The summer has been a hot mess. There were monstrous fires, floodwaters, and rivers drying up so fast Moses would have been envious. Blazing temperatures made us hotter than Tyla’s lover could ever.

We are cooked. Yet business continued as usual. When it came to the infantile patriarchal moral order, where consequences take precedence over prevention, care and maturity remained conspicuously absent.

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This essay contains spoilers for Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey.

The Odyssey is an extraordinary patriarchal film. Admittedly, this is a strange thing for me to say. How can a feminist find a patriarchal work great? Yet throughout the film, that was the thought running through my mind: this is compelling as a patriarchal story, not as a feminist one.

The paradox exists because, if I were to define feminism’s purpose in one sentence, I would say it is to recapture the world through female desire, values, and language. I draw on writers such as Alice Walker and Hélène Cixous, whose ideas – from womanism to écriture féminine – seek not merely to reclaim narratives but to reinvent them.

The Odyssey does not come near this. The film, like the poem, tells the story of a world, a people, and a man through a patriarchal lens. Homer’s epic is unapologetically a tale of male desire, male values, and male language. Rather than scanning it for feminist threads where none are intended, I prefer to take it on its own terms. Judged on those terms, it succeeds brilliantly.

By male and female desire, I do not primarily mean erotic desire but ontological desire. Nor do I mean that desire itself is gendered. The longing for justice, belonging or recognition is universal. But what justice, belonging or recognition has meant for men, historically, is hardly identical to what it has meant for women.

Recorded history is a record of male ontological desire. We are living inside the male mind, and every so often it produces something astonishing, such as The Odyssey. These epic tales also tell stories of women, albeit through male sensibilities; their love, fears, and wants.

The female performances are excellent, though. Zendaya’s Athena is understated, and Lupita Nyong’o is ravishing as Helen of Troy. She and Samantha Morton, as Circe, leave a lingering impression. Anne Hathaway’s Penelope is so convincingly empowered by her own disempowerment that one almost forgets that she remains subject to the absolute authority of men – her husband, her son, her suitors.

Still, while the women of the film have been allowed to reclaim some power, this reclamation works within a male story. The true empowerment lies in noticing the spaces between the lines, on the margins, and in the glitches of male history, where unconventional women have always dwelled.

This is why my favourite character is the one played by Charlize Theron – Calypso, the nymph who is typically portrayed as a lonely temptress living in isolation in Ogygia, her home in the middle of the sea.

I cannot help but interpret Calypso differently than as a lonely temptress. She is a woman who is both within and outside the story. She too is, of course, an invention of male ontological desire. Yet she remains fugitive: a lapsus in patriarchal storytelling, a trickster nymph who has escaped her own script. Calypso creates an enclave where she lives among lotus flowers, eats fresh fish, and weaves not only textiles, but a whole new narrative world. In Odysseus, she encounters a man whom she mistakenly perceives to have escaped the story – his story – too, and thus unsuccessfully plots towards keeping him eternally.

Her fugitive quality is most palpable in the scenes where life on Ogygia unfolds according to its own rhythm: slow, embodied, and wise. In one of her exchanges with Odysseus, she says, “Give up the fight, give up control, and live,” revealing her own philosophy and her awareness that Odysseus will never give up a world where he sits firmly on the throne.

Watching Calypso, I found myself thinking, too, of Yemoja, the Yoruba deity of the waters, because she also inhabits the sea as more than a setting – as a way of being in the world.

Calypso is always by the sea. Watching her, I read the sea as a figure for female ontological desire: ever-changing, ever-present, swelling and withdrawing according to a rhythm that belongs to no throne, no conquest and no linear history.

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Except for Athena, who omnisciently appears everywhere, the scenes of the other female characters mostly take place in dark, cave-like environments that give patriarchy its spatial form. Whenever the patriarchal narrative reaches a crescendo, such as when Odysseus and his men encounter the Cyclops, or when they are interred in the Trojan horse, or when the suitors get violent and offensive in the dungeon, we are in the cavernous darkness. These spaces reverberate with roars of anguish and triumph, the encroaching territorialism, the swishing of slaughter, snorting and brawling and cackling. Moreover, these scenes are often accompanied by low camera angles that add to Odysseus’s übermensch portrayal, such as when Odysseus’s men unironically sheepishly follow him to chase a flock of sheep.

