran’s economy is already very weak; destroying its oil infrastructure will weaken the country further. If a new regime were to come to power, it will have a very tough time; Iran’s people are condemned to long-term hardship come what may.

US defensive actions have included the interception of Iranian missiles targeting Iranian-Kurdish forces, suggesting that a US tactic is indeed to support ‘the Kurds’ against the regime, as has been speculated. However, the idea that Kurdish forces might be used to topple the regime is absurd. Those forces are tiny, perhaps 2-3,000 strong (Iran’s army and security forces, perhaps 1-2m). They are geographically isolated in a corner of northwest Iran and many are outside Iran, based in northern Iraq. This is nothing comparable to the 2003 invasion of Iraq when Kurdish ‘peshmerga’ forces were mobilised in the north to form a kind of second front against the Saddam regime, a strategy which had significant impact in the overall conflict (though in that case the Kurds were fighting alongside US special forces on the ground).

Furthermore, very recent history in Syria has savagely demonstrated that the US is an unreliable ally for the Kurds. Only a few weeks ago, the US abandoned the largely-Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), their former allies, in favour of the Sharaa government in Damascus, in spite of the cooperation between the US and SDF in the over 12-year war against ISIS, at the cost of the lives of more than 11,000 Kurdish and Arab SDF fighters.

US support for the Iranian-Kurds does however point to lack of planning in Washington for any kind of plausible ‘regime change’ strategy, a deficit for which there is plenty of other evidence.

Inside the System: what’s going on inside governments

US military attacks are usually long planned and allies are forewarned. This is not the case with Trump. While the US military build-up in the Gulf lasted for several weeks before the attacks took place, there was, it appears, little or no coordination with allies, except of course Israel. One way of looking at this war therefore is as US unilateralism: a US that does not seek and does not care about building alliances. This is very different from the 1991 or 2003 wars against Iraq when a great deal of diplomatic effort - both wooing and bullying - was expended by the US to recruit countries to join ‘the coalition’ even if sometimes their participation was merely nominal.

This also underlines again that the US cares little about international legitimacy and cannot be bothered even to pretend it does. George Bush offered specific and argued legal justification in 2003, even if the argument (invented by the UK in fact) was totally spurious. Today, the US has only loosely referred to its right of self-defence against persistent Iranian attacks.

This touches on the UK debate about the legal justification of possible British involvement in the attacks. Lord Wolfson, the Conservative shadow Attorney-General, argued that the attacks could be defined as self-defence against imminent attack and that therefore UK forces should have joined in. This argument, like America’s legal justification, does not hold water - there is no evidence of an imminent Iranian attack. An attack must be very imminent to fulfil this - in any case very weak - criterion of legality. Instead, the usual formulae of the legality of war apply - military action must either be in self-defence (i.e. your territory has been attacked, not you think it might be on some day in the future) or authorised by the UN Security Council. In this case, neither was true.

Meanwhile, the British government has judged the attacks unlawful (though not subsequent ‘defensive’ actions necessitated by Iran’s own retaliatory attacks in self-defence). There has been much mention of the lessons of the 2003 Iraq War and even the Chilcot Inquiry (the official public inquiry into the war). This is all very gratifying to someone who testified to Chilcot about the illegality and lies of that war but the UK has already done its worst to the ‘rules-based order’ by its disgraceful complicity in the Gaza genocide and indeed by invading Iraq in 2003.

The US also does not care much about explaining itself at the UN. Its statements there are inconsistent, on the one hand mentioning dismantling Iran’s nuclear program as the objective but also self-defence. It’s striking that there has been almost zero attention to that discussion at the UN, for instance at the Security Council. US indifference to the UN appears contagious. Likewise, international criticism of the assault has been very muted. There is a rote feeling to Russian and Chinese condemnations for instance. One explanation is widespread deference to the US; perhaps a more plausible explanation is that no one cares enough about Iran to put their heads above the parapet and invite American retaliation. Iranian diplomacy has been a comprehensive failure.

