Lawyer versus mayor is no longer a hypothetical. Keir Starmer, a human rights barrister who governed by legal test and precedent, resigned as Labour leader on 22 June. Andy Burnham, mayor of Greater Manchester, was acclaimed his successor unopposed on 17 July and became prime minister three days later. Constitutionalism lost, mayoralism won. The interesting question was never who Labour preferred; it was which man had an actual answer to who should hold power, and who answers when they misuse it. Neither, on the evidence, ever really looked.

Their temperaments explain the gap. Starmer was stern and procedural, more comfortable citing a rule than making a case for one. Burnham is looser, better on television, happier with a slogan than a mechanism. A lawyer’s instinct is to defend whatever arrangement already exists, because that is what precedent does. A mayor’s instinct is to announce a new one, because that is what a speech does. Neither instinct is an argument. Both men have mistaken a personality for a philosophy of government.

Burnham built his path to Downing Street on one line: Manchesterism, he said in his Makerfield by-election video, is “the end of neoliberalism”. He repeated it at the People’s History Museum, promising devolution as the replacement: power pulled out of central government, a new outpost called “No.10 North” set up in his old mayoral city, “the biggest rebalancing of power” the country has seen.

Good line, wrong funeral. “Manchesterism” is itself borrowed, lifted from Cobden and Bright’s Manchester Liberalism, the free trade movement Disraeli sneered at as “the Manchester School” and that Thatcher drew on directly. Burnham has put the name of the tradition he’s burying on its own coffin.

Starmer’s instinct was the mirror image: parliamentary sovereignty defended out of habit rather than argument. Not a rival philosophy, just an absence of one. Both men miss two separate ideas, not one — though only one of them still has to answer for it. Hayek’s is about information: prices let people who will never meet coordinate what to make and where, and no planner, however local, can replicate that by moving his desk closer to the problem. Buchanan’s is about design: write the rules before you know who’s in charge, because whoever ends up in charge will bend rules written for someone else’s convenience. Put together, Burnham fails the first test and hasn’t faced the second yet. Shuffling committees towards Manchester says nothing about who sets prices, and “stronger public control of life’s essentials,” his own words from his first speech as prime minister, points the other way entirely: ownership recentralising, not decisions decentralising.

The gap between the words and the mechanism doesn’t show up the same way twice: one test already ran and stayed unresolved, one is built into the rules themselves, and one is being decided live, right now.

Brexit already ran this argument once, aimed at the EU, and it’s still unresolved a decade on. The strongest case for leaving was never sovereignty as a chant, it was that rules written for an entire continent misfire locally in ways rules written closer to the ground don’t. The UK in a Changing Europe’s assessment this year puts the economy as much as six per cent smaller for having left; the same analysis expects the government’s “reset” with the EU to recover barely half a per cent of that over fifteen years. Taken seriously, the case for leaving never stopped at the border; it argued for pushing power past central government too, not just moving the centre from one capital to another. So far, mostly, that hasn’t happened.

Fiscal policy turns the same question into an accounting problem, because Britain’s own rules split spending into what counts and what doesn’t. The current rule targets public sector net financial liabilities, which lets investment through so long as it comes with an offsetting asset, a loan, an equity stake, ownership of a company. That is precisely the route by which “stronger public control of life’s essentials” could be paid for without technically breaching anything: nationalise something, book it as an asset, keep the spending below the line, call it discipline. Above the line, the numbers already look tight. Headroom against the current rule has narrowed to under twenty billion pounds since the spring, gilt yields touched an eighteen year high in May, and monthly borrowing has come in above forecast for most of this year. A government that keeps the visible books tidy while moving its real commitments into an asset column hasn’t solved the accountability problem. It has just decided where to keep it out of view.

The City should worry the “just deregulate” reading of all this most, because it’s live now. This year’s rollback of post 2008 ring fencing rules split the Treasury from the Bank of England: the governor, Andrew Bailey, publicly blocked a meeting his own chancellor wanted with a fintech seeking a licence, while critics at Positive Money warn depositors are back on the hook for risks taken elsewhere in the same banks. That isn’t Manchesterism reborn. It’s the other half of the tradition Burnham thinks he’s burying, the part built on stopping private power concentrating unchecked, quietly dismantled before he’d unpacked.

Which leaves the design question neither Hayek nor Burnham can dodge: who checks power once it’s moved. Devolving it is easy, which is why Burnham liked it as mayor, when something went wrong he could point at central government’s cuts. He can’t anymore. He is the government now, and the rules that will judge him are ones his own administration is writing this year, not ones written in advance by someone who didn’t know he’d be the one in charge.

So: not the end of neoliberalism, the overdue start of taking its argument seriously, on its own terms rather than borrowed ones. Bury it if you like. It was never in the coffin, and this week it moved into Number 10.