Conversely, the sea scenes are often shot at eye level or bird’s-eye view, conjuring a sense of longue durée, deep relationality, and otherness. That is especially the case in the portrayal of Calypso’s slow and private intimacy on her island of Ogygia. There, away from the drumbeat of masculine conquest, the polytropic sequences of Odysseus’s journey can reveal the petrichor of his conflicted interior world.

Calypso may be the only one living in solitude, but all the female characters are in isolation from each other, separated as it were by the sea. The exception is the sirens. They are plural – therefore dangerous. Patriarchal mythology can only imagine such a gathering as a catastrophe. Their voices are not dangerous because they tempt men into pleasure; they are dangerous because they inhabit another way of knowing. As Odysseus recounts, their song was “all the things you most can’t have and that the most you can’t have is what you already had and lost”.

Odysseus is both saved and destroyed by the siren song. In divergence from Homer’s original poem, where Odysseus returns to Ithaca, this Odysseus becomes one of the ‘people from the sea’. This transformation begins with the sirens’ voices and is deepened through Calypso.

Men do not know what it is like to be inscribed into history through the eyes of a fearful, scheming male gaze.

They do not know what it is to exist on the outside of history, where the peripheral is a source of strength.

Nor do they know what it is like to have the possibility of becoming free from that story.

It is not simply to be in the sea, or to be by the sea. It is to be the sea.

Mothers are under enormous pressure to be Good Mothers. To be embodiments of virtue. To not transgress. To not disappoint. Never to be unethical.

But I have been thinking about another figure: the Complex Mother.

The Complex Mother is imperfect, flawed, searching. She is sometimes aware of making the wrong choice – and makes it anyway.

I’m not referring to mothers who maltreat their children physically or psychologically. Such mothers are the consequence and cause of tremendous suffering. The Complex Mother is not emotionally cold or abusive.

The defining characteristic of the Complex Mother is self-possession. She lives fully. In doing so, she teaches one of the first lessons of a fulfilling life: do not reduce yourself for anyone, not even your own brood.

Love – whether platonic, erotic, or in this instance maternal – always contains a modicum of separation. The Complex Mother’s love of herself both includes and transcends her maternal role. In fact, the Complex Mother refuses to become a role. Many of us have known one, we simply haven't had a name for her.

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Eons ago, in a world where meltwater poured into oceans and all life was marine, massive continental blocks collided in an event known as the Pan-African Orogeny.

Over millions of years, through volcanic forces, tectonic shifts and countless evolutionary events, those collisions gave rise to a continent that proved extraordinarily favourable to the evolu…

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Charlize Theron has spent the past month on an unavoidable promotional circuit. From the numerous clips I’ve seen, she comes across as both inspiring and interesting; vulnerable but self-possessed. There’s one clip that I found less straightforwardly empowering though. You may have seen it. It’s where she’s on a show called SubwayTakes with Kareem Rahma, and when Rahma asks the gimmicky, very 2020s question he poses to every guest — “So, what’s your hot take?” — Theron’s spicy opinion is that the phrase “making love” gives her “the ick”. It dries her up. I don’t want a lover to make anything with me, she says. I want them to do something with me.

Predictably the episode has sparked a debate among women about whether it is off-putting when a man says he wants to “make love” to you. And at least on the Subway Takes page, at the time of writing, a clear majority say it is.

But I’ve also seen hot takes arguing the opposite — that something has gone fundamentally wrong when a generation of women say they would rather be fucked than made love to.

But why accept the premise at all?

When it comes to conversations about sexual behaviour, few are as obediently binary as this one. The debate assumes that female pleasure travels in mutually exclusive destinations: romantic or animalistic, emotional or physical, lovemaking or fucking. Female desire is much more kaleidoscopic than that.

Desire does not fit neatly into an either/or box. It is like insisting a holiday can either be a beach holiday or a hiking trip. Other types of holidays exist.

