Today’s show, summarised below, is with renowned military expert Stanislav Krapivnik, who has Donbas Russian roots and served as an officer in the U.S. army. Outside the military, he worked as a software engineer and a director of supply chain management for oil, gas, and engineering companies and now serves as a commentator on some of the biggest podcasts in the field.

Stas tells us that the drone will go the way of other technologies that seemed revolutionary on the battlefield but were soon countered and neutralized. Mainstream media are still reporting this as the era of the drone but the era of the drone might already be drawing to a close if Stas, who has an incredible network of contacts in the Russian military, is right.

In 1914 the machine gun stopped movement dead. Cavalry, sent forward to break the deadlock, turned out to be merely a faster way of presenting a larger target. And the settled wisdom of the moment — held by men who were neither stupid nor uninformed — was that manoeuvre was finished for good.

Then came aircraft that could strafe and bomb, and then tanks, and manoeuvre returned. Then the Panzerfaust appeared in German hands in 1942, and the tank was declared finished. Then the armour got thicker. Then the Sagger, and the Egyptian anti-tank teams who gutted Israeli armour in the opening days of 1973, and the tank was finished again — until the Israelis put infantry back on the hulls to shoot the missile crews, and it was not.

Each cycle produces the same announcement and the same refutation. Krapivnik’s argument, made in some technical detail, is that the drone’s cycle is already turning, and that the West is congratulating itself on a revolution in military affairs at roughly the moment that revolution is being priced out.

The exchange rate

The clearest measure is the number of drones it takes to kill an armoured vehicle.

Russian tanks are now appearing with reprogrammed Arena-type active protection: a radar system that detects an incoming munition and throws a small charge into its path, detonating in its face. Krapivnik describes a column run last week — four tanks and an armoured personnel carrier, carrying different configurations of grilles and blocks.

Analysts who went through the unedited footage counted close to 20 drones expended on one tank. Two to four would once have burned an immobilised vehicle.

None of this makes armour invulnerable. It makes armour expensive to kill — which is all that has ever been required for manoeuvre to return.

The operator is the fragile part

The second line of decline has nothing to do with the machine. Friends on the line tell Krapivnik that Ukrainian drones are now flying badly — the signature of green pilots, because the experienced ones are being killed faster than the schools can replace them.

And the operator is a remarkably fragile node in the system. A two- or three-man team lies up in a treeline or an abandoned house as close to the line of contact as it dares, carrying rucksacks, food, and ten to 20 FPV airframes hanging off them in every direction. The arrangement works because the front is static and because a drone that costs 3 or 4 units per kill justifies putting men that far forward.

Change either variable and it stops working. Raise the cost per kill fivefold and the maths of forward basing collapses. Restore even limited mobility — small local advances, nothing dramatic — and an overloaded drone team on foot finds itself overrun.

Meanwhile the counter-battery problem has been solved from an unexpected direction. The Chinese have fielded a drone that hunts not vehicles but radio emissions: it flies deep, listens, locates an operator and passes the coordinates back for artillery.

The oldest counter-drone system is the weather

By late September the rains arrive. With the rain comes the fog, which for much of the year in that part of the country is not haze but pea soup, rolling in and cutting visibility to a few metres. Drones do not fly in fog. There is no point flying above it either, because you see nothing through it. But satellite navigation means that infantry can move in fog perfectly well while nothing overhead can watch them.

What the drone was already failing to do

There is a final piece of evidence, and it is the one the Western press has managed to report as its opposite.

Over roughly 50 days of concentrated Ukrainian drone attack on the Rostov–Mariupol–Zaporizhzhia corridor, some 56 lorries were destroyed, most of them stationary at fuelling stops, killing most of their drivers. In the same period about 12,000 lorries made the run. A kill rate of under one per cent was written up in London and Washington as the severing of Russian logistics.

The defences that produced that number were not exotic. Russian corporations were permitted to raise their own gun crews — technicals, in effect: a pickup with a mount in the bed and a 7.62mm machine gun on it. Drones are slow and loud, and a machine gun is very good against slow and loud; even the quieter battery-powered Hornet types are well within reach.

Nothing disappears; it becomes ordinary

The machine gun did not go away after 1918. It stopped being the argument and became a component. That is the likeliest fate of the drone, and on Krapivnik’s evidence it is already happening: not obsolescence but demotion.

The uncomfortable corollary for Western planners is that a doctrine has been built, at speed and at considerable expense, on the assumption that the last three years describe the next 30. They almost certainly do not. In 1916 that assumption was called the primacy of the machine gun. Two years later it was called a mistake.