Benedict Anderson’s famous claim was that the nation is an imagined community: people who will never meet, never share a table, never learn each other’s names, who nonetheless feel bound together as one thing. He thought the printing press did most of the imagining — a shared newspaper, a standardised vernacular, millions of strangers reading the same words on the same morning and concluding, correctly, that they belonged to something larger than their village. It’s a good theory. It also undersells how much easier the whole trick gets once you add a dish everyone already eats for lunch. You don’t need to read the same newspaper as a stranger to feel bound to them. You just need to eat the same soup.

Sociologists have a word for this now: gastronationalism, coined by Michaela DeSoucey in 2010 to describe the use of food to define and defend national boundaries. It has an actual legal apparatus behind it. The European Union runs a registry of “protected designation of origin” labels — the mechanism that makes Champagne, Parmigiano-Reggiano and feta legally exclusive to the places that claim them — and by the time DeSoucey was writing, it had already certified nearly 800 products as belonging, officially, to one nation and no other. Anderson’s printing press has become a customs stamp. The imagining works the same way. It just comes with a legal department now.

Nowhere has this been fought more literally than over hummus. In 2008 Lebanese industrialists accused Israel of marketing hummus, tabbouleh and other regional dishes as Israeli inventions, and threatened to sue. What followed was an arms race conducted entirely in chickpeas: Israeli chefs set a Guinness World Record for the largest dish of hummus in 2008, Lebanon beat it in 2009, Israel doubled it in January 2010, and Lebanon settled the matter that May with ten tons of hummus, prepared by three hundred chefs and garnished with a cedar tree cut from the national flag, for the avoidance of doubt. Lebanon also applied to the EU for the same protected status that covers feta. The application failed, because nobody, Lebanon included, could actually prove hummus was invented within its borders and nowhere else. Chickpeas have been eaten across the region for something like six thousand years. The dish is regional. The dispute is national. That gap is the whole story.

Baklava shows a gentler version of the same mechanism, and a more useful one, because Anderson has a word for this too. The dish’s oldest ancestors are Mesopotamian and Assyrian honey-and-nut pastries from what is now Syria and Iraq; the Ottomans refined it in the kitchens of Topkapi Palace in Istanbul and then carried it, via bureaucrats and pilgrims, across an empire stretching from the Balkans to North Africa. Every region it landed in did what Anderson says every vernacular does with a shared root: it localised. Gaziantep uses pistachios and a light sugar syrup. Greece uses walnuts, cinnamon, and honey. Syria and Lebanon add rosewater or orange blossom. Armenia calls it paklava and adds cloves; Iran calls it baqlava and adds saffron; Azerbaijan also calls it paxlava, cuts it into diamonds it says represent fire, and keeps it specifically for Novruz. Nobody seriously argues these are twelve different desserts. They are one dessert that went vernacular, the same way Anderson’s common Latin went vernacular into French, Italian, and Romanian, each eventually solid enough to build a nation on. The difference between this and hummus is that nobody has yet tried to patent one version of baklava and sue the others for using it.

Lahmacun shows what happens when that same regional variation gets treated as a zero-sum claim instead. In 2020, Kim Kardashian posted a video calling it “Armenian pizza”; Turkish social media spent days informing her it is Turkish. Armenia and Turkey have been arguing over the dish for years, alongside lavash, which UNESCO recognises as Armenian and which Turkey resents accordingly. The detail almost nobody raises in these fights is that the word itself, lahmacun, is Arabic — lahm bi ajin, meat with dough — meaning the two nations arguing most fiercely over the dish can’t actually claim its name. Neither side finds this disqualifying. That’s the tell. A gastronationalist argument was never really about etymology, any more than an argument over who first pressed a certain grape was ever really about the grape.

The dispute gets more interesting still when the nation doing the claiming isn’t a settled one. In 2017 the Hong Kong government added milk tea — brewed from black tea leaves sourced from British colonial Ceylon and served with evaporated milk, owing as much to English afternoon tea as to Cantonese yum cha — to its official inventory of intangible cultural heritage. The timing wasn’t incidental. Researchers who study the drink trace its rise in local pride to the years around the 1997 handover, when Hongkongers went looking for something to mark them as neither the mainlanders nor the colonists they’d just stopped being governed by. Milk tea did the job precisely because it was never fully either one. Cha chaan teng culture has kept doing the same work through every fresh round of pressure from Beijing since. It’s gastronationalism practised by a place with no vote on its own nationhood — which makes the food do more work than the flag ever could.

Not every country waits to be provoked. Thailand has spent over two decades running an actual government programme, “Thailand: Kitchen of the World,” whose explicit goal was simply more Thai restaurants abroad — there are now more than seventeen thousand of them — on the theory that a cuisine people already like is an easier sell than an argument they need to be talked into. Others copied the model outright: Taiwan ran a four-year, $34m “Dim Sum Diplomacy” campaign; Japan folded ramen into a $16m “Cool Japan” strategy. Peru did something similar with far less government money: after decades as a byword for civil war and instability, it rebuilt its international image almost entirely around Gastón Acurio and a handful of chefs who took Peruvian and Peruvian-Chinese cooking global. Acurio calls his restaurants “living, daily embassies,” and by his own count runs about forty of them. This is gastronationalism with better manners. Instead of arguing a dish is exclusively yours, you make sure your version is the one most people meet first. The Guinness-record wars are what happen when that softer approach was never tried, or was tried by two nations at once.