And even beaches and hikes come in countless forms, to stay with the euphemism. Patriarchal religions, capitalism, and pop culture have cloned sexual narratives into a formula, but in actual real life we all know that lovemaking does not have to mean cheese — champagne, chocolate, cherries. Yes, when sex is intimate, vulnerable, tactile, emotional, and connected sex it can fittingly be described as making love. But lovemaking can be fierce, unruly and wild too. It defies categorisation.

Equally, fucking does not have to follow a script of detached indifference. Fucking can feel selfish, yes, but it can also feel safe and uninhibiting. It can be playful, devoted, transgressive, affectionate, urgent, experimental, consensual. You can make love to someone you barely know. You can fuck someone you have loved for twenty years. You can fuck someone while feeling deeply connected, and you can make love while feeling distant. What you can’t do is make a neat formula out of it.

So the real question is not whether Theron is right or wrong. The question is why we keep thinking about sexuality through a dualist framework.

We are shaped by a dualistic education largely devoid of complexity, and it also shapes how we speak about desire. We think in oppositions: mind vs body, reason vs emotion, sacred vs profane. And we apply similarly rigid categories when thinking about sex.

Dualistic thinking shapes so much of our thinking, but this is one debate worth refusing. Sex can be beyond either/or. It can be both/and. And it can be neither/nor. It can move from one mode to another in the space of a single encounter, and it can span, shift, and surprise us in endless ways.

Sure, even biologically, there can arguably be fluctuations. Studies suggest that women attracted to men are often drawn to different traits depending on where they are in their cycle. I can relate to this. Someone slowly kissing the back of your knees, or softly caressing the nape of your neck when you are PMSing, can feel like trying to quench a fire with eye drops. But on days when you desire tender caressing and eye contact, urgency and roughness might not be your menu choice.

Even our bodies seem to show precisely the ever-shifting nature of female desire. So ultimately Theron is right about lovemaking and wrong about lovemaking at the same time. The hot take lacks nuance. Which is, of course, the point.

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Hello friends,

I’m speaking at the How The Light Gets In (HTLGI) this weekend.

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The baseness of male sexual violence against women is in the news once again, following the harrowing CNN investigation that uncovered ‘rape academies’, a phenomenon befitting of the word evil. This post is not directly about that story. I’ve written in the past about my experience of Drug-Facilitated Sexual Assault (DFSA) in Sensuous Knowledge, and I also shared an excerpt from the book in an earlier Kaleido post.

This piece is about appetite, a notion which sounds innocent enough until one remembers that, in a woman’s body, very little is ever merely physiological.

I’ve been thinking about appetite because mine has recently become rather conspicuous. Gone are the days of restraint; these days are defined by multitudes. As a result, I’ve put on a little weight, which has had the curious effect of returning me to myself at thirteen — the age I was when a man first molested me.

I was walking home from school when he followed me. He entered the apartment building where I lived and got into the lift, where his filthy hands groped me. He then slipped out before the lift ascended.

By this point in my life, I was growing accustomed to a certain kind of attention from men. Not the attention from boys at school. Not the crushes expressed through teasing and chasing. I, too, paid attention to those boys. I found them beautiful, although I would have preferred to engage in less adolescent behaviour — yes, even from adolescents.

Nor was this new attention straightforwardly what Laura Mulvey meant by the objectifying male gaze. In Mulvey’s theory, men are active viewers of women. They ‘coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order’.

The gaze that I was becoming aware of was transgressive and taboo, rather than active and assured. It came specifically from older men. It was omnipresent yet hidden: a peeping, ogling, leering eye that followed you everywhere, all the time.

One of my responses to this ominously voyeuristic gaze was to increasingly hide my body, which by then had become a woman’s rather than a girl’s. But I was a girly-girl, so I scoffed at the baggy-jeans tomboy look. Instead, I took to dressing like those women who now style themselves as ‘trad-wives’. Conservative. Demure. I wore prim blouses buttoned up like a good church-girl while the real me wanted to show her figure off in hot pants and crop tops.

That version of me had to wait.

When she eventually appeared, so did raving and experimenting with amphetamines, which had the side effect of reducing from a curvy size twelve/fourteen to a more androgynous eight/ten.