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I. The Last Witness

My father has reached the age – 94 – at which anecdote becomes testimony. He is, without ever intending it, the last man in the room who was there, and he knows it. I visited him in England this summer and we talked about the Blitz, about Paris on a scholarship in 1948, about London in the sixties, the high jinks of Oxford-educated copywriters. I added some of mine.

What stayed with me afterwards was not what he remembered but what nobody had noticed at the time. The Blitz is now a settled narrative with a beginning and an end; in 1940 it was weather. The people living through the decisive events of the century were, for the most part, thinking about lunch. This is not a criticism of them. It is the ordinary condition, and it is the subject of this essay – not the decline of England, though there is some of that here, but the older and more general problem of how a society conducts itself in the years before something it has not perceived.

I have a test case of my own, and I was 13 years old in it.

II. Missile Screens and Asteroids: 1982 and 1983

In the summer of 1982, my sister and I went jetty-sailing with our father, 50 and divorced, aboard his thirty-three-foot boat, Evita, moored in Brighton Marina. The marina was a charmless place then – raw concrete, the air of a building site, portacabins selling bacon sandwiches on the ground where a shopping centre would later grow. The tides were vicious, the entrance awkward, the smell constant, and between the jetties the sea carried whatever the bilge pumps gave it, wreathed in green weed. But the mooring was cheap, and blond, tousle-haired children scooted between the pontoons in dinghies while I read the back pages of the Sunday Times, memorising which personalised number plates commanded a premium. In the Lanes my friends and I fed coins into Scramble and Asteroids, whose white vector graphics were an innocent mirror of the missile-tracking screens being watched in deadly earnest elsewhere.

It was the summer of the Falklands. The task force came home to brass bands; Prince William was born; the Princess of Wales blazed from every front page. Up north, where unemployment was climbing and the previous year’s royal-wedding bunting had frayed, the mood was different – but the tabloids rejoiced, and the country talked about itself.

Now the other ledger, the one nobody was keeping.

That autumn the submarine intrusions began in Sweden, where I spent most of the year – later the subject of my own work, and of the essay series continuing on these Substack pages. These seemed to betoken the first stages of a world war, as they were taken to be Soviet submarines launching special forces scouting operations into Swedish territory. In September 1983 a Soviet duty officer, Stanislav Petrov, looked at a screen telling him American missiles were inbound, judged that the satellites were lying, and did nothing. Six weeks later NATO’s Able Archer exercise rehearsed nuclear release procedures, and some Warsaw Pact forces appear to have gone to a readiness they would not normally have adopted for a drill.

How close that came to catastrophe is still disputed, and the dispute is worth a sentence because it makes the point better than certainty would. The President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board reported to George H. W. Bush in 1990 that Washington may have put relations on a hair trigger without knowing it, and that the intelligence community had made the grave error of assuming the Kremlin shared its own confidence that nobody intended to start a war. That report was prised out of the archives only in 2015, after a twelve-year fight by the National Security Archive.1 Since then Simon Miles and others, working from Warsaw Pact records, have argued the near-miss has been overdrawn – that the East watched the exercise with more composure than the Gordievsky-derived account allows. I incline to the first view. But note where that leaves us: forty years on, with the files open and no career at stake, serious historians cannot agree how close the world came. What chance had a boy with a fistful of 10p pieces in the Lanes? What chance had his parents?2

III. Mechanics of Denial

What matters more is not why we ignore danger, but how we sort real threats from the daily noise. The 1982 case is useful because the failure is so clean, and because it decomposes into parts that recur.

The first is that the evidence sits with specialists. Petrov’s decision was not reported; it was buried, and he was reprimanded for his paperwork. The Swedish intrusions were known to a naval staff and a cabinet, and what the public was told about them was, I have argued at length elsewhere on this Substack, wrong. A citizen who wished to be well informed in 1983 could not have been. This is not apathy. It is a structural condition of nuclear-age politics, and it has not improved.

The second is that the people who do sound the alarm are usually socially marginal. The women at Greenham Common were the “crazy lentil-eating feminists” of tabloid legend: unwashed, camped in the mud, and, on New Year’s Day 1983, quite ridiculous: forty-four women broke in and danced on the missile silos. They were mocked comprehensively, and the mockery did its work – it made agreement with them harder. In retrospect they were among the very few people in the country behaving as though the situation were real. I should be careful here, because admiration is not endorsement: they were right that the weapons were there and that the alert state was real, and their proposed remedy – unilateral disarmament – was a policy like any other, contestable, and contested with some force by people who think the deployment is precisely what brought Moscow to the table. But being wrong about the cure is a smaller failure than not noticing the disease. I think now they were admirable.