Then there’s the case that runs in the opposite direction entirely: a country’s most confidently national dish turning out to have a murky, borrowed history it never advertised. The popular story of fish and chips credits Sephardic Jews, fleeing the Inquisition and settling in London, with the fried-fish half of the pairing — fish floured and fried in oil so it could be eaten cold on the Sabbath, a practice a Jewish immigrant named Joseph Malin is credited with pairing with fried potatoes around 1860. It’s a good story, repeated by food writers and rabbis alike. It’s also more contested than either side of the hummus fight ever gets to be: food historians have since pointed out that battered fried fish shows up in English cookbooks that predate the Sephardic community’s arrival, and that the cold, floured Sephardic dish and the hot, battered chip-shop version may simply be two different things that got conflated afterward. Even the myth-busting is itself disputed. Britain’s most stereotyped national meal turns out to be a live argument about its own origin story, one level further down than the hummus fight — and Britain, notably, never had to hold a Guinness World Record over it.

Nobody, meanwhile, is fighting over lentil soup, which is at least as old and at least as widely eaten across the same region. The difference was never the dish. It’s whether two nations currently need something to fight about, and whether a court, or a Guinness adjudicator, exists to make the fight official. Which is the actual answer to the question this all keeps circling back to: can you love a food without owning it? Anderson would say that’s a strange question to even ask, since a nation never really owned anything it claims, either — not its language, not its borders, not its history, and certainly not its chickpeas. It just agreed, all at once, to believe it did. Food turns out to be one of the fastest ways to get several million strangers to agree on anything. That was always the imagining. The soup just makes it taste like something.

Power has retreated to the telephone, not from nostalgia for a simpler technology but because every other channel now leaves something behind: a transcript, a leak, a screenshot, a subpoena. The phone call has become one of the most important instruments of statecraft precisely because it disappears the moment it ends — no audience, no algorithm, no archive, unless someone happens to be taping, which is its own risk. This hybrid form of diplomacy, too private to be official and too consequential to be informal, has become the default for crisis management: testing intent, negotiating the gap between what leaders will do and what they will be seen doing.

For most of the twentieth century, the backchannel was the exception, used only once the front channel had failed. Robert Kennedy’s private meetings with the Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin during the Cuban missile crisis were a backchannel because the UN and the cable traffic had proven too slow; the actual deal — missiles out of Cuba for missiles out of Turkey — was struck off the record. The public “thirteen days” everyone remembers were only half of it: Anastas Mikoyan then spent an unpublicised month talking Castro down in Havana and finishing the details with Kennedy in Washington. What has changed is not the work’s existence but its rank: the backchannel used to be the fallback; now it is often the plan.

The front channel — the summit, the statement — used to be where diplomacy happened, and the backchannel fixed things when it embarrassed someone. Increasingly the sequence runs the other way: a public statement is a commitment a leader’s own audience will hold them to, so it has to sound tough before it can be tested. None of which makes the front channel dispensable: a backchannel deal never ratified by the public politics it was meant to serve is waiting to be undone by whoever wasn’t in the room. Oslo was negotiated almost entirely backchannel, in Norway, then handed to the front channel all at once, in a single handshake between Rabin and Arafat on the White House lawn. The image did the work the quiet negotiation hadn’t: building public consent for what had already been agreed. Just over two years later, a man who considered that consent illegitimate assassinated Rabin for giving it. A backchannel that succeeds only in private hasn’t finished its job — it has just moved the risk from the table to the street.

Voice carries information text cannot: a pause before answering, the quality of a hesitation, a threat delivered flatly versus through gritted teeth. Lakhdar Brahimi, the veteran UN mediator, has described a meeting with Taliban leadership that turned on how a young interpreter chose to render what was said — a judgment call he credits with keeping the talks from collapsing into war. None of that survives being typed up; a transcript records words, not the decision to soften one before it leaves your mouth. A phone call also solves a problem email and encrypted messaging never have: it produces nothing to steal. The 2019 call between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky shows exactly how much that distinction can matter: aides monitoring the line wrote up what they recalled afterward, the White House released it as a memo rather than a transcript, and the argument over what the difference between those two things actually meant ran for the rest of the year. That asymmetry — rich in signal, poor in verbatim evidence — is what makes voice the preferred instrument of people who need to say a great deal while keeping the exact record thin.