It is not that the male gaze disappeared as my body changed — it did not — but the more bellicose form of it seemed to recede in proportion to the number on the scale.

In the years since, I have not dieted in any formal sense. I have, however, eaten in ways shaped by yoga, and later by an endometriosis diet. I have, broadly speaking, remained slender, and my relationship to food has felt, if not entirely neutral, then at least balanced.

Until recently.

At first, when my appetite suddenly increased, I wondered if I might be pregnant. I craved fats, snacks, treats. I ate them. Then I noticed the effects on my hips, my waist, and everywhere.

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Kaleido is a publication that names what others miss about our moment in history through its flagship series, The Europatriarchy Files. If you find value from reading it, please consider supporting my work by subscribing or buying me a coffee.

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What do people like Martin Luther King, bell hooks, Bayo Akomolafe and Rebecca Solnit share in common? Aside from being brilliant minds, they are all radical both politically and spiritually.

Politics needs a metaphysical dimension to speak to people’s deeper desires. Conversely, spiritual life needs political depth to address their everyday concerns.

Unfortunately, the group that especially understands — and abuses — this insight today are the populists of political life and the abusive gurus of the spiritual world. They know exactly how to speak to the whole person, even as they divide it.

Those of us who are interested in both political change and spiritual growth are instead, subtly or explicitly, encouraged by the powerful dualist logic to choose between inner work and outer change, between contemplation and criticism, and between politics and beauty.

This separation has consequences, and this is why last week, at London’s Kairos, I presented a talk about an unusual pairing of topics: feminism and nondualism.

The word spiritual is not exactly fashionable. I can understand why, it is overused, vague, immaterial. Nonetheless, I use it here as well as in my books for two reasons.

I don’t know a term that better describes an inner perceptiveness about the invisible dimensions of life; a curious disposition towards the things that instil a sense of quiet and presence; and a simultaneously light and serious rejoicing regarding the strangeness and beauty of our being here at all.

It also describes my own journey. As a child, I yearned to know whether there was a God and what that God thought we ought to desire. I faced several near-death experiences and some mystical ones too, and this made life feel mysterious, fragile and porous.

Moreover, I was an early meditator, even though I didn’t know it myself. My meditation practice didn’t come from any authority and no one around me practised it. Rather, I invented a game: “How long can I go without having a thought?”

I would sit in my room and challenge myself to not allow thoughts to pass. It was as if I had an instinctive need to quiet the mind.

It was only as an adult, and after many years of meditation, that I realised I had actually already intuitively practised stillness in a previous stage of my life.

Yet here’s the thing — this inner life was always political too. How could it not be?

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Kaleido is a publication that names what others miss about our moment in history. If you find value from reading it, please consider supporting my work by subscribing, liking and sharing this essay, or buying me a coffee.

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Kaleido is a publication that names what others miss about our moment in history. If you find value from reading it, please consider supporting my work by subscribing, liking and sharing this essay, or buying me a coffee.

Today would have been Toni Morrison’s 95th birthday.

The occasion made me think about the passing of time, and the impact great literature can have on our lives. I was sixteen when I read my first Morrison novel, Sula. The novel catalysed a recognition that deep in my soul, I was a free spirit, even though my reality then was confined. I have Morrison to thank for that insight.

To thank, or to blame, depending on how you look at it. Reading the story about the bohemian, independent character Sula was like reading a diary, as though Sula’s memories were my own, despite the very different worlds we inhabited. Her bravura awakened in me a deep longing to defy the patriarchal order. But even at sixteen, I intuited that journey would be more challenging and lonely. Still, the glint of an authentic life that Sula embodied was motivation enough.

“When you gone get married? You need to have some babies. It’ll settle you.”
“I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.”

Morrison has since been a faraway mentor. She has inspired my writing and thinking, but it is the vision she bequeathed to history that I especially resonate with.

Any attempt to summarise Morrison’s vision is precisely that: an attempt. As is often the case with great thinkers, Morrison had many visions. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that her vision had many branches.

