I was taken to a July 4th picnic. A bunch of upper middle class Americans sipped wine and watched the fireworks being set off from the then working class suburb of Mountain View below them as they celebrated America’s escape from a British king. As I listened to their disparaging commentary on the vulgarity of the red, white and blue colour scheme of the display, I realised that the American class system might be as pernicious as the English one I had left behind. It was a cautionary moment.

The new America is caught in the picture of an alarmed commuter on the Washington subway surrounded on July 4th by masked and armed men who are on their way to demonstrate for a very different set of values to those that have animated America since its founding. America is angrier and more doubtful about its future than ever before.

Full Faith & Credit

The solemn truth is the worst president of the United States in its 250 year history exercises more disruptive power than any of his predecessors. A product of a moment when Americans have lost faith in their establishment and its institutions, he has been able to overturn or break the boundaries and checks that the founding fathers had so painfully constructed.

This month has chosen a brazen disregard for America’s history, its constitution, and even the architecture of its capital, Washington. The White House itself as it was turned into a raucous fight club for a night; but most noticed abroad was even the rules of the World Cup were not safe as Donald Trump intervened to reverse an American striker’s red card.

While World Cup visitors also saw the country I had seen fifty years ago, an America of wide spaces and soaring cities, good humour and hospitality such as the Scots received in Boston, those foreign fans also couldn’t escape seeing the bigotry and anger of its broken politics and its overbearing symbol, Donald Trump.

Missing in Action

And disconcertingly if the visitors looked a little harder they would also have seen that rather than limbering up for a midterm landslide against a now unpopular incumbent - the author of a war in Iran and soaring gas prices - the Democrats are struggling too. They are as divided as most European social democratic parties in how to respond to broken trust in government when their governing instinct remains more taxes and more government.

Coup to Coronation

Back in Britain the coup against the hapless Sir Keir Starmer reached its conclusion and a new prime minister, Andy Burnham was sworn in promising “Manchesterism,” defined as a devolution of power from Westminster together with the local public-private partnerships he forged as mayor of Greater Manchester that notably delivered a better bus service and more housing.

Now, as his opponents have quickly pointed out, Burnham inherits a more complicated national agenda and the central dilemma that brought down his fumbling predecessor: soaring demands on public spending, and an economy stuck in a low-growth groove that simply cannot afford it. He must tackle a welfare system that soaks up more spending at an alarming rate but is swamped by a growing caseload of young and old; together with the demands of increased security spending. A Russian destroyer cheekily greeted Burnham’s arrival in Downing Street by firing off live ammunition 40 miles off Plymouth. Britain’s old sea dogs, Sir Francis Drake, Horactio Nelson, and there fellows must be turning in their watery graves.

My suspicion is Burnham will talk to the left and govern to the right. The cultural alienation of the working class from Labour which has pushed them into the arms of Nigel Farage's Reform requires the first. Having been a colleague of Burnham’s in Gordon Brown’s government, my hope is he will realise that on the economic agenda, he must prioritise growth not spending. For the bond markets alone, he must live down Labour’s tax and spend reputation. Starmer and his chancellor, Rachel Reeves have left Britain with the highest taxes in decades and the most expensive debt. These are not the conditions for growth.

“Good growth in every British postcode”

But his is the challenge all Western governments are facing: how to reverse a malaise that has spread from the underperformance of their economies back into their political systems. A metastasising that now affects faith in institutions and politics has allowed the rise of the far right. Where the usurpers have taken power they are as bereft of solutions as the social democratic establishments they have replaced. Desperate lunges by politicians of all persuasions to “reindustrialise”, “pick winners” or “protect” domestic industries exposes the empty bag of tricks currently available to them.

Our political systems are adrift; they have lost confidence in a coherent way forward. The most serious heights of the British media poured scorn on the new prime minister’s claim that neoliberalism had failed us. They wanted to hold onto the achievements of Thatcher and Blair and feared he was proposing a return to old fashioned state socialism. But the truth is that while Thatcherism and Blairism produced extraordinary periods of growth in the eighties, nineties, and noughties, its failings came home to roost thereafter. Once the wheels came off, it could not sustain a political consensus.

The scars of Thatcher’s deindustrialisation of Britain are too evident in too many places. Burnham must be right to promise growth in every post code. Yet equally, as Britain has shifted to a services economy, the promise of reindustrialisation is a hollow one. Trump’s America is trying to bring factory jobs home but the early evidence is its robots, not people, that are the new workers.

Responsible and Regulated

The UK is in fact lucky to have less industrial exposure than many of its neighbours. Almost certainly a British jobs strategy requires a strategic state with a vision of where the future jobs lie and the willingness to use its powers to prioritise those sectors and, where needed, slash - not increase - business taxes and regulation.

This certainly needs to be accompanied by the circumspection not to try and pick individual company winners; and a government radical enough to turn the tax system on its head moving a significant portion of the burden to assets and wealth, and away from income or wealth creation. Yet also ensuring all the earning population contributes however modestly to the tax take to restore a sense of shared burden for funding the welfare system and therefore for its use. And finally a flipping of the benefits of spending from the old to the young: delinking pensions from the so-called triple lock of inflation indicators; finding a partially self-funding model of social care where pensioners can borrow against their estate for their costs of care and redeploying spending on youth training, apprenticeships and lowered university fees. This, not to feed dependency and the current soaring mental health payments to youngsters, but to get them into work and exciting futures. If the Labour Party can’t grip these difficult choices now it’s unlikely to survive the next election.

Nor are the economic opportunities as bleak as the commentariat would have us believe. For now the energy debate in the UK has gotten reduced to North Sea drilling licenses but the shift to renewables is not the hair-shirt pathetic manoeuvre that the right wing media or its Green champions on the left often claim. Nor of a time to leave UK energy costs expensively uncompetitive as they currently are. Rather it remains the route to a new Green growth strategy that offers both massive investment opportunities and new jobs. Compellingly in an age of new conflict, it also offers energy security.

Britain also enjoys advantages in the field of growing defence spending. I never thought the words Swindon and tech hub would belong in the same sentence. But this famously unfashionable town is now literally a buzzing drone hub! Beyond that, the UK’s university adjacent science and innovation parks position it well to keep up with the revolution in war fighting technology that is unfolding in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. And as Europe detaches from the US in terms of defence procurement, this is also an opportunity. Commentators have been pointing out that Britain is home to inventions but less good at taking them to commercial scale. Time to change that.

The list continues. The last Tory Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak’s, legacy is he did get his foot in the AI door. Britain is no US or China but it does have a deep domestic bench as Sebastian Mallaby’s remarkable book on our local London boy, Demis Hassebis of Deep Mind, shows. And as the backlash against a reckless AI of energy-guzzling data centers, feared job destruction and privacy concerns grows, Britain may, with its commitment to AI safety issues, be able to position itself the home of a “Social AI”- responsible and regulated. For the first time, Britain has a cabinet-level minister dedicated to AI.

So we must wish Burnham in the UK and those lost American Democrats Godspeed as however imperfect their current offer, they must be the way back for their countries and the world. So Happy Birthday America and may your 300th be a happier affair than your 250th. And may Britain still be free enough that an amateur Brit de Tocqueville can still offer an American president a tongue lashing in pages like this.

See you in September.

Best,

Mark

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Assisted by Eilis Klein

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Further Listening

• Here is the full run of the podcast that I co-hosted, World’s Toughest Job now:

• Britain may not be the only place that needs saving by a mayor

Some other pieces from the month:

• David Miliband on how to end the democratic depression

Arguably

David Miliband: how to end the democratic depression

This is the 2026 Jonathan Sacks Memorial Lecture, “Kings, Priests and Prophets: Power and its Missing Guardrails”, delivered by David Miliband at the London School of Economics this evening…

Read more

2 months ago · 17 likes · David Miliband

• Crisis Group, causes of peace

• How to Ensure AI Serves the Public Good, from Paschal Donohoe

• Burnham, Manchesterism and the return of place in foreign policy

This month has provided me plenty of grist to reflect on whether the UN has entered the terminal decline that afflicted the League of Nations in the 1930s. A draft manuscript of an excellent new book on the League, Ghost in Geneva by Michael Manulak, provided a rich seam of historical comparisons. The decline, for example, started well before Italy invaded Ethiopia and involved League climb downs over Corfu and Manchuria that set the precedent for the League’s passivity over Mussolini’s shameless Ethiopian act of late imperialism. The British Foreign Office, never convinced that a new rule-based order could replace the old one based on balance of power, bluntly prioritised keeping Italy and Japan out of the arms of Germany. This took precendence over the League’s commitment to rights and justice because that’s what you do in a balance of power system. You keep enough countries on your side - whatever the moral cost - to deter the other guy.

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State of Play

The first wave of candidates to be the next UN Secretary-General (SG) took to the road this month and a number appeared at hustings in London, where I was part of a warm-up act, and Geneva.

Several of the candidates notched up solid performances but none electrified their audiences and a sense remained that other candidates were still hiding in the wings. But equally there was a suspicion that those skulking offstage are not necessarily the visionaries who might rescue the organisation but the back-pocket candidates of the P3 - the US, China and Russia - whose support is necessary for a candidate to succeed. A choice needs to be made over the next months to allow a new SG to take office on 1 January, 2027.

Macky Sall in New York

Over this month also, I have participated as co-host in recording an eight part podcast series, World’s Toughest Job for Foreign Policy and the UN Foundation. Under the probing guidance of our excellent host Jasmin Bauomy, each episode combines a rich archival example of UN Secretary-Generals rising to a challenge - such as peacemaking, climate negotiations, development or simple leadership - followed by a panel discussion about future challenges and then my closing thoughts.

So where does my month of multilateral immersion leave me?

6 Key Points

• First, that this election matters. It probably is a last ditch chance to revive the UN and restore its legitimacy and authority which is currently hanging by a thread after a terrible decade for the organisation. Notably because two of its founding members, Russia and the US have strayed from any pretence that their imperialistic ambitions comport with the UN Charter. This has swung the world back towards an older pre-1919 disorder, Balance of Power politics. It makes a new Secretary-General both the standard bearer for that currently-vanishing 1945 vision of a rules-based order but also, without armies of her or his own, someone who must nevertheless keep channels open to the UN’s founding, now rogue, backers. Above all, they must be a persuader. The SG must juggle the roles of principled and loud campaigner for collective solutions to the world’s problems with the role of diplomat who talks to all, even the villains of the new disorder. One moment they will be wearing the boots of the activist, next the dancing shoes of the mediator.

• Second, in the podcast Prince Zeid, the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, lamented that the selection process did not allow a balanced panel of the wise and the good to go search the world for the best candidate. He wanted to keep the process free of the normal political horse trading. It sounded a bit like how a new Dalai Llama is chosen! Although the latter lacks a temporal CV as they are chosen at birth!

  My preferred example from another religion, the Catholic Church, is barely more realistic - but the sharp and mature political calculations about candidate positioning, communication skills, and management competence that allowed the quick selection of Pope Leo in closed conclave at the Vatican might in other times be an inspiration to the UN ambassadors exercising this vote - above all to put the institution and its mission ahead of national interests. Little chance, I fear.

• Third, what can be done to open up the race; make sure the candidate field is as strong as it can be and that the best candidate wins. The formal process, laid out in the Charter, is that the successful SG must secure 9 votes out of the 15 council votes and must not be vetoed by any of the 5 permanent members. The successful candidate is then presented to the General Assembly for confirmation - until now, no more than a polite affirmation of the Security Council choice. In a UN where legitimacy is swinging from the deadlocked Security Council to the General Assembly, one level of protection of the process would be that a P3-sponsored candidate is rejected by the General Assembly (GA). While floated privately by some senior GA figures, it seems unlikely that the GA would combine on such a poke in the eye to Big Powers. More plausible is that the elected members of the Council, the so-called E10, sit on their hands and do not give a P3 candidate a winning majority, but here too arm-twisting by the P3 makes it look a frail defence. And yet a candidate who is not the General of the other 190 members but rather the Secretary of the P3 is bound to fail. They will lack the authority of the many and be under the thumb of the very few.

• So fourth, the one manoeuvre that might work is that the British and French stand up now and declare that as the other two veto holding powers they will not let a candidate through who:

  • does not enjoy widespread support in the General Assembly; and,

  • has not exposed themselves to sufficient public scrutiny in the GA hearings and through global town halls and media appearances.

  • No last minute stealth candidate produced out of a Mar-a-Lago hat. Various dubious Palm Beach socialites are rumoured.

    As the votes are conducted in the Council by an informal straw voting system it would not require either formally to deploy their veto, which they are properly reluctant to do given its increasingly anachronistic associations.

    

    But a necessary ingredient - political courage- is not very evident in either capital. Until this week, at least, French diplomacy has been reduced to a hospitality objective- making sure Donald Trump came to Macron’s G7 summit and stayed until the end; that meant no provocations. Now perhaps the French can worry again about the world, not the place settings.

    

    And British ministers are completely missing in action as that government melts down. Officials, not ministers, are therefore in charge and they remain instinctively - or sentimentally, pick your term - Atlanticist, not wishing to add to the list of US grievances with the UK, which currently spans from Iran to defence spending. So, other UN diplomats view them as bobbing along in the American wake rather than helping open up fuller General Assembly involvement. In fact, the choice of a UN Secretary-General cannot be high on Trump’s priorities or flash points. For him it’s no more than a world stage with a captive audience to behave badly on once a year in September at the opening of the General Assembly. The British could well afford to add one more to his list of complaints about them at little real cost. And UK officials might reflect on how their predecessors’ bloody hands were all over the knife that slayed the League1. Will they repeat the crime?

• Fifth, a genuine rogue card in all of this is China. A very different Nationalist China was betrayed by the League over Manchuria2, when the latter accepted Japan’s fake-news version of the facts as justifying intervention. And once Mao’s China finally took its seat, the UN has provided a vital platform of influence for China.

  Further, the rule-based global order allowed China to get rich long before it could project the military power to protect its trading routes. In a rule-based world that spawned globalisation, they were safe on their own as a global mercantilist with a puny military. China has done very well out of the UN and its comments about this SG election have been appropriately moderate as a consequence. China refers to its spirit of sino-multilateralism as ‘true multilateralism.3’ It’s Foreign Minister has acknowledged, for example, that ideally it is Latin America’s turn to produce a candidate- and preferably a woman. So China is a greater respecter of UN convention than its norm-busting peers, the US and Russia, but hardly likely - given the character of its own politics - to embrace as SG a champion of human rights, or one who makes uncomfortable arguments about conflict prevention.

• Sixth, the ambition to have a woman Secretary-General surged ten years ago but was thwarted4. The champions of it this time5 are being careful in framing the case in a way that would not set off Trump, with his hatred of anything that seems to deliberately tilt the world against white men. Yet writing against the backdrop of Trump’s masculinity-celebrating cage fights staged on the White House Lawn, his failed war in Iran, and its flawed ceasefire (all largely men-made spectacles and mishaps), it does seem that Trump is in this regard at least a woman’s best friend. A little compassion and respect, together with a patient attention to detail when it comes to peacemaking, would not go amiss amidst the chaotic and violent testosterone-charged world he and Putin so relish.

  

  Trump boasted on Truth Social the night was “PERFECT!” - the AP

General of the GA

The reason so much rests on this SG choice is not just a frantic grasping for good leadership - often a mirage if the decks are stacked against it - but more an emerging certainty that the UN has to chart a path to new ownership if it is to survive as a useful institution. With a broken Security Council, the Secretary-General becomes a critical potential helmsman in navigating this shift.

I saw from my own time at Kofi Annan’s side that a Secretary-General has a unique platform to find common ground, edge diplomatic processes forward, and convene eclectic parties whether on security, public health or climate. But Annan had an advantage that this successor will not have - strong support from Big Powers and when even he lost that over Iraq, his diplomatic authority was significantly reduced.

A new chief will have to create a new evolving and shifting bench of substitutes to make up for the American and Russian semi-absence. There are plenty of countries from regional powers such as Brazil or India to smaller countries that hold on to the centrality of the UN6 in how we organise ourselves. They have no appetite for trading in a rule-based system for the current descent back into a pre-League world.

Yet it will not be a heroic return to rules with a happy ending. The script gets written in the messy reality of politics, not in Hollywood. The tension between realist national interests and the aspirations of a world run by the UN rule book will remain a live one. Regional powers are every bit as capable of double standards when it comes to protecting their local standing as global ones.

May the best system win

What is striking about the League of Nations is both systems, realist vs an universal rules-based system, jostled for influence inside the League. A small number of visionary politicians pressed for the full League ambition. Their efforts centred on the Disarmament Conference, the brainchild of UK Labour leaders, whereas the realists stuck back with the Locarno Pact. The Pact was initially intended to stabilise European western borders but then became essentially a concert of bigger powers that met privately in advance to put the fix in on key League decisions. Whereas the disarmament effort, despite great hopes, fell apart as Germany demanded the right to rearm to achieve parity with a suspicious France; the British objections to naval reductions added to the inevitable failure. Countries concluded, as the war clouds gathered, that they had to hide behind arms not laws.

The world was limbering up for another war. The Thucydides trap of rising powers and falling ones was on full display. The idealism of the League, even the memory of a devastating World War, was no match. Countries had reverted to taking sides.

The question is whether this time around rival systems and visions of how the world should be organised can be contained within a UN framework. Again, the realists are on the rampage but so far they are not succeeding. Putin is not winning his war in Ukraine; nor Trump his in Iran. And the realists brought down the League but failed to keep the peace when Hitler invaded Rhineland in 1936 and revoked the treaty.

Learned our lesson?

Let’s hope it doesn’t take another such conflict to make leaders recognise the limits of realism as an operating doctrine. Our globalised world is already too connected — trade and economies are too interlinked, modern choke points like the Gulf of Hormuz too critical, the impact of coming climate change too imminent, the impact of forces such as demography and AI on the quality and global location of work — for the world to waste too long on this re-run of a pre-modern system. It should be consigned to the cage fight and the history books.

The bloody noses the Big Powers are getting may make Trump and Putin’s successors think twice before putting all their eggs in the realist basket. There may be a modest swing back to a more engaged multilateralism as they recognise the limits of conventional force and power in an age of asymmetric, fast-changing warfare and shifts in economic standing. Yet the Thucydides logic will remain.

Both powers are losing ground to China and now others. The temptation to try and hold back the future via a desperate realism will vie with the commercial and economic need for a more orderly stable world. A UN Secretary-General will be a key figure managing these epic shifts, not least as these old men are shuffled from the stage.

Seeking World’s Secular Pope: mediator, storyteller, strategist & manager

My own ringside view of the SG job is that it combines the infinite patience of the mediator - repeated phone calls and travel7 - as the the two sides are inched forward to a peace agreement, with the long-term vision of a storyteller and strategist, who can seize on problems like climate change, assemble the right actors, and develop a convincing narrative about the possibilities of long-term change.

And there is the ever present challenge of management; never enough resources; and of preventing the permanent temptation of the bureaucracy to slip into never ending processes. In a forthcoming episode of our podcast, Sigrid Kaag and Martin Griffiths, two of the most successful UN officials and mediators of recent years, argued that despite the overwhelming agenda they will face, a new Secretary-General might initially do better to take challenges head on through a small, loyal but talented team, immediately around them, rather than by trying immediately to re-animate the wider bureaucracy. The latter is so incentivised to descend behind the ramparts of that bureaucratic process as a means of demonstrating even-handedness to a watchful state membership that staff can often become detached from their raison d’être: impact and results.

There was a reason we called the podcast World’s Toughest Job. It’s a pity Pope Leo doesn’t have a sister.

Best,

Mark

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With assistance from Eilis Klein

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Further reading

• Endearing American sports stories are doing A LOT to buoy America’s reputation:

  • New York - a British take on Knicks in 5

  • Boston/ Scots - American impressed by Scots’ cleanliness to inebriated ratio

  • Kansas/Algeria - Midwesterner serves as proof positive of ‘Midwestern nice’

• New from ECFR | The new climate battle: Five deals to recharge the green transition

  

• Jeremy Konyndyk: “This Could Be the Worst Ebola Outbreak in History”

  

It’s at the very least an unfortunate coincidence of timing that we briefly got very good at making poorer people elsewhere a little less badly off just as we began to lose the art of doing that at home. Now Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) is being slashed as the West pivots to tend to its own domestic failures. What’s left seems destined to be repurposed for use in exactly the failed ways it was before ODA’s years of triumph.

Dam(med) if you do?

A genesis for ODA’s modern success was 1988. A UK Sec of State for Defence visited Malaysia. His actions at the time later led to a landslide change in British aid policy. He promised aid in return for Malaysia purchasing UK arms1.

It led to £234 million funding of the Pergau Dam by the Thatcher government, despite it being deemed an un-economic white elephant of a project by UK officials. Tim Lankester, the top foreign office development official at the time, refused to sign off on it. It finally went to the Prime Minister’s desk where Margaret Thatcher approved it.

The “arms for aid” affair was a huge scandal at the time. Its legacy, however, was a fundamental reset of British development policy. When Labour came to power in 1997, it set up a new separate department, DFID - the department for international development - so as to free development decisions from British trade and politics. The new approach was confirmed in the 2002 International Development Act that determined that aid was for the purpose of poverty reduction alone. And UK Governments - Labour and Tory - committed to 0.7 of GDP in annual ODA.

From the UK to the MDGs

Internationally, development spending tracked the British example. At the United Nations I and others under the leadership of Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, introduced the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). They came on the heels of a civil society anti-poverty inspired debt relief campaign aimed at lessening the burden of earlier ‘aid for arms’ type deals. The U.S., employing aid to sustain its sphere of influence during the Cold War, was particularly culpable of allowing dictator allies to run up corrupt debts from the World Bank and others that then fell on the shoulders of their hapless citizens. Countries such as Zaire, later the DRC, and Indonesia were egregious examples.

The stage was set for a whole new era of development. The MDGs established at the start of the new millennium set stretch goals for poverty reduction over the period 1990-2015. The results were bracing.

The number of people living in extreme poverty fell from 1.9 billion in 1990 to 836 million in 2015. That met the global goal of halving the proportion of those living in extreme poverty (less than $1.25 per day). The number of children not in school dropped by almost 50% over a 10 year period. There was a 53% reduction in child mortality and a 45% drop in maternal mortality over the 25 year life of the MDGs. And there was dramatic improvement too in combating infectious disease.

None of this was easy. In my early years as head of the UN Development Programme (UNDP) , the sudden scourge of HIV/AIDS seemed likely to set back all health improvements - instead, infection rates dropped by 40% over a 13 year period and those on anti-retroviral treatment increased from 800,000 in 2003 to 13.6 million in 2014. That avoided some 7.5 million deaths. It took deep diplomatic and development engagement led by Kofi Annan but also involving President George W Bush and other leaders very directly; as well as their developing country counterparts such as Festus Mogae of Botswana, who died this month, Big Pharma, Foundations and civil society. It was tough and bare knuckled at times over issues of drug copyright and pricing but we got there together because there was the political will to do so.

The fifteen year period 1995-2010 was the most dramatic decade and a half in human history in terms of global progress for humanity’s poorest.

Progress was uneven. Geographically, as many have noted, China disproportionately drove these global numbers with its billion plus population. But there were substantial gains almost everywhere and while good national priorities counted for more in this success than ODA, the mutual reinforcement between good governance and aligned ODA, leading to real progress was exhilarating for a senior development official like myself. The sins of Pergau had an apparently happy legacy. A development atonement.

But there was still a long way to go. Poverty might have been down but income inequality was persistent. And new risks were gathering. Climate-related threats were endangering progress - natural disasters were on the rise, farmlands and cities alike were subject to weather threats that disproportionately hit those on the worst land - the poor. We had just begun the journey.

The Ghost of the Past

And today the shadow of Pergau is back. Progress has stalled and in some cases been thrown into sharp reverse. Last year ODA fell 23%, the largest annual fall on record. And what’s left is rapidly being redirected in many cases from altruistic poverty reduction to supporting donors’ national interests.

The US takes the prize for the crassest reversal. As an example it has proposed to Zambia a health compact - one of several dozen such national health programs it plans. The US would provide $1 billion over 5 years (less than half of what it was receiving before President Trump took office). In return, the US would get privileged access to Zambia’s critical minerals and to its citizens’ private health data. Zambia is understandably stalling. As a consequence the US has threatened to suspend its ongoing antiretroviral funding. Around 1.3 million Zambians are currently being treated on the US PEPFAR program. An internal State Dept memo argued:

“We will only secure our priorities by demonstrating willingness to publicly take support away from Zambia on a massive scale.”

Or another example, the US looks set to reverse decades of improvements in how it deploys its own agricultural surpluses to address hunger, sustain American farm incomes but not undermine local farmers in Africa and elsewhere. The carefully crafted steps to balance these objectives are to be jettisoned as it becomes a simple bailout for midwestern farmers, a constituency that was losing faith in Trump as his tariff wars impacted their export markets.

Aid is rapidly being remade as a tool of foreign policy and commercial interests. How did this reversal come to pass? How was such a rare global public policy achievement that at the time seemed to enjoy the support of the left and right alike take such a fall? Like so much that has gone wrong recently Trump has got quite a lot to do with it.