The third is the subtlest. The warning does arrive – and arrives as art, which the culture knows how to consume. In 1982 Raymond Briggs, the man who had given the nation The Snowman, published When the Wind Blows: Jim and Hilda Bloggs, a retired couple in the countryside: he puzzles over the worsening bulletins on the wireless; she chatters over the teapot in that domestic murmur which is the verbal cement of long marriages, the noise of love and life. Between their small exchanges Briggs interleaved great dark spreads of submarines running towards their firing points. After the bombs fall, the couple follow the government’s Protect and Survive pamphlet faithfully, whitewash the windows, and die politely of radiation sickness, mistaking their bleeding gums for ill-fitting dentures. The same year Alan Parker filmed The Wall, from the Pink Floyd concept album, and in Gerald Scarfe’s animation for “Goodbye Blue Sky” a dove rises from an English summer garden and is torn apart by a Nazi Reichsadler, a steel eagle: a few seconds later the film cuts to a battlefield where a Union Jack sheds its stripes to leave a bleeding cross – Britain’s wars, past, present and pending, stitched into one seam. Two utterly different registers, the pensioner’s cottage and the rock star’s disintegration, delivering the same warning to a nation that preferred the thwack of a cricket ball on Test Match Special.

Both were successes. Both were widely seen.

Neither changed anything, because a society which can absorb its own annihilation as a graphic novel and a rock film has, in the act of absorbing it, given itself permission to stop worrying. Being told is not the same as being informed.

IV. The Return, 2026

I went back this summer: a month in England, mostly in Winchester, the old capital, with London at either end. It was my third or fourth visit to my father in eighteen months, so what follows is a composite rather than a snapshot.

A caution first, and a method. A scientist draws small conclusions from massive evidence; a journalist draws massive conclusions from tiny evidence. I have been that kind of journalist, particularly when shuttling between Sweden and England, each crossing generating emotional theories the facts did not support. So in what follows I have tried to keep three things apart: what I saw, what I infer from what I saw, and what I merely suspect. The first is worth something. The second is arguable. The third I include only because leaving it out would misrepresent how a mind actually works under conditions of low-grade unease – which is, after all, the subject of the essay.

Begin with what I did not find, since the discipline is worth more when applied against one’s own side. I did not visit Bradford, Wigan, Blackpool, places where successive governments’ Levelling Up policies went to die. My travels were limited to London and the prosperous South.

Bear that in mind when I say I did not find the Britain of the American right’s imagination – the Vance and Carlson picture of terminal collapse, the first Islamic nuclear superpower in waiting. The young American YouTubers who film Southall’s Little India and present it as news are showing you a street that looked exactly the same 30 years ago. A friend took me to Whitechapel to show this old Londoner how far things had fallen; my girlfriend worked in Whitechapel in 1997, and it looked exactly as foreign then. Harlesden, a mile from my old flat in Maida Vale, resembled Johannesburg three decades ago and resembles it still. London has always been a theatre of violent scene-changes: stand on one of the loveliest streets in Little Venice, cross the little bridge, and within 50 metres you are on the Edgware Road, among run down and wholly Arab-owned phone shops. That is not decline. That is London, and always was. To a Briton living in Sweden, a country whose towns repeat themselves identically for ten hours of northward driving, the compression is still astonishing.

Nor is it the 1980s. Anyone who remembers King’s Cross as a byword for prostitution and misery, or Liverpool Street as a styrofoam coffee from a British Rail stand and a paper from W. H. Smith, will find the smartened stations, with their delicatessens, the free museums and the arts centres close to miraculous. St Pancras, whose hotel was shuttered for most of a century, is a beautiful gateway to Europe. The machinery of daily life runs frictionlessly: everything contactless, hotels and trains booked in seconds, no cash handled in a month, the Eurostar never late, my Winchester train never late. Visiting Americans, with their cheques and their tipping rituals, now find Britain the more modern country in these small ways.

The trouble is the date at which the improvement stops. London is enormously better than 1985. It is not detectably better than 2007 – and I flag that as impression rather than measurement, though it is the kind of impression that could be tested against public capital spending and would, I suspect, survive. The elegant food halls, the restored stations, the transformed docklands were all in place by the financial crisis, and nothing comparable has been added since.