Yet, despite the multitude of forms her work takes, a singular thread runs through it. Many have sought to identify this thread, this vision. The scholar Andrea O’Reilly called it “a politics of the heart.” Patrick Bryce Bjork described it as “a search for self and place.” Valerie Smith captured it with the phrase “the writing of moral imagination.” Farah Jasmine Griffin speaks of a search for a “language for goodness.”

I call it doing beauty.

It’s a phrase I first wrote about in Sensuous Knowledge. It comes from Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, where her character Pecola—a Black girl who longs for the blue eyes that racist society has taught her represent beauty—eventually realises that “beauty is not simply something to behold; it is something one can do.”

In her novels, essays, and work as an editor, activist, mother, citizen, and what we know of her way of being, Morrison did exactly that. She turned the noun beauty into a verb. This is also how I think of sensuous knowledge, as a way of doing beauty that resists the enclosures of Europatriarchal Knowledge.

It wasn’t only Pecola, or for that matter Sula, but also Jadine, Sethe, Beloved, Milkman, Florens: characters who existed within the worst of what humanity has invented: slavery, rape, torture, dehumanisation. Yet in Morrison’s hands, their core preoccupations weren’t those horrors but rather the vicissitudes of love, community, betrayal, and desire. They lived under oppression, but they weren’t defined by it. There is a difference, and it has everything to do with beauty.

As Morrison once said:

“If I spend my life despising you because of your race, or class, or religion, I become your slave. If you spend yours hating me for similar reasons, it is because you are my slave. ...I will have shaped your life. That is the gift of your hatred; you are mine.”

Morrison endowed us with many gifts—but not that one. She didn’t offer her intellect to hatred or her creativity to whiteness. Even at the level of imagination, she refused domination.

Rather than fighting hatred, she asked: what do Black people mean to each other outside of the white gaze?

Her answer was beauty. We mean beauty. We represent beauty. She showed that doing beauty makes life a testament to freedom and meaning.

Beauty is, of course, a loaded word. It evokes pleasure, awe, wonder, and joy—but also manipulation, competition, and exclusion. Over centuries, it has been manufactured to mean something monolithic, marketable, and mass-produced.

It has been captured by mechanical and narrow understandings—attempts to categorise and domesticate beauty according to the reductive parameters of colonialism, patriarchy, apartheid, oligarchy, absolutism, white supremacy, technocracy, extractivism, nationalism, anthropocentrism, militarism, heteronormativity, and Eurocentrism.

None of these systems say anything about what beauty actually is. They speak volumes about ugliness. Oppression, hatred, and violence are ugly. American politics right now—which I’m sure has Morrison turning in her grave—is ugly.

Beauty, by contrast, has an ineffable quality. Despite the attempts of power, it cannot be empirically or temporally captured. It is ever-present and everlasting. It spans generations. It transcends space and time. It is a spirit that has surely been with us since the beginning.

Morrison once recalled the story of her house catching fire just after she had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. No one was hurt, but she lost manuscripts, photo albums, and belongings. Yet when asked what she was most upset about losing, she didn’t name a book, or a document, or a piece of furniture. It was the loss of her jade plant, which she had nurtured with quiet care over years.

I think of the jade plant as a symbol of her way with words. How she burned away everything inessential, everything ornamental. She let the fire take what needed to go, and kept the one living thing that mattered most. The nurturing of beauty.

And it seems to me that the message Morrison left us with is that simple: to do beauty, especially in the heat of the inferno.

A few days ago, I was moved when a vendor at a market in Lagos told me about an upcoming Valentine’s Day event. He couldn’t remember the Western name so he called it “Love Day”.

It reminded me why Valentine’s Day is the only widely observed Christianised feast that makes intuitive sense to me. Celebrating love just feels right.

Unfortunately, however, wha…

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The end of the world is an old problem. We are all ghosts to the ancients. The Apocalypse, Armageddon, Judgement Day, and Y2K should have wiped us out. Yet here we are, apparently.

It seems hardwired into human beings to believe that collapse is inevitable. Whether it’s God’s wrath that leads to our demise or our own wrongdoing (the same thing), we are fated to believe that our days are numbered.

Beliefs and desires are deeply entangled, however. Doomsday predictions say as much about a people’s wants as about their fears.