This is also where the case for the phone call gets uncomfortable. Privacy lets a leader offer a concession without their own base watching — face-saving isn’t vanity in diplomacy, it’s often the only way a hard-liner climbs down. But an audience is also what democratic accountability is made of. A promise made on a call that officially never happened is one no legislature can oversee and no successor can discover, let alone be bound by. The same deniability that lets two leaders quietly defuse a crisis lets either quietly start one, or agree to something their citizens would have objected to, and never say so. Secrecy is not, by itself, the villain or the virtue here. It works exactly as well for good-faith de-escalation as for the kind of arrangement nobody would ratify if asked. Joe Navarro, who spent twenty-five years catching spies for the FBI, made something like a career observation out of the same problem: almost nobody, in his experience, experiences their own worst decision as a villain would. The traitor has a story. The diplomat quietly conceding something his voters would object to has one too. An unrecorded room is where that story gets to go uncontested — not because anyone is lying, exactly, but because there’s no one else present to ask the second question.

People who run these calls have built a small, unwritten craft around them, mostly about voice rather than words. Standing rather than sitting or pacing steadies the breath in a way that reads as authority down the line — voice coaches and negotiators broadly agree on this. The same instinct governs the room once a call becomes a meeting: the seat beside the principal is, by convention, the one to avoid, since it speaks second, right after the leader sets an unscripted tone. The irony is that the one part of all this that did get written down became the industry standard anyway: Roger Fisher and William Ury’s Getting to Yes, the 1981 Harvard text that turned negotiation into a repeatable method — separate the people from the problem, argue interests rather than positions — is still what most professional negotiators are actually trained on, phone call or otherwise. The theory got published. The practice, wisely, did not.

The historical irony is worth sitting with. When Washington and Moscow built the original hotline after the Cuban missile crisis, in 1963, they deliberately did not give each other a telephone: the line was teletype, carefully translated, slow enough to be considered, because both sides feared what a live voice channel might produce under pressure — a mistranslation, a threat that couldn’t be unsaid once made. Voice used to be the risk. Text was the safeguard. Six decades on, that logic has essentially inverted: nobody worries about mistranslation now; the fear is that anything typed anywhere is stored somewhere, and stored things get hacked, leaked, or subpoenaed. The precedent runs back further than any one scandal. In 2010, WikiLeaks published a quarter of a million classified American diplomatic cables — “diptels”, in State Department shorthand — turning years of candid embassy reporting into a searchable public archive overnight, and ending a great many careers built on the assumption that a cable marked confidential would stay that way. American officials planning a strike on Yemen relearned the same lesson in March 2025, when a journalist was accidentally added to the encrypted chat where the plans were discussed, and the conversation was public within the week. Encryption protected the message from everyone except whoever added the wrong contact. The hotline generation feared the phone because it couldn’t be edited; this generation prefers it because it can’t be forwarded. The tool reversed. What it was for — control over the record — never changed at all.

People say China is communist. Fei Xiaotong, who did more than anyone to explain Chinese society to itself, said it was agrarian. Agrarian is the less dramatic claim, and the more accurate one — it also happens to resist slogans, which communism never quite has. He made the argument in 1947, two years before the revolution his critics assume produced it. China’s social reality is older than its regime. Western frameworks keep failing to predict China’s behaviour not for want of data — there has never been more data — but because they reach for ideology and the individual as the basic unit of analysis, when the operative unit, in China, has always been the relation.

Fei’s China was agrarian in the sense that mattered least literally. He wasn’t describing an economy; farming was simply the terrain on which he first found the pattern. The pattern was a way of organising trust, obligation, and authority around land, lineage, and the people you actually know, rather than around the abstract categories — citizen, employee, comrade — that organise trust in industrial societies. That pattern outlived the fields it was named for. Shenzhen has more than ten million people and almost no soil left to speak of, and it still runs on guanxi: networks of reciprocal obligation between people who know each other, or know someone who does — the same operating system Fei found in nineteen-forties villages, running now on considerably faster hardware. The Party itself is organised this way in practice, whatever its documents say: patronage, factional loyalty, the gap between what a rule states and what a relationship permits. Ideology sits on top of all this. It has never replaced it.

The Western default lens for any country is the individual: a citizen with rights, held by a state that either respects or violates them, organised into bounded groups — Fei’s tuantigeju — in which membership is equal and rules apply the same way to everyone inside the boundary. A parliament is this kind of group. A human-rights framework assumes this kind of person. Fei’s China runs on the opposite geometry: not bounded groups of equals, but concentric rings radiating outward from each person — family at the centre, then kin, then acquaintance, then stranger — with obligation and morality both thinning as the ring widens. There is no equivalent, in this system, of a rule that applies identically to everyone; there is only the question of how close you stand to whoever is asking. Two observers can watch the same village, the same company, the same Politburo, and see two different structures. One sees a system failing to apply rights uniformly. The other sees a system succeeding at something it never promised to do uniformly in the first place. Both readings can be accurate. That is the actual problem: they are accurate about two different objects, and only one side tends to notice.