What has been added is on the pavements. The shopfronts of Oxford Street, where my sister once worked at John Lewis, are lined with tents. So is Marble Arch. So is the forecourt of the British Library, where a man lay sleeping across that elegant entrance, fifty metres from the Eurostar terminal and its own encampment. At Waterloo one early evening I was approached for money by four or five people in succession, some of them menacingly – a thing that did not happen to me fifteen years ago. Outside Euston the forecourt by the office tower has become a shabby food court strewn with rubbish.

Here the figures are more interesting than the impression, and partly against me. CHAIN, the London database and the most careful count there is, recorded 12,938 people sleeping rough in the capital in 2025/26: a fall of 2 per cent on the previous year, and the first annual fall since 2017 outside the Covid distortion. Against that, the same figure is about 60 per cent higher than a decade earlier, and the entrenched cohort – those living on the streets rather than passing briefly through them – has been setting records, up 18 per cent year on year in the last quarter of 2025. So the flow has stopped rising while the sediment has thickened, which is exactly what a walk down Oxford Street feels like and not at all what a headline about a 2 per cent fall sounds like. The general note is of a country that reached a plateau twenty years ago, just before the Great Financial Crisis, and has since lacked the money, or the will, to do the corners up. Set the last two British decades against the last two Chinese ones and the word is unavoidable: stagnation.3

V. The Heat, Which Is the Same Problem in Another Key

Not a drop of rain fell in the south during the month I was there – not a drop – and the lawns burnt to cinder, giving the Home Counties an unfamiliar Highveld look. Unlike 1976, there were no standpipes; the water system, credit where it is due, held. But the temperature sat between 30°C and 35°C (86–95°F) from noon until ten at night, and Britain has almost no air conditioning. Americans will scoff at 35°C, but they cool their buildings; the Mediterranean countries, with their narrow streets, courtyards, fountains and siestas, spent millennia engineering their summers. England has neither the machines nor the architecture. From 5 am until 10 am each morning I lived in the old country; for the twelve hours after that I was good for nothing, and so, visibly, was everyone else.

If Britain treated this as permanent, it would be debating a mass roll-out of air-conditioning devices and what it implies for the grid. Instead the question has been culture-warred into a quarrel about American vulgarity versus the sanctity of old facades. I put this beside the nuclear material deliberately, and not because the risks are comparable. They are not. The mechanism is comparable: a slow accumulation, no single day on which it becomes news, a warning available chiefly in registers – scientific, aesthetic, foreign – that we have learned to note and move on from.

Here I must separate two failures the essay has so far allowed to sit together. The 1982 case was a failure of perception: the evidence was classified, the people raising it were socially discreditable, and the warning reached the public in a form the culture knew how to consume rather than act on. What I saw in 2026 is not that. Nobody in London has failed to notice the tents. The heat was on every thermometer in the country. This is the duller condition – a society perceiving accurately and doing nothing, having neither the money nor the appetite, and having therefore learnt to look at a thing daily without registering it as a demand upon itself.

VI. The Heritage Industry

Winchester has scarcely changed: a closed shopfront or two, otherwise prosperity, Pimm’s, talk of Henley and Wimbledon and gallery openings. The heritage industry is done beautifully – museums to the Gurkhas and the Hampshires, uniforms of 1914 and 1942, library shelves heavy with the Chindits and the Bismarck, King Arthur’s Round Table on the wall of the Great Hall, a thirteenth-century forgery cementing a myth, which is itself rather English. Orwell wrote in Homage to Catalonia of the deep, deep sleep of England “from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs”. Winchester sleeps that sleep still.

In Waterstones the current-affairs tables carry a carefully curated picture of the world, one in which Britain fights the good fight against dictators rather than forming part of the problem. Nothing – nothing – on the issues occupying strategic analysts: the warnings traded between Washington and Moscow; the intelligence each supplies to the other’s adversaries; Western-built, Western-navigated drones – operated by Ukrainian crews but reliant on US and UK targeting data – striking deep inside Russia,4 while Moscow muses aloud about answering in kind at factories outside London: specifically, a Ukrainian weapons plant next door to an American airbase in the Suffolk countryside.5 Is the British government an entirely innocent party in this conflict? A case can be made that it is not. Of course Waterstones stocks the books of political realists like John Mearsheimer and Richard Sakwa, but you won’t find them on the book tables.