Yet in truth, the reality is more complex than the early antics of Trump and his chainsaw waving accomplice, Elon Musk, when at the start of his second term USAID the world’s largest bilateral aid program was shuttered. On Feb 3 2025 Musk wrote on X: “we spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could have gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”

No wonder this American pageant became the defining public moment in ODA’s global immolation. The US started with a bang, falling from $63 billion in 2024 to $29 billion in 2025 - a whopping 57% decline.

The Pinch

Aid’s fall elsewhere has been a quieter, less noticed affair. And the US Congress, including some Republicans, has actually sought to restore some of the cuts, meaning that as a percentage the UK, which has cut from 0.7% to 0.3% - cuts initiated by both a Tory and then a Labour Government - will ultimately have cut proportionately more than the US. And DFID got folded back into the Foreign Office. Pergau was back.

You would not know it from the sanctimonious tone of the UK Government, which even has the gall this week to be hosting an international conference on the future of ODA. In a very British way it expects to be still taken seriously even as its money dries up. And in truth it still has as great a concentration of development experience among its officials, think tanks, foundations and NGOs as any western capital. It’s just they are now in the wrong place. They should be in Nairobi or Jakarta, not London.

Across the EU, the cuts’ story is the same. Of the 17 EU states that are DAC members (the OECD’s ODA committee), cuts were nearly 10% and EU institutions nearly 14%. Further, a fifth of Europe’s ODA spending goes on meeting the domestic accommodation costs of illegal migrant flows - a disputed DAC-approved stretching of what counts as aid.

France has come down by about half from President Macron’s high point of French aspirational leadership on ODA soft power. Germany, which aspired under Chancellor Merkel to be Europe’s leading player in Africa, has fallen back as have traditional ODA superpowers like Sweden and the Netherlands.

Yet from their publics and parliaments, barely a peep. The case made by governments has been that they are reluctant cutters compelled by tight public spending and increased defence spending as the world tips back towards conflict.

Their argument is of course not entirely wrong. In the post-1989 world, there was a post Cold War political dividend. A new generation of political leaders and voters did have the luxury of not having to weigh overseas public spending through the lens solely of national security interests. There was a rare moment of relative international harmony that allowed development ambition to take wing. An aspiration for global cooperation and solidarity to end poverty became mainstream.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, as a World Bank and then UN Development leader I got in the habit of researching public opinion data before visiting European ministers and parliaments. Aid had become good politics. Among younger voters it was often more of a determinant of voting intention than party affiliation. Elevated by the debt relief campaign and the MDGs, it became a significant national issue.

In 2005 as a UN official, I was asked to speak at both the Labour and Conservative party conferences. More glamorously Bono and friends had become the face of campaigning. Aid was cool from Glastonbury to Westminster.

Now, aid is not. Polling reveals exaggerated public estimates as to what was spent on aid but ever more a resentment that at a time of domestic spending cuts, money is still diverted to foreign causes. That resentment taps into a deeper vein in our contemporary politics, the insecurity - economic and cultural - of those in the old economy.

But nor are its tribulations donor centred alone. When Musk swung his chainsaw at USAID, there was not just silence in the North. There were not the sustained protests across the Global South that many might have expected - and this despite analyses from the Lancet and the highly regarded Center for Global Development (CGD) in Washington, that possibly millions of lives were at risk.

Partly perhaps Southern leaders, like their Northern counterparts, were reluctant to prompt Trump’s wrath. The Secretary of State Marco Rubio has brazenly and provocatively asserted that not single a life would be lost because of the cuts. And perhaps also too many ministers remain regrettably detached from their country’s frontline of needs. A rural health clinic or refugee camp cut off from vital medical resupply may not be top of mind for the minister in the distant capital.

The Second Decolonisation

But there is something else too. ODA, despite its authors’ good intentions and its success, had never escaped its history - not the Pergau history - but an earlier war of empire and colonies. It has been a prisoner of the DNA of its beginnings: support to countries largely under European colonial rule; a means in later years to prepare them for self-rule but nevertheless one that meant priorities and direction were set from a Western capital, too rarely their own.

Later this led to ever more detachment between real needs on the ground and donors with their changing menu of development priorities. Issues fell in and out of vogue: community development; microfinance; education; public health; the private sector; climate. Each important, indeed vital, but each needing consistent attention and prioritisation rather than the fits and starts of the changing donor agenda. A great benefit of the MDGs was that even though they may have shared the same colonial birthmark, in some respects they did allow a consistency of approach over a critical 15 year period. The successor SDGs are so all-encompassing, and adopting of so many priorities, that they provide no such useful discipline.

So from the crash and burn of the old ODA system, there may be a silver lining: an opportunity to build a new development finance system that is centred on developing countries themselves. A power shift, from the donor-created strategies of the past.

Some ODA will remain but it will need to be triaged: for humanitarian needs, which are sharply growing in a conflict and climate hit world; for fragile states that have no other financing choices; for some basic health and education programs; and for Global Public Goods where arresting climate change, for example, benefits us all directly and so merits shared funding. Hopefully, a narrower, more focused ODA will over time allow some rebuilding of donor public support.

But beyond that, developing countries are going to have to find ways of accessing Western financial markets and savings pools. A new financial tyranny for some but for others an emancipation from overbearing western aid officials.

And developing countries recovering control over its own development strategy may be a political win and in the long term a much more promising development path, for now, it will be expensive, unaffordable in many cases, and risks building up unmanageable debt all at a time when fuel and fertiliser prices are soaring. Countries are going to be thrown back on growing their own tax revenues, international public borrowing, some of it at concessional rates from development banks, and private investment. It will be a cold new world for many developing countries. The giddy progress of the MDG years is not coming back anytime soon.

To borrow an old phrase: ODA is the baby that has been thrown out with the bath water. It needed reform, not evisceration. But in today’s age of political demons nothing is safe - least of all the rare public policy that actually produced results.

Best,

Mark

—

With assistance from Eilis Klein

—

More:

• Make fun of Musk corner: Jon Oliver on Twitter

• For more on the rise and fall of DFID, read Mark Lowcock and Ranil Dissanayake’s book

• From Masood Ahmed, one of DFID’s finest, and colleagues: https://www.cgdev.org/publication/clear-vision-official-development-assistance-purpose-principles-and-priorities

• For more on a new development financing system: https://www.bwi80.org/

• The second episode of World’s Toughest Job is out now

• Important read from the New York Times on a reporting trip in Somalia.

• On my weekend watch list: Dr Comfort Ero’s remarks (starting around min 42) at Georgetown’s Walsh School of Foreign Service Graduate Commencement:

It is strange times when it takes a Pope to warn against war conducted in the name of religion. Yet despite JD Vance’s doubts about the Pope’s grasp of theology, the doctrine of a Just War is a pretty clear one. It’s defensive and a response to the other side hitting you first. Such an approach to war precedes Christianity; Cicero argued much the same thing as do other religions and it is embedded in secular contemporary doctrines of war, notably the UN Charter.

While these arguments may have little standing for an Administration seduced by the glamour of American weaponry and the promise of Iranian regime change delivered in the Situation Room itself – no less by Prime Minister Netanyahu – to an impressionable President and a court of more sceptical underlings who nevertheless could not muster the courage to say ‘No’ to what Marco Rubio grumbled was the Israeli leader’s “Bullshit”. (Further NYTimes reporting on the decision here.)

“Weaker, worse and severe”

At one level it’s a descent into farce but one that is now hitting the rest of the world with very real effects - petrol rationing in Asia; fertiliser shortages in Africa. Similar shortages are only weeks away in Europe too. European airline stocks took a hit as this dawned on markets. The IMF’s scenarios for global growth as a consequence make grim reading: “weak, worse and severe.” The US is one of the least hit: gas prices up at the pump but markets and growth blithely unaffected so far and a predictable flight of foreign funds to the safety of the dollar even when a global crisis is of US making. A Trump risk premium is dawning only slowly on markets.

But still more tragedy than farce even though the comeuppance may not be as immediate as Trump’s critics anticipate. Yes, the Americans haven’t won; but No, the Iranians haven’t won either; rather they haven’t lost… yet. In fact the damage to their economy is huge- some argue greater than in the eight years of the Iran-Iraq war when fighting, and therefore damage, was largely contained to the frontline. Iranian media claim $270 billion of infrastructure damage from air attacks on 17,000 targets that the US and Israel have launched which have deliberately targeted the economic as well as military capacity of the country. With a blockade on top of existing sanctions, the earning capacity of the economy is largely shut down. And the human loss horrible.

The most likely outcome seems a messy ceasefire disguised as a peace agreement to save both sides’ face. The second most likely is an American ground invasion to save just Trump’s face but where both sides will lose mightily. In the meantime the assassinations of the early days of the war have not led to regime change but more hardline replacements, and a strengthening hold of the Revolutionary Guard. The likelihood is more domestic crackdown, not the regime change Trump initially anticipated.

Own Goals

Washington last week with the IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings gave the impression of a strange immunity from all this. The president was claiming victory and trading barbs with the pope. The sun and the remains of the cherry blossom were out. The world’s war capital was a building site as Trump, the real estate guy, seeks to remake its public face- the vast East Wing ballroom and an even taller 250 foot monument arch with gold fixtures on top that obscures the view between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington Cemetery. At the same time commercial, restaurant and middle class residential Washington seems to be in the grip of its own recession as a result of the DOGE wholesale layoff of Federal workers.

Yes, the global economy faced new threats because of the Strait of Hormuz but the why of that was publicly skirted around with diplomatic caution by the delegates. No spitting on the host country, rather a strange decorum prevailed among the meetings’ delegates. If official feathers were ruffled, it was by another Trump threat to fire Jay Powell. Mythos, the new Anthropic AI application, also seemed to alarm many attendees more than the Straight of Hormuz; the FT editorial board agrees.

The consequences of the war were deplored but the causes overlooked in public. However, in the corridors and at the hotel bars delegates privately seethed. The anti-Americanism spilled out after the second cocktail and even before the first sip of the first martini there was a dawning recognition that there was no going back to some imagined golden age of American hegemony.

Trump could not be dismissed as an aberration. Uniquely crazy and vulgar, certainly, but a spokesman for an America that had deserted the global rules it had written. A lot of chatter about how the Biden administration on Afghanistan, Gaza and green tariffs (the Inflation Reduction Act) had, with hindsight, been a foretaste of what was to come by already beginning the abandonment of the old order.

Some of the more plausible explanations of the fever that has gripped America are found in the growing literature around why empires end and how they are challenged by upstarts. My new favourite is Odd Arne Westad’s The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict and Warnings from History. A Yale historian of Asia, this short book makes the comparison to 1914 Europe and how the German, US and Japanese challenges to British imperial power are analogous to how China and a number of Middle powers are today challenging the US.

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The key insight of the author is that this is not just a foreign policy thing but rather it washes back into the domestic politics of incumbent and challengers alike prompting aggressive nationalism as competition heats up. In turn, this drives a more confrontational and capricious policy abroad. He points out the barnstorming campaign of Austen Chamberlain, a leading UK politician of the period, to raise tariffs. He cites polling in the US that reports that two out of 5 Americans think it likely that their country will go to war with China in the next five years. In China he is frequently asked by students when he thinks such a war might erupt. Large majorities of Europeans and Indians view China unfavourably. Two thirds of Russians believe their country is in “ a civilisational struggle” with the West.

For those of us bewildered to see the U.S. in such a sorry place there is both comfort in the explanation and alarm in its consequences. Attributing it to the moving tectonic plates of geopolitics and economics and seeing it as a wider phenomenon than just the US means we escape blaming it on some cultural malaise in the US body politic alone but it does raise the wider problem that the world as a whole may not be in the mood for easy platitudes about co-operation. We are in an angry and dangerous place. But all the more reason for rules and rebuilding respect for them. As Westad argues, the alternative is war - possibly a global one.

Not Getting Trampled On

In the meantime it is incumbent on the rest of us to rewrite the rules for a rebalanced system that better represents the world of now - not that of 1945 when the tablets first came down from the mountain. A revived multilateralism at this point may be less about rebuilding a system that enjoys immediate universal respect but rather about rebuilding a rule-based order that is a rival operating system to the Country First model of Trump and Putin.

It is likely to be a long road- not an instant one- back. Multilateralism may have a spell on the opposition benches until the authoritarians exhaust their welcome. It took 16 years before Orbán lost in Hungary. Probably most, if not all, countries will remain in the UN as being out carries risks of not being at the table when global policies are determined; but a significant number including the US may be more spoilers and observers than stewards of the system in the coming years.

That shouldn’t stop the rest of us embarking on a process of ambitious renewal of the system. The election of a new Secretary General later this year does seem to be the healthy prompt for a debate about a reformed UN. The [Re]Group website is a good place to start exploring the issues. Shortly, the first issue of a podcast series I am co-hosting on the Secretary General election and the UN’s future will be up on the site.

The difficulty is that only four candidates have dared to come forward so far because the election remains stacked by the veto power of the five permanent members. Any candidate has to escape objection by any one of them. While Trump and Putin risk dragging the choice down, it is a test of leadership for the UK and France whether they can use their legacy veto to force a more open election that puts them on the side of a UN majority that wants a UN that works as a buffer against big power disorder.

Best,
Mark

—

With assistance from Eilis Klein.

Further reading/ listening:

• War but no peace https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/opinion/international-world/israel-war-strategy.html

  

• The Washington Square Arch (just outside NYU’s main library) feels pretty massive in person… https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/04/15/us/politics/trump-dc-usa-triumphal-arch.html

• Brad Setser on de-dollarization hype vs. reality https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-16/brad-setser-on-the-war-in-iran-and-the-future-of-the-us-dollar

• Helpful brief as the slate of UN Secretary General candidates becomes clear https://www.crisisgroup.org/cmt/global/prioritising-peace-what-un-should-ask-its-next-secretary-general

• Trump Meets His Match in the Pope

• Learning from policymakers who have invested in resilient, clean energy

Let’s Party. It’s another month; another display of shock-and-awe American and Israeli military capability. For a second time in less than a year Iran is the target. Less than 2 weeks into the war, three factors stand out: first, this is another Middle East war where both sides had had an incentive to exaggerate the weaker side’s military capability. The US was casting around for a reason to attack; the target, Iran, was equally bigging up its lethal strike power in the hopes of fending off that attack.

As with Iraq in 2003, we are told that Iran was about to pounce with long range ballistic missiles if there hadn’t been a preemptive strike. It brings memories of the dodgy dossier that claimed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction ready to go. The evident truth is the strike on Iran came now because of Iranian weakness– not strength. It was a chance to hit the enemy while it was still down after last June’s assault on its nuclear programme.

Second, the Iranian military weakness may not count for so much when for the first time since the Second World War the US has leapt into a conflict that involves central nodes of the global economy, including the region’s oil and gas infrastructure and its exit route, the Strait of Hormuz as well as the new global services entrepôts, Dubai, Doha and Israel itself. This is a war that jeopardises the global economy- in a way Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq, all a long way from any geoeconomic nerve centre, didn’t. It offers Iran an asymmetric opportunity to cause global damage when just a few drones or rusty old rockets get through and sink a ship in the strait, knock out a Gulf water treatment plant, or, as they already have, close down QatarEnergy’s gas production- nearly a fifth of the world’s LNG supply.

Third, the war is plain illegal. Keir Starmer’s “handwringing” lawyers - to echo Pete Hegseth, the US Secretary for War’s complaining term1 - are spot on. The fact that the war has widened and Iran has attacked its Gulf neighbours now provides legal cover to come to the latter’s defence. But the opening shot, the Israeli-US assault on Iran had no legal justification. And as bad, the decision was capricious. Trump capitulated to Netanyahu’s demand to join Israel in the attack a day after his negotiators in Geneva and their Iranian counterparts thought a deal was getting closer. I have this from two sources who were in Geneva.

“[T]he [Feb 26] proposal showed some flexibility in the Iranian position. It was also an opening offer and unlikely Iran’s bottom line.” - Arms Control Association

Despite a brutal crackdown by the regime on protesters that killed possibly tens of thousands, the Revolutionary Guards and their cleric allies have run a theocratic autocracy that is deeply unpopular with a majority of Iranians. Their regime is criminal in its cold blooded oppression of Iranians. But this attack seems likely to worsen, not ease, that.

My UN generation worked at a doctrine to deal with country cases where that kind of rule tipped into brutal domestic oppression, the Responsibility to Protect, but it has long since become a lost doctrine in the cratering world of multilateralism. So no effort other than an empty US exhortation to the unarmed protesters to rise up and overthrow their heavily armed oppressors was made by outsiders to stop the violence. And when war came, regime change came and went in a kaleidoscope of changing war aims.

Certainly the war has been met with understandable support across most of the Israeli political spectrum because Iran with its ballistic missiles was a much more formidable threat to Israeli civilians2 than Hamas (other than the horror of October 7th) or Hezbollah. It is an existential conflict. Unlike the US, this war is understandably deemed by most Israelis to be in their interest.

In the United States polling shows deep reservations. It’s the least popular start to a war since modern polling began. But the war is predictably more popular among Republicans compared to Democrats and for some MAGA Republicans, surprisingly more popular than for other Republicans. In that corner of America it is being praised in almost Crusader-Christian terms as a Just War.

There does seem to be a brand makeover of America First underway in MAGA circles. The first version was that of an Administration that stayed home and fixed domestic problems. No more forever wars. Instead its mission was to reverse de-industrialisation and the marginalisation of a betrayed white working class. That remains the MAGA of many of its major influencers.

Now, however, its Supreme Influencer, Donald Trump, is offering them bread and foreign circuses instead. After the humiliations of Afghanistan, Iraq and indeed Vietnam, Trump’s America aspires to walk tall in the world again. Perhaps it will distract them from domestic failures, the classic diversionary tactic of caesars.

“I said it’s a great job and people all around the world are cheering you on,” [Laura] Loomer told the FT. “He’s making us proud to be American.” - FT

What marks out the Trump Administration, and indeed Putin’s disregard for the law on Ukraine, is its shamelessness and completeness3. Bush sort of tried in 2003 and Blair tried a lot harder still, to get the right UN Security Council resolution blessing for the invasion of Iraq. In the end they went in without. However, lawyers could genuinely disagree about the legality of that conflict even if later the legal case for war fell apart because it was found to rest on false intelligence.

In my years at the UN a huge amount of time and thought went into trying to define what was a reasonable trigger for a preemptive strike. Just how close to hitting you did an adversary need to come before you had that right of self-defence? In an era of destructive modern weaponry, including nuclear, diplomats recognised a country couldn’t always wait till it was hit first. None of those debates mattered a jot in this case. This was a power play in the rawest sense of the term. They had the weapons, the means and an enemy on its knees so Israel and the US took advantage to try and complete their re-ordering of the region.

Balls-Up

Days in, it’s much too soon to score the result of this which extends an extraordinary set of Israeli wins since the tragedy of October 7th. On all conventional counts, the US and Israel are demonstrating overwhelming force and dominance. But the regular battlefield isn’t everything. As I suggested above, this war is playing out in the midst of some of the more critical, but vulnerable, parts of the global economy and a lot of stuff may get broken. Call it a ‘bulls in the china shop problem.’ This war may also have a long tail:

• First, if Trump had allowed in his first term the completion of the JCPOA negotiation to ensure that Iranian nuclear development was peaceful, the region might have been a much quieter place in 2026. Diplomacy then, many knowledgeable observers believe, could have accomplished more than this war has done now. And a real kicker, Iran may now remain nuclear free but it’s less clear that regional neighbours such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt won’t embark on their own nuclear weapons development. The Middle East is now in a dangerous arms race. And in the meantime Trump and Putin seem to be walking away from global nuclear arms control. This war is making the region more, not less, dangerous.

• Second, the markets and politics may not so easily fall in line. Just as the stock market helped tame Trump on tariffs, so the commodity markets may also push him to an earlier conclusion on Iran than Israel wants. Soaring gas prices at the pump could cost him the American motorist’s support on the eve of the midterms. Similarly, slaying the Supreme Leader may play well initially. But assassination is a dangerous card to play. The long conflict between oppressed Shias and their Sunni rulers may well be reignited by the martyrdom, as many see it, of the older Khamenei and his family. His son’s ascent is early evidence of Shia resolve.

• Third, whatever slight hope there might have been in the region for a political way out of its generations’ long tailspin is likely lost. The Abraham Accords, almost the only significant diplomatic achievement of Trump’s years in the White House, is likely to stall. While Gulf leaders may privately applaud the degrading of the Iranian regime and hope for its overthrow, their own streets think very differently. A conservative Arab monarchy/Israeli/ US-backed alliance in the region to stem the spread of radical Islam and build regional prosperity and therefore stability looks more elusive than before. Israel has elected since October 7 to pursue a security rather than political solution to its regional isolation which means it is likely to shed, not gain friends, as the likes of Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia are forced to tack away.

• Fourth, the conflict may undo the upside down order of recent years in the region. Its old capitals, Damascus, Cairo and Beirut, had fallen into decline. Beirut’s corniche- once the Arab world’s most elegant street- is a pockmarked war zone. But an alternative, a new ahistorical civilisational mirage had seemed to rise in the sands of the Gulf as oil and gas coffers funded its new cities. Culture, history, wealth were all acquired. This new world was not, it seemed, constrained by history and the wars and sectarianism of the old Middle East. Now that old Middle East is lapping at the new world’s doors as Iranian drones rain down. The painstakingly built reputation for stability risks being shattered.

Party Games

Let me look at the war through the eyes of the UK. When I was a toddler, President Eisenhower stopped a real Anglo-French folly that they had been put up to in no small part by the Israelis, the attempt to seize back control of the Suez Canal. It was an imperial nonsense that cost the British prime minister of the day his job. We are in no position to return the favour and rescue the Americans from their contemporary screw up. When a superpower veers off the reservation, there is nobody able to pull them up.

But that doesn’t mean we have to pliantly bounce along in the wake. Two hundred and fifty years on, it is time for our own little Declaration of Independence, a UK foreign policy that doesn’t loyally revolve only around the US.

The bones of it are in clear view:

• a stronger, more independent military capability;

• a re-engagement with Europe around the transformational imperative of the war in Ukraine and the Russian threat;

• a Mark Carney-like throwing ourselves in with other middle powers to build restraints on superpower behaviours;

• a revived multilateralism that doesn’t just passively spout rule of law norms but gets stuck into resolving rogue regime issues like Venezuela and Iran through robust diplomacy;

• and a revival of a soft power profile that allows us to re-champion a values-based approach to international affairs as an alternative to the current jungle rules.

I have given two talks this month about British foreign policy, more than at any time since the failure to secure a second Brexit referendum, and sense a new appetite for a subject that had lain neglected. It was a casualty of Brexit, because for all the claims of the Brexiteers to the contrary, like early MAGA, it was a retreat home. It was leaving the world even more than it was leaving Europe. But the blinds may be lifting.

For a Labour Government it offers possibly a last chance to put some differentiation and purpose into how it governs. Having not found a narrow domestic narrative that reflects its principles of individual and community in any plausible and coherent way, it now has a chance to start again abroad. As Trump pulls his own sleight of hand and redefines America First as America in global command, so the Starmer Government has a slim window to define itself as a middle power social democratic champion of a politics of values, rather than one of power alone.

That means not just getting our limping military in shape and kitted out for a warfare in Europe. What that might look like is undergoing its own revolution in terms of arms and tactics on the battlefields of Ukraine. New generations and types of weapons might allow some opportunity for diversification away from US to European suppliers.

It also means reviving soft power. The UK hid behind the US on its aid (ODA) cuts. Now the US Congress has pushed back against the White House and restored some of the Musk-Trump cuts. This means that compared to two years ago, the UK is cutting ODA by a higher percentage, 27%, than the US, 24%. And in volume terms, it’s no contest – the US still has more than $50 billion to deploy whereas the UK will have about S7.7 billion. So the US, the hard power titan, even beats us at our own game, soft power.

At the height of the New Labour Government’s standing, pre-Iraq, it was a leading voice and funder of the most successful global development the world had ever seen; and it fed back home into securing the support of university-educated young Brits for whom it was a central part of Labour’s appeal. Along with a dynamic creative industries sector, a relatively thriving BBC, the British Council and a purpose-driven civil society, there was a field force promoting British values around the world.

It is easy to romanticise that recent past. And, I lived in the US in those years so add the rose tinted glasses of the expat. Nevertheless, there was a social cohesion as Britons felt they were all growing a little bit richer together. That has been replaced by a bleak mutual distrust and polarisation which among other things Russian disinformation appears to happily feed on. National security today is minds, not just boots.

A lot of that past is not, and should not be, recoverable in its old form. But there are lessons in its seamless connection of a Britain abroad and at home, pushing an ambitious set of social reforms that created a distinct Labour ideology for its day. There was a narrative.

Dancing Partners

Now Starmer needs to seize his Love Actually moment and stand up to the US. Not in eye-poking ways that further threaten NATO or the basics of the US-UK relationship but rather smaller steps that aim to rub the shine off the “Special” in the Relationship.

An early start might be to signal that Britain will act as an agent of the wider membership in the forthcoming election of a new UN Secretary General. In other words it will use its vote, and if necessary veto, to stop the P3, the US, China and Russia, imposing their choice on the wider membership. Not for the Brits to choose an alternative candidate but to insist that whoever is chosen has been properly vetted and questioned by the wider membership and enjoys majority General Assembly support. Almost certainly that will, and should, be a woman. France, as the fifth veto holder and never willing to be outdone on such gestures, would almost certainly join such a British endeavour. And getting an effective Secretary-General would be no small victory. Part of the UN’s malaise is its headman problem.