Fei’s own image for this was a stone dropped in a lake. Each person is the splash, and the rings spreading outward are their relationships — family closest and most binding, then relatives, then friends, then colleagues, then strangers, each ring fainter than the last. He named it chaxugeju, the differential mode of association, and set it explicitly against the Western tuantigeju, in which people belong to bounded groups — a company, a congregation, a nation — inside which everyone is meant to count the same. Chinese social life, in his account, has almost no equivalent of that flat, bounded group; even the state gets experienced as one more set of rings, closer for the well-connected and fainter for everyone else, rather than a single membrane treating every citizen alike. One of Fei’s own chapters is called, simply, “A Society without Litigation” — disputes get settled through ritual and relationship rather than taken to a stranger in a courtroom, because a courtroom assumes exactly the abstract, interchangeable individual this system was never built to produce. None of this is the absence of morality. It’s a different distribution of it: loyalty to your family ahead of a stranger isn’t hypocrisy here. It’s the whole point.

Every few years a new report explains why China is about to liberalise, or collapse, or become predictable, because its growing middle class will surely want what middle classes are assumed to want. The prediction fails, and the fix proposed is always more data, more access, a sharper model of the regime’s intentions. But the theory was never actually short of data. It was short of the right unit of analysis. You cannot predict a relational system with a model built for bounded individuals, any more than you can predict tides with a model built for solids. None of this defends the Party, which is a real thing that does real harm — and which Fei Xiaotong understood rather better than most Western analysts ever will. He spent two decades being cleaned out of Chinese intellectual life by an ideology with no use for a theory of China that wasn’t itself: denounced, silenced, sent to clean toilets during the Cultural Revolution, rehabilitated only once the ideology that broke him had exhausted itself. The soil outlasted it in the end — not because the ideology wasn’t real, but because it was only ever the weather. Underneath it, the whole time, was the ground Fei had already mapped.

I started playing chess at seven, or eight — the exact year is gone, the way exact years tend to go. Two decades later, I am still playing. If you ask me to pick a colour, I pick Black: the side that moves second and spends the whole game answering a question somebody else asked first. My favourite pieces are the bishops, both of them, ideally still on the board deep into the middlegame — a bishop traded off early feels like a small, avoidable loss, the kind that outlasts the game it happened in. I play the Modern as Black and the Queen’s Gambit as White, which sounds like a contradiction and isn’t: control everything from a distance, or else offer something up front and attack whoever is greedy enough to take it. Mostly, though, I play blitz and bullet. Even there, I don’t rush it — almost everyone survives their first mistake; a position tends to forgive just one. What I wait for is the second, on the theory that everybody makes mistakes, but hardly anyone stops at making just the one.

None of this makes me unusual, for a certain kind of player. A hundred years of romantic theory — Nimzowitsch and the hypermodernists, the idea that you could control the centre by watching it from a distance instead of occupying it, which is more or less the argument behind the Modern Defence I still play — got quietly checked, move by move, against something with no opinions and no doubt. Most of it held up. Some of it didn’t. Nobody was consulted either way.

The Queen’s Gambit answers to an older creed: Steinitz’s idea that chess isn’t won by brilliance so much as by collecting small advantages — a better pawn, a freer bishop, half a tempo — until they add up to something decisive. It’s the same instinct that keeps me holding onto both bishops long after most players would have traded one off. Nimzowitsch built his whole revolution arguing with dogmatists who’d flattened that idea into a rulebook. I seem to have ended up on both sides of the argument, depending on which colour I’ve got.

This is, I suspect, why I play the way I do. A classical game, two hours a side, is closer to the machine’s version of chess than blitz is: there’s time to remember the line, to check the idea against what’s been studied, to play something closer to the computer’s chess than your own. Bullet chess has no such patience. Ninety seconds a side leaves no time to consult anything. You play what your hand already knows, which is really just a faster way of saying you play who you are. I suspect this is closer to how most decisions actually get made — not the classical version, with its adjournments and second thoughts, but the bullet version, where the clock runs whether or not you feel ready.

If there’s a part of these twenty years I’m nostalgic for, it’s Linares — one of the great elite tournaments, players in suits, a room that took itself entirely seriously. I was watching players like Kasparov before I understood what had actually happened to him: a machine called Deep Blue had already beaten him, years earlier, and I only learned it from a headline photograph — his head in his hands, the board barely in frame. That photograph, as far as I can reconstruct it, was my actual introduction to the idea of artificial intelligence, well before I owned the word for it. Chess doesn’t look like that any more. It lives in the gaming world now — no suits, mostly channels and streams — and about the closest thing left to a Linares-era grandee showing up in public is Kasparov himself — these days more likely to be talking about Putin than about pawn structures.

I’d still pick Black, if you asked. I still try to keep both bishops on the board for as long as the position allows — a small, unglamorous kind of patience that rarely wins a game outright but tends to still be standing once the flashier pieces are gone. Twenty years in, that’s the whole of my chess philosophy, and possibly the only opinion I’ve held that long without a machine eventually telling me I was wrong.