Collapse belongs in that lexical register. The climate emergency has already made life impossible for countless humans and non-humans. Collapse expresses a moral desire that its believers don’t believe society fulfils.

I have previously argued that collapse is a europatriarchal fantasy, a panic about what happens when the world no longer centres the same people, the same myths, the same epistemologies. And yet, something else has certainly collapsed globally, including in the Western hemisphere (if Europe can still be called that after the US president’s revival of the Monroe Doctrine). That thing is time.

A few days ago, I was listening to music on Spotify when a song came on that grabbed my attention. The artist was called Let Babylon Burn.

By the third or fourth time one of their songs made me pause, I became suspicious.

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Kaleido is a reader-supported publication that names what others miss about our moment in history. If you find value from reading it, please consider supporting my work by subscribing, liking and sharing this essay, or buying me a coffee.

At a recent conference, I introduced myself to a fellow speaker as a “public intellectual.” He thought it brave of me to use the label. That is precisely why I used it. It is somewhat audacious, and it names the work I actually do: researching, speaking, and writing about society and ideas in public, with the aim “to advance freedom and knowledge,” as Edward Said once described the task.

But over the past couple of days, I found myself reluctant to do what a public intellectual might do when a major news event unfolds, such as the capture of Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Adela Flores de Maduro.

It’s not that I had nothing to say. While I lack specific expertise on Venezuela, a public intellectual is typically a generalist, and my work addresses power, paradigms, imperialism, and masculinities. But I didn’t want to add to the endless hot takes on the matter.

I found myself more interested in the meta-narrative—the idea of capture itself. It’s not only Maduro who has been captured by the graceless politics of Trump; it’s the world.

For a decade now, since Trump’s first term as president, his apoplectic antics, culture wars, and unpredictability have captured the political imagination.

When it all feels too ominous and unreal, I resort not to hope but to an adjacent emotion: fantasy.

I fantasise about the day Trump will no longer be president—a day that is (too) slowly but surely coming. Rather than capture, the fantasy makes me feel rapture. I can almost feel the exhilaration much of the world will collectively experience. It might take us years to stabilise our nervous systems, and God knows what will follow Trump, but we will certainly feel lightness and the easing of tension.

We are not there yet, though. We must still contend with this feeling of capture.

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Yesterday was the darkest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. In the UK, thousands of druids and pagans gathered at Stonehenge to mark the occasion.

Winter solstice ceremonies are often understood as celebrating the lengthening of daylight hours from this point onwards. But this isn’t the full story. These traditions honour cycles—of light and dark seasons in this instance. They are non-dualist: not against darkness, not pro-darkness. Not pro-light, not against light.

I am drawn to darkness. Something about its mood appeals to me—the ghostly quiet, the murkiness of what cannot be seen, the unadorned mysteriousness, the heightened awareness of life’s inevitable mortality, and the introspection these phenomena inspire.

One of my favourite things in winter is switching off my lamps at a certain hour and lighting lots of candles. But I equally love the moment of snuffing them out just before bed. The immediate darkness that follows is so pregnant with nocturnal essence, dreams, and rest.

Then I enjoy the absence of light when I wake in winter, and the permission that the pitch black gives you to arrive slowly at your day, and to meditation, as is my practice.

Darkness is essential for expansive sexual intimacy, which shrinks when forced into clinically perfectionist, puritanical atmospheres that demand a performance of smoothness rather than presence.

Europatriarchal knowledge insists on a power dynamic between light and dark. This hierarchical dualism informs a solution-focused rather than observation-focused culture, a fixation on the scientist rather than scientific enlightenment, and the refusal of darkness through an aesthetics of neon lights, glitter, and stupefyingly shiny bright decorations—not only at Christmas, but year-round, applied to everything.

A culture’s fears reveal much about its nature. The dominant europatriarchal culture clearly fears darkness above all else.

That fear provided the perfect framing to vilify and harm Africa. The Westerner constructed Africa as a place of dark people, dark jungles, and dark practices and then used this construction as a buffer for his racism and destructiveness.