Another opportunity is the G20 which the British will chair after the US. Foreign office mandarins wearily declare that their main ambition for the meeting, still 18 months off, is that everybody shows up. The Americans have banned last year’s hosts, South Africa. Full attendance seems a dismal little ambition. Rather, Britain should resurrect South Africa’s debt and development agenda and if Trump doesn’t show up, so be it. It would mean a better communique but more importantly it could be the real launch of Carney’s Middle Power alternative- a G20 without Trump.

The reaction of some will be why burn bridges when Trump will be gone before long. But as I have argued before, the fact that checks and balances have failed at home and abroad to contain Trump forces a moment of reckoning for Western democracies. They cannot put themselves at this risk again. They need to strike out now and build an alternative vision.

History repeats

For a fictional insight into the death spiral of the Israeli-Iranian contest, I recommend David McCloskey’s The Persian. Just published, the author, a former CIA Middle East analyst, reaches deep, despite the apparent limits of the spy thriller format.

And for an evocative reminder of earlier American over-reach, watch Cover-Up on Netflix. This is a documentary that explores the career of Sy Hersh, the investigative journalist who exposed the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War and then Abu Ghraib during the Iraq War. A friend, Mark Obenhaus, is one of its two directors. It’s been winning awards.

Best,

Mark

On the off chance this edition wasn’t long enough for you…

• Foreign Policy removed the paywall on its Iran coverage for 48 hours https://foreignpolicy.com/ - it is still accessible as of this post’s publication

• DC-based oligarchs mansions tour!

@acrecampaigns.orgBeep! Beep! The Oligarch Mansion Bus Tour is coming. Want to know what wealth and housing inequality look like in DC? Just get on board and take a look! #eattherich #taxtherich @shutdowndc

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• Trump’s vision of America: feature or bug?

• Dispatch from the US Congress - responsibility to plan?

• American military industrial complex in the AI era

• Body cam footage of the 2025 US Institute for Peace takeover

Dear Herr Trump,

Merci. You have made us all increase our defence spending. You have woken us up to the existential threat that Putin’s Russia poses and we are proud to be re-arming. And we were particularly reassured to hear your Secretary of State, Marco Rubio in Munich pour a little, much needed emollient on our very open wounds- a consequence of your vice-president’s less friendly words a year earlier at the same conference; and your own designs on Greenland, among the many other slights and gauntlets from denigrating our soldiers fighting on the US side in Afghanistan to tariffs. The Munich Security Conference’s own pre-conference report was the most unGerman and blunt recognition of the threat you represent to Europe. The gloves are off.

Yet apparently according to Marco, you still love us and we remain linked by a common civilisation. It seems we are all the descendants of White Christian Europe – even Mr Rubio, despite a long multi-generational family spell in Cuba. Reading the speech we wonder whether he is of conquistador stock. A descendant of the slayers of the indigenous peoples of the Americas appropriate perhaps for the spokesman of a new, equally pernicious white supremacy.

When we reread Marco’s speech we were a little less reassured. It’s one thing to be asked to confront a common external enemy who clearly means us harm. It’s another to face off against an ‘enemy within,’ when the overwhelming majority of its number are some of our best and most hard working citizens. We are each proud of our multiracial societies.

London Burning

Not least of all London which you seem to have seized onto as the poster boy of “civilisational erasure”. The last census showed that 40% of Londoners were not born in Britain. For you, that indicates a London infested by crime and social breakdown for us its the very foundation of its vitality and appeal. Perhaps it’s why so many of your fellow Americans are fleeing your country to enjoy its diversity, cultural richness and political freedom.

The Russian Bogeyman

So does your push for rearmament have us chasing the right enemy? Russia, which you seem to think isn’t hostile anyway, has an economy smaller than Texas. In 2024 EU countries spent €343.2bn on defence1. The UK was the third highest spender in NATO, spending $84.2 billion on defence2. Also in 2024, well into Russia’s mobilisation into wartime, Russia’s military expenditure reached double the level in 2015 - which was still estimated at $149 billion. And its dismal progress against a much smaller neighbour, Ukraine, where 4 years in it has taken roughly 20% of its territory. Its casualties are thought to be numbering more than 30,000 a month. This is a war Putin anticipated polishing off in days. On current form it seems unlikely that Russian tanks and drones will be swarming into the Baltics or Poland any time soon.

More likely is that Putin will pursue his tactics of disruption and disinformation. This risks dividing our countries because they gnaw at those very multiracial bonds of trust and legitimacy that we value so much. He will look for asymmetrical ways to make trouble- sowing low-cost, high-return social media polarisation. Bots, not tanks.

That said we need a backstop against the bully. It’s clear the two of you have ushered in an age where military power counts. We need to rebuild ours, no argument. But is it the main threat? The real frontline seems to be internal trust or rather lack of it- in our institutions and our democracy.

The New Right

That real frontline is reflected in the rise of the new right in our countries. We have lazily denigrated them as movements harking back to a sentimental past of village cricket and warm beer, or boules and vin ordinaire, populated by white natives. Just writing those words reminds us how foolish this characterisation is. As Mark Leonard argues in an important new paper, for a white working class that has seen several decades of stalled or declining earning power and the hollowing out of their country’s manufacturing base, these parties have a well-crafted and contemporary, grievance-based messages. Uninhibited by the legacy structures of old parties they operate on efficient social media organising platforms. They are part of the political future- not the past as we too complacently sought to dismiss them.

“The policy responses adopted by governments raised crucial questions about whom the state serves, and often suggested that the answer was not ordinary working people. For example, during the financial crisis, governments rescued the banks but cut welfare payments and let people’s houses be repossessed. On the climate crisis, they raised heating costs for households but allowed oil companies to keep growing. Migration helped corporations turn incredible profits but has driven down wages, driven up house prices, put pressure on public services and changed the character of more vulnerable communities. In Ukraine, Western governments have rallied to help a foreign country in need, but at the cost of an inflation crisis due to rising energy bills and of defence spending hikes funded by higher taxes or cuts elsewhere. During the covid-19 pandemic, many white-collar employees could work from home while blue-collar and low-wage service workers had to risk their lives on the front line.” - Mark Leonard, The new right: Anatomy of a global political revolution

In the US the foreign policy counterpart was “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan, the flawed handiwork of detached elites whose sons and daughters were not the ones who paid the price of life and limb for these failed adventures.

But exploiting that sense of grievance has become a license for corruption on an epic scale. Most notably you, your family and chums like Steve Witkoff are making fortunes out of government. Foreign policy, like domestic policy, is for sale.

We have seen it alleged in this Substack before: you are in quantitative terms almost certainly the most corrupt leader in human history. And as that becomes understood and absorbed into the politics of both your country and ours it is going to further damage the standing of institutions and a political class that is letting you get away with it.

Just as you have converted the Republicans from a country club to a working class party, so that same conversion has turned our politics on its head. The Labour Party in the UK risks being reduced to a supper club for liberal human rights lawyers in north London.

In Germany, working-class support for the social democrats is down from 48% in 1998 to 12% in 2025. Meanwhile, the AfD won 38% of working-class votes in the 2025 election (up 17 points on 2021) compared with 21% in the overall electorate.

In France, the contrast is even starker. In the first round of the 2024 snap parliamentary election, Le Pen’s RN secured 59% of the working-class vote, while the PS, LR and Emmanuel Macron’s centrists combined only scraped together 41%.

So it’s time we got out and knocked on doors. Oops – not the right metaphor in the new digital world our opponents have embraced. But you get our point. After all, JD Vance in his infamous Munich speech a year ago said that Europe’s main enemy was within. We just disagree about who it is.

Swords into Rappers

You are now apparently planning to fund these new right groups, as you seek to reverse that “civilisational erasure”. Well this is the real new battleground and we are on different sides. We stand for the diversity that makes us great- and, before you, made America great. Our natural American ally for this battle is Bad Bunny, not Pete Hegseth and your Department of War. The Super Bowl halftime show reassured us America has a future if it can escape the grip of its current rulers.

Pew, Feb 2026 - Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. About a third (31%) say they have not heard of him. Still, more hold an unfavorable view (41%) than favorable view of him (26%).

That show also expressed the enduring power of art and entertainment as tools of soft power. A halftime show largely in Spanish and celebrating people of colour was sedition pure and simple in your America.

And we need to tend to our soft power abroad too. Our foreign assistance programmes have been cut catastrophically to fund defence; the UK has actually cut by a higher percentage than the US where Congress has reversed some of the Musk-Rubio cuts; the funding for the BBC World Service hangs by a thread; most importantly, our foreign policy needs to jump its Atlanticist tracks and make new friends in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Not based on past history but a new one of mutual dependence in trade terms and shared values in a multilateral system. Mark Carney, Pedro Sanchez and Lula are leaders who get it. We are not breaking with you, Donald, but we do need to “derisk”, a word reintroduced for dealing with China but now applied to you, as we do believe you have hastened, not postponed, the moment when America no longer commands the room.

We must seek common cause with countries everywhere who refuse to submit to this power alone model of international relations. The limping UN may have a deathbed recovery as countries rally to it as the antidote to your Board of Peace with its runaway ambitions as a global peacemaker under its chairman-for-life, Donald J Trump.

The Holy See “will not participate in the Board of Peace because of its particular nature, which is evidently not that of other States,” Parolin said.

“One concern,” he said, “is that at the international level it should above all be the UN that manages these crisis situations. This is one of the points on which we have insisted.” - Reuters

On defence, we in Europe need to put in place procurement rules that move to dramatically reduce our dependence on American kit and technology. Not easy but necessary. We need to recover defence independence- not without NATO or its US leadership- but the autonomy to defend ourselves if one day America does not meet its Article 5 mutual defence commitments.

But we need to double down on the soft power we have strayed from. You’ve vacated that space. Nobody takes the US seriously anymore on calls for democracy, human rights or the rule of law. Not that you even bother to make them. Oil (Venezuela and Iran), neighbourhood mates (Argentina and El Salvador), real estate (Greenland, Gaza and Diego Garcia) and Big Power carve-up (Ukraine) seems to be the motives – plus, of course, pursuit of that annoyingly elusive Peace Prize.

Perhaps as Nobel made his money out of dynamite we could ask the Norwegians to mint a special one-off prize: for the man who blew up the world.

Many of our officials, and at times we too, comfort ourselves that it is only three more years. They cannot bear to let go, London’s Whitehall most notably. But at various side gatherings in Europe around Munich, the word was that you are set on subverting this year’s midterm elections by suppressing voting and messing with the count. And even if you don’t succeed, the new right is not going anywhere. AI and global competition are going to increase, not lessen, the pressure on blue collar voters in all our countries. The grievances will not diminish.

Most difficult to say, once a superpower has behaved as it has under you, trust doesn’t recover. We’ve seen the price of overdependence on the US and our impotence when you walk away. We are not going to go down as the leaders who failed to set in motion a process of recovering our independence. Ironic that in the 250th year of your independence we must embark on recovering our independence from you.

But we cannot blame our condition on you alone. The biggest threat to trust and legitimacy remains at home where we have exhibited a Biden-like failure to understand and address the underlying economic grievances of falling real incomes for blue collar workers. And unlike the US, we have a dismal recent track record of failing to grow our economies at a level that might satisfy our voters’ aspirations. As a consequence each of us faces, before long, a likely career-ending political reckoning.

So we are not quite sure whether this is an open letter or a last will and testament.

Regards,

Your European Frenemies

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Further material:

• A recent ODI panel, with my co-authors on the BWI at 80 report:

• An exciting initiative to close data gaps - and make the existing data more useful and more timely. More info here and a first report here, underscoring how crucial MDBs are and will continue to be

• I enjoyed my conversation with Professor Ayse Kaya at Perry World House on the future of development

• In case you missed it, opportunities for economic growth in the UK, from Best for Britain https://www.bestforbritain.org/growth_report

• Like Bad Bunny, Beyonce represents an alternative to Trump’s vision of America https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/07/podcasts/beyonce-tour-us-politics.html

• Bobi Wine update: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cz0pr807yz7o

In its way it was as revelatory to an international audience as President Biden’s shambolic appearance in the first 2024 presidential debate was to Americans. Biden had emerged from behind the White House cocoon and was exposed as no longer having all his faculties. Now Trump is similarly revealed as losing his marbles.

In more normal times the opinion columns of newspapers might be filled with debates about whether the twenty fifth amendment to the US Constitution should be employed to remove President Trump from office. His impairment may be different from Biden’s but his narcissism has hardened with age into an evidently world-threatening liability. His niece speculates that he may have inherited his father’s Alzheimer’s. However removal would require an independent-minded cabinet, not second-rate sycophants, together with a moment of bipartisan Washington reckoning. That’s not about to happen.

Trump’s posts, speeches and press encounters provide daily evidence of an unhinged individual stumbling from issue to issue with no compass points or governing theory other than a transactional obsession with deals, dominance and prestige. And it must be said - a much quicker political instinct than his plodding rivals.

His Board of Peace launch, which came after he had petulantly complained publicly to Jonas Store, the Norwegian prime minister, that he was giving up on peace first after he had been rebuffed for the Nobel Peace Prize. At its launch he was surrounded by a bunch of autocrats as more mainstream leaders eschewed membership. Despite the Davos setting it seemed more saloon than salon.

Ambiguity Reigns

Trump is taking America into very dark places. As Davos was gathering to greet the preening emperor, I was with a group of African leaders. A former president complained that Africans were still being held to standards of democracy and governance that those judging them had betrayed at home. This led me to intervene that obviously a president who had attempted to retain power by a coup and voter suppression; had used his military in illegal foreign adventures and against his own citizens; was guilty of corruption on an epic scale, as well as daily acts of illegality, should be called out.

I didn’t mean Museveni in Uganda or Biya in Cameroon as my audience might have expected. Neither is guilty of quite such a scale of offenses. I meant of course Donald Trump. The sheer speed of the fall of America’s international standing is something that we all struggle to comprehend. It is offset and disguised by moments of dazzling displays of American capability, the military seizure of Maduro, or the tech bros and their AI wizardry at Davos. That confusion is reflected in the chart below.

And in the financial markets, there is continued dollar depreciation and a giddy gold price but a US stock market held high by tech stocks. And the political market place is sending its own ambiguous signal. America’s allies continue to infantilise themselves by seeking to ingratiate but are derisking by diversifying away from the US in terms of trade, security and political links. Not deserting but limiting the risk. Mark Carney gave his Davos riposte speech to Trump after visiting China and then sensibly left town before a visibly offended Trump arrived threatening retaliation. Trump withdrew his invitation to Carney to join his Board of Peace – no doubt saving Carney the trouble of having to say No.

Yet even the Board of Peace evokes mixed reactions. Its Gaza role is endorsed by the UN Security Council, and the Europeans and Canadians want in because they consider it the only game in town, despite its lopsided structure that puts Trump lieutenants in charge. His unexpected expansion of its draft mandate to whatever global peacemaking takes his fancy is what deters and alarms them.

As many commentators have observed, for the first year of Trump Two it was still just about possible for allies to shrug off this Administration as an aberration. Certainly Britain’s Keir Starmer did, as did his European counterparts. The strategy was to flatter and placate while reassuring each other that Trump would be gone in three years. In their minds, the need to keep the US on side on Ukraine, a European conflict, and deep historic transatlantic ties, or more bluntly dependencies, gave them little choice.

This is America

A trip last week to the United States further convinces me that a more fundamental rift is taking place. And this is despite spending time at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perry World House as a visiting fellow where the students and faculty I met were as open-minded and engaged in the world as you could hope. It remains America at its best. But we are now in a world of two Americas and the other one is ever more hostile and dark. A smart internationalist Republican, a never-Trumper, opined to me that she was convinced that Britain was pockmarked with No-Go areas where high levels of immigration had driven out the police and white people.

And a little channel-flicking on cable TV or surfing social media confirms, as it has for years now, that America is a land of two hostile media universes and the one, centred on Fox News and right wing influencers, has as a central narrative that white culture is being deliberately swamped and drowned by immigrants.

And we were there in a week where America came dangerously close to open conflict in Minneapolis. A second victim was gunned down by federal agents, increasingly Trump’s unaccountable SS – similarly staffed it seems with untrained vigilantes. A nurse at a Veteran’ hospital whose unprovoked killing was caught on video, his death has become a spectacular own goal for the Administration. Trump seems to be sounding the retreat. Bovino has been sent packing and the president has distanced himself from some of his proxies’ early false claims about the killing.

In an ironic meeting of names, the snow may save ICE from triggering near civil war. An extraordinary snow storm and freeze may keep some of the demonstrators and agents off the streets and allow tempers to cool. But there seems little doubt that today America is on the edge.

Some will not recognise that last claim and consider it as far-fetched as the claim that Britain was disappearing under a wave of crime and immigration. And that is part of the problem. Beneath the high politics we are starting to form very negative stereotypes of each other. Europeans and Americans are starting to come apart in a way that I am not sure their leaders understand. The British establishment has always held to a tight Atlanticism as though its status depended on it.

Ordinary Brits have always been a bit warier, reveling in trips to New York, Miami or California and sucking up Hollywood and the wider culture but maintaining a healthy suspicion of overbearing Yanks. My wife and children who carry American accents, despite many years in the UK and British passports, sometimes run into the mild derision of taxi drivers and others. Our youngest revels in being the only one who sounds like a British native.

But this is something different. It is hardening into a visceral dismissal of the America of the last 250 years. We are imbibing a dystopian view of an America in the last stages of empire- corrupt and failing- and in the hands of the kind of crafty nincompoop that history tells us late empires produce. He’s America’s George the Third or Rome’s Nero. He may be but we need to keep a firm hold in our minds of the other America, the open one I saw at the University of Pennsylvania. And the one that still leads the world in many fields.

No Kings

That other America will come back. It is leading in the polls and the midterms are just ahead. One of its most interesting young representatives, Zohran Mamdani, has just kicked off his term as mayor of New York. As I write this he has just been photographed helping to dig a driver out of a Brooklyn snow drift. In the meantime Trump was hosting a black tie dinner at the White House to launch a documentary of his wife Melania. Its making and promotion was in the form of a lavish tribute paid by Jeff Bezos of Amazon to enjoy favour at the emperor’s court.

And we need to retain the self-awareness that it could happen here. In most of Europe the populist right is currently in pole position to win in the next electoral round or is already in power in several cases. White working class alienation, as the foundation of a broader coalition of the disaffected, is evidently not unique to Trump’s America. The African leader I referred to earlier was right to point to a wider crisis of western democracy.

Check, Mate

British colonial administrators imagined themselves to be bringing enlightenment and progress to their colonies but history hasn’t been kind on that score. Power needs limits. The growing international breach with Trump is framed as a breakdown of trust in America’s word. I suspect it heralds something deeper: a wariness of imperial power.

That is the lesson we are relearning again. Liberals started the Vietnam War. Traditional Republicans with Democrats’ support blundered into Iraq while hiding behind the lie that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11. Countries need checks on the exercise of power abroad as much as at home. Mark Carney suggested that Middle Powers should provide that counter “because if they weren’t at the table they were on the menu.”

He also argued that the pleasant fictions of the international rule of law had been truly punctured. Middle powers had to throw their power around to get noticed. And that’s where I depart from his thesis. We don’t need more power unleashed. Rather, harnesses matter. The UN’s creation was American statesmanship at its best. A framing of a rule and institution based international order that would head off war and spread development. Carney recognises that it has been undermined over the years by Big Power double standards. Yet the solution surely is a relaunched UN which better polices its members rather than a reversion to a nineteenth century power politics.

At present the UN seems in extreme jeopardy. The Board of Peace is just the most obvious immediate threat to its tattered authority. But talking to an ambassador from a Caribbean country last week I was left in no doubt of his resolve and others like him to fight for a reinvigorated UN. Canada and Europe belong in that fight. No defecting please.

I make the case for that renewed international solidarity, or at the very least coalitions of the willing in this article in The Observer.

Finally four books that have particularly impressed me during the holidays:

• Andrew Ross Sorkin’s 1929: The Inside Story of The Greatest Crash In Wall Street History. It shows the interplay of personalities, and the deeper forces making the American manufacturing economy. I would have liked a little more Main Street but Sorkin brilliantly captures the Wall St players who lured in American middle class savings through the promise that America could only get richer so the stock market was a one way bet that nobody could afford to miss out on. Ring any bells?

• And another book with current resonance, The Director, a novel by Daniel Kehlman about an evidently deeply talented German film director GW Pabst who wants to make it in Hollywood, but whose ways bewilder him, so finds himself falling back instead on Hitler’s Berlin where his personal compromises end up making him, a staunch liberal, an unintended Nazi propagandist.

• And to cheer you up a glorious Henry James romp, if that’s not a contradiction, John Banville’s Venetian Vespers, a glorious tale set in the Venice of 1900.

• And similarly if you enjoy a Trollope-like excursion into the lives of Britain’s political class, Elizabeth Day’s One Of Us is a great read.

Fundamentally, we are between Orders. The post-war international liberal order of the last 80 years and its principal architect, the United States, are lost but we live amidst the falling masonry not knowing what comes next. We are not going to find the answer in a dysfunctional White House and its fawning court. So let’s take a seasonal look through the other end of the telescope so to speak and reflect on some of the victims of that wider collapsing international political order- refugees; and those who seek to support them.

There are more and more of them. Nearly 8 million Venezuelans, almost a quarter of the population, have fled their country. Similarly, a quarter of Sudan is displaced- 12 million people. Afghans are on the move both ways - hundreds of thousands recently forced home by Pakistan and Iran; many of them born in exile. And others desperately still seeking a way out of Taliban controlled Afghanistan. Their legal, and illegal, routes are increasingly restricted. The Trump administration has suspended, and actually reversed, Afghan asylum claims after an Afghan gunman attacked two members of the National Guard in Washington. Prominent in their number are Afghans who had collaborated with the US and Western militaries and now see the doors of those countries slammed shut1. Short memories, bad consciences.

And then of course the refugees who are going nowhere, stuck across generations in refugee camps in East Africa, the Middle East or Bangladesh in the case of Myanmar’s Rohingya. The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported that there were 117 million displaced people worldwide of whom 42.5 million were recognised as refugees2. Of those, over 25% have been refugees for at least 10 years or since birth. In the case of Afghans I remember first visiting the Pakistan camps more than 35 years ago. In the case of the Palestinians they have been displaced since the 1940s and so are many generations into camp life in some cases.

Return becomes ever more elusive. In the 1990s an average of 1.5 million refugees returned home a year. While returns of refugees have increased according to the data in the second half of 2024 and first half of 2025, many of these returns seem unsustainable as refugees returned to areas where insecurity persists3. And the US and others are scaling back their third country resettlement programs. Take the Rohingya in Bangladesh. Eight years ago when this current exodus began there was big talk of third country resettlement as an inducement to Bangladesh to open its borders. In total some 5,000 Rohingya have been resettled in third countries. Bangladesh has been left holding a camp population of more than a million.

Give [them] your tired, your poor, your huddled masses

Ultimately no surprise there: southern neighbours whether Colombia and Peru for Venezuelans; Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda for East and Central Africans; South Africa for Zimbabweans; or Jordan and Lebanon for Palestinians and Syrians have usually borne the brunt. Western hosts are noisy about the burden but take much the smaller share of it.

Refugees’ hopes to get to the West have run up against the hottest of live wires in contemporary western politics, the fear of illegal immigration and the two factors that have driven it: a generalised, and respectable, fear of economic insecurity around jobs and overcrowded services such as health, schooling and housing; and a more sinister Replacement Theory embraced by MAGA and its European populist friends. This is a white supremacist doctrine whose current support from the White House to leading opposition parties in the UK, Germany and France should frighten the rest of us. Migration, in their minds, is an effort to undermine family, flag, god and country by progressive elites who have apparently actively encouraged these waves of migration.

The virulence with which these theories are pursued on social media I see up close and personal as George Soros - and therefore I, on occasion as his purported internationalist collaborator - are pilloried for this conspiracy to undermine white rule and culture. Replacement Theory, a small step from Nazi race theories at best, is a pernicious threat not just to multiculturalism and tolerance at home but obviously to refugees who need sanctuary and now find themselves stuck in a camp for life.

But there are points of light. I have just been in Bangladesh at a board meeting of BRAC, the world’s largest NGO and one of its most interesting ones. With around 100,000 staff in Bangladesh its original home, it looms large in national life. The new Dhaka branch of Aarong, its handicraft social enterprise has just been designated by the Guinness Book of Records as the largest arts and craft emporium in the world. Yet size is a misleading boast because what really marks BRAC out is the intimacy of its engagement with the very poor- its staff are consummate listeners and they back up what they hear with rigorous research on impact. It makes them very local and very effective despite their size.

I have written about BRAC before so I won’t repeat its extraordinary range of innovative activities both in Bangladesh and abroad but confine myself to two points and then their Rohingya programme: first, like the whole sector it is having to contend with a turnover of donors. The West is going, or gone. When I joined the board six years ago, the British Government was the biggest international donor. Today it gives this organisation with a billion dollar plus turnover a modest £500,000 a year. Fortunately its own self-financing activities from businesses like Aarong and new donors have for now largely made up the difference. Its mixed funding model versus so many international NGOs’ over reliance on Western government funding gives it a welcome resilience in these times.

The British, though, are missing out on arguably the most efficient poverty reduction program anywhere. It costs $500 per household over a two year program of interventions centred on the woman of the family to lift them out of poverty- nearly always permanently. We visited successful graduates, now proud owners of small, and in some cases, not so small businesses.