A man sits against a stone wall in Jerusalem, a hundred-odd years ago. He holds up two fingers to the light, testing it the way people test the air for rain, or for change. A cane rests against the wall beside him, close enough to reach, not quite touching him. The archive has filed him under “beggar”, which is the least interesting fact about him and the only one anyone bothered to write down.

The photograph is a century old. The economics in it are current.

Most poverty does not look like the photograph. It looks like a flat that stays dirty because nobody has agreed whose job the dirt is. A cup in the sink. A coat on the floor. A plan, half-made, abandoned for the want of twenty pounds. Two people who cannot afford to leave a room will, instead, fill it with each other’s faults.

The row is never really about the cup. Nobody in the history of rows has been genuinely angry about a cup. Gordon Comstock, in his one truly stupid, admirable idea, declared outright war on money — quit the good job, kept the shabby room, made poverty itself a point of honour. He lost, in the end, the way anyone loses that war: not to a rival, but to the plain accumulating weight of not having any. Money doesn’t need to fight back. It only has to wait. Generosity, seen this way, is not a virtue. It is a subscription, and it lapses the moment the money does. It is easy to forgive a dirty cup when a machine will wash it. Take the machine away, and the small, ungenerous version of a person is the one left standing in the kitchen.

Being broke does not make anyone noble. It makes people accurate — accurate the way a magnifying glass is accurate, finding the one flaw and holding it to the light. The sharp word gets said not because it’s true but because it will land, and there is a brief, low satisfaction in the landing, gone by the time the shame arrives — and the shame always arrives, worse than whatever caused it. Dostoevsky’s gambler could have told you as much: proximity to money cures nobody of anything — including whatever it’s already done to the people who love them.

Underneath rows like this sits a second, quieter unfreedom that has nothing to do with rent. Some people cannot go home, and not for sentimental reasons: home comes with a draft notice, or a family that treats happiness as a performance with real penalties for missing a line. Isaiah Berlin once counted six enemies of human liberty — Rousseau, Hegel, and four others most people have forgotten. He never got around to money. Are you the seventh, money? You don’t need to lock a door. You just make sure the ticket, the visa, and the lawyer all cost more than anyone in the room actually has.

None of this feels dramatic while it’s happening. Failure rarely does. It is a hot afternoon spent in a library, chosen because the library is free. It is finally writing the thing you always wanted to write, and feeling almost nothing, because pride needs a little capital underneath it to stand up straight, and the capital has already gone to the landlord.

And yet the hope does not fully leave, which is the one illogical line item in the whole ledger. There is no evidence for it — the evidence, historically, argues the other way — but the good things have a habit of arriving through a side door, unannounced, on the one day nobody was watching for them. Every family that has ever had less than it needed keeps a version of the same story: a piece of gold, sold for someone it could not otherwise save, at a price the seller understood exactly and paid anyway. Call it stubbornness rather than faith. It is the one asset poverty has never managed to repossess.

These rows end the way they always end: not because the money arrives, but because two people too poor to keep affording the anger find their way back to the same bed, in the dark, and choose skin over the argument. Money doesn’t get a vote in that room. Not yet, anyway.

War is often treated as a uniquely human phenomenon. It is discussed through history, strategy and politics. States mobilise armies, leaders calculate power and scholars debate causes. Yet there is a quieter way of approaching the question.

One can begin with ants.

Ant societies contain many of the structural features that political theorists associate with warfare. Colonies organise large groups, defend territory and attack neighbouring colonies. Some species conduct raids that resemble coordinated military operations. Others deploy specialised “soldier” ants whose sole function is defence. The scale can be extraordinary: a single tropical colony may contain millions of individuals.

For observers such as Christopher Coker, the comparison is intriguing because ants appear to possess many ingredients commonly associated with war: organisation, conflict over resources and long-term collective strategy. Yet their motivations are not ideological, political or moral. Ants do not deliberate over strategy in the way human societies do. They simply behave according to evolutionary incentives embedded in their biology.

The observation introduces a small but important complication. If organised violence exists among species with no political consciousness, then war cannot be explained entirely through human ideas. Something deeper must be present: a pattern of collective competition that emerges when social organisms defend territory and resources.

This does not mean that human war is reducible to biology. Human societies differ fundamentally from ant colonies. Political communities are shaped by culture, institutions and ideas. Humans debate the legitimacy of war, justify it through moral arguments and regulate it through law. Ants do none of these things.

Yet the structural similarities remain difficult to ignore.

One explanation is that organised conflict arises whenever cooperation expands beyond small kin groups. Ant colonies demonstrate this clearly. Individual ants share a high degree of genetic similarity, which makes extreme self-sacrifice possible. A single ant dying in battle has little significance if the colony survives and reproduces.

Human societies, of course, are more complex. Nations are not genetic collectives. But they do construct identities strong enough to sustain large-scale cooperation. Citizens pay taxes, obey laws and sometimes accept the possibility of dying in war. In this sense, modern states function as highly organised systems of collective loyalty.