This extends beyond Africa. In his deeply moving book In Praise of Shadows, Japanese writer Jun’ichirō Tanizaki describes how the Japanese find beauty in shadows, cloudiness, the poignant winter, and “the darkness beneath trees that stand deep in the forest.” The Westerner, by contrast, pursues light relentlessly—sparing no effort to “eradicate even the minutest shadow.”

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“Miss, excuse me,” I heard a voice say.

I looked up wearily. The voice belonged to a man in his mid-thirties, with intense eyes and a pep in his step that made him appear as light as a kite floating in the sky.

“You look sad,” he continued. “Why don’t you give me a smile? Please, show me that beautiful smile.”

It was only the end of May 2015, but it was sc…

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Everyone was worked up about it.

For good reason. The transformation of a long-standing ally into an adversary was jarring, if not impetuous. America was violating the boundaries of allyship, undermining Europe and declaring ideological battle. Where there had been a shared lexicon, there was now an erasure of language: of mutual agreements, shared values, shared commitments, the liberal order. What remained was just an overwrought and sanctimonious “strategy.”

The strategy opened with a preamble: “To ensure that America remains the world’s strongest, richest, most powerful, and most successful country for decades to come, our country needs a coherent, focused strategy for how we interact with the world.”

“A strategy,” the document continued, “must evaluate, sort, and prioritise. Not every country, region, issue, or cause—however worthy—can be the focus of American strategy.”

Yet the strategy appeared to be directed at the world, rather than at Americans themselves. The word world appeared on 27 of its 33 pages. “My fellow Americans” appeared on one.

It went on listing all the things that America wants: infrastructure that can withstand natural disasters; the most lethal and technologically advanced military possible; the world’s most robust and productive energy sector—none of which can be realised in practice without global entanglement.

Despite the claim to be “principled without being idealistic,” the strategy waxed lyrical about past glories and heroes. It nostalgically conjured golden ages that could only be achieved, it claimed, through “strong, traditional families that raise healthy children.”

When I thought about that last statement in particular, I couldn’t help but think: if only. If only the strategy were a reflection of mature, healthy thought.

The next section listed all the reasons America can, of course, get what it wants. It read like a deck of affirmation cards.

But the real blow to Europe—the one that understandably rattled everyone—was this: “We want to support our allies in preserving the freedom and security of Europe, while restoring Europe’s civilisational self-confidence and Western identity.” America had made it clear: as long as Europe faced the prospect of “civilisational erasure,” it could not be certain of remaining a “reliable ally.”

It seemed like stonewalling, but the truth is closer to strategic abandonment: the calculated withdrawal of support to reassert leverage, rather than a genuine rupture of alliance.

The depressing truth is that this tactic may well work. With a little help from America’s oligarchy, the British could vote for Farage’s Reform Party, the French for Bardella’s RN, and the Germans for AfD. If this happens, America’s political fantasy will come true—populist leadership will dominate the West’s near future. Should this unfold, we can look forward to this “Western civilisation”—so beloved in public speech—delivering a histrionic performance of substantial consequence.

The populist obsession with protecting Western civilisation reveals how successfully that message has been embedded. Raise generations on superiorism, and this is what you get. It’s unfortunate that the rest of us must bear witness to the idea of Western civilisation contending with the idea that it’s under threat, much like a cat fighting its own reflection.

A Yoruba proverb says there’s enough room in the sky for all the birds to fly. That’s the African strategy. The American sky is far narrower.

Regarding Africa, the strategy contained a coded statement about exploiting mineral resources, dressed up as part of the trade-not-aid discourse.

There was no mention of healing, reparations, interconnectedness, humaneness, reconciliation, protecting our earth, empowerment, or building a thriving education for our times.

To live in a new, spacious world where such values matter would require a very different type of “methodology”—of freedom, love, nonconformity, kaleidoscopic vastness.

In the end, it was clear that one man’s “strategy” is another man’s “breakdown.” Liberal Europe saw itself as the loser in this game, but it could write a different agenda if it were brave.

How did this matter to you, me, and to us—the citizens of the world? It clarified the “sky” on offer: scarce, joyless, competitive. The strategy did not appear to have wings.