Second, as much as the Right hates it, migration will remain a central part of how demographic imbalances are addressed. Trust BRAC to have taken an intriguing step. In a classroom in Dhaka, young women and several young men are learning Japanese. Once qualified they will be dispatched to care for elderly Japanese in Japan, a country whose population is shrinking by more than 800,000 a year and so creating an age overhang without the young workforce to care for their elders. Unlike the racket of many migrant employment programs in the Gulf, this is well regulated with transparent terms of service and decent wages.

There one sees a strand of future migration: legal pathways to temporary work stays or settlement but matched to needs of, and not undermining, local labour markets. Refugee asylum in the West - the protection of those at risk because of their beliefs- is a different strand that may remain stuck for a while until the political sting is drained from the first. It must await the return of kinder times.

Cox’s Bazar

With BRAC colleagues I visited Cox’s Bazar, which gets its name from a British sea captain, who seized the port for the Empire. It lies on one of the longest bits of uninterrupted beach in the world. It is now home also to 1.2 million refugees. In the immediate districts where the 33 refugee camps are situated they numerically overwhelm locals. In a country of 170 million they are proportionately a smaller humanitarian burden than say Lebanon, Jordan or indeed Pakistan has had to face. But very locally the shoe pinches.

The first tragic thing to acknowledge is it seems unlikely that the refugees can return home anytime soon. While the situation across the border is volatile with their most immediate tormentors, the Arakan Army, apparently lately losing ground to central government forces, the latter has been no kinder to the Rohingya who have been a persecuted Muslim minority in majority Buddhist Myanmar for a long time. This current influx began with a military crackdown in 2017. When we asked the refugees what they hoped for, it was to be able to go home. But for now it remains a dream. Some youngsters may be recruited to fight their way home but there won’t be peace in Myanmar until its generals and political leaders come to terms with a multiethnic future. At present Buddhism nationalism, Burmese MAGA you might say, prevails.

So local settlement remains the expedient medium term solution and on this it was obvious that the national political shoals will remain difficult to navigate. There are elections due in early 2026 in Bangladesh. Camps is an easy way to keep the problem locked up.

Nevertheless politics aside, the current international humanitarian support system to camps like these is under dire strain. I had an early UN job as a UNHCR field officer and so as a very young man I ran some very big camps. Indeed my biggest Cambodian camp was possibly briefly bigger than an emptied out Phnom Penh, the capital. For years afterwards UN leaders would introduce me as the former mayor of Cambodia’s largest city; an undoubted career boost!

So I did well by camps but nevertheless developed a healthy antipathy towards them. They are incarceration by another name and create both a dependency on external support; deny occupants much chance to make a living; become the focus of contention with local communities who resent the ostentatious outside help (by measures such as health workers per head of population, refugees appear better served than poor Bangladeshis); and are essentially stranded populations, awaiting political developments they cannot control, to recover their own agency.

On the other side, camps can allow oppressed groups, notably women, to find a voice they hadn’t had back home. We heard that in Cox’s Bazar. But all-in-all camps are a terrible place to be. Dispersing the refugees more widely across Bangladesh with a combination of targeted support both to the refugees and the host communities, together with the right to work, could, even if controversial at first, lower their profile. It also offers a sustainable future at a time when international aid flows are in free fall. For BRAC, with empowerment its core idea, helping refugees find a degree of economic self-sufficiency rather than relying on dwindling aid flows, is an obvious path forward.

Surprisingly a boiled down list of critical Rohingya needs for 2026 may be covered by donors. After that expect a cliff. WFP food rations are already cut4 and the very large overhead of expatriate UN and international NGO staff looks increasingly wrong sized. For years it’s been a comfortable conviction of international organisations that they are needed because in politically exposed situations, locals may not have the backbone to stand up to their own authorities. In truth, navigating local labour markets and obstructive officials, the level where so much real protection work happens, needs local savvy.

Also the internationals - in a well-intentioned effort to rationalise their own efforts -have created elaborate sectoral co-ordinating committees to support health, education, sanitation etc. But now the sectors, each with their own siloed bureaucracy reaching back up to Dhaka, don’t communicate with each other effectively at the camp level preventing an effective single point of interface with the refugees themselves.

The funding crisis will be the blunt instrument that blows this up. BRAC, which has argued for more consolidated management by camp not sector, seems to be getting its way as the cuts bite. But will even BRAC with a much lower-cost delivery model find the funding for a camp-based population? And there the local advantage seemed clear. Through a combination of a Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell approach and informal locally-struck deals, farming projects adjacent to the camps, some handicraft production or the provision of SIM cards to encourage small-scale commerce were collectively allowing a degree of self-empowerment that almost certainly couldn’t be achieved from formal UN demarches about refugee rights.

UNHCR remains a critical presence but it and its UN sister agencies have slipped into an operational role which will be unaffordable going forward. It needs to wind back to a much more operationally limited oversight role and protection function.

For refugees, by a refugee

A catalyst for a rethought and repurposed UNHCR will be the arrival in January of a new High Commissioner for Refugees, Barham Salih. After an almost unbroken string of European high commissioners, and some very strong European candidates this time round, the UN has opted for an Iraqi Kurd who has Gulf support- a sign of the times as both the aid crown and moral leadership pass from a Europe whose own refugee asylum policies are ever more restrictive.

Salih is an old friend who I knew first in the 1990s as a Kurdish representative in Washington and then when he was Iraqi finance minister and I was leading the post-war UN reconstruction support. He is an impressive figure. As he wryly observed to me, he was the only candidate who has himself been a refugee twice. Now it will fall on him to chart a new path and find new supporters for an organisation whose old Western base has frayed. Maybe as in Cox’s Bazar financial realities will drive some hard but not necessarily bad choices.

A New Year’s Resolution

And behind these local fixes looms the bigger question that I opened with. Where is the diplomatic energy and leadership going to come from to secure peace in Myanmar to allow a permanent return; or for that matter to bring the brutal war in Sudan to a close? A few weeks ago all 450 patients and staff in a hospital in El Fasher were slaughtered by one side in that war. Satellites picked up the blood of civilians running down the town’s streets.

We cannot get quickly enough to a new order where hopefully peace and human rights again have a place. So to close with some hopeful New Year predictions: that 2026 is the year when multilateralism gets a reset and gets back into the business of stopping wars. The debate around the election of a new UN Secretary General might be the opportunity to agree to a new skinnier but more muscular multilateralism- despite Trump, or if needs be without him. And second, let’s all play our part in tuning out that tawdry daytime soap opera on Pennsylvania Avenue. May it die on its own sword, the ratings. Let’s refocus on the rest of us.

Happy holidays to all.

Further Thoughts:

• US G20: this is a battle worth fighting - the US is over its skis in barring South Africa from participation

• David Miliband, IRC’s president and CEO, speaking with the WashPo on IRC’s 2026 Emergency Watchlist: New World Disorder

• Rob Reiner’s meditation on what it means to be the president of the United States

• In case you missed it… the BWI at 80 report is out. Read more here - Facing Up to the Future: Navigating Disruption, Building Trust

This is just a quick dispatch to let you know that the report on the future of the World Bank and IMF that some of you are aware of that I have been working on, with Sri Mulyani Indrawati, until recently Indonesian finance minister, and Patrick Achi, a former prime minister of Côte d’Ivoire, has just come out. Titled Facing Up to the Future: Navigating Disruption, Building Trust, the report is accessible here. We briefed both their boards earlier this week.

Here too is an article by me online in The Observer today which picks up our central point: in an era of collapsing Aid (ODA) and geopolitical competition and fragmentation, borrowing countries need to step up and take charge of their own development destinies. Don’t count on the old donors or the old ways.

We were asked by the chief executives of the two institutions to undertake this report just over a year ago as the IMF and the World Bank Group (the BWIs) reached 80. The year since has been a long one in the development sector. Long-term trends such as climate change and inequality continue to worsen and the grant resources to address them are more constrained. And new threats from tariffs to AI and crypto have roiled the global economy.

The psalm predicts that only the strong make it to fourscore years - the authors didn’t think of warning that the 81st year can be a rough one. Ajay Banga at the World Bank and Kristalina Georgieva at the IMF have handled the broncho-ride of Trump’s return to the White House with some aplomb, continuing to make significant operational improvements in their institutions while navigating the treacherous politics of Washington. The Bank, for example, is continuing to put a lot more staff in the field and the IMF to strengthen its surveillance.

But as we argue, it is time for a shift of cultural ownership in the institutions from donors to borrowers. When Washington politics governs what you can or cannot say about development mainstays like climate or gender it is time to upsticks and head for the field!

Relying on borrowing from the markets rather than solely grant funds the BWIs assume a bigger not smaller role in the new landscape. But a landscape where aid will have fallen by a third over a several year period and new donors, public and private lenders and investors, have entered the space, which means a new political and policy context.

The moment has arrived for a new development sovereignty, when borrowing countries themselves get to make the choices about their development strategies. The slashing of development assistance (ODA) in the institutions’ 81st year, by the US and Europeans alike, has set the stage for possibly as dramatic a shift in the institutions’ character and ownership, as the four score years that preceded.

I am eager to hear any reactions, once you have a chance to take a look.

Best,
Mark

Except that there was a strange normalisation effect about the conversation. The discussion of Trump Two and its early record suggested to an outsider’s ear that this might be a mildly critical review of any administration nearly a year in. And of course it should be anything but. Trump Two has disrupted and broken the norms and laws that have governed America for 250 years. To a visitor it seems any such conversation should be about pointing up the extreme criminalisation that is underway.

Out on the streets of Washington there is a strange detachment between an out-of-towner’s expectation of military patrols and immigration raids on the streets and a reality of an almost empty city centre with furloughed federal workers staying home. Lunchtime restaurant traffic is said to be down by a third or so, leading to a strange calmness.

Trump’s assault on the senses of his neighbours over the last ten months has been so relentless that an exhaustion has set in. Even knocking down the 102 year old East Wing of the White House seemed to be greeted with a weary acceptance. Although there was plenty of speculation among the political chattering class that Trump was secretly lodging a state of the art family bunker under the gold baubles and Home Depot-trappings of the outsized shopping mall type ballroom he was building above. An insurance against his erratic foreign adventuring. The Trumps at least would be preserved.

To be fair, it is more likely a rumour based on reporting on the East Wing: The East Wing was not totally separated from more dire business. The bunker below — officially called the Presidential Emergency Operations Center — is where Vice President Dick Cheney went during the 9/11 attacks, and where Trump was taken during protests in his first term. President George W. Bush used the East Wing to practice his State of the Union address in 2004.

Not everywhere is so quiet. A niece’s son’s nursery school in Chicago was noisily invaded as I began writing this by ICE agents chasing a pre-school teacher. America’s cities may be slipping towards martial law. Washington’s calm is also a measure of the failure of its political leadership to stand up to this.

The November 5th Election Day and a sceptical Supreme Court hearing on the Trump tariffs suggested resistance across other parts of Washington wasn’t as supine as I might have feared. Two new Democratic Governors, a Californian redistricting proposition and in the greatest rebuke of all, a Democratic Socialist and Muslim, Zohran Mamdani’s election as New York mayor was all a big poke in the eye for Trump.

The Financial Times reports that the decline in Trump’s polling numbers is the worst this early into a term of any president in modern polling memory. Trump humphed that he wasn’t on the ballot. However, each of the successful campaigns in this Democratic sweep was explicitly about him. The candidates, moderate and progressive alike, hammered home economic issues and Trump’s failure to address them. In a telltale sign, he stayed away from the campaign trail but it didn’t save his candidates who lost by even higher margins than anticipated.

What swayed voters was not, it seems, Trump’s constitutional breaches but cost of living issues. Like Biden before him it may be the price of milk and eggs, not the future of American Democracy, that brings him down. His global odyssey in search of a Nobel Peace Prize, and when he is at home the almost daily Oval Office media show with a foreign leader as prop and straight guy, is in sharp contrast to what worries so many Americans: economic security, jobs, especially federal ones at present, and prices.

So the voter defections are coming thick and fast. Republicans with elections to come are noticing and may start to take their distance. Democrats who have been in an extended nervous breakdown since last November may begin to recover their mojo. But we still may need to look elsewhere for the defence of the US Constitution and the rule of law more generally.

The Supreme Court’s Spine

The Supreme Court hearing on tariffs offered some comfort. Chief Justice Roberts called a spade a spade and described tariffs as a tax on the American consumer; still more interestingly, Neil Gorsuch appeared to query this extension of executive power and its apparent breach of the congressional right to authorise tax. The Supreme Court had delayed a series of critical constitutional decisions about Trump’s power grab through orders that had allowed temporary continuations of his actions. Perhaps it won’t be the court condoning Trump’s actions, that many feared, but a matter of having given him more rope to hang himself. We shall know soon enough.

We are so used to hearing that the court has a conservative majority, and will therefore do Trump’s bidding, that we may overlook the fact that Trump isn’t a conservative he is a radical, and very transactional, populist one ungoverned by any solemn or consistent theory of power. To the extent he has a coherent view of power, it’s of more- Power- for him. That has to be threatening and antithetical to anybody who has spent years of their life immersed in law books, the constitution and the notion of checks and balances. Given the choice of expanding executive authority at the expense of Congress, or a commitment to the textual interpretation of the constitution for American judicial conservatives, the latter may prevail.

By contrast, Democrats in Congress view themselves as a relatively powerless minority in both houses and seem to have bought the argument that pursuing Trump by legal rather than political means is a losing strategy. They look to what happened during his first term (two impeachments) and during the Biden years where his mug shot during an indictment in Georgia has become the iconic official portrait of a man standing up for American freedom while he is unfairly persecuted for his political beliefs. And the camaraderie and heroic status in MAGA circles attributed to the ‘martyred,’ now pardoned, ‘prisoners’ of January 6th has further deterred Democrats.

Democratic leaders particularly are running scared. Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries make a sorry dismal pair. A sad footnote: Nancy Pelosi, who was a real fighter and Jeffries’ predecessor, has now announced her retirement at the next election.

It’s become a lot easier for such political hacks to hide behind cost of living issues which after all is what cost the Democrats the presidency. Conveniently it unites the different wings of their fissiparous party- and it works, as November 5th demonstrated. But will it be enough to unseat an insurgency set on bending the ways of American government to its long-term control.

Trial by Fire

Salutary watching this month, compared to the heady hope of say the Mamdani acceptance speech, is the Economist podcast interview with Steve Bannon. This former Goldman Sachs banker, who shares the MAGA gold star - a jail term - is an angrily articulate, if verbose, champion of the blue collar wing of the Trump constituency. There is a lot of blood and thunder in his vision of retributive politics. Perhaps fortunately, the money wing of Trumpism, tech titans, are as much in his sights as old Wall Street. And he calls for an unconstitutional third term for Trump. After the Supreme Court and the Wall Street Journal perhaps the greatest threat to MAGA is itself.

But as the politics of Britain, France and Germany shows, the populist right is not to be limited to the margins and the crazies. It’s very real and coming to us all. The Dutch election this month where the centre-left D66 narrowly eked out a 28,000 popular vote win over Geert Wilders’ right wing populist Party for Freedom for now remains the happy exception. Both got the same number of seats.

The difference between the Netherlands and its neighbours is the Dutch had just tried government under a Wilders coalition and it was a chaotic failure. Like Poland earlier, they had seen populism fail. The British, French and Germans have no such direct experience to deter them and each sees at home a current failing centrist managerial governments.

The one example that might stop them in their tracks is a resounding Trump failure. We all consume more American news than any other. We have all become Trump-watchers. Yet the US stock and bond market and the real economy, despite the 3% headline inflation, remains strangely immutable to the antics in the White House. If Washington, Bannon storm troopers aside, is enveloped in quiet gloom, the Wall St end of New York retains its market exuberance.

Contemporary politics in France and Britain seems particularly weighed down by a sense of the inevitability of a Trump-like takeover. I have begun to refer to Sir Keir Starmer as a younger Biden, an enabler for Farage (although Biden by the end had probably forgotten more politics than Starmer ever knew). But when a rather dull, over-promoted lawyer or Macron, a narcissistic and precocious political wonder kid, both find themselves helpless in the face of these apparently unstoppable political forces, one must recognise bigger forces at play. Le Deluge, to borrow De Gaulle’s phrase, already laps at their feet.

It may be that only a Dutch experiment of their own can wean either electorate away from populist experiment. They may need to suffer rule by Farage or Le Pen first. But what a trial to have to go through. Years of failure and government breakdown.

So much of what so many of us admired and respected about America is being destroyed in front of our eyes. Hoping that the rule of law can be re-established and in due course the accountability of leaders for the corruption and crimes being currently committed is a hope we must hold onto. And it may be that Trump’s unintended legacy is to restore exactly those values as Americans rediscover decency and courage in the face of his onslaught.

And if not the courts, or bitter experience, the bond market may ride to the rescue. The heavily indebted US economy may not hold up forever in the face of an evident $35 trillion AI bubble and the dollar’s fading status as the world’s reserve currency. Nobody should wish for an economic crisis and the danger is that far from it showing the risks of Trumpism to the rest of us, a US correction may follow - not precede - a public debt crisis in France and the UK. Both are close to the edge, fighting a political opposition to spending cuts that risks bond market turmoil. We could both get those populist governments as the American voters get ready to throw off their own nightmare. In each case it will be incumbents, not a political philosophy, who are punished by an economic crisis.

If I haven’t piled on enough let me recommend Ian McEwan’s just published light touch dystopian novel, What We Can Know. There is some kind of never defined nuclear-economic-climate crisis in our near future. The book purports to be an account by an academic seeking a missing but famous poem from that time. He writes a century after the Derangement, as it has come to be known. When the new sea levels have turned Marlborough in Wiltshire, the place of my landlocked school years, into a port city; and the breakdown of the old political order has made the US too dangerous a place to visit because of its warring factions. Bits of technology have survived, others have been lost. Life is harder and more dangerous. Our contemporary consumer cocoon is a distant memory.

Best,

Mark

• Zohran’s full victory speech

• Some good news from Washington: London’s venerable wine store, Berry Brothers has opened in Washington

**

Sliding Doors

Earlier in October I went to Sarajevo to celebrate an extraordinary organisation, the International Crisis Group (ICG), whose founding 30 years ago grew out of the venture that a group of us had been implausibly engaged in of trying to lift the brutal siege of that city in the 1990s. We were blessed with a measure of beginner’s luck. It had begun with a call to me one Saturday morning from George Soros that opened with words to the effect, “we cannot let a new genocide - this, against Muslims in the heart of Europe - go unchecked. I am prepared to commit a lot of money and time to stopping it.” From that early success came ICG.

In this same month another brutal siege and invasion came to an apparent end in Gaza. President Trump took a deserved victory lap in Israel and Egypt. Separately, George Soros has been targeted by President Trump as an alleged funder of terrorism. This 95 year old Holocaust survivor, awarded the medal of freedom by the last president, is somebody who his successor would lock up. Changing fortunes, indeed.

One man’s human rights hero is another’s terrorist.

A President who seemed ready to give Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, his head to wage war till the bitter end suddenly yanked his chain and forced a ceasefire, and possibly a peace that had eluded so many of his predecessors. Netanyahu, in a hubristic moment of overreach, had attacked an American ally, Qatar, in a vain attempt to assassinate the Hamas negotiating team. That crossed several American red lines. Netanyahu was humiliatingly made to phone the Qatari prime minister in front of Trump and press cameras and apologise. Trump also had to extend an executive order of dubious value promising to protect Qatar against future aggression from all quarters. Probably the one leader who wouldn’t mind such a dodgy Trump IOU, unbacked by Congress or treaty, is President Zelensky who struggles to get any American security commitment even though it is a key to a peace agreement. Maybe Trump who is having lunch with Zelensky today may discover there is no such thing as a free lunch and offer a similar blandishment.

Like I am sure many others, news of Robert Redford’s death led to a viewing of All the President’s Men, which in turn reminded me of the similarities between Richard Nixon and Donald Trump. Both impeached and the latter a felon; both co-opting their justice departments to their own political ends; and both governing with a mixture of menace and unpredictability that intimidated friends and opponents alike.

The governing approach in Nixon’s day was at least domestically hidden and covert. Its Watergate discovery led to his downfall. In Trump’s America it’s celebrated, public and in your face. But internationally, it’s arguably the key to both their successes in the Middle East. Nixon was explicit about using unbridled threat as a tool of foreign policy. MAD - mutually assured destruction, a nuclear deterrence strategy preceded Nixon but he raised it to religion, the core principle, deterrence through fear, infused his, and his envoy Henry Kissinger’s, Middle East peacemaking. Threat of being dropped by the US or exposed to retribution corralled reluctant enemies - Israel, Egypt and their Arab allies - into a settlement that was never just and, as the tragedy of October 7th, 2023 and its aftermath has grimly reminded us, not sustainable.

That perhaps is the key lesson for this generation of negotiators as they seek to build on the ceasefire and hostage release. Terms can be imposed when one side is defeated and on its knees but if those terms don’t grip the essential truth that neither Palestinians nor Israelis are going anywhere, they will ultimately fail. So a means still has to be found for both sides to live peacefully, adjacent or together, with full political rights. The challenge hasn’t changed in 80 years.

Never Forget, Never Forgive

Now, as Rob Malley, a former ICG president, American negotiator and co-author of a new book on Middle East negotiations argued at our gathering in Sarajevo, we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves. Trump the showman has generated a momentum that has swept up fierce opposites in his wake who briefly don’t dare to disagree; but when the Trump whirlwind has moved on and they touch the ground again old animosities will be back. The book’s title, Tomorrow is Yesterday, says it all.

Today mediators face a situation where Israel is both more militarily dominant in the region than ever before but at the same time more isolated; and by contrast, with a rash of western recognitions of statehood, the Palestinian cause is both more internationally supported but has never been weaker at home, with Hamas defeated and the Palestinian Authority discredited. And, even as the international community finds a belated new enthusiasm for a two state solution, on the ground it has never seemed further off because of the hostility and rank hatred that October 7th and the war that followed has understandably generated on both sides.

Patience, rebuilding, and a lot of healing - not intimidation and bluster - is ultimately the path forward. And that stands in contrast to the “one day stand’ diplomacy style of Trump, which as always is transactional, declaratory and abrupt rather than about relationships, details and the long-term. At its heart, the key requirement is finding a way for Palestinians to be legitimately represented in the process.

That’s currently missing and leaves a giant unbridgeable hole. Banning Hamas, and a Netanyahu-attempted blackballing of the Palestinian Authority from a formal role in Gaza, may not be as unpopular among Palestinians as outsiders might expect. Both have shamefully let down Palestinians. October 7th was a war crime full stop. And as I write, Hamas back on the streets of Gaza executing opponents is a terrible sign. The decrepitude and apparent corruption of the Palestinian Authority may not be similarly lethal but at the very least it is a generational crime. It’s badly run by out of touch old men. Mahmoud Abbas is 89.

The 20 point peace plan proposes a Palestinian committee of technical experts to run Gaza under a Peace Board chaired by President Trump with Sir Tony Blair as a member. Hamas is to forego a political role; give up its weapons; and current members who surrender are to be exiled. From the point of view of regional security, it is hard to argue with any of that but as a political starting point for rebuilding Gaza, it is a tall order and can only work if Palestinians are engaged in the team’s selection and planning. That Palestinian majority which today rejects Hamas has not also dropped a politics of grievance. After generations of displacement, intermittent occupation, and penned into Gaza and the West Bank, why would it?

The mix of public and private money that will now be needed to rebuild Gaza is going to remain on the sidelines unless there is stable long-term governance in place with a plan. And that will take a recognition that any legitimate Palestinian voice is going to be more than a meek technocratic one. It’s going to have uncomfortable things to say about sovereignty and Israeli accountability for war crimes. Predictably, Netanyahu has blocked the release of the Palestinian that many view as the one legitimate leader who might unite Palestinians and be a bit of a Mandela. That is Marwan Barghouti. Israelis object that he is a murderous terrorist. He is clearly no saint but Apartheid South Africa said the same things about Nelson Mandela.

Sarajevo today shows none of the physical scars of war. It has been comprehensively rebuilt and is bustling. European and Gulf money has flowed. Traffic jams, not rockets, govern movement around town. This is not the city that I remember where one dodged bullets along Sniper’s Alley to leave or enter a bombed out Sarajevo. It’s rebuilt but in some ways it is a hollow success as the politics of rebuilding, reconciliation, remains frozen. Intercommunal trust is still missing.

Technocrats and well meaning Western statesmen didn’t work when it came to Sarajevo’s political repair. For Gaza - absent political progress - even the physical reconstruction seems unlikely. Beirut, still full of pockmarked blown up buildings, seems a more likely role model. Capital abhors a political vacuum.

Nor, by the way, will an international security force finish what Israel, despite cruelly flattening Gaza, couldn’t - forceful disarmament of Hamas. The international troop providers are not going to put their troops in that kind of harm’s way. That again will need Palestinian police and a political agreement to disarm.

As various commentators have pointed out, probably only a change of government in both Palestine and Israel offers any prospect of a sustainable peace process. And let’s not underestimate the difficulties of that.

And speaking of history…

Involvement in a project on the future of the Bretton Woods institutions has caused me irreverently to distill a lifetime of what generally works in development into a single diagram.