What Everyone Is Getting Wrong

This may be a predominantly American operation, but it is an Israeli war. There is no question that, but for Israel, the US would not be attacking Iran. Netanyahu has badgered the US to attack Iran for many years. He succeeded last June in the ‘12-day war’ when the US and Israel extensively bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities. Trump claimed that Iran’s nuclear capability had been ‘obliterated’ in that attack. Yet here they are doing it again.

Israel now seems to have a very biddable ally in Washington who is willing to expend considerable American military force, money and lives in support of Israel’s security. The claim that Iran threatens US security or ‘interests’ is ridiculous. Iran threatens Israel. Iran is many years from fielding an intercontinental ballistic missile that might hit the US - and why on earth would it use such a suicidal weapon?

Amid the cacophony of Washington’s many explanations for the war, you may have caught Marco Rubio’s early justification: that the US was taking pre-emptive action against Iranian attacks that would follow Israel’s planned bombing which the US was told to expect and that therefore the US attacks were ‘defensive’. A more convoluted explanation is hard to imagine, but it also unwittingly indicates the real instigator.

Given the almost random and constantly changing array of explanations he has offered, it seems likely that Trump has no clear idea of the objective, except some vague and grandiose idea of repeating the Maduro kidnap ‘decapitation’ operation in Venezuela (a theory supported by his ludicrous suggestion that he alone decide the next supreme leader in Iran). Moreover, as noted, one consistent theme of why the bombing is happening is already pretty clear i.e. the pursuit of Israeli security, as defined by Israel.

As usual, there is a lot of talk about ‘Iran’s nuclear program’, as if it is a given that Iran is on the verge of deploying a nuclear weapon. This too is one of the justifications offered by Israel and the US. It’s a claim that’s reinforced by statements by the UK, France, Germany etc that ‘Iran must not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons’, a formulation that seems to be designed to reassure the US of their support for the objective of ending the nuclear program even if they are not participating in the military operation - a kind of diplomatic having your cake and eating it or, as Trump might see it, free-riding.

The US and Israel are far from reliable sources on the extent or progress of Iran’s nuclear weapons program as their many contradictory and exaggerated claims over the years have demonstrated. There is, in truth, no fully reliable source, perhaps not surprising for a secret program, and a reality that may be allowing Iran to pursue a ‘keep ‘em guessing’ strategy, much as Saddam apparently encouraged his enemies to think he had WMD capability when in fact he didn’t. If that is the case, the strategy has not worked.

But, as usual, few commentators have mentioned that in the Oman-hosted talks with the US that preceded this war, Iran reportedly offered to limit its uranium enrichment program to only 3.6% enrichment (down from the current 60%; weapons grade is 90%) and send its current stockpile of 400kg of enriched uranium (which btw the US and Israel targeted but admitted they did not destroy last year) overseas – i.e. get rid of it – and suspend all enrichment for several years. In other words, an acceptable diplomatic and peaceful solution was in fact available. These terms are not far off those agreed with the US (under Obama), and the other P5 countries plus Germany in 2015, as part of the so-called JCPOA1, an agreement that the first Trump administration withdrew from. It’s reasonable to assume that further negotiations now would have produced tighter controls, perhaps analogous to those in the JCPOA or better. The JCPOA took over a year and a half to negotiate; this time the US allowed a few days for discussion. We can conclude therefore that the ‘failure’ of negotiations was a mere pretext; the talks themselves a sham. It appears that the US and Israel were intent on war whatever concessions Iran offered at the talks. Other countries that might one day be offered ‘negotiations’ when facing threatened American assault, such as North Korea - or indeed Denmark - might want to take note.