The resemblance is not perfect, but it is suggestive.

Political philosophers have long debated whether war reflects human nature or the structure of political life. Some, such as Thomas Hobbes, believed conflict grows naturally from insecurity and competition. Others, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, placed greater emphasis on the institutions and social arrangements that shape human behaviour.

The familiar question follows: is war a matter of nature or nurture?

Aggression certainly exists in nature. Yet humans like to describe themselves as rational animals. The puzzle therefore remains. If reason guides us, why does organised violence persist with such regularity?

The comparison with ants offers a quieter possibility. War may not arise simply from aggression in individuals but from organisation among groups. When communities grow large enough, and coordinated enough, competition acquires structure. It becomes strategic rather than spontaneous.

Seen this way, war is less a moral accident than a structural outcome of collective life.

This perspective also helps explain why war has proven so resistant to disappearance. Over the past two centuries its forms have changed considerably. Industrial technology transformed the scale of conflict. Nuclear weapons introduced the logic of deterrence. Expanding trade networks reshaped the incentives of powerful states.

Yet organised conflict has not vanished. It adapts. Today it appears through proxy wars, economic pressure, cyber operations and remote systems such as drones. The habit of killing remains; only the methods evolve.

Ants, of course, will never read strategic theory. Their battles will continue without reflection.

Humans possess the unusual ability to think about war before they wage it. That awareness does not necessarily prevent conflict. But it does mean that war, unlike the battles of ants, is accompanied by explanation, justification and doubt.

Ants wage war instinctively. Humans wage it thoughtfully.

For decades, the “English School” of international relations has occupied the crowded middle ground between the bleak realism of Thomas Hobbes and the starry-eyed universalism of Immanuel Kant. It posits that states do not exist in a vacuum of “all against all”. Rather, they form an “International Society”, a club of sovereign entities which, while acknowledging no higher master, agree to abide by certain rules of the road.

Yet, as the geopolitical centre of gravity shifts away from the West, a nagging question persists. Is this "society" a universal truth? Or is it a localised European habit which the rest of the world has been forced to adopt?

The English School is a term coined by Roy Jones in the late 1950s and refined by scholars such as Hedley Bull. It rests on three tripartite pillars. On one side sits the international system, representing the realist view of power politics. On the other is world society, the Kantian dream of a global community of individuals. In the centre lies international society: the Grotian via media.

In this hybrid world, anarchy does not equal chaos. States are viewed as members of a community which recognises common interests in maintaining order through diplomacy, international law and the balance of power. It is, in effect, a democratic mechanism for sovereigns rather than citizens. But this structure is built on a foundation of “natural law” which was originally, and explicitly, Christian.

The Achilles’ heel of the English School is its history. Traditionally, the narrative of international society begins at Westphalia in 1648 and radiates outward. When Hedley Bull historicised the concept, he relied on the Victorian distinctions of James Lorimer. It was Lorimer who divided humanity into the “civilised” (Europe), the “barbarous” (Asia), and the “savage” (the rest).

Such a classification is more than offensive. It is bad history. By treating diplomacy and order as European exports, the school overlooks sophisticated systems of international governance which flourished elsewhere long before the first Dutch merchant set foot in the East Indies.

Consider the Haudenosaunee, or the League of the Iroquois. Founded around 1450, this North American confederacy functioned as a robust security regime. It institutionalised conflict resolution and regular summits centuries before the Concert of Europe was a glimmer in Metternich’s eye. As Neta Crawford argues, the League was arguably more democratic and stable than its European contemporaries.

The Islamic tradition offers a similarly sophisticated alternative to the Westphalian model. Western critics often reduce Islamic international thought to a binary of “believers vs infidels”. Yet the Abbasid period saw the development of a “universal nomocracy”. Figures such as Majid Khadduri point out that the Islamic dawla (state) practised diplomacy and adhered to a supra-national community of law. This concept of a “society of states” was as universal in its aspirations as the Respublica Christiana, yet entirely independent of it.

Is the English School still a useful lens? Certainly. It remains the most effective tool for explaining why states cooperate even when they are armed to the teeth. However, if it is to remain relevant in a multipolar century, it must shed its ahistorical, Eurocentric skin.

Barry Buzan once suggested that the “old” institutions of war and the balance of power might be replaced by markets and democratic security communities, at least in a modern Europe. Yet this presents a flawed dichotomy. It suggests a “post-war” Europe while leaving the rest of the world to grapple with “primitive” conflict. This is not only unfair; it is analytically blind. Today’s international society is predominantly non-European, composed of states acting interdependently in a productive, rather than exploitative, manner.

War is not a relic of 'non-European' development. It is a problem which affects the collective international society and must be addressed at the interstate level, rather than dismissed as an exclusive local issue. To understand the 'profound wisdom' of this society, one must look beyond the palaces of Europe. The foundations of order were never a European monopoly, and peace cannot be a European exception.