After decades at different parts of the development coalface I have become convinced the necessary constant for a country to make its way out of poverty is a sustained political will that goes much deeper than the passing preferences of current ministers or presidents. It needs to represent a deep rooted national consensus that lasts across several generations. I, like many, have cited China and South Korea but the list is happily longer and includes African and Latin American states as well. It must be acknowledged that democracy evidently isn’t a precondition. Sometimes the consensus uncomfortably begins with a traditional and unelected elite who realize sharing the development cake wider is the price of survival. China’s communist rulers faced that blunt choice after the Tiananmen Square protests.

Argentina, a noisy democracy, currently representing 35% of IMF exposure, neatly presents the problem. Governments of left and right have received big mandates as their predecessors have spectacularly blown up but then they too have hit the rocks as bitter partisanship pits the opposition against any president. Argentina is onto its 23rd rescue program from the IMF. Even as a Trump favorite, President Milei will find he cannot escape the Argentinian law of political gravity and is due to hit the buffer of midterm elections. Trump this week made clear that if Milei doesn’t beat the odds and win, the American credit line, additional to the IMF package, evaporates. Having been involved in earlier US rescue packages for Latin America, I know how unpopular they are on the Hill. This time, coupled with Trump’s public admission this week that he has authorised a CIA operation in Venezuela, make his Latin American policy as unpopular south of the border as in Washington.

And now for a different kind of ownership:

AI was put to the test in an English country living room. It did not cover itself in glory. Our host, an old friend Robert McCrum, a writer, and former commissioning chief at Faber, where he built a stable of literary greats, summoned as his key defense witness a particularly evocative passage from F Scott Fitzgerald explaining the outcome of the First World War in terms of the rich social history of the British, French, and Germans. Fitzgerald argued it gave them staying power in the trenches- social glue. Robert claimed AI could never match its descriptive power.

Here is Fitzgerald’s prose full of glimpses and glancing reference to a middle class culture that allowed that ultimate sacrifice:

This Western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it again but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafes in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the Mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers… This was a love-battle - there was a century of middle-class love spent here… All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high explosive love… - Tender is the Night

And here is an effort from my virtual Man Friday, Anthropic’s Claude. A good try but lame compared to Fitzgerald.

Claude’s attempt: The great armies of the European powers endured the unspeakable horrors of trench warfare through a peculiar alchemy of national character and grim necessity that no man who had not witnessed it could fully comprehend. The German soldier, schooled in Prussian discipline and fortified by an almost mystical devotion to the Fatherland, held his muddy ramparts with the same iron will that had animated his forebears at Leipzig and Sedan; he was sustained by superior organization, the methodical genius of his general staff, and an unshakeable conviction that culture itself stood behind his parapet. The British Tommy, that patient son of an island race accustomed to enduring all manner of privation in the far-flung corners of empire, brought to the Western Front a stoic humor and sporting determination that transformed the trenches into a sort of ghastly cricket match from which no gentleman could retire; behind him stood the vast industrial might of Britain and the inexhaustible reserves of the Dominions. As for the Poilu, he fought with the passionate intensity of a man defending not merely soil but the very heart of civilization, drawing strength from an ancient martial tradition and the knowledge that the sacred earth of France lay beneath his boots—and should he falter, German boots would soon stand in the Place de la Concorde. These three nations possessed, in their different fashions, the combination of material resources, military discipline, and sheer bloody-minded determination required to transform what ought to have been a war of movement into four years of calculated butchery.

But if you are still with me after wading through that sorry final confection I must add a lingering doubt. In a world made easy by AI, will we still read widely and deeply enough to understand Fitzgerald’s signposted allusions to history, class and culture? Or is AI’s real conspiracy, not its promise that it will make us smarter, but that it will dumb us down by stealth to where all we can understand is its pablum. Will we still read widely and deeply enough to appreciate and understand Fitzgerald or will the world of AI, condemn us to simplicity when we once reveled, as a civilisation, in complexity.

Feedback is very welcome. And many thanks for all the kind comments on last month’s eulogy to my mother.

Best,

Mark

Additional reading:

• My happiest reading of the month was Thant Myint-U’s new biography of his grandfather, the UN Secretary General U Thant, called Peacemaker. It’s an extraordinary narrative arc from early embrace by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson of this “small brown” post-colonial leader who spoke for the aspirations of a newly liberated global majority to the predictable fall from grace over his opposition to the Vietnam War and more broadly to western powers who continued to meddle in their former colonies. Today the UN is in different times but the power dynamics are not altogether changed.

• A much longer account of Nixon & Kissinger’s Middle East strategy

• Why Is Trump Making Excuses for Hamas?

• CFR explainer on Argentina

• An important new paper from Alexia Latortue and Jared Goodman on country platforms

• New book co-authored by Rob Malley - Tomorrow Is Yesterday: Life, Death, and The Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine

And finally I add a eulogy to a life that is so different from the big bad, angry and noisy lives that seem to fill our screens; instead a good life lived modestly and decently but one whose love touched and changed the lives of many. My mother died last month at the age of 103.

—

Welcome back after a summer when politics didn’t stop to take a breath. No lazy days of August. Instead a high voltage, full tilt, head-on - choose your metaphor - assault on peace, the law and life.

From Ukraine to Gaza and Sudan, violence took dangerous new directions putting more civilian lives at risk. And elsewhere the political rhetoric and tension amped up: outside asylum hotels in the UK; with ICE raids on immigrants in the US and the National Guard on the streets of the capital, Washington; with mainstream governments in Europe looking increasingly precarious; and southern Asia, long relatively immune to the pessimism and the disruptions of the contemporary West exhibiting its own vulnerabilities as students in Nepal and Indonesia seek to copy earlier protest movements in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh and take on what they view as corrupt government systems.

At a step above the national fray, the plates of the wider international order are in unpredictable motion. At the recent Shanghai Co-operation Organisation meeting, a photo of Indian Prime Minister Modi together with his Russian and Chinese counterparts was a stinging rebuke to President Trump’s propensity to make enemies out of friends and symbolic of a world that has abruptly lost its American anchor.

First the UN and its travails. A considerable portion of what follows draws on a piece that I wrote for last Sunday’s Observer.

When I was UN Deputy Secretary-General and the UN was under attack from the irascible John Bolton - then the US ambassador to the UN - an unofficial delegation from Montreal quietly slipped in to offer me an abandoned Montreal goods yard, needing redevelopment, as a possible sanctuary. I quietly shooed them away. Even if I could imagine the UN without Washington I could not imagine it without New York!

My successors may have to. The secretary general has just announced a 20% increase in office space in Nairobi as he both cuts his secretariat staff by 2900 positions, saving $700m, and decants staff to other UN cities. The humanitarian agencies, which - other than Unicef - are not headquartered in New York, are making even bigger cuts of up to 40% of their staff. At the moment the trimming of New York is budget driven but it may quickly get political.

There are voices in Washington calling for a full withdrawal from the UN. Spending rescissions may throw the US into an arrears situation that costs it its voting rights as other countries lose patience. The Trump Administration has denied visas to the PLO delegation that had intended to travel to New York for UNGA; an egregious interference with its obligation as host country to allow delegations to come to New York for UN meetings. UN staff and international attendees at its meetings are increasingly feeling threatened or deterred from travel. Those living in the US in many cases no longer feel safe from roving ICE agents.

The latest malaise - and the UN has spent much of its 80 years struggling with unfriendly powers - may have begun with Putin’s Russia betraying the most basic tenet of the UN charter, a respect for a neighbour’s borders, with its invasion of Ukraine but Trump’s America has piled on. Doubling down on condoning war crimes in Gaza; threatening the independence of its northern neighbours, Canada and Greenland; and more generally turning the post World War Two order on its head with tariff wars, a rejection of international security commitments, and a disregard for the rule of law at home and abroad. These threats and actions fly in the face of almost everything the UN and its Charter are about.

As the UN readies to welcome leaders to its annual General Assembly later this month there is anxiety about who will even bother to show up. The real dealmaking on peace and security or contentious international rows about tariffs or debt seem to take place anywhere but the UN.

Trump Card

President Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt absurdly claims “he has closed seven global conflicts around the world” and has scoffed at the UN’s record by contrast. At the same time Trump has decimated US funding for UN activities including lifesaving public health and humanitarian interventions. The Lancet has estimated his cuts could cost up to 14 million lives.

The UN itself seems frozen by the betrayal and rejection of its first parent. Its origin story is the very personal vision of President Roosevelt whose dream imbued its charter and values. The US has hardly been a steady guardian of that vision over the subsequent eighty years but it has been enough of one to allow that basic relationship to remain intact.

But now may be the time the cord gets cut. First, not because the UN has changed but because America and too much of the rest of the world has. Protecting Roosevelt’s original vision of a world with strong multilateral institutions, operating within a world of laws and treaties, is evidently at odds with the transactional America First, deal making of the current occupant of the White House. But second, seeking to tiptoe around a short-tempered parent has consequences for relations with the rest of its members. Many, despairing at where the world is going, want a UN that campaigns on their behalf for the values of the Charter. Until member states get that they will continue to use other fora, including the BRICs, the G20 or the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO).

G Minus One 1

There are an array of countries itching to step up and offer enhanced UN leadership from China, a controversial rescuer for many, but one very publicly espousing the rule of law as a counter to the current US; to a new generation of emerging powers such as India, Brazil and South Africa (Brazil is leading a push for renewing the UN Charter); to coalitions of smaller countries, developed and developing alike across regions, who deeply fear the consequences to them of the reversion to a world of raw power rather than multilateral rules.

"We must continue to take a clear stand against hegemonism and power politics, and practise true multilateralism," Xi said, in a thinly veiled swipe at the United States and President Donald Trump's tariff policies. (Reuters)

Until now the UN, and its former officials, such as myself, have always insisted its universality is its critical comparative advantage. Everybody is at the table whatever their differences. Unless the Trump administration denies the visa, of course.

The UN’s universality worked when leading powers subscribed, at least nominally, to the charter values. But today that has left the UN adrift. It seems to its many critics to stand for nothing. To recover purpose it needs to invert its priorities: championing the charter first; universality second.

That puts it on a collision path with the Trump Administration. For now rather than pulling out a more likely posture is that it grumpily straddles with one foot in and one out. It pulled out of the recent Seville conference on financing development, so allowing a consensus to be reached by other members.

Less Flattery, More Delivery

And even when one's mind goes to the prospects that the UN must leave the US, in truth for now it's more about how to work around it and accommodate. In a world where Trump management has become a deferential art form of flattery, obfuscation and swallowing of principles, the UN, rarely famous for backbone when it comes to the US, needs to find the courage to stand up and be counted.

But finding its voice is not enough. Antonio Guterres, its Secretary-General, and his colleagues actually have repeatedly spoken up on crises and climate for example but they are rarely heard. Neither the media or those who read them seem to think they matter anymore. They treat them as spectators, not players. The UN’s press briefing room is now, I am told, more mausoleum than the bustling centre for breaking global news that I remember.

The exception to an overlooked UN is the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. There they have a voice because they are seen to have real skin in the game. Bravely trying to get food in against overwhelming odds and protesting and challenging the Israeli blockade. So a revived UN is more than rhetorically poking the Trump administration in the eye, it is about getting back out into the world and fighting for the lives of the weak and vulnerable.

As other donor countries cut their aid budgets because of fiscal constraints and increased defence spending, the UN funding is at high risk. For the first time in nearly 30 years France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the the United States will all cut for at least two years in a row and I imagine more. On the UN side, the consequent cuts appear more a panicked move to cut costs rather than making the most of the crisis to really clear the decks and reset direction. To work out how to do more with much less and to reconnect to the founding vision.

Cut the Cord

To get the rest of its members back on side it needs to focus on its basic missions, starting with peace and security. Even if Gaza and Ukraine are arguably beyond its reach, because of America and Russia keeping them out, no such excuse pertains for the bloodiest current conflict in the world, Sudan, where the UN has been equally missing in action as it has in other Middle East and African conflicts or Myanmar where a brutal civil war also drags on. It simply seems to have abdicated from the hard work of peacemaking.

On the peacekeeping side, the blue helmets have been largely booed off the pitch in recent years. Replaced in some cases by unsavoury Russian mercenaries and other goons, as keeping the peace gets pushed aside for the priority of keeping leaders in power, but in others because they are simply no longer effective. A reinvention beckons, as drones and other surveillance technologies allow a much lighter, less troop-intensive monitoring of ceasefires than in the past, with the prospect of much more unassailable evidence of breaches when they occur. So where there is a political will to keep the peace - no longer a given - blue tech may be a better prop than blue helmets.

The UN’s humanitarian work remains a strong franchise but its current model of large numbers of expatriate operational staff is becoming unaffordable as the caseloads of those in need grow dramatically as a consequence of more wars and more climate emergencies. A reengineered approach would limit the UN role to light touch funders and overseers of relief but shaved of the massive delivery infrastructure of the past. Delivery would rely primarily on a network of local partners such as the mutual aid groups currently active in Sudan.

And there are other areas such as human rights, where more boldly challenging a US or Russia and their proxies, or indeed other spoilers, such as Saudi Arabia on women’s rights, Uganda on LGBTQ issues or China on forced labour, might restore energy and moral purpose. One can imagine majority but variable coalitions forming around these different issues and majority voting replacing the solemn consensus voting that condemns so much UN activity to lowest common denominator irrelevance.

By taking sharper, charter-based positions on issues, the UN does not need to betray its universality. When a country finds itself on the losing side of an argument in this new reinvigorated UN it hopefully won’t storm out but rather either change its behaviour or come back with better arguments next time.

It would allow a UN that was once again out and about in the world and noticed as ready again to take on the great issues and challenges of the times. And a place of active debate, not always mealy-mouthed compromise. President Trump would not be the first overbearing parent to have perversely done the bullied offspring a favour by forcing them to get out and stand on their own feet.

Nine Lives and Counting

Watching the faltering government in London versus its confident counterpart in Washington is a puzzle. Peter Mandelson, the UK ambassador to Washington is rightly fired for his Epstein connection; yet Trump, brushes off his association with the same pedophile; Angela Rayner, the Deputy prime minister resigns for underpaying stamp duty, a house purchase tax, by £40,000. Chump-change to Trump who has made literally billions in crypto and Middle East real estate deals in his first months back in government. Hardly a finger is laid on him.

Starmer has the parliamentary numbers and an apparently crushing mandate behind him but he is knocked off course at every turn whereas across the pond Trump, with the narrowest of congressional majorities, rides high. Is it a presidential versus parliamentary system; personality; a relentlessly prosecutorial UK media and an intimidated US one; political culture; an American economy resilient enough to survive the madness of politicians; or plain chutzpah that makes the difference. Most worryingly is it a sense that the narrative arc favours Trump. That the future of politics is going his way and Starmer is just a younger Biden, an interlude before the main show.

Ten years ago, the 1000th anniversary of the Magna Carta was celebrated in both countries. As someone with a life on both sides of the Atlantic I observed that the celebration seemed more noticed by Americans than Brits. Its intent, limiting the power of a capricious and overpowerful king; subjecting him to the constraints of the law and forcing him to recognise the rights of his subjects excited American friends while leaving jaded Brits largely uninterested. They took the rebellious barons’ victory for granted whereas Americans celebrated it as an important step in their journey towards the cherished checks and balances of their own constitution. Just 10 years ago that progress seemed irreversible. Next year the US celebrates 250 years of Independence. Will that occasion be similarly celebrated as about hard won human rights or be recast instead as a celebration of absolute Power? The indications are that America’s new ruler envisages the latter.

Not a dry eye in the Church

At a time when our public life seems to be filled with people behaving badly, I can't help but share with you a celebration of a quiet life lived well. This is the eulogy I delivered to a full village church following the death of my 103 year old mother in August.

Further Reading

• An open letter from President Lula

• Mo Ibrahim: 'Inaction on Sudan down to skin colour' - BBC Africa

• Helpful from Project Starling on UN80 and emerging member state positions

• Mike Froman on the leader-level SCO meeting and implications for broader US-India relations https://www.cfr.org/article/xi-modi-putin-and-new-geopolitics

It may not be the most evidence-based weighing of risk but it is very much a fear that is abroad, stories abound of “accidental” detentions, long-term residents stopped, and legitimate visitors turned back. And their phones and iPads searched.

US-China relations is a constant feature of the early tumultuous months of Trump 2. Framed as the US responding to the expansionary ambitions of an authoritarian China, its ramifications go much wider than the fraught bilateral relationship. It threatens the world. And it reminds us that for all Trump’s showmanship his presidency will likely be judged as an effort to mask relative American decline rather than the revival of American power he promises. On any ideological measure Trump’s abuses of the law and treatment of migrants has removed much of the reputational advantage that the US enjoyed. This is now a naked struggle for economic leadership.

In the course of the weeks, during which I have made my own small version of Marco Polo’s odyssey, US tariffs on China soared to a trade-stopping height of 145% and settled back down again after the meeting of both sides in Geneva to 30%. A 90 day pause. Was this still-dizzying high number the beginnings of a retreat or a brief ceasefire before hostilities resumed, was the question on Chinese lips.

Shenzhen Valley

A visit to the Guangdong region of China and Hong Kong, part of an economic region now branded the Greater Bay Area (GBA) by Chinese planners, is a blunt reminder that world economic relations had already entered a stressful and disruptive period. And that Trump tariffs are a response to this. The energy and innovation evident in the businesses and conversations; the stories of the rapid adoption of AI are all expressions of a surging confidence and productivity. Eastern China is responsible for 90% of the country’s AI revenues so it is both the country’s manufacturing hub and now its technology capital. It is Palo Alto, Seattle, Chicago, and Texas rolled into one.

And I should acknowledge a geographic bias in my month’s travel sample. If I had started in Palo Alto rather than Washington I would have no doubt been exposed to the same animal spirits that were so bracing in Guangdong’s Shenzhen. Whereas if I had stopped off in Beijing instead, perhaps I would have encountered more of the capital city pessimism of a Washington. The cultural clash of Elon Musk and Washington demonstrates the neckbreaking speed of technobros anywhere versus the plodding slowness of the political class.

So to Shenzhen where courtesy of my hosts, the Tsinghua PBCSF School of Finance, we visited three start-ups that alumnae were involved in. Some start-ups! A helicopter company, Heli-Eastern, that was intending to become the transport leader in the new Chinese industrial enterprise zone, low-altitude. Not content with on the ground development success this city has designated a low sky zone a development priority for autonomous taxis and drone delivered groceries. Then, Shenzhen Transsion Holdings Co., a mobile phone manufacturer that is dominant in developing markets, and has added services, including the largest Spotify-like provider in Africa, Boomplay. And finally, WeBank, a FinTech bank that actively serves a 250 million customer base of the rural and small town underbanked in predominantly northern China from this one office at the other end of the country. A majority of its 5,000 staff are software engineers whose algorithms and access to 20 credit data sources approves or rejects credit applications within one minute. There are no human loan officers.

America is Sparta

The Harvard political scientist, Graham Allison, famously warned a few years ago of the Thucydides Trap that confronted America as China caught up with it. Would the old empire make way for the new one, or reach some power-sharing accommodation; or would, if history’s odds are the guide, the passing be violently contested as a majority of such imperial transitions have been, cautioned Allison.

If the measure of purchasing power parity (PPP) is used, it can at a stretch be argued that the Chinese economy, after all a much bigger country in population terms, is already larger than the US. But this would be a stretch as the more traditional per capita income is still only about $14,000 a head in China versus a US-level of around $43,0001.

China’s continued economic success, as it navigates the challenges of an ageing workforce, the development economists’ warnings of a middle income trap, a domestic housing sector debt crisis, persistently low levels of domestic demand and now an international trade war, is not a slam dunk. And its human rights record still contains egregious shortcomings. But whatever the outcome, the Thucydides rise has so scared US policymakers - Democrats and Republicans alike - that it belongs in the top tier of threats to world peace. And again to call a spade a spade, in Trump’s America this is not anymore legitimately a battle of ideas but rather a battle for markets.

And it explodes in a world which has already lost its balance. And the reasons why form quite a list. Where to start. Conflicts are growing and peace efforts are sporadic and partial at best. Countries are rearming after years of lower defense spending, world trade was already disrupted before tariffs. Since Covid, economies have become more and more protected with restrictive trade measures outnumbering liberalising ones.

And supply chains were being politically reshored before Trump 2. Growth is slowing around the world and development assistance (ODA) has fallen off a cliff. And from boardrooms to cabinets, "climate" has suddenly, at Trump’s bullying, become a banished word, even as the world goes on getting dangerously hotter. A dysfunctional UN Security Council that has been years in the making. The list goes on. Somebody needs to take charge.

The World in Four

That said, having recently spent two weeks first in Washington at the Spring Meetings of the World Bank and IMF and then in New York for the board of the UN Foundation (UNF), was it fanfare or farewell to American power in the world? Was it a muscular display that America still mattered or rather a spectacle created by the manner of Trump's chaotic leaving of it? The two Washington institutions tiptoed through their meetings, avoiding contentious words - such as climate - but determined to protect their core programs. I attach an article I wrote on the week for the relaunched Observer, a UK Sunday paper.

From Scott’s lips to God’s ears

The words of Scott Bessent, the US Treasury Secretary, were awaited with fear and anticipation. His blessing, when it came, allowed a wave of relief to infuse the meetings. The US would stay engaged but expect the institutions’ partnership on an America-First agenda. A week later the White House proposed federal budget confirmed that amidst the falling pillars of American foreign aid - the collapse of funding to both USAID and UN agencies - the US contribution of $3.2 billion over four years to the World Bank's concessional lending arm, IDA, remained relatively unscathed.

And more, Bessent's "back to basics" message of supporting basic development, including gas and nuclear energy, appealed to some developing country ministers who had grown impatient with the condition-laden aid policies of the Biden Administration and the European donors which has sought to impose priorities such as climate, gender, and democracy-building on recipients. So correspondingly, it irritated Europeans who felt long-developed consensus policies in these areas were imperiously brushed aside by Bessent.

In private meetings Bessent was apparently explicit that the price of keeping Trump and the MAGA elements around him on side was to demonstrate that he, Bessent “ruled” the institutions, the World Bank and IMF (BWIs).

And superficially this display of naked power by their largest shareholder and the deference paid it throughout the week might seem to indicate that rather than the steady, organic drift towards a multipolar world that think tanks and foreign policy journals have been celebrating for years, this was an abrupt reminder than American power shouldn't be buried prematurely. As its great son Mark Twain observed in the context of his own premature obituary, "the reports of my death were an exaggeration."

Perhaps. However, seeking to make these two institutions national tools of US foreign policy priorities both jeopardises their legitimacy with their other 190-odd members but also exposes how otherwise empty the US soft power arsenal has become. Having taken a chainsaw to its own programs it has little choice but to hitch itself to these multilateral institutions, both conveniently located a few blocks from the White House.

An Amtrak train ride away in New York, the UN has no such advantages of proximity or propinquity. When I was at the UN we had to battle early social media claims that our black helicopters - never mind that they were white and never flown in America - were invading the US. The suspicions go back to McCarthy and the belief that the UN was harbouring American Communists on its staff and further back still to the League of Nations, whose principal architect was President Woodrow Wilson yet which Congress never allowed the US to join.

Now on the back of not just US but European funding cuts, as well as chronic late payment of assessed dues by a much wider range of deadbeat states than just the US, including China, the UN Secretary-General is planning dramatic reductions in staff members and programmes together with the merger of different offices and programs. If it happens, and the financial outlook is so bleak that it seems it will, either through a version of such a plan being reluctantly blessed by member states or because of haphazard closures as the money runs out, the UN could literally be a shadow of its former self.

In many ways, the story of the UN has been a post-colonial world bridling at American influence. Going back to the organization's third Secretary General, U Thant, the UN in its General Assembly and other bodies has sought to counter an American world order with an alternative vision of a fellowship or sisterhood of states that would champion global causes that addressed long-standing perceived injustices. From Nixon onwards there have been American presidents who have disparaged this shop steward for third world causes on their doorstep.

Yet until now the US was always ultimately able to swallow its own irritation and largely get its way. It often loudly complained through a series of colourful US representatives to the UN, including Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and John Bolton, all of whom launched verbal broadsides at third world targets in the General Assembly. But whatever its faults, the American-created post World War II order, with the UN system at its centre, set the field and wrote the rules for the most rapid and diversified period of global growth in world history.

What was good for General Motors (GM) may, as the adage went, have been good for America - but critically it was also good for much of the rest of the world too. The US wasn't the only winner from free trade and a rules-based system. Both China, India, and many others could finally escape the economic bonds of nineteenth century and twentieth century colonialism and its devastating mercantilist economics and take great leaps forward. The UN-championed New International Economic order of the 1960s and 70s that had irritated Americans and others suddenly seemed a hollow manifesto as that global growth surge took off in the later years of the last century. It spread wealth enough that the rest went along with the American model.

A second reason why the US was able to contain its critics was the loyalty of Europe when push came to shove at the UN. Yes, there were differences of opinion over African liberation movements or on occasion open breaches such as the US-UK led war against the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq. But generally the Atlanticist group of nations held together and largely got its way in the UN. In the Biden years, or the earlier Obama ones it was possible to imagine a genteel decline in America’s leadership as others stepped up to share the burden.