The strategy of preplanned and deliberate (and unprovoked) attack is consistent with Israel’s post October 7th military posture which is to annihilate all potential threats before they become a threat, taking pre-emption to a whole new level. This doctrine is also apparent in Israel’s repeated and unprovoked bombing of supposed Hezbollah positions in Lebanon including Beirut and its illegal and seemingly now-permanent occupation of a swathe of southern Syria which continues to attract zero international attention let alone criticism, just like Israel’s continuing and apparently ceaseless bombing of Gaza. This observation about Israeli strategy is not speculation. Israeli ministers have announced it.

What to Watch: Signals indicating where things are heading.

Trump and his ‘Secretary of War’ Pete Hegseth have already started saying that the ‘war is won’. They have offered no more evidence of the destruction of Iranian nuclear or missile capabilities than they did in the ‘12-day war’ but what matters is what they say rather than what has actually been done, not least because, helpfully for them, it is impossible for the public or press to judge the real extent of damage inflicted by the bombing. Interestingly, at the time of writing, Israel has not said the same, perhaps pointing to a divergence over when to stop bombing. But once the American statements of victory start to come thicker and faster, we can hope that they presage the cessation of the war. By the same token, the absence of such statements will indicate the continuation.

The longer the war goes on, the more that America’s allies in the Gulf or Europe will press, at first in private then more loudly, for it to end because of the very negative effects for them, including on oil prices. Trump has particular financial interests in the Gulf (Qatar gave him a 747!) so he may pay attention at least to their pressure. The UAE in particular seems to have been hit disproportionately by Iran - over a thousand missiles or drones have been launched at it, it’s not clear why. I don’t agree with those who say that Iran’s strategy to target Gulf and other neighbouring countries is a failure: much of the pressure on the US to end the war will come from those states, who are paying a significant price for US/Israeli attacks. Dubai will never seem the same again. China, which imports more than 70% of its oil, may also be exerting behind the scenes pressure, which is not insignificant.

Do not expect regime change, even if it remains a possibility, for the reasons I described in my last post. More likely is the dogged continuation of the current regime, for whom merely not losing will be presented as a kind of victory. The appalling violence meted out by the Iranian state against protestors in January suggests that a popular uprising would be viciously repressed and there is yet, perhaps as a consequence, no sign of such an uprising. The only hope therefore would be some kind of internal coup perpetrated by disaffected officers from the army or Republican Guard or other kind of regime insiders. The outcome of such a takeover is of course, like all possibilities in this turbulent situation, totally unpredictable and is as plausibly bad as much as good.

The Deeper Current: Long-term forces shaping the situation.

American and Israeli technological advantage in waging war - particularly from the air - has again proven to be overwhelming, but note that this campaign is against a weak adversary armed mainly with very out-of-date equipment (Iran has almost no airforce to speak of, though its air defence missiles are fairly modern Russian systems). But illustrating yet again the power of insurgent-style tactics, Iran has discomforted Gulf countries, and even Cyprus, by launching hundreds of very cheap and easy-to-manufacture ‘Shahed’ drones (compared by one analyst to ‘toy aeroplanes’). As Ukraine has also shown, ingenuity can go some way in taking on scale.

One sidenote: as The Economist has reported, the US has used a new type of (non-nuclear) missile in this war that would be prohibited under the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) agreement between the US and Russia that has been allowed to expire by both parties. This is one material indicator of the more general and concerning decay of the global arms control regime which I wrote about a few weeks ago.

International law is not revived by a few Europeans belatedly declaring its importance in this case. Unlike compulsory domestic law enforced by the state, international law is a long term normative and shared understanding that is given force not only by present day declaration but also by historical memory. It is held up above all by the powerful choosing to respect it, cite it and demand it consistently and over time. And with this war, those fragile norms have suffered another body blow. The world is thus more dangerous for all of us. The putative bolstering of Israel’s security through unlawful violence comes at a more general cost of weakening the security of everyone else.

Just as I argued in the Syria case, the US remains the regional hegemon in the Middle East. Its military power and political sway continue to dominate without challenge of any kind, whether political or military. But the question too remains: why does the US give such extraordinary attention and resources to this single region? There’s a simple answer: Israel.