Few people I met appeared to connect Britain’s high energy prices with the permanent structural costs of Europe decoupling from cheap Russian gas and of the inflationary consequences of the geopolitical rupture. The apportionment is arguable; the absence of the argument is not. It is worth being exact about this, because the facts need no dressing up. On the government’s own IEA-derived series, British industry has been paying the highest electricity prices of any member country, and British households sit at or very near the top – highest before taxes, second to Germany once taxes are counted. For those facing the bills, the causes are worth reading closely.6

VII. Where Brexit Fits

Only here, and briefly – which is itself the argument. Attention is finite. A country can hold roughly one great question at a time, and Britain spent a decade of its entire national attention on the lesser of the two impositions upon it. The greater one – the American – was never on the ballot. Leave could not raise it, because its financiers were Atlanticists; Remain could not raise it, because it was the same lobby’s other wing. I opposed Brexit, for reasons that belong in another essay and are not the reasons that belong in this one. What belongs here is the mechanism: a referendum that might have been the occasion for an honest reckoning of eighty years of post-war development became instead the most effective attention-management operation in modern British history. It worked not by concealing anything, but by crowding out the room for anything else to be noticed.

VIII. What We Are Entitled to Expect

So: a country better than the caricature and worse than its self-image; efficient at the card reader and derelict in the doorway; without civil war and without purpose; exactly. And around it, unmentioned in Winchester, the rumble.

The newspapers have for the moment dialled the war rhetoric down, which the complacent read as calm and the attentive read as pressure gathering under the cap. Neither reading can be settled from the outside, and this is the permanent difficulty. In June 1914 the London Stock Exchange took almost no notice of a murder in Sarajevo or the build-up to war in the month that followed; the season went on, the Test matches went on, and the crisis broke in the last days of July, at which point the exchange simply closed. Those men were not fools. European crises had been coming and going for thirty years, and every previous one had passed.

That is the honest conclusion, and it is not comfortable for a writer in my line.

The complacent are usually right. Most volcanoes rumble and subside. A person who spent 1982 worrying about nuclear war probably wasted a good summer; a person who spent it reading the number-plate advertisements in the Sunday Times lost nothing at all. That is the asymmetry. Almost every time, ordinary life is the correct response to history. The once it is not, it is too late.

My father is the only person I know who has lived through the whole of it: 1940 as weather, Paris in 1948 on a scholarship and a coal ration, Brighton Marina in 1982, and now this. Ask him what any of it was like and he will tell you about a girl, a train, the price of a room. He is not being trivial. He was being a person in years which later acquired capital letters, and he had no way of knowing which kind of year he was standing in. Neither, this summer, did I.

He has been lucky for ninety-four years, and he is the last man I know who understands exactly how little that proves. □

NOTES

There is a particular error English writers make about ABBA, and they make it so consistently that it has hardened into a genre. Simon Sheridan, in The Complete ABBA, files the group between Volvo and IKEA as “Sweden’s biggest brand name,” and reaches for the usual adjectives – glossy, homely, reassuring, a guilty pleasure redeemed by camp. Giles Smith, gentler and funnier in My My! ABBA through the Ages, treats them as an embarrassment one grows into, a kind of national service of the ear. Both men are clever and neither is wrong about the surface. What they cannot do – what no Anglophone account I have read manages to do – is name the thing under the surface, because the English language does not carry the word for it.

The word is vemod.

It is not sadness and not nostalgia; it is the gentle, resigned wistfulness a Swede feels watching the light leave a lake in late August, an ache that is half pleasure. Its sister is längtan, a longing with no object and no cure. These are not exotic flourishes – they are significant words, words a Swedish child learns before he can spell them, and ABBA is built out of them. An Englishman hears “Dancing Queen,” registers joy with a catch in it, and calls the catch “bittersweet,” which is the lazy compound you reach for when you have no single word. A Swede needs no compound. He was raised inside the feeling. The English-language books circle this absence endlessly and never close on it; they keep describing the weather and missing the climate.

That feeling is produced by a technique so precise it deserves to be described properly, even by someone like me who cannot read a stave. The trick is a deliberate quarrel between the body of a song and its words. The body is engineered for happiness: a major key bright as enamel, a dance tempo, Rutger Gunnarsson’s bass walking with that disco lift, and above all the two women singing in locked thirds – a sound with no grain and no sweat in it, frictionless. Against all this the melody keeps leaning downward. Benny Andersson began on the accordion, and the melancholy of Swedish accordion music never left him; his tunes sag toward the minor and toward folk inflection even while the arrangement insists everything is fine. Then comes the key change – the device that in any other pop record is pure uplift. In ABBA it arrives like a sigh you cannot suppress, a lift that somehow lands lower than where it set off. Benny once said of one of their own recordings that it felt extremely sad to listen to although the lyric was not sad at all. That is the entire method in a sentence: the affect and the text are tuned to two different sorrows, and the listener is made to stand in the interval between them. The interval is exactly where vemod lives.