A Committee to Save the World

Now a US that has abruptly sided in the UN with Russia and a handful of pariah authoritarian states on Ukraine may have brought to a sudden head, no longer that steady, rather smug drift towards multipolarity. Bluntly put, as Ngaire Woods has argued in the pages of Foreign Affairs, now it seems we may have to make a world system work without a hegemon because the latter has gone walkabout. A long slide has ended in a precipice.

The Trump Administration judges the UN by one question: is it good for America? But by its nature multilateralism has to be good for a lot more than just one of its members. Suddenly the indispensable partner of 80 years, Trump’s America becomes the useful bogeyman not just for developing countries but now for Europe too, to organise against.

Similar to how voices in Europe thought a British exit from the EU might allow the rest to pick up the pace of reforms, a US exit from the UN, some argue, might allow long-overdue UN reforms. Brazil and others have broached the issue of a UN Charter Review. For years this was moot because of the fear it might unleash US Congressional demons and diminish, not improve, what was achieved at San Francisco in 1945. Now maybe the US will be on the sidelines so the like-minded can be unchained, goes the thinking. The Lula Administration has used its leadership of the last G20 and the next COP to raise this kind of ambition. Optimistic, probably. But if the US did not pay the assessed contribution part of its UN dues, it would lose its vote - if not its influence.

The difficulty is the US may remain on the sidelines as a spoiler. Even if the reality is a US withdrawal from the world, the pageantry of Trump’s first state visit of the second term to the Gulf demonstrated the ambivalence. In Saudi Arabia, he condemned a long US neo-con tradition of engagement in foreign wars and state-building but in his behavior - meeting the new Syrian President and promising to lift sanctions; intimating a US-Iran nuclear deal was imminent; declaring that he was the only person who could get Putin to the table for Ukraine peace talks - he exhibited all the imperial chutzpah of old. And don’t expect the ambivalence to resolve itself. Even if Trump’s Main Street wants an end to forever wars and foreign entanglements, his Wall Street needs global investment and commerce. America cannot come home.

So wars, trade, and financial imbalances, global public goods and global development will need to be managed in ways that work around an America that may be more spoiler than absent.

That may limit the ability to reboot the official multilateral institutions of which the US is part. That elusive Security Council reform may remain just that for now, whereas the General Assembly is showing new signs of life. Other groupings where the US is present may lose further influence. The G7, unless it can be revived by its most qualified host in years, Canada’s Mark Carney, is a lost club of Western economies. The much more representative G20 is suffering from the US, the next host after the current South African chair, having noisily failed to attend either of its two recent ministerial meetings and Trump almost certain not to attend its heads of government meetings despite a promise, at his apparently quite congenial friendly lunch with Cyril Ramaphosa, to reconsider. The lunch followed another made-for-reality-TV put down of the his guest around a fake news video of white farmer deaths. Don’t expect China’s President Xi to show up anytime soon to be put through such an unedifying spectacle.

In the meantime, non-US groupings like the BRICS are growing in membership but not necessarily in coherence. And the climate gathering, COP, although the US will be gone, struggles to sustain momentum on climate.

Yet the issues a G20 might have addressed - such as the trade imbalances that have provoked Trump’s tariffs; or the climate change that is already prompting conflict, migration and economic destruction - cannot go unmanaged.

In the short-term we may see the revival of more informal forums such as Davos or Munich in Europe, which in the case of the first had begun to look very lost, and their Gulf and Asian copies where businesses and civil society can both engage with each other and press governments to act in concert on cross-border issues. Even an American Pope may serve as an informal bridge. As an American late-night comic quipped, its a strange world when we have an American Pope and Russian President.

And over time either the revival of existing official fora such as the Security Council or G20 or the emergence of new groupings, coalitions of the willing. Effectiveness may need to trump universality for awhile.

The global imbalances that have led to Trump’s tariffs may, because of their current potency, drive new institutional arrangements before conflict or climate does. The World Trade Organisation (WTO) has been increasingly marginalised by the US over the last decade but some constellation of it and its Bretton Woods sisters, the IMF and the World Bank, need to provide a platform to address the currency, savings, investment, trade, and development imbalances that has the US at China’s throat. If not tariffs, then a genuinely ambitious political grouping would accord a degree of economic coordination including a lower dollar and the steady buildup of alternatives to the dollar which flies in the face of America First-ism but would provide a much more sustainable economic future for Michigan’s unemployed car worker.

For while fixing multilateralism ultimately requires a reset between America and the world, the necessary starting point may be US-China relations which is the anvil all else may rest on. Somehow an American president whose declared hero is a tariff wielding nineteenth century predecessor, William McKinley, has to be coaxed into co-existence with a country, China, where history and a twenty-first century future seem to have found a dynamism that has eluded America.

To get there requires a forum where political leaders can meet over well-prepared plans. Deep in the statutes of the IMF, sleeping until now, is a provision for a Council of Ministers. Perhaps its time has come. And maybe its first possible deal on imbalances should even be called the Mar-a-lago Accord, if that is what it takes to get the last reluctant US signature.

Further reading:

• Rebalancing the world economy: Right idea but wrong approach

• In the run up to their Governance Weekend, the Mo Ibrahim Foundation has released their always-excellent Facts & Figures report

• Ian Bremmer on the techbros vs. the political class

• I am not the only one bemoaning the departure of a spirit of public service from DC: Living Among the DOGE Wreckage

• The Definitive Guide to Types of Oligarchies

King Corruption Corner:

• $Trump dinner!

• The White House’s exchange of influence for money is so frank that one lobbying veteran called it “outer-borough Mafia shit.”

Fast checking

Old media are doing their best to keep up even as they become one of the targets of Trump’s witch hunt against dissent. But their attempt to keep tabs on the truth, as they earnestly fact check his and his acolytes' claims, lags behind. They cannot catch up, and we cannot keep up, so the redefinition of what constitutes political truth races towards a Trump-defined Overton Window, where invasion of neighbouring countries, illegal expulsion of migrants to prison camps, crushing the independence of courts, universities, media, and The Fed are suddenly, if not okay for many of us, at least part of the mainstream discourse.

America, where for a bewildering moment it seemed the last opposition standing was the bond market, suddenly reflects the dangerous genius of a president who moves fast and breaks things. Trump seems to know that even if some of the broken crockery will need to be stuck together again, in the meantime he has moved the discourse on, leaving his critics floundering in his wake.

The great catch up may have begun as he veers ever further into conflict with the courts and strays beyond the issues of inflation and migration that got him elected. Tariffs are as inflationary as it gets and his economic carnage may get him into much deeper trouble than just supermarket prices; a Trump recession may loom. And a few braver voices on the opposition political benches are coming back onto the field.

But I am left with a sense that our understanding and response is still falling short of the real magnitude of what is happening. We echo the words and phrases that note the end of the liberal order that America made; we see the comparisons to Germany in 1933 and the 50 odd days it took Hitler to overwhelm the democratic defences of the Weimar Republic. But rightly, I suspect, we refrain from adopting what we fear is an overblown rhetoric of Fascism in America. Could it really be that bad? And at the very least it seems ahistorical to borrow from the example of Germany, a country burdened and angered by the reparations and de-industrialisation imposed on it after losing the First World War, with contemporary America that has enjoyed the rich rewards of innovation, immigration and global economic leadership for decades. America seems to be great already and we struggle to fully comprehend the M (Make) and A (Again) of MAGA. Whatever the pattern of winners and losers globalisation may have created, America is surely not Germany of 1933.

Two literary events this month suggested to me we may be looking in the wrong place for answers. One was the death of the Nobel Laureate for Literature, Mario Vargas Llosa and the other was a play by David Edgar called The New Real. Both stirred memories for me of my own years in politics but more importantly both reminded me we may have to wait for great fiction and drama to finally make sense of this moment; to sort out what really matters and what was just ugly noise.

Truth is stranger than fiction

There is nothing new in noting that writers of fiction seem often to be the beneficiaries of moments of revolutionary upheaval or the crackdowns of authoritarianism. They often thrive with the big canvas these moments offer. And not just writers - in a decade of crisscrossing Latin America and Asia as a political consultant, I sought to memorialise each campaign by acquiring a painting that caught its essence: the indigenous faces on the outside of power in Bolivia; the strong matriarch and her empty-eyed husband as the mothers stood up to Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile; or the head of a Christ-like dead revolutionary by Guayasamin, Ecuador’s leftist anti-American provocateur artist-in-chief.

Vargas Llosa has been lauded by fine obituaries that have generally dealt lightly with his political life where he was at odds with many of his contemporary regional literary greats, such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who like others celebrated Fidel Castro long after they should. Mario was a fan of Margaret Thatcher and when he recruited me in his elegant Kensington apartment to come and work for him in Peru, his one reservation was I had never worked for her. It seemed barely offset in his mind by my perhaps more useful experience of having worked on other presidential campaigns across South America. As he discussed his Anglo-Saxon recipe of free markets and a small state I wondered how well that Knightsbridge liberal vision would travel to Peru. But Paddington Bear had made the journey the other way, maybe we would get lucky.

So in 1990 he ran for president of Peru and lost. In his memoir of the campaign, A Fish In The Water, he gleefully notes that I once assured him he was the worst candidate that I had ever worked for! But I wouldn’t have missed a moment of it. He was both self-effacing and charismatic; and deeply honest about his political prescriptions and profoundly reluctant to hide or smooth their edges to win votes. He describes how he wouldn’t compromise on the mandate for painful change that he sought. Political salesmanship was anathema.

He was a visionary who lost all perspective when immersed into the pressure cooker of a political campaign. He entered as an outsider challenging a failed political order (which remains the case 35 years later) but then allowed himself to be backed by the two traditional right-wing parties. He finished as the champion of the same order that as a novelist he despised. The atheist was even endorsed from their pulpits by the Roman Catholic Cardinal and his priests. An irony he richly enjoyed.

Vargas Llosa had become the unintended defender of those he attacked most vigorously in his novels. The social outsider from a broken family in Arequipa, who had had to go abroad to seek fame and fortune, was seduced and captured by the white elite of Lima’s affluent Miraflores neighborhood, Peru’s Kensington. The outsider was invited in- a seduction for the ages.

The embrace destroyed his appeal, as its social hostesses crowded round him in their latest European fashions at his rallies. They came between him and those who had followed him as an angry activist condemning a broken government. He was bested by an agricultural economist, Alberto Fujimori, whose dawn radio programme on the how-tos of farming was loyally tuned into by the country’s poorer voters as they worked in the fields or, displaced from the countryside, made the long early morning commute from impoverished barrios to precarious jobs in the informal urban sector. Fujimori was a hidden star. The elites, who no doubt were still asleep in their feather beds in Lima, knew nothing of his Apprentice-like media appeal. Fujimori’s very Trumpian period in office ended in prison. Sometimes the truth remains even better than fiction!

Mario’s deepest recurrent insight as a writer was into the corruption of those elites and the deep desire for revolutionary social change they provoked. In Conversation in the Cathedral, Peru’s ruling class was dissected by the frequenters of a dingy bar. The War of the End of the World describes a millenarian peasant revolt against the Brazilian state and its landlord backers. And once politics was behind him, and with evident relief, he returned to writing novels like The Feast of the Goat, based on the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. It showed the muse burnt as brightly as ever. His Nobel citation read in part: “cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of…..resistance, revolt and defeat.”

He was frustrated by Peru’s failure to seize its future but that same failure was what fed his writing. The literary genius but failed politician is a neat personal encapsulation of my point. As a writer, Vargos Llosa could make sense of the same politics that confused and swamped him as a candidate. So a silver lining - we may hope that a new great age of Big American social novels may lie ahead. Latin America’s general political failure has produced great literature! And that we may revisit those novels that already resonate again. The Financial Times this month ran an essay suggesting that today’s gilded age chaos offers F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby a new lease of life.

Through the looking glass

A play that already has something to say about these times is David Edgar’s The New Real. I saw it on stage before the US election. It is the story of two American consultants, former partners and bedmates, who end up on the the different sides of several elections that pit a Western-style candidate against a cynical Viktor Orban-esque figure, who in this fictional country, a cross between Hungary and Ukraine, sends liberal democracy packing as he consolidates a populist rule. It draws on Alpha Dogs by James Harding which is the story of my then modestly legendary consulting firm, the Sawyer-Miller Group. Now long gone.

Deviating sharply from the firm’s own liberal biography, the play’s conservative consultant and his candidate then weaponise the involvement of a human rights foundation whose rather naive representative is earnestly promoting democracy. This storyline mirrors Orban himself targeting George Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF) to consolidate his power with a Hungary-first rhetoric. As a later President of OSF, who had met my wife Trish at Sawyer- Miller, before which she too worked (much earlier than me) at OSF- the biographical echoes were considerable.

So we supported a showing in London to friends and political and theatre types of a film version of the play, actually shot before I had seen it on stage. Some months later, same play, but different message. Now we were watching it after Trump had returned to the White House. An Eastern European observes in the play, “they sent us democracy and we sent them back dictatorship.” And suddenly this is a play about the crisis of US democracy. For the viewer, different parts of the script stand out.

There is a reversal of which country explains the other. Now it is not two consultants falling back on US campaign war stories to explain the alien world of Eastern Europe. It’s Eastern Europe - its shadows, conspiracies and nativism - casting light on America today. The conservative consultant sums up what they have seen:

• The liberal candidate and her advisers thought there was a majority of young Western-oriented consumers and voters who were embracing the new capitalism and its opportunities.

• But she had forgotten those who were left behind - pensioners and those in small towns and rural areas. A resentful majority.

Then the first consultant applies the observation to the US and describes the Democratic Party as formerly a coalition of Berkeley and Flint, a failing Michigan industrial town. Then Berkeley, a shorthand for the Democratic policy elites and all their political correctness and detachment from blue collar concerns, he argued divorced Flint. Edgar built on this in a subsequent post-film stage discussion. He argued that for the first time a majority of lower-income voters had marked their ballots for Trump and higher-income voters for Harris. A historic inversion.

So we see great fiction and drama through the lens of our own times but at its best it’s a mirror that helps us see the very essence of those times- what truly matters. For decades I have watched Latin America disappoint politically and shine in literature. These are terrible days but hopefully they will make for some great books. That may be some comfort.

So, perhaps a new slogan. In easy times our art can tend towards closed comedies of social manners and an emphasis on form. In bad times we get the big sprawling angry works of social commentary. So a slogan for our times: MAAGA. Make American Art Great Again!

Best,
Mark

Following a Trump Executive Order, the Voice of America and its sister channels, America’s global public radio network, have largely fallen silent or are playing music rather than reporting the news. In the day, when the state broadcaster started to play music it usually indicated that a coup was in progress.

President Trump has suspended the stations as part of a much wider assault on American soft power. The most striking include the dismantling of USAID, the literal occupation and seizure of the US Institute for Peace and the US-Africa Development Foundation, and a 180 day review of international organisations. This has led to a questionnaire to many UN agencies asking them to justify themselves against criteria that include: what have they done to make America safer; to improve the US economy; and to make the country great again. Further questions explore these agencies’ commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Together, these questions seem to provide a loyalty test that organisations that serve 193 countries will have difficulty meeting. Already large numbers of staff are being let go. In the UN’s corridors there is muttering of an institutional McCarthyism, recalling a time when the US imposed an anti-communist loyalty test on American staff at the UN.

The singling out by President Trump of individual judges as ripe for impeachment for just doing their job of upholding the law; or the denigration of public sector officials such as Samantha Power, the Biden head of USAID, or Michael Abramowitz, the director of Voice of America, as leftwing crooks and subversives suggests a personalised McCarthyism not just an institutionally targeted one. Samantha is an Irish immigrant who came to America with her mother and Mike the second generation of a family devoted to government and service. Both are longtime friends of mine and I can attest are the among the best exemplars of an American dream of making a difference and giving back to the world. An ethic we are seeing blown up in front of us. There is little sympathy or patience in the MAGA heartlands for such values or people. They are tarred as deep state criminals and Washington has so lost its way the charge sticks. I suspect it won't help either of their cases to say I first met Samantha when she was interning in the office of Mike’s father Mort Abramowitz when he was the president of the Carnegie Endowment. Further evidence no doubt of deep state ties!

This is not just a Washington earthquake. Quite apart from the free fall in US international standing that these actions have generated there are wider consequences. Is the international system answerable to one owner or the other 192 as well? Second, is there a future for development assistance (ODA) when the world’s largest provider has made clear its intentions to end most of its provision? The dismantling of the American postwar system and pursuit of the people who ran it is a story that is going to run and run. But what it means for development and international co-operation is not a bad place to start.

Partly this is to acknowledge that what starts in Washington doesn’t stay in Washington and it’s also to recognise that Trump and Musk had a public opinion rich target in attacking ODA. The US is not alone other than in the abruptness and malice of the cuts. And hence my opening point about Trump and Musk knowing how to find open doors to kick in.

As tragically, Europeans have cut too, including France, Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands, and very dramatically the UK. For the most part they have expressed regret blaming it on budgetary pressures along with the hope that they might reverse the cuts in due course. The UK, as the latest to cut, has explicitly laid it at the door of the increased defence spending necessary as Trump’s America signals a pullback from Europe. They have also tried in some cases, unlike the US, to give recipients notice. The UK for example has signalled the reductions early and allowed a two-year phasing down. Yet with no alternative donors in sight this is arguably merely a death sentence delayed.

Odourous ODA

The tragedy is that over a quarter of century from the 1990s, development outcomes in terms of poverty reduction, life expectancy and health, and educational enrollment improved more rapidly than at any time in world history. And climate change was slowed. ODA was part of this success. Looking forward there are challenges in both development and climate which still need large amounts of grant support and it is a tragedy that they seem unlikely to get it but what can be salvaged is a system of long term lending.

Here, despite this bleak picture, I suspect there remains a real future for strong, international public financial flows to support development and contain climate change. It’s just not going to be branded as aid or ODA. So in future not grants but concessional loans. And that has real limitations as Mia Mottley, the prime minister of hurricane-prone Barbados, and others have argued. Natural disasters such as floods or earthquakes take away economic capacity so repairing the damage on loan rather than grant terms is a real burden on the recipient.

One glimmer of light is that ODA will stay put for the rising number of humanitarian disasters - a consequence of changing climate and security breakdowns. Annually it swallows a bigger portion of the ODA that’s left. But, hopefully there will be enough to also support the 25 or so poorest and most fragile states where loans would only increase indebtedness. A leaked memo suggests a re-launched scaled back US program might indeed be centred on humanitarian assistance with the rest going into the kind of private sector lending guarantees and blended finance that are clearly going to be a major part of the future financing architecture.

But ODA - rich countries “giving” to poorer ones - has evidently peaked after a quarter of century of growth and success. Everywhere domestic spending priorities are crowding it out. On the right, it has long been labelled a welfare programme for corrupt elites in third world countries paid for by the blue-collar tax payers of the world’s donor nations. On the left, there has been a growing unease about its paternalistic or colonial character. In developing countries, there have also been frustrations. First, the demand that ODA should be elevated to a right not a gift and be enshrined as a reparation for either colonial occupation or climate damage (or both). That seems less probable than ever. And second that assistance should be set at much more significant and predictable multi-year levels and that the sourcing should be much simpler. At present every international conference seems to end with a new fund so as to placate the demands of developing countries. The new vehicle is then left largely empty by donors because they are not increasing their total funding just fragmenting it across more outlets. For a recipient, navigating this is made ever harder- more sources to chase and each with their own rules and requirements.

It's just not reliable funding. The last point is demonstrated by Trump’s abrupt USAID closure. Life-saving programs got shuttered overnight. The Center for Global Development calculates that an estimated 3.3m lives a year were probably saved annually by USAID programs. Now many of them will be in immediate jeopardy. The two biggest casualties will be the public health and food security programs which were big in scale and vital lifelines.

But many programs could have been a lot more efficient if they had been blended into a single all donor country strategy. They would sit neatly beside World Bank, UN and other bilateral flows in a single coherent programme that reflected clear, national priorities and built up national (as against donor) delivery capacity. Instead too many programs are often an incoherent set of projects reflecting donor, not recipient, preferences. In USAID’s particular case, congressional earmarking has been a particular bugbear, reflecting home town voter priorities - such as shipping out midwestern farmers’ grain surpluses, a long running sore of the aid system.

Towards post-ODA Finance

So why given this wholesale assault will financial flows for development not slow even if they change in character and origin? The case begins with the obvious. They are still needed. Bluntly, the strategic costs of allowing a large portion of the world to fall further behind in terms of security, illegal migration flows, the limiting of potential global economic growth, unmanaged climate change makes an abandonment of financial assistance flows unlikely - although not impossible.

Further, as many emerging market countries reach a stage where they should be improving domestic revenue through higher taxes, rather than relying on aid flows, the whole categorisation of the world into rich donors and a poor Global South looks absurdly simplistic. In truth the big Asian economies are racing ahead in any world league table of national income. They will pay for their own development - and largely already do.

Perhaps the more important question is what kind of global political order might underpin such flows in future by providing a new rationale. The first possibility is a world of empires where literal territorial expansion (think Canada, Ukraine or Taiwan) is accompanied by new much larger spheres of influence; shadow empires so to speak.

Donald Trump’s apparent aspirations for a modern Yalta where three global powers - US, Russia, and China - would divide the world up into spheres of influence and would almost certainly usher back an era of old fashioned aid-for-influence. The Cold War most recently saw not just an arms race but also an aid and soft power race between the US and the Soviet Union. Countries were cultivated with financial largesse, scholarships, a flow of media and cultural seduction from the Moscow and Washington rivals. Soft power was as much a tool as its hard power sibling: security assistance. Any return to such a big power world will quickly reintroduce a demand for soft power as the three rivals angle for influence in a new age of rivalries.

Ironically, a Trump Administration would likely find itself reviving not just an aid agency but an official global broadcaster, an Institute of Peace like think tank network and other soft power institutions. This as it competes to hold onto allies against China’s Belt and Road Initiative that finances recipient countries’ infrastructure, Russia’s RT broadcaster, and China’s international Confucius Institutes. Empires cost, and not just the hard power part. Ironically it could even be the best bet for an ODA revival as America finds itself doling out grant money again to hold onto friends.

The difficulty is Cold War aid was highly inefficient and corrupt precisely because its primary purpose was to win and keep friends. So its benefits flowed to corrupt elites, not the poor. And too often drawn into it were the multilateral institutions. Most were heavily US and Western dominated. The Bretton Woods Institutions, located in Washington, and leveraging a capital structure of Western governmental guarantees, which allowed the US to secure major loan allocations to allies, were particularly vulnerable to becoming in all-but-name an extension of US economic foreign policy. When I worked for the World Bank in the 1990s, we were still unwinding the financial and reputational consequences of lending to American-backed dictators in Africa, Latin America, and Asia where the monies had too often gone to ruling family enrichment - not development.

The other path is one where a much broader set of nations steps up and seeks to work around this emerging new super power constellation. This coalition of the willing would support a new development compact, based on governments putting their collective guarantee behind long-term affordable loans that allow poor countries long-term predictable borrowing against agreed national development strategies. This imagines a single, largely unified funding channel through multilateral partners rather than the existing fragmented bilateral channels. With the current cuts only Germany retains an aid program, at $38 billion, of sufficient size to be able to make a respectable, as against flag-waving, case for retaining its bilateral character (for now - as it may be the next to cut in order to pay for defence spending increases) .

Rally Around This Flag

More important though than the efficiency point is the re-positioning of ODA away from its past as conscience money or tool of influence to a new contract of equals between donors and recipients, where mutual accountabilities are spelt out, and the burden shared for moving a shared planet forward through the multiple collective challenges posed by development, climate and technology change. By changing the financial nature from aid to loans, in other words a development banking model, not aid agency grant, the relationship as a whole can be reset from one of dependency and its ugly history to a businesslike one of equals. The platform for this would be the already extensive network of development banks at the global, regional and national levels. The World Bank is just the most well known.

Core to this new model is an overdue switch from programs designed out of Washington and other Western capitals to locally designed and owned strategies. There is a growing recognition that imposed strategies don’t work. Countries must choose their own path and own it. Showing the way is the NGO sector for which the mantra in recent years has been the ungainly word, localisation. This recognises that Western-led disaster and development response must be replaced by one where local capacity is built up. Locals and their own organisations must lead. Related to this has been a big push by new-ish organisations like Ground Truth to opinion test beneficiaries and affected communities so that their voice is also represented in the design. Sometimes a developing country capital city is as detached from conditions on the ground as an international donor agency.

And there is a powerful alternative political rationale to that of empires of influence for such a co-operative partnership-based financing system. It’s the anti-empire stance that we are starting to see play out in the revival of the political fortunes of the ruling Liberal party in Canada and its new leader Mark Carney (up 25% in the polls in a matter of weeks) or in the position of the new German chancellor-to-be, Friedrich Merz. They are anti-Trump and anti-Putin and want to keep their countries and the world free of over-reaching autocrats.

Soft power is a key to keeping the world an open system, as against the closed one of the first path, and multilateralism becomes the solidarity against big power dominance. The likely recruits, from Europe to southern middle and smaller powers, for such an alternative system are large in number.

At a far from negligible cost - more expensive money - it allows development and climate finance to be freed from the political dead weight of the “aid” name and to be reset in terms that both lenders and borrowers can be portrayed to their citizens as winners; for lending countries they are paid back and for the borrowers they are masters of their own development. It is not a panacea and will be accompanied by its share of debt crises and lot of angst about the natural justice (or lack thereof) of loans rather than grants but I suspect given the politics it is where we are headed. It is a means of putting locks back on the development assistance doors, and politically weather proofing them, to return to my opening.