Israel’s influence over American foreign and military policy continues to far outweigh Israel’s size, importance or significance to broader American interests. But that influence may well have peaked. Opinion polls show that for the first time more Americans are sympathetic to the Palestinian ‘side’ than the Israeli. More and more mainstream politicians and commentators are choosing to criticise Israel, hitherto a no-go zone in US political debate.

Israel’s influence is not just down to the ‘Israel lobby’. It is also an effect of the powerful constituency of evangelical Christians. To non-Americans, the power of this group is surprising: there is no equivalent in largely atheist Europe for instance. After the attacks of 9/11, George Bush declared a ‘crusade’ in the Middle East. Criticism of this statement quickly caused him to withdraw this provocative term. No such restraint today applies to the rhetoric - or tattoos - of Hegseth who has, for instance, described Iran as ‘hell-bent on prophetic Islamist delusions’, America’s freedoms as ‘god-given’ and whose body is tattooed with religious iconography, including a large Jerusalem cross, used by the crusaders, on his chest and ‘Deus Vult’ – ‘God Wills It’, a crusader battle cry, inscribed, appropriately enough, on his bicep . Some American army commanders, following Hegseth’s lead, have told their troops that the Iran campaign is “all part of God’s divine plan” and cited the Book of Revelation and Armageddon.

But the US choice to fight Israel’s war may be as simple as Netanyahu somehow getting Trump to do his bidding. But how? What did he offer him, what has he got over him? Every diplomat in DC would like to know.

The deep racism of American military policy is revealed - yet again - by the consideration, or lack of it, given to Iranian lives. Imagine if 160 white Serbian school children had been killed by NATO bombing in 1999, the number of Iranian children the US has apparently killed at a school in southern Iran. There would be outrage and a huge chorus demanding the end of the war, both among politicians and on the street. By contrast today in the media or among politicians, there is no mention of Iranian lives as a limiting factor in the war: that perhaps the war should stop in order to preserve them. There is a grotesque hypocrisy in referencing the Iranian regime’s recent slaughter of protestors as an indicator of its cruelty while taking yet more lives by means of aerial bombing which is claimed as precisely targeted but is clearly often indiscriminate. The lives of others, as ever, seem low on the list of the warmakers’ priorities even if ‘security’ is top of that list. We seem to be talking only about the security of some, not others. Indeed the malleable and typically undefined notion of ‘security’ continues to be put into service to justify war waged by the state. It’s interesting that this term is never or only very rarely used by ‘non-state’ actors of any kind for it seems to be ‘about’ some abstract idea of the security of the state, for political leaders or diplomats to define, rather than the lives of actual people.

There is a further layer to this. The fact that ‘security’ can be defined in many and varied ways gives great room and sway to those doing the defining, in other words political leaders. Tony Blair mendaciously claimed that Iraq threatened Britain’s ‘security’ in 2003 when his real motive was giving blanket support to a bellicose America bent on post 9/11 revenge, anywhere, anyhow. Today, Trump and Netanyahu allege that their own countries’ security is at stake. They claim to speak for the state and indeed, constitutionally, their voters have so ordained them. But do they really? It’s very easy to see that each of them has concealed motives of pure and cynical self-interest: Trump’s to evade the spreading Epstein scandal and Netanyahu to secure his political survival with the blood of others, whether Palestinian, Lebanese or Iranian.

Thus, the final question. Why do we give these people the power to define what the state needs or wants? Why do we even accept the notion, a grotesque manufacture, that there is such a thing as requirements or interests of the state that are somehow distinct from the needs, bodies and lives of real, bleeding people? One day, I trust, this false construction will be regarded as an excuse for killing (or dying) no more justifiable than killing for a king, a barrel of oil, or a crucifix.

[If readers have any reaction to this new format of my substack, please comment]