And the subject matter is not romance – this is the second thing the brand-name critics miss. ABBA is not music of the first flush. It is music of the long middle and the bitter end of love: divorce music, marriage music, the music of two people who know each other far too well. “Knowing Me, Knowing You,” “The Winner Takes It All,” “When All Is Said and Done,” “One of Us” – these are dispatches from inside collapsing households, written by Björn Ulvaeus while his own marriage and Benny’s came apart, and then sung back at them by the very women they were leaving. “The Day Before You Came,” their strangest record, is a divorce set to a synthesiser: a woman recites the blank timetable of a commuter’s day in a flat voice over a dirge, the most ordinary life imaginable, and it is unbearable. The genius is in the commonplace. The milk, the office, the train home, the cigarette at half past two. ABBA grasped that the real theatre of love is not the meeting but the Tuesday – the stable household rather than the first kiss, and the slow intractable war that goes on inside it.

There is something deeply Swedish in that war, and it is not entirely flattering. Sweden runs the most thoroughgoing feminist culture in Europe, and beneath its decorum a low, permanent conflict between men and women is conducted with great politeness and no quarter. You feel it in the songs as a structural fact. Agnetha was the home-loving one who hated touring and wanted her house and her children; Björn wanted the Anglophone world, the conquest of England and America. That marriage’s central argument – stay rooted, or go out and win – is the argument the whole country has with itself, and ABBA compressed it into four minutes of radio. Gradvall, who is Swedish and therefore unembarrassed, can hear this plainly. The English, reaching again for camp, cannot, because they have decided in advance that the group is a delivery system for irony rather than for grief.

I did not come to any of this neutrally. My mother was a Swede – glamorous, a model in London advertisements and a designer for Conran, often taken in the street for the ABBA singer she resembled and was very nearly the age of – who in her thirties decamped to Sweden as a single mother and conducted her own long campaign against my father.

I live now in a small town in the middle of Sweden, not far from where Stikkan Andersson – the manager who assembled the whole apparatus out of the folkparks and the schlager tradition – was born, and I know that tradition from the inside. The raggarbilar, the old American cars, still grind around the squares on summer evenings; my girlfriend’s stepfather once leaned into one of the old Fords to tell a passing Agnetha he would give her a future as an electrician’s wife, and she, sensibly, declined. The day before I sat down to write this I had ABBA Gold plugged into my ears, walking by one of the small-boat harbours. None of that is the point of the music. But it is why I can hear what the pureblood Englishmen cannot.

Because here is the paradox the brand-name writers will never resolve. Sweden is a small, smug, efficient, heavily taxed, gently smothering country where very little changes from one century to the next, and where everyone is, just at present, marching in the same pro-NATO direction with the same untroubled face. You go abroad to feel alive – to find people who argue, conflicts that move, a society that is not already settled. And yet five minutes of ABBA and you are in love with the place all over again: with the countryside, the few weeks of white nights, the whole idea of Swedish womanhood. That is the real magic, and it is conservative to the bone – a rooted, particular, untranslatable feeling that the global machine has spent fifty years trying to render as kitsch and camp and Mamma Mia! merchandise, and has never once managed to flatten. The glitter was always a disguise. Underneath it was vemod, and vemod does not export. You have to have stood by the lake.

I want to begin not with a submarine but with a pub. It was a raw February evening in 2014, and I was sitting in a cramped bar in Stockholm’s Old Town opposite a lean man with a grey crew cut and a stare that could strip paint. His name was Anders Hasselbohm. Thirty years earlier he had been one of the most decorated investigative journalists in Sweden. Then he wrote a book – Ubåtshotet1, “The Submarine Threat” – saying that the mysterious submarines haunting Swedish waters were not Soviet, and on that subject, in the polite Swedish way, the doors quietly closed. He kept his trade – his paper sent him abroad, and he reported for years with distinction as a foreign correspondent – but the home story, the one that mattered to him most, was no longer his to tell. By the time I bought him a beer he had had three decades to think about how a free country falls quiet without anyone ever being ordered to hush.

I had sought him out because I wanted to ask him the question that has organised most of my working life since: how do you tell a true story that powerful people have decided is not to be told? He looked at me for a while, the way old reporters look at younger ones who think they have found something new, and said something I have never forgotten. He said the bad days for press freedom in Sweden were not the days of censorship. They were the days when six hundred journalists sat in a naval mess hall, were fed coffee and sandwiches and mood music by admirals, and went home convinced they had been told the truth.