The New Cold War- Open versus Closed Worlds

Loans or grants we are in for a period of contestation between the closed and open alternatives - Yalta versus the rest. The real rivalry of the US and China, now expanded by a Trumped up Russia, economically weak and dependent on China, is likely to be inherently unstable as both sides pile on soft as well as hard power cards in their attempt to prevail. But it will have its supporters where other strongmen are rapidly borrowing from the Trump playbook. Take Erdogan’s arrest this week in Turkey of his main opponent or Netanyahu’s explicit comparisons to Trump in his attacks on a supposed leftwing deep state as he fired his domestic intelligence chief.

The new competition between closed and open societies is just getting started. It will be fought within states as much as between states. I wish my old friend and colleague George Soros, who relaunched Karl Popper’s phrase ‘open society’ and put his mind and his fortune behind it, was thirty years younger and could take up the fight again as the new champions are taking their time to identify themselves, let alone get on the pitch.

Any thoughts or reactions always welcome.

Best,

Mark

Links

• The success of Ivory Coast is Africa’s best-kept secret

• Stadium - or TikTok? - diplomacy

• Who wrote “Wind of Change” - the Scorpions or the CIA?

• On VOA: When the future tennis star was growing up behind the Iron Curtain, hearing U.S. music and the news of the world “was our lifeline.”

• The US may regret stepping back from the climate conversation when it returns

Now starts the nightmare. If historians are still free to say so, they will almost certainly conclude that the past thirty days or so have been the most corrupt in American history and quite possibly the world’s, so far. Consider just a few of the indications: in the run-up to the inauguration healthcare executives and others are reported by The Wall Street Journal to have shelled out $500 million to join dinners with the president-elect at Mar-a-Lago; a Trump family cryptocurrency launch on the eve of the inauguration that put the implied weight of the US behind a private venture and made instant billions1; major federal agencies that regulate his lieutenant Elon Musk’s enterprises being shorn of staff; the firing of almost 20 inspectors general, the cabinet departmental anti-corruption watchdogs; and the suspension of the enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act2 so letting a number of well-connected notorious individuals off the hook3. I could go on but you get the idea. The US is in the hands of thieves. And they are just getting started.

Within the wider Shock and Awe of early Trump Two, this dimension has perhaps gone less noticed than the betrayal of 80 years of US foreign policy and the slashing of government. We are not short of choice on what to be outraged about.

And just to make sure this grand Theft goes unchallenged, legal actions by President Trump on the slimmest of grounds against ABC and CBS seem intended to intimidate the whole corporate media sector4. Suddenly deep-pocketed media owners, who have other conglomerate business interests to protect, are no longer defenders of a free media, if only because that was what used to make advertisers and the old political establishment comfortable. But now they are easily cowed into line by an apparently existential threat - Trump wrath. CBS’s parent company’s sale of itself might be jeopardised and so on if they earn the ire of a White House which has brought previously independent regulatory agencies under its direct command. And so owners and advertisers alike are rushing to comply. Jeff Bezos has announced - on X, of course! - the Washington Post will largely limit its globally respected op-ed page to the celebration of “personal liberties and open markets”. In the past this decision might have been expected out of Moscow or Beijing news rooms, not Washington. Meta has reined in its fact checking5. Even as the mainstream media is tamed, social media is again a fact-free free for all.

America has had its share of colourful episodes of corruption both at the presidential and town hall level. Kickbacks and political influence were the stuff of legend. But step back and consider both the quantum and the character of what is now happening and we are in different territory. The past looks almost quaintly old fashioned - a per cent on a deal. Now we see wholesale takeover.

Musk Access

The misfortune is that Big Tech and Trump have ridden into town at the same time. Never has a business sector enjoyed such political access at a moment of such momentous market opportunity as tech does today. It has dominated the stock market as it has enjoyed a yearslong bull run. But it’s perhaps just the beginning. Going to dinner earlier this month with a group of public sector tech salesmen I was struck by how many of them had military and security backgrounds. In the past if they had previous government careers it would have been in the domestic spending departments. But now defence is the new market opportunity. The sector is being made over by the purveyors of software and drones. Palantir and SpaceX are the new Boeings.

West Coast tech has drawn in government-hating idealists, progressives and libertarians but now its leaders must contend with a period of historic disruption and expansion in their sector. They could do it alone or they could get help from a White House which is for sale. Who will be brave enough to resist that corrupt embrace with the weight of expectations of investors and shareholders to meet? Elon Musk has taken $38 billion in subsidies and loans since 2003 according to the Washington Post.

Yet it risks a reversal of what made American capitalism pre-eminent. As a European I have watched with envy how the US political and legal system has stood up to white collar crime during both the Savings and Loans scandal and then the 2009 global financial crisis in a way Europe did not. The animal spirits needed rules, guard rails and enforcement. Without it business slips into a comfortable at best, corrupt at worst, co-existence with government.

A Scarlet Letter

Earlier this month at a meeting I was co-chairing in Rabat, Morocco, a group of career-long development experts when asked to choose what mattered most for development chose good governance and an absence of corruption. The American case was far from their minds. This was decades of collective development experience in the room, seeing close up what allows countries to move forward and what holds them back.

An old colleague of mine, Peter Eigen left the World Bank to found Transparency International (TI) in the 1990s because he had already seized this essential insight. Jim Wolfensohn, a brave new president of the World Bank seized the nettle himself and elevated the “C” word, as he dubbed it, to a central concern of the institution.

I had come to the World Bank from a background of political consulting where I had seen campaigns in Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia turned on their heads by allegations of corruption. When public aspirations continually ran ahead of what governments could deliver, corruption was a lightening rod. Allegations were thrown around thick and fast both because more often than not there was apparently a lot of truth in them. It was a real plague but its political potency as mud to throw at an opponent often out ran even the apparent truth.

And once corruption itself is implanted it’s exasperatingly difficult to uproot. TI’s annual corruption perception index improves at a snail’s pace because new rulers too often forget the indignation of the campaign trail and pick up where their predecessors left off. The nature of government-business relations too often invites it. This is partly the structure of wealth and regulation in many developing countries. Wealth is in the hands of the very few; there is sometimes little opportunity for a middle class to emerge with its own savings and economic independence; and so government becomes the trough that everybody feeds on and where the least powerful find themselves the victims of predatory extortion by government officials. It’s a tangled ball of misaligned interests that can take generations to unravel.

And it doesn’t help when the corruption slur is weaponised against political opponents. So President Xi in China has used a highly political anti-corruption campaign to bring down political rivals and leave others, the “Red Princes,” who have achieved huge inexplicable wealth through their connections to power, untouched. President Putin has done the same, accusing pretty much all of his liberal opponents of corruption. Sir Bill Browder, the doughty campaigner for the Magnitsky law, an anti-corruption measure named after his Russian lawyer who was killed for investigating official fraud, has written a book about his attempted framing by Putin.

And now President Trump and his team have borrowed the playbook. USAID counts for about 1% of federal spending but is repeatedly accused of corruption by Trump and Musk. Usually no evidence is provided but foreign aid is something the MAGA base loves to hate. As the net widens to other parts of government no doubt these allegations will become a torrent: dead people still on welfare benefits and fraudsters of all sorts sucking at the public purse will become the daily staple of their social media postings. Again proof will be in short supply. Smear and move on.

Rooting out corruption is a matter of mending systems, not tilting at foes. It’s about the rule of law and its clear, unambiguous enforcement; transparency of regulation but also wider societal transformation to create plural economic structures that are not beholden to government. And about a business sector that builds things rather than enjoying a rent seeking relationship with the state.

As a Foundation head I funded a group of thoughtful civil society groups that moved simultaneously on parliamentary, media, government enforcement and professional standards fronts at the same time to attack the cancer of corruption in the city of London where lawyers, accountants, PR and financial professionals had become enablers of global money laundering. Both the last government and the current one have taken the problem seriously and there is progress.

The US used to take the problem seriously too. I remember living in Washington twenty five years ago and being both surprised but impressed by how West Coast tech, then in its relative infancy, spurned the world of Washington influence peddling. Many of its first leaders made a point of not fielding government affairs teams in DC to the frustration of the K street lawyers and lobbyists who were greedily eyeing the rich pickings of this brash new industry. Both sides have made up for it since.

Perhaps most alarming in this story of American backsliding is how the country really does risk emulating the structure of Chinese or Russian authoritarianism, not just in its new choice of international friends or in its political style but also in this degraded economic model where darkness and dealings in the shadows replaces America’s muscular openness. Next year’s TI index is surely likely to face the biggest decline in its lifetime. And worst of all what starts in America has an unhappy habit of spreading. After Trump endorsed a cryptocurrency, his Argentinian counterpart rushed to do the same.

So where are the country’s famous checks and balances? Yes, there is a 6 to 3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court but only two of those six, Judges Thomas and Alito, seem to be unquestioning foot soldiers of a runaway executive. They also have enjoyed rich lifestyles supported by donors that they tried to conceal from investigative journalists. The others may believe in enhanced presidential authority versus the bureaucracy, but not at the expense of the powers of Congress, the States or the Law. In Congress the Republican majority may for now be Trump all the way but it remains an uneasy coalition. Budget and foreign policy hawks must be privately appalled by the early international betrayals, notably Ukraine. The domestic policy direction on debt, tariffs and the dollar equally must shock traditional small government conservatives.

Yet, politicians, judges and media owners don’t have the luxury of time to rediscover their courage. Corruption happens easily but once established is a lot harder to undo. They have given Trump and Musk a flying start as they move at Silicon Valley- not Washington- speed. The Senate did not stand up to his cabinet nominees so he is now surrounded by probably the most servile but least experienced cabinet in the nation’s history.

I suspect it won’t be a great debate about democracy that trips him up but rather humble politics and economics, together with a lashing of the “C” word. Trump’s early Shock and Awe may be already stalling as a smattering of federal judges step up and polling numbers begin to melt away. For now to oppose Trump as a Republican may be a political suicide note but by the midterms a failing economy and chaos abroad may be joined by a chorus of corruption charges against an administration that will be ill-placed to refute the allegations. Once corruption is introduced into politics it gets everywhere. Trump could be its most prominent victim.

Tea and Aid on Toast

A final footnote: King Charles has invited Trump to tea in Scotland when he is next visiting his golf courses, with a state visit to follow thereafter. This was part of the courtship rituals that accompanied Sir Keir Starmer’s visit to the White House. Less edifying was the decision to slash ODA to pay for the defence spending increase that was the entry price to Trump’s good books. The defence increase is as Starmer argued overdue; but the ODA cut is bonkers. At a stroke it has put Britain abroad in the same bracket as the US with its slashing of USAID. In the G20 meetings in Cape Town last week, at the UN and elsewhere, the UK was dismissed as having caved.

British Ministers may argue that the reasoning was different. That this was a progressive government up against budget realities rather than an enthusiastic choice. But actually the decision was made by the political operation in Number 10 and sprung on ministers. Indeed Anneliese Dodds, the development minister, has resigned in protest. And for the back room politicos it was a very happy choice as they now see Nigel Farage’s Reform as their principal political threat and wanted to steal its anti-aid clothes.

So, the spirit of Trump is stalking Westminster. Africans, the main victims of the cuts, and the rest of us are right to be outraged.

Links

• From Sam Freedman: How Trump and Musk are exposing fractures in the global right-wing alliance

• How London became the dirty money capital of the world

• Trump’s ‘flooding the zone’ strategy is successfully knocking geopolitics off-balance - Gillian Tett argues investors better pay close attention as well

• I was glad to sign on to this letter to the Prime Minister expressing concern on the aid cuts

Yet as the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) reported earlier this month Trump alarm is for now a very Western thing. Beyond Europe, Japan, and South Korea, people are more sanguine. And indeed many welcome an America that no longer poses as the world’s policeman and self-appointed conscience. They are relieved by the prospect of a more transactional, less preachy superpower.

However that American preachiness was critical to the UN’s founding DNA. Both President Roosevelt, and then his widow Eleanor, imbued its institutions with an uncomfortable conscience. And while many UN diplomats may sympathise with their publics’ opinion as expressed in the chart above, these institutions are in their bones still deeply American.

I have had a multilateral immersion month. I co-chaired a wonderful two day discussion on the Bretton Woods institutions at King’s and Queens’ Colleges, Cambridge with the college heads, Gillian Tett and Mohamed El-Erian; spent several days in New York taking the pulse of multilateralism at the UN with its senior leaders, diplomats, and civil society; and spent (for me) a highly educative couple of days at Middlebury College in Vermont, listening to student views on the Bretton Woods institutions’ future roles.

At the UN since January 20th a new US Administration with other things on its mind has been largely invisible. There are, however, tea leaves to be read: US statements have now deleted references to “a two state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” The new Ambassador’s confirmation hearings are read as indicating that the best reason for staying in the UN is to stop China filling the space. Better than the feared pulling out but hardly a ringing Rooseveltian endorsement of the UN.

And the US freeze on foreign assistance is creating knock-on impacts across UN budgets. For most the US is still the largest contributor. And given that some very significant part of the freezes seem likely to be permanent, it may trigger a dramatic rationalisation of UN operations. In the past, European governments and American Foundations have often stepped up to fill gaps caused by periodic US withholdings. This time there will be less of that. Mike Bloomberg has already come in on funding the COP climate process. But the Europeans are having their own aid meltdown. Last week Switzerland was the latest to react, implementing an anti-aid vote by cutting key funding.

Perhaps an even greater systemic threat to multilateralism than money is politics and doctrine. Just two weeks in office and President Trump has laid claim to Greenland, the Panama Canal, and Canada. His new Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, has warned that the Greenland claim is “not a joke” and is already pursuing the Panama claim with an official visit. Receding Arctic ice is opening up both new trade routes and sources of strategic metals. The Panama Canal carries about 40% of US seaborne container traffic. In a world no longer at peace, these routes matter to the US which seems on the verge of joining other global powers in believing that controlling its strategic backyard by coercion and force if necessary outweighs its treaty commitments to the global commons or the international rule of law. The foundations of multilateralism seem to be cratering.

The Price of Infractions

It is a dangerous bandwagon of authoritarians that the Trump Administration is intent on joining. It puts them in the company of Russia, whose case for invading Ukraine was that it had fallen under Western influence and that it was a threat to its Russian neighbour, and of China and its escalating militarised push into the South China seas and its ultimate prize, Taiwan. Both Russia and China’s behaviour was condemned as rogue. Now an American Administration is apparently intent on normalising it.

And the habit is spreading. Last year Venezuela’s President Maduro threatened to seize Guyana’s newly discovered oil fields. By contrast, Africa has lived sometimes uncomfortably but with admirable adherence within its colonial borders. Leaders recognised that the price of infractions anywhere was that the principle of territorial integrity would break down everywhere. And now it may be.

The periodic descent of the Rwandan-backed M23 guerrillas on the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)’s city of Goma, capital of North Kivu Province, is not new; military incursions have occurred over years. In the past, having won promises from the DRC to restrain Hutu rebels based in the Kivus, M23 retreated. And indeed from 2012 to 2021 M23 seemed to have left the scene. Now they have taken Goma and are marching on Bukavu. Some 800 people were reported killed in the last week.

Several things appear to be different this time. Rwanda seems set to more formally dominate the precious metal trade, sourced from the Kivus and exported through Rwanda, and add territory for its own tightly squeezed population. UN and International Crisis Group (ICG) sources estimate that there are at least 4,000 Rwandan nationals currently in the Kivus. And unlike in the past, they are not doing much to hide it. What has apparently critically shifted is the private attitude of many African leaders who previously condemned Rwanda’s backing for M23. This time sentiment has shifted. They have lost patience with Felix Tshisekedi, the DRC President, who has not moved to create security in the region. Rwandan strength is grudgingly admired over Congolese fecklessness in an age when suddenly Might is Right.

I could make a similar argument about Sudan where a number of neighbours and regional actors’ covert interventions risk a military stalemate and de facto partition of the country where loss of life from the conflict is currently the highest in the world. As I write a brutal attack has just occurred on civilians in the Omdurman market.

At the UN, British and French representatives have threatened consequences for Rwanda’s actions but they appear lonely voices. They seem to be the last on deck. The Russians and Chinese are tellingly silent and Africa seems to have formally deferred the issue until a new African Union leadership is chosen in the coming weeks.

Sinking Boats

Stepping back it is hard not to conclude that these are the early but accelerating signs of the collapsing values system on which the UN rests. No region is immune. We seem headed for a much more regionally-based order where power and security is settled not by law but by strength. It will be a world that will inevitably have much higher levels of conflict as regional kingpins jostle for dominance.

It is not just the political order that is broken. Rather less of a bad thing, the intellectual order that accompanied the multilateral system has also taken a tumble as the old Western grip on ideas weakens. That was what we heard in Cambridge, as we gathered in John Maynard Keynes’ old college to debate the future of the Bretton Woods institutions which he did so much to shape. In economics or social policy one size no longer fits all. Orthodoxies, including Keynesianism, are being challenged. The old man, an incorrigible disruptor, must be smiling down. The intellectual world order, aka the Washington Consensus - a name that will not die - may be as challenged as American political hegemony. From within as well as outside its borders.

Now “tariffs” are a new American President’s self-confessed favourite policy word. And his predecessor both maintained Trump One’s tariffs and added a massive green industrial policy to the mix. Trump Two may seek to dismantle Biden’s green industrial policy but is offering a new highly personalised State-Big Tech partnership instead. And trade may have held up as a proportion of global GDP but it is evidently regionalising and reorganising on priorities of political security, not economic efficiency. America is opting out of international trade in goods. More tariffs will just accelerate that.

Many developing countries are dismayed that the open markets they were promised are being slammed in their face, but have much more mixed views about other parts of this Western policy conversion. Many had fought to keep a more ambitious role for the state and have been sceptical of Western financial regimes that have provided them unaffordable debt to buy into a dubious exposure to Western trade and investment - on the latter’s terms. No wonder many welcome a US that may stick closer to home and allow them greater space for pragmatism and choice in both their political bedfellows and economic strategies.

I suspect the Trump Presidency, despite its braggadocio, will be viewed by history as a presidency of American retreat. It has been the stuff of commentary for years that a genteel American decline is allowing the rise of a more balanced multipolar world. That expectation seems misplaced not least because in economic and security terms the US is arguably as strong as it has ever been in recent years. The decline, provoked by its loss of manufacturing dominance and the good blue collar jobs that go with it that has led to an abrupt reversal on free trade, is primarily in its political cohesion. For that Trump the provocateur is nevertheless more consequence than cause.

So the risk is that as America retrenches into its hemisphere its leaving contribution may be chaos. Not just because of the power vacuum but perhaps because in the manner of its leaving, it betrays the multilateral order it authored and founded, the UN system and the rules that made it. One that has imperfectly helped keep a peace of a sort for 80 years.

Sin & Salvation

That bleak prospect confronts us immediately in the Middle East. Trump’s public reflection that Gaza is well-located seaside real estate that could be excitingly redeveloped if its Palestinian occupants could just be decanted to Egypt and Jordan reopens the original sin of the UN and its US sponsor. The UN resolution in November 1947 allowing the Partition of Palestine replaced the old League of Nations UK-administered mandate for Palestine and envisaged the creation of both Jewish and Arab states. I can attest that no issue has undermined respect in the region and beyond for the UN itself, or its US sponsor, more than the failure to carry through on the second part of that. That broken commitment is the bitter origin of the frequent complaint of double standards at the UN.

The deep historical resonance of this region, home to the biblical warnings of original sin, being the possible graveyard of the modern UN should not be lost on us. Even though it probably will limp through in some attenuated form, if the dream of a Palestinian homeland is extinguished a stake will have been driven through the UN’s heart.

But could it come back and reattach itself to a new assertion of values that might breathe new life into the institution? That is the challenge to middle and small powers who will have to learn to assert themselves much more forcibly than they have done until now if they want to preserve or renew a world of laws and universal norms.

The intellectual breakdown described above offers encouragement. We are seeing new honesty about development and financial stability. The old solutions didn’t work and so slowly minds are opening to new approaches. Bringing climate and gender into calculations of financial resilience; or facing development failures like persistently lagging African GDP, unaffordable debt or net private capital outflows rather than the promised investment surge; and not just lauding successes. This opening up of debate is because of a healthy, creeping pluralism in official development. Debate is reshaping global economics as new voices find their way to the table - official and civil society ones - that were largely ignored before.

Could the current political low point similarly open up the debate for renewal and inspire a new coalition of the less powerful states and groups, for whom the UN and its values are a key lifeline in a world of rule breakers? And the one platform where they gather globally? We risk a generation of conflict and instability, disrupted growth and likely planetary disruption if the like-minded don’t use the UN to grip the issues that are at present threatening to overwhelm us.

Madam Secretary-General

As a scrappy Democrat once said, “Never waste a good crisis.” Public opinion in Canada and Germany, both with elections ahead, are showing incipient signs of standing up to a bullying Trump. Can others too make a virtue of the current rush to disorder and take a stand for a rules-based world before it is lost? A possible moment when such a save-the-UN coalition might crystallise is the election in 2026 of a new UN secretary-general. The damage of the rule of the jungle should be evident by then. If multilateral renewal doesn’t happen, I wager the numbers in that ECFR chart may look different a couple of years from now. The old America may even be missed!

The honeymoon phase

First, some quickfire predictions on what this change of the guard will mean for the rest of us. At home the populists will I suspect initially do better than their critics expect. Partly a sugar rush as they introduce a raft of pro-business and tax cuts and giddy new levels of public spending to placate their base. But it's also because they have latched onto several vital truths their liberal rivals have ignored. Ordinary folk with almost no personal savings are feeling extraordinarily insecure and hence their alarm in the West about prices and migration. Twenty seven per cent of Americans for example have less than $1000 in savings1. More than half of US households could not manage an unexpected expense of $10002.

Second, they have understood that the liberals' cherished machinery of government is broken. It has runaway costs, much admittedly in entitlement programs, and simply cannot deliver. It’s failed and bringing the wrecking ball of Elon Musk to bear on government efficiency may or may not work but it responds to what every American - other than the most partisan Democrat sees - government is broken. It’s become a millstone, not an enabler. It’s viewed, not just by right-wingers, as a runaway regulatory nightmare that suppresses economic activity rather than enabling it.

Third, the disruptors get an early break when the status quo is so unpopular and when the early dire warnings of their opponents seem overblown. In the longer term the contradictions will catch up with our new rulers. Public Debt is the probable grim reaper3 but a wider failure to find real solutions to the impoverishment and insecurity of their base will catch up with them in time. Even the stock markets and their business boosters will desert them when the real economy tanks.

And fourth, my decade in political consulting taught me that when in a bad economy the rich are nevertheless getting richer, the public, if it doesn’t frame its objection directly, brings such elites down for corruption - real or imagined, but usually the first. Trump and his kind take power at a moment of watershed change in their countries’ economies. Across defence and government delivery of domestic services, AI and related information technologies will remake whole public sectors. The Pentagon was already shifting its procurement from dinosaurs like Boeing and Lockheed Martin to West Coast tech providers, as it shifts towards smart weapons and away from drone-vulnerable twentieth century weaponry. Similarly, domestic government delivery is on the verge of a similar makeover as it struggles to contain runaway costs. Elon Musk’s role at the centre of all of this is just the visible tip of the iceberg. He is rescuing astronauts from space because NASA doesn’t trust Boeing to do it safely. Big Tech, enjoying cozy access in Washington and other G7 capitals, is about to get even richer and (potentially daily) cross every conflict-of-interest boundary good governance experts have ever devised. And this isn’t the corruption of kickbacks, it's the wholesale plunder and state capture of sectors of the American economy. Whatever the benefits, and there will be no doubt many, such as America extending its lead in military capability, this hijacking of power and wealth may be a step too far. Ultimately the Rockefellers and the Morgans built America’s modern infrastructure but the backlash to their unhampered power helped shape twentieth century American politics.

Trump’s doctrine of unpredictability

On the international side the chaos will come sooner. From South Korea to Syria and Ukraine we are seeing the price of uncertainty - Trump’s doctrine of unpredictability. The cat is preening himself in Mar-a-Lago so the mice will play. A South Korean president tries to thwart the political order with an auto-coup. A Syrian rebel group takes advantage of the collapsing old order to seize power in Damascus.

With President Biden gone from the scene in all but name, we are getting an early taste of the jostling for power and influence in an unruly world. Expect Russia to up its undermining of Europe; China to press for advantage on the ground in Africa and Latin America, and in fora like the UN, as America sidles home and away from international commitments. Admittedly, the chaos and poor choices that Trump inherits in the Middle East and Ukraine are a consequence not just of his threats to betray Zelensky and force a Putin peace deal on him, and to back Netanyahu to the hilt; this is also Biden’s dismal legacy. Biden similarly enabled Netanyahu, and whatever the temporary reprieve of Israel’s impressive military victories, we will reap the consequences for generations to come. And on Zelensky, Biden never had the wit or the strategy to either enable Ukraine to win or force Zelensky towards a settlement when the war favoured him.

And the imitation Trumps around the world will be similarly impatient with existing rules-based orders and kick up similar chaos in their own backyards. A bumpy, and possibly lethal, time all round. There are currently 56 conflicts in the world which is the highest number since the Second World War. It will grow as opportunistic political leaders read uncertainty as vacuum and hence license to take a pop at a neighbour.