The Hedgehog’s Sunset

As Isaiah Berlin once said, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”. Today’s leaders seem more like foxes, scurrying across a fractured landscape, unable to find the “one big thing” that once provided a common, if blood-stained, language for global survival.

We are living in a political screen-print: the same faces, repeated in different neon hues, but with the registration increasingly off-center.

The Architect and the Brand

Franklin D. Roosevelt was an architect. He looked at a world in ruins and saw a series of structural necessities: the New Deal, Bretton Woods, the United Nations. He built global institutions intended to outlast his own mortality. Donald Trump is a businessman by contrast, and specifically a brand licensor. To the businessman, the world is not a project to be engineered but a series of transactions to be closed. Where Roosevelt sought a foundation, Mr. Trump seeks a deal.

In the businessman’s ledger, geopolitical flashpoints and grand prizes are treated as distressed assets or branding opportunities. The acquisition of Greenland, the restructuring of Venezuela, a “peace board” for Gaza, and the pursuit of a Nobel Prize are not seen as parts of a long-term architecture. They are trophies to be won or properties to be flipped. In the 20th century, the language was infrastructure. In the 21st, it is equity. The architect builds a house for everyone to live in. The businessman sells the signage on the roof and moves to the next property.

The Stalwart and the Solicitor

In Britain, the contrast is equally telling. Winston Churchill was a stalwart. He was a man of historical destiny, a hedgehog whose “one big thing” was the survival of a specific, romanticized idea of Western liberty. He spoke in the thunder of the 19th century to save the 20th. Even his alliances were built on grand, if volatile, foundations. His relationship with Charles de Gaulle was a strained and essential collision of two men who both believed they were the embodiment of their respective nations. They argued over the map because the map was the only thing that mattered.

Enter Sir Keir Starmer. Sir Keir is “Labour” in its most skeptical, administrative form. This is not the fiery, ideological Labour of the post-war consensus, but the forensic Labour of the legal brief. He is a solicitor in a world that requires a sentinel. Churchill dealt in the currency of blood, toil, tears, and sweat. Sir Keir deals in the currency of compliance and the “fiscal envelope.”

He defines his moral standing not through a vision of the future, but through his management of the fallout from the Epstein files. Where Churchill sat as an equal with titans like Roosevelt and Stalin to decide the fate of continents, Sir Keir finds his comfort in the polite, synchronized consensus of Emmanuel Macron and the European administrative class. He is a leader who offers apologies for the vetting of an ambassador and calls for Prince Andrew to testify, attempting to save the reputation of the British state through a series of forensic explanations rather than a grand strategy.

Where Churchill was indifferent to the sensibilities of the day, Sir Keir is defined by them. He operates in a modern landscape where he is constantly afraid of being labeled as “right” or “Islamophobic”. This leads to a leadership style that is more about defensive positioning than offensive vision. He is a man of the subcommittee. One sought to shape history by sheer force of personality. The other seeks to manage the inbox while avoiding the landmines of the 24-hour news cycle. The stalwart gave the people a vision. The solicitor offers them an audit.

The Partner and the Protagonist

Perhaps the most dangerous linguistic shift is found in the East. Joseph Stalin was a tyrant and a monster of the first order. He was a man who oversaw the Holodomor and left millions of Ukrainians to starve in the name of a singular, iron-fisted vision. Yet in the 1940s, the West viewed him as a “partner”. He understood the one big thing of spheres of influence. He signed treaties and expected them to be settled in land and steel with a grim, bureaucratic consistency. Stalin’s Russia was a heavy, iron statue. It was brutal but it was solid.

Vladimir Putin is not a partner. He is a protagonist in a sophisticated protection racket with a nuclear arsenal. His Kremlin is not an ideological monolith but a shifting, flickering video feed. Where Stalin built a solid bloc, Putin’s Russia is a blurred collage of alliances with Iran, China, and North Korea. It is a world of Wagner-lite mercenaries and “hybrid” threats that lack the permanence of the past. Stalin wanted a seat at the table to redraw the map. Mr. Putin wants to flip the table to ensure no one else can sit at it. In the 20th century, the East spoke in the language of empires. In the 21st, it speaks in the language of the gang.

The Loss of the Universal Dialect

The giants of the past, for all their monumental flaws, shared a common vocabulary of permanence. They understood that power required a certain architectural rigidity to prevent the ceiling from falling in on everyone.

Today’s trio are foxes in a world of 15-minute news cycles. They are vivid, they are loud, and they are brilliantly colored, but they lack the singular, “hedgehog” focus required to bridge the gap between Moscow, London, and Washington. They are “Pop” leaders: mass-produced, instantly recognizable, but ultimately two-dimensional.

The common language that saved the 20th century was the language of the Great Game. The tragedy of the 21st is that we are no longer playing a game with rules; we are simply watching a broadcast that never ends, led by men who know many small things, but have forgotten the only thing that matters: how to keep the lights on.