I have spent years reporting from London and Brussels on exactly the kind of story that does not fit the official map of the world. This is one of the most important ones I have found. I am setting it down here, at my own length and on my own Substack, because the venues that are supposed to carry stories like this would not, and because I have finally stopped waiting for their permission.

What every Swede of my generation remembers

You have to have grown up in Sweden to understand how strange the early 1980s were. I grew up in London and spent most of my adult years there. But for a few years I lived in Sweden, with a Swedish mother. The years of 1982–85 remain vivid. I was a teen schoolboy in the high Social Democratic noon, when Sweden was rich, calm, egalitarian and faintly smug – the country that had supposedly squared the circle, combining American living standards with Scandinavian fairness, and which therefore felt entitled to lecture the rest of us on its failings. Read The Times or The Spectator in those years and you would think the place kept one foot in the Soviet Union; live there, as I did, and it was nearer to Chicago’s North Shore, the high school of the Breakfast Club movie, than to Moscow. And every few months this placid, self-satisfied country was gripped by a maritime ghost story.

A conning tower would be sighted in some sheet of water near Stockholm. The Navy would descend with helicopters and depth charges. The television would carry daily bulletins from stern men in uniform. The tabloids would run diagrams of Soviet midget submarines creeping between the islands.

My older cousin came back from his military service with a story about a neighbouring unit that had supposedly found Soviet frogmen’s badges and an empty tin of Soviet sardines at an abandoned campsite. Every family that owned a summer cottage by the water – hundreds of thousands do – learned to look twice at a moving shadow on the surface. No schnapps party was complete without nervous jokes about Russians in the bay.

And here is the thing that should have made everyone suspicious, and made almost nobody suspicious: in all those years of hunts, with all that ordnance and all those headlines, the Swedish Navy never once brought a foreign submarine to the surface. Never identified one. Never produced a hull, a flag, a sailor. The intruders were ghosts. But ghosts, in Cold War Sweden, had a nationality assigned to them in advance. They were Soviet. The media said so, the opposition said so, and – this is the part that matters – the Swedish Navy said so. Prime Minister Olof Palme, who at first believed his own admirals, slowly stopped being sure.

It is the not-being-sure that drew me in.

The one real submarine, and the lie that grew out of it

There was exactly one genuine, undeniable Soviet intrusion in the whole affair, and it is the key to everything that followed. In October 1981 an actual Soviet submarine – a clapped-out Whiskey-class diesel boat, U-137 – ran aground on a reef deep inside a Swedish military zone near the naval base at Karlskrona. “Whiskey on the Rocks”, the foreign press called it, delighted. The Soviet captain told a transparent string of lies about broken navigation equipment; the Swedish inspectors found the equipment working. It looked, and was treated as, a smoking gun. The Russians were prowling Swedish waters. Q.E.D.

Except that the local fishermen, when an awkward, dissenting Swedish reporter named Ingemar Myhrberg finally bothered to knock on their doors – the Navy never did – were certain it was an accident. The boat had come in on the surface, in full view of radar, with its diesels making, in one witness’s phrase, the racket of two locomotives without silencers. No spy submarine behaves like that. A spy submarine comes in submerged, silent, on its electric motors. The likeliest explanation for U-137 is the dullest: a drunk and incompetent trainee crew took a wrong turning and then lied to save their skins. Other theories claim that the senior officer on board the submarine had secretly been paid by the West to create a scene and embarrassment for the Soviets.2

But the grounding did something far more useful than any successful spy mission could have done. It planted in every Swedish mind a single, unshakeable assumption: that any submarine in Swedish waters must be Russian. And once that assumption was in place, it could be exploited by anyone with a submarine and a motive. As one of my sources would later put it to me, after U-137 the Soviets had been framed in advance.

Hasselbohm’s heresy

A year after U-137 came the great hunt at Hårsfjärden, in the Stockholm archipelago, right on top of Sweden’s main naval base – and the timing was uncanny. It began in the very weeks Palme returned to power on a pacifist, pro-dialogue platform, just as the rest of Western Europe was lurching rightward into the arms of Reagan and Thatcher. For two weeks the Navy hurled depth charges into the bay in front of the world’s press. It caught nothing.

This was the hunt that Hasselbohm investigated, and what he found is the heart of the story. A senior, frightened naval officer had come to him and said, plainly: “It is not true what the military leadership are saying.” The submarines, the officer believed, were Western. Hasselbohm spent a year talking to divers, captains, engineers, admirals and submarine builders at home and abroad, and he came to a conclusion that would cost him dear: at least one NATO submarine, and probably more, had been at Hårsfjärden.

He also took apart, piece by piece, the supposed forensic proof of Soviet guilt that the official Submarine Defence Commission and its young star, Carl Bildt, had waved at the public. They said the seabed keel-marks proved a Warsaw Pact boat, because “only Warsaw Pact submarines had keels”. A glance at Jane’s Fighting Ships – had any Swedish journalist bothered to look – showed keels on British and French boats, and no keel on the Soviet Whiskey. They said two propellers meant Soviet; British, Dutch and French boats had two propellers too. They said the electronic signals were on Soviet frequencies; the head of Sweden’s own signals-intelligence agency later admitted to the Defence Ministry that no such evidence existed. Every plank of the case pointed, if anything, the other way.

For his trouble Hasselbohm was made to pay. Bildt mocked him in print for “making mountains out of molehills” and, more woundingly, questioned his purpose – the insinuation, never quite stated outright, that a Swedish reporter whose findings pointed west rather than east must be serving some interest other than Sweden’s. He was not driven out: his paper kept him on, posting him abroad, where he spent five years as its Middle East correspondent and three more in Norway. But the submarine story – the one closest to home, and to him – was effectively no longer his, and he knew it. When I met him three decades on he was calm about it, in the way of a man who has had a long time to make his peace, but he wanted me to understand the mechanism. It was not that anyone was ordered to lie. It was that the entire press corps had been flattered, fed and embedded by the Navy at the Berga naval base, and a flattered press does not investigate its hosts. “These were bad days for press freedom in Sweden,” he wrote. They did not feel like bad days. That is the point.

The professor in Oslo

Hasselbohm pointed me up the chain to the man who had picked up his fallen baton: Ola Tunander, a Swedish professor at the Peace Research Institute in Oslo. I went to see him too. He looked like central casting’s idea of an absent-minded academic – nervous laugh, spectacles, a rapid blink – and he had spent a career being called a conspiracy theorist by the Swedish naval establishment for saying out loud what Hasselbohm had found.

What I liked about Tunander is that he had been wrong first. As a young scholar he had written the standard textbook stating that the intrusions were Soviet; he had taught it at the US Naval War College and lectured on it at the Pentagon. He came round slowly, and against his own professional interest, which is the opposite of how a crank behaves. The hinge moment, he told me, came in 1993, on a long car ride back from a conference in Norway with James Schlesinger – former US Secretary of Defense, former Director of Central Intelligence. In the loosened, after-dinner mood of old enemies who have outlived their war, Schlesinger admitted to him that a US submarine had been damaged at Hårsfjärden in 1982.

From there Tunander pulled the thread. He talked to British former submarine captains, who told him it was not only the Americans but the Royal Navy, and that British boats were the boldest and most secretive of all. One senior officer said to him, cheerfully, “We had good fun in your waters!” Another, the former fleet commander Admiral James Eberle, looked at him and said, in a tone you could not quite read, “Don’t people fall in front of a bus sometimes?” – and turned his back. Tunander’s reading, after years of work, is that the intrusions were an Anglo-American psychological operation, run with the connivance of a faction inside the Swedish Navy that loathed Palme: a deliberate campaign to terrify the Swedish public, discredit the Soviet Union, and destroy a prime minister who wanted to talk to Moscow rather than fight it.

I could have written all this up as “Swedish professor makes startling claim” and left it there. Plenty of journalists would have. But a claim is only as good as the questions you are willing to put to the other side. So I went to the other side.

I went to London and started knocking on doors

I started with the on-the-record admissions, because they already existed and almost nobody in Sweden had taken them seriously. In 2000, Swedish television had interviewed Caspar Weinberger, Reagan’s Secretary of Defense, who said plainly that US submarines had operated in Swedish waters as a matter of “routine, regular, scheduled” testing, with prior agreement. A month later the same programme interviewed Sir Keith Speed, Margaret Thatcher’s Navy Minister, who confirmed it without a flicker: the sort of thing Weinberger described was the sort of thing he, Speed, “was enabling to happen too”. Asked directly whether the testing had been done in Sweden, he said yes. And yes again when pressed.3 The Swedish establishment’s response had been to announce that two senior Anglo-American defence ministers were confused, senile, or misquoted.

So I picked up the telephone and called Sir Keith Speed myself.

He confirmed every word. British submarines, he told me, had operated in Swedish waters under orders from Margaret Thatcher personally. “Every single operation was approved by Margaret Thatcher.” They were, he said, “the most secret operations the