Can the new guard hold on?

So, the question for 2025 is will the new rulers do a better job of holding onto the keys. Partly, it may depend on how they got there. In Syria and Bangladesh, sudden revolutionary surges unseated long standing autocrats. But expectations will be high and both face wary outsiders worried about their true colours.

In Syria the new regime remains terrorist listed. In Bangladesh its influential Indian neighbour harbours the deposed leader and chooses to suspect an anti-Hindu strain in the new political order. In a few places, including my own UK, the centre-left displaced an incompetent centre-right. And in many cases the incumbents were the ones who “lost it” rather than the challengers that won it. The story of Ghana’s December election, the sixtieth of the year, speaks for most of those that preceded it in 2024. In my last Substack, anticipating the trend would hold, I forecast the incumbent government’s defeat and John Mahama’s return as president. However, he it seems only secured 100,000 voters more than when he last lost in 2020. It was the government side that hemorrhaged votes with almost 2.2 million fewer of their supporters coming out to vote. Turnout was almost 20% down. That is essentially the story of most elections this year. In most places, it was the right that stormed the parapets and took possession. Looking at Germany and France, that trend still appears to have a ways to go in 2025.

So will the right - in most cases a populist version - hold on? If these were cost of living power changes, then the new rulers need to pay attention to that agenda and avoid their predecessors’ preference for ignoring that agenda and claiming the elections were all about the survival of democracy or in this new crew’s case, mimicking Trump and aspiring to Make their Country Great Again. Despite Trump’s claim of a sweeping popular majority, he won a slim 1.5% lead in the popular vote. Trump’s vote was not so much up as Harris’s was down. Grocery and gas prices kept their voters home. And there are some universal lessons about consolidating power - for example, if Trump won an inflation election not a MAGA one, his threatened tariff wars will increase US consumer prices and, together with Health Secretary Robert Kennedy’s war against the American farmer, depress rural incomes. Both risk hitting his political base.

Window of opportunity: Bangladesh

But today I want to speak about another, more sympathetic national leader, the 84 year old Muhammad Yunus, who was thrust into service as the Senior Advisor in Bangladesh. (Senior Advisor is the term in Bangladesh for an acting prime minister chairing the transition to new elections). I visited him earlier this month. A Nobel Peace Prize winner for his earlier work on microfinance, his international reputation, and cadre of foreign admirers, had always enraged his long-time nemesis, Sheikh Hasina.

This summer, a dramatic series of student-led protests caused Hasina’s downfall and flight into exile in India. Massive ministerial corruption - siphoning off more than $16b a year between 2009 and 2023, according to a to-be-published government white paper - that among other things appears to have funded several illicit London property empires, demonstrated how broken political accountability and transparency had become, under Sheikh Hasina’s one-party rule.

The onus is on Yunus to reset the political system before elections to prevent a repeat, this time by the opposition, the BNP. The BNP, like the former ruling party, the Awami League, appears to represent interests - including garments, overseas manpower providers, tea and the military - not people in its leadership; the country’s mainstays maybe, but not its people.

I was UK Minister at the time of the last interim government in 2007-8 and watched as its well-intentioned political reforms were ripped up by Sheikh Hasina once she was back in power. So Yunus must race to get a parallel reform plan in place and agreed to by the parties, under a spotlight of public scrutiny, before elections and therefore barring any subsequent temptation of return to their bad old ways. But another clock is ticking. The protest movement was again as much about jobs and prices as it was democracy, and with the uncertainty of an interim government investors and lenders appear to be holding back. So the economic pain is not going away.

Top of the anticipated political reforms is term limits for the Prime Minister. Given Hasina’s office-for-life ambition, that is understandable. Bangladesh will need a much broader set of constitutional reforms than just that, however, to build an inclusive and accountable democracy. And to buy the time to build such a political consensus, Yunus must offer some ameliorative economic steps. Not easy with a broken government machinery and investor uncertainty about the future.

Revolutions

I was in Bangladesh for a meeting of the different boards of BRAC, the world’s largest NGO in manpower terms - and in many ways, its most remarkable and inventive. Under a second generation of family management, it has gone from strength to strength4. With its 90,000 staff and contractors in Bangladesh, it may arguably be a bigger player in whether the Yunus administration can secure an economic reprieve than his ministers. BRAC staged an extraordinary session with young student leaders who had risked their lives, and seen friends, family, and classmates die, during the July uprising. One nimbly stomped around on a prosthetic leg, provided by BRAC; all had remarkable stories of bravery and hope to tell.

I was then asked as a ‘veteran’ revolutions-watcher to offer some observations and advice on what next. I didn’t want to puncture hope but equally if I had any messages to convey it was: Real change is profoundly difficult. The street scenes, the symbols, the art, the popular expectations in July in Dhaka brought back memories of Cory Aquino’s People Power revolution in 1986. I was then her political consultant but as I observed to my Bangladesh audience, she overthrew a dictator whose son, Bongbong Marcos, is now President. Those brave original protestors assumed there would be massive reforms of the political and economic systems in the Philippines. They could not have imagined a return of Marcos rule. But today, many of the structural inequalities remain. That flawed political economy allowed his return. My four points after this ‘caution’ were:

1. Bet on young leaders. Technology and communication are transforming our societies so quickly that we need to jump a generation of leadership and not just in Bangladesh. Not an obvious point though as the student leaders who have gone into the interim government are viewed by some as immature hot heads and not seasoned enough to run a government department. My suspicion is this is less about age and more about a reaction to the students seizing more power than the rest of society feels they should. So a clash of agendas, not age.

2. Be disciplined about the interim administration’s objectives and ambitions. Stick to unifying priorities. In places like the Philippines, Chile and Eastern Europe, I watched single-issue social activists seize moments and constitutional reform processes like this to try and push through pet changes that then undermined the critical political consensus. Worryingly, there are 15 different government commissions in Bangladesh presently polishing reform proposals. Too many.

3. Get the political settlement done then go to elections. Too soon and elections can open up divisions; too late and it may turn ugly.

4. Never forget this was about inflation and jobs, not the mechanisms of democracy. Getting the latter right is a lucky extra - but a vital one. Just don’t overlook the perils of incumbency. They descend quickly. Honeymoons are short.

Looking at Bangladesh in 2024, as I did in the Philippines back in 1986, I wondered to myself both times whether the real answer to the embedded inequalities lay in Democracy or Marx. A recent book I have cited before, Stefan Dercon’s Gambling on Development, persuasively argues that stubborn Gini coefficients of inequality only ease when elites proactively get out of the way and recognise their own survival requires them to cut a new deal with their poor and allow a real measure of redistribution. So it’s top down change not bottom up in many cases. It’s enlightened vested interests not the ballot box that sometimes enables change.

And that is of course where the MAGA-style right, the new/old incumbents in the US, Italy, Hungary, and elsewhere fall short. Redistribution smacks to them of socialism, which as the American election showed, is a much more viral putdown tagline, when used against Kamala Harris or Joe Biden, than their own feeble rebuttal name-calling of Trump and his kind fascists. The American memory is not long enough. There are socialists today in Venezuela and Cuba, a present threat. Fascism is for the back shelves of the library in a bookless age. The first resonates with recent history, Cold War and others, the latter reference an apparently forgotten chapter of European history.

The devil is in the delivery

Politics in a post-memory age just got harder but its essence everywhere remains delivery. That is both the challenge but the dilemma for populists - they are not necessarily very good at it because it acts against their own interests. So, they would do well to heed the verse, and the warning, of St Matthew’s Gospel 16:19 which introduced the phrase I opened with: “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” Let me on that note wish those who celebrate the holidays a happy one.

With almost three quarters of the American electorate wanting change; a clear majority believing the country was going the wrong direction and Trump leading on the top two issues, the economy and immigration, Harris was arguably fighting impossible headwinds. Frankly, the only thing that kept hope alive before November 5 was indeed hope - and marginally over-optimistic polling. Now headlined as the collapse of the Democratic Party as we know it, it was still a tight race nationally in the popular vote.

But the Harris Campaign lost where it mattered- the seven swing states. Her celebrity donors did not help themselves with their “happy vibe” star-studded campaign. America very obviously wasn’t happy so pretending it was turned off voters. Ultimately her’s was a campaign with too much money and too little message. So big spending liberalism became the default message. Trump had several searing ads pinning Harris to wokeish positions: she’s for “They/Them,” he’s for “You”. She had no such cut-through counter. As in 2016 the Democrats heavily outspent Trump which only makes their humiliation more galling. 

The real loser of this race though, as many have observed, was Joe Biden. He held on too long through his evident physical and polling decline, and, with his aides and family, sought to trick Americans out of a real choice in this election. So now a convicted felon returns to the White House.

In Mexico and Indonesia incumbent parties - with new presidential candidates - broke the pattern and held on - in both cases handsomely. In India, the charismatic Narendra Modi also just held on but without the sweeping victory he had anticipated. In each of these cases local political or economic conditions favoured them.

But they are the exception. Ghana gets to vote before the year is out and is in a similar incumbency-versus-change tramline. The opposition change candidate is a very flawed former president who will likely pull off a Trump-style resurrection and secure a new term because he is not from the current ruling party.

And a further lesson: today there are no honeymoons - the dead weight of incumbency is quickly attached to new governments. The rapid decline in popularity of the champions of beleaguered liberalism, Sir Keir Starmer in London and Donald Tusk in Warsaw, make the point. Both recently elected; both now unpopular.

From this I want to draw a wider lesson about the perils of incumbency and suggest it's not a short-term phenomenon attached to the price of groceries and gas. Rather, it will remain a standing threat to politicians everywhere until we crack the dilemma we have created for ourselves between the breach of promise that led, across many parts of the world, to a lapsed inter-generational expectation of kids doing better than their parents. This is the core betrayal, the now breached social contract of democratic Western politics and indeed wider democratic politics. 

Having worked in Latin American politics thirty years ago, I saw incumbent instability as leaders failed to meet popular aspirations for a better life. Electorates recklessly cast around from left to right and back again for solutions. Now we are all Latin Americans. Add to that impatience the polycrisis cocktail of climate change and its effects, demography, and consequent economic nationalism that is pushing most of our countries towards low-growth, high-debt futures. 

At the IMF/ World Bank Annual Meetings in October, Kristalina Georgieva, the Fund’s Managing Director, warned of long- term tepid growth and immediate debt- to-GDP levels of more than 100% globally. China and the U.S. are the major culprits. 

We are in a mess and our politicians for the most part are in no mood to dig us out. As has been widely noted we are at the end of the neoliberal era, with its faith in markets, free trade and small government, but are arguably adrift in a world in search of what next. For now politics is governed by that spirit of decline and a flailing search for how we might unleash the animal spirits to reverse it.

The populists have a much better political instinct for all this. They have heard the problem - a sense of rising inequality and hence insecurity inside countries.

But they don’t have the answers. Their disparagement of government coupled with tax breaks for their chums in fact pushes back against answers. Fair taxes and effective government are two vital props in finding effective solutions.

Nor is the quest for economic security limited to Western voters. Most young job seekers in the future will be in Africa. The majority currently have little prospect of higher education or a good job. Only one in four of the one million Africans who enter the job market every month are at present securing full employment. By 2050 one in four of the world’s population will be African. Depending on the policy choices made today that amounts either to a demographic time bomb or a healthy jump in African and global GDP and wellbeing. At present there is little to no sign that policymakers are galvanising on the ambition or scale needed for the second outcome. 

So whether it is a European or North American capital, a Latin American, African or Asian one, most political survival is precarious. My own highly impressionistic view is that most of the world is in a long-term funk with only significant parts of Asia happy about the future. The best tonic is to spend time in South East Asia. People still expect their lives to play out on an escalator of improving wellbeing. 

The World Happiness Report, which measures factors thought to determine happiness, tells us that Finns, Danes and Swedes should be happy with their lot - welfare states that work and more - but read those countries’ contemporary literature or watch their politics and there is little evidence they are. Instead immigration, crime issues, and a fear that the future will be less good than today have tilted politics to the right.

We are a world in urgent search of solutions that will lift our spirits and allow the kind of ambitious capital investment in both the transition to sustainable energy and the tackling of the structural insecurities and deepening inequalities in each of our countries. At the Annual Meetings of the IMF and World Bank in October, as in the UN General Assembly before it, there was an underlying sense of horse trading over scraps when it came to proposed reforms or increases in resources but almost no grasp in official delegate discussions of the scale of the crisis the world faces. 

For a long time, climate activists have lamented that politics is short-term, the equivalent of the corporate sector’s preoccupation with quarterly earnings, while climate change is long-term. Perhaps once true but weather events such as the U.S. and Caribbean’s two recent mega-hurricanes, Milton and Helene, could have been the wake-up call. Had Milton ranged a degree or so further inland it could have taken out the infrastructure of two U.S. states and have posed a threat to the financial stability of the insurance industry. Instead it just fed more conventional presidential campaign disputes about the urgency of the White House response. 

But the insurance industry has always been anxious to manage risk and can see what is coming. I advised Swiss Re on mechanisms to mitigate weather risk to crops in Africa almost a decade ago. And on the government side Mia Mottley, the Barbadian Prime Minister, has led the charge on mechanisms to postpone debt repayments in the aftermath of natural disasters. So the world is not entirely at a standstill as imminent crisis mounts. But it is in the business of treating symptoms, not the causes.

And it would be an irony if an American President, whose first term was brought down by a health issue he did not believe in - Covid- , found himself similarly grappling in a second term with a planetary issue he does not believe in, climate. 

If short-termism is the challenge to how we address the coming climate crisis, a difficulty in wrapping our minds around the multi-dimensional nature of the polycrisis is further challenge. Take AI - we all suspect there is a huge measure of opportunity and risk. From its most experienced denizens to armchair amateurs we hold the same wary broad judgment however much or little we know. The UN has made a brave, but implausible, bid to help develop the regulatory framework. We are probably a dramatic disaster or two away from any kind of consensus or regulatory actions. For now tech leaders calling for regulation are, in our deeply skeptical times, suspected of trying to prevent new entrants from disrupting their early lead; or alternatively trying to slow other leaders so they can catch up. Elon Musk, the new Trump First Buddie, seems to be in the latter category. No surprise.

But we can already see likely directions when it comes to employment and income distribution. Some 40% of jobs are likely to be impacted by AI; 60% in developed economies and just 26% in low income countries. That is because lower-income countries may lack the skills, the capital, and the markets to apply AI to their economy. That will increase the gap with rich countries but of course within those high-income countries there will be consequences too. The skilled and tech sectors are likely to be beneficiaries as a post-industrial twenty-first century economic model buries the industrial but also labour needs of what came before. 

John Maynard Keynes predicted that by now we would be down to a 15 hour week. That has seemed a piece of Bloomsbury flight of fancy. He probably imagined us all lazing away the days in some dappled Sussex fields (the country retreat of the group). But perhaps he was again just ahead of himself. When tech, knowledge, and capital dominate, labor will suffer. Work in future may be short but, for many, also financially unrewarding. Unless we address it with vigorous counter-measures we may return to nineteenth century levels of inequality between owners of capital and tech knowledge, and workers. The new economy has every prospect of being more naturally unequal than the last one.

It is this sense - that far from being on track for solutions, the world is slipping further into crisis - that make this moment of incumbency as an endangered species so concerning. Stable government alone may solve nothing. It will need both a long-term perspective and plan, and a liberating rather than constraining vision of economics. Thinking at present on behalf of the IMF and World Bank heads about their future challenges, I am struck by how hemmed in conventional economic policy has become. Most notably we have condemned ourselves to an economic model that largely treats investment as a cost, even when it is directed towards climate resilience, nature, or human development - all of which expand the economic cake. We have to find a way not to let leaden principles of twentieth century accounting critically constrain us from what we have to do. 

Similarly as we are hearing from COP29 in Baku, and earlier from the much more colourful COP16 in Cali, Colombia last month, where my wife Trish was an enthusiastic participant, the real resources - and it should be added, ingenuity- for solutions will come from all sorts of places beyond national governments: the private sector, states and municipalities, and communities. In the U.S., Trump One provoked a whole flourishing ecosystem of the above into existence. 

And from all of this we can begin to see the seeds of what may follow neoliberalism. A more strategic state, no wholesale deferring to the hidden hand of markets, but one supported by its partnerships with private capital and enterprise on the one side and community engagement and activism on the other. As the working week shrinks, maybe the community one will expand. We could all be better citizens. But between there and here lie a host of problems that today’s broken politics show little signs of picking up. 

And internationally we may hope for a managed competition, as against a reckless confrontation, as leaders, recognising the permanent precariousness of their domestic positions, eschew international risks and double down domestically. At least in theory the new authoritarians claim to prefer peace and prosperity over costly conflict. We will soon see.

Many have involved foreign policy - most recently, a renewed FBI investigation in October 2016 of Hillary Clinton’s private email server when she was Secretary of State; the aftermath of President Carter’s botched rescue of Iranian-held US hostages in 1980; failed Vietnam peace negotiations stirred up October-timed surprises in both 1968 and 1972. This roll call of famous moments puts in doubt the frequently repeated claim that foreign policy doesn’t count in U.S. elections. Perhaps most of the time that is true, but mistakes matter - and the mistakes candidates can least control for come from abroad more often than not.

Not always. Perhaps the first October surprise was Martin Van Buren’s Democrats accusing the Whig Party in 1840 of importing Pennsylvania voters to vote in New York. Although the claim was held till mid-October to have maximum impact, Van Buren still lost. Today, with Pennsylvania the key swing state, shipping back some of those surplus New York Democrat votes would be more useful!

Back to foreign policy. Other than two hurricanes, which in these climate-stressed times possibly should not earn the sobriquet “surprise,”(sea temperatures reached 31 degrees Celsius this summer in the Gulf of Mexico, enough to boil up such weather events and an acceleration of a 30 year pattern of warming) it is the Middle East which seems likely to provide the election-rattling event. 

One Year On

Now a year after the tragedy of October 7th, that brutal Hamas attack on Israeli civilians, the war continues to widen. The technical wizardry of Israel’s strikes against Hezbollah, the synchronized blowing up of operatives' handheld communications devices and then the targeting killing of its leadership, has left Hezbollah apparently decapitated as an organisation.  

So where next for the trigger happy Netanyahu government? Israeli troops are already deep into Lebanon and its bombs are cruelly raining down on Beirut. Iran is an enticing next target and its direct and proxy attacks on Israel may provide justification under international law. It is reported that the hawkish political-military end of that government is pushing hard to finish the job to dismantle Iran’s nuclear and political threat to Israel by bombing its nuclear enrichment plants and weapons facilities. As I write, the US has now just sent a further defensive missile system and the troops to operate it to Israel. There are real doubts Israel could take out the nuclear facilities without American offensive support and the provision of the latter’s outsized 30,000 pound bunker-buster bombs and the planes that fly them. Israel’s military ingenuity and prowess has surprised before but we can anticipate that if the war does escalate, it will put both U.S. presidential campaigns on the spot.

Will America be at war again in another global theatre on election day? 

It is easily forgotten how America’s “Forever” wars have shaped modern American politics. Opposition to them helped President Obama come out on top in the 2008 primaries against Clinton; it then shaped his Administration’s foreign policy, earning charges of caution and appeasement in its handling of President Assad of Syria. Then it led to Biden’s stubborn and chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. It has animated the three Trump presidential campaigns (and his one term) with their neo-isolationist America-First messages. 

Both Vice President Harris and former President Trump would now find their campaign positions stood on their head if Netanyahu succeeded in leading America by the nose into an unwanted war- or even supporting with air cover and logistics an Israeli expanded one. Trump would overlook his own responsibility for re-triggering Iran’s nuclear program through his abandonment of diplomacy and sanctions against Iran but would be torn between his support for Israel and his wider ambition to bring America home. Given he survives on fantastical contradictions, one can imagine Trump supporting Netanyahu in order to drive a wedge between the Democrats and Israel but promising to end the war with an Iranian capitulation the day he takes office!

Harris would likely have the harder time defending yet another example of Biden being continuously outfoxed by his Israeli counterpart. It would feed a narrative of a chaotic Biden-era world with wars in Ukraine and now the wider Middle East compared to the security of Trump, the strongman. An expose of this Biden weakness comes in the latest volume from Washington’s perennial chronicler, Bob Woodward. This new book “War,” which evidently relies heavily on interviews with Biden, lays out at length Biden’s frustration with Netanyahu’s lies and deceits. But the bottom line is Netanyahu has led a gullible, elderly American president and his aides to the edge of war and so risked the Democrats’ electoral prospects in November. 

At the very least it risks the key midwest battleground state of Michigan where an electorally significant community of disillusioned Arab Americans have organised to oppose Biden’s apparently almost unconditional support for an Israeli prime minister who ignores him at every turn. But as protests on American campuses show, the concerns are shared much more widely than just among Arab Americans. More than 40,000 civilian deaths in Gaza; the destruction of much of Gaza’s physical infrastructure; and now the beginnings of something similar in Lebanon risks Israel losing younger centrist and liberal Americans and Europeans, irrespective of their identity. The war has turbocharged a campus redefinition of Israel’s role in its region that began before this war, with a growing human rights literature which sought to condemn it as an apartheid state and a political science analysis that similarly condemned it as settler-colonialism. 

No End to History

For my generation it is a dismaying turn. We grew up with the contemporary experience of a beleaguered and heroic Jewish state and the appeal of the Kibbutz movement. Academics and senior policy makers alike have complained that campus protestors spout slogans but don’t get the history of Israel’s struggle. True - but history is a living thing reinterpreted through the eyes of each generation that writes it. And not just in protest encampments but in lecture halls and books, Israel is being delegitimised for many. 

Unlike our children, we may not have added up so clearly the lives and human cost of decades of occupation that Palestinians have endured. Although in my case as a UN official, it fell to me to visit Gaza and the West Bank frequently. The level of violence and oppression they have faced is a crime against humanity. Full stop. Denied their rights, let alone a political process to address their needs, this morass is the harvest we now reap. 

And let’s not kid ourselves. The international political world’s rediscovery of its support for a two-state solution after years of effectively ignoring the issue rings utterly hollow in a region where both sides are now traumatised by a year of brutal conflict that has killed many more civilians than combatants. Hate on both sides make any neat constitutional settlement and divvying up of precious, scarce land next to impossible. 

We are literally at a dead end. New minds and new ideas will over time need to find new ways through. But in the meantime a spreading war risks driving a wedge that longer term risks Israel’s longtime bedrock ally, the United States. Traditionally Israel’s mainstay, the Democratic Party is unlikely to forgive the perpetrators of an October surprise that draws an old President in his final days into an election-losing war. The progressive base of the party - by actuarial circumstance, its likely future leaders - will build a defining narrative into their own formative political experience: the Netanyahu regime for its own selfish reasons brushed aside weak American peacemaking to land itself and its Washington ally on the wrong side of opinion at home and abroad. It could cost the Democrats power at home and America standing abroad for a generation to come.

What seems to be a common theme of October “surprises” is that they are not really surprises. They often feed on deep-seated vulnerabilities - American hostages in Tehran; a Vietnam War that wouldn’t end. But what makes them surprises is that the politicians on whose watch they happened were straining every muscle to make the public think about other things. As much as Biden’s foreign policy sought yet again a pivot to Asia, together with a return to traditional TransAtlanticism; and the Harris campaign is about abortion rights and middle class concerns about everyday affordability; the election may actually end up being all about Israel and the Middle East - because of an ally which went rogue. 

And that’s the rub. Even if Biden wanted to, can the America of 2024 really control its allies’ every move? A subplot of the Vietnam War was the willingness of a puppet South Vietnam regime to occasionally strike out on its own. Yet this is more. In the longer historical sweep of things, it will fit a narrative of a world where power is sometimes chaotically, and certainly messily, being redistributed. 

Multiplicity of sovereignty

In a month when the war in the Middle East was the biggest threat to international peace, the United Nations met for its annual General Assembly. Although speakers acknowledged and condemned the conflict, often eloquently, it was obvious the UN, other than in the humanitarian space, was largely a bystander. Yet if there is one pattern emerging in its recent decisions, it is of power shifting from a failed deadlocked Security Council to the General Assembly. 

That is no coincidence in the world I have just described. Multilateralism is coming out from under the hegemon’s shadow. Whether it can stand on its own two feet in a world of more fluid and distributed power remains to be seen. I attach a piece I wrote in September for the Financial Times comparing the narrow circle of transatlantic experts that designed the Bretton Woods institutions eighty years ago to the much wider group that needs to be engaged today around their reform. Whether in the tragedy of today’s Middle East or the more placid waters of multilateralism there are currents being unleashed that are remaking international relations in ways we cannot yet fully grasp.

News and updates

• Adam Tooze argues the Biden Admin hasn’t been dragged by the nose into the Middle East; what if the Biden strategy in the region is part of deliberate and comprehensive revisionism by way of strategy of tension?

• Mairav Zonszein, senior Israel analyst with the International Crisis Group: On Israeli Apathy

• Kim Ghattas and Gideon Rachman on Hezbollah, Lebanon, and other regional considerations, with Kim Ghattas reporting from Beirut

• The End of Depoliticisation? Branko Milanovic on if an international economic system can exist in a world of rising nationalism

• My FT op-ed (linked above) invites broad participation in an iterative dialogue on the future of the Bretton Woods institutions - some CSO friends and partners have answered that call

Best,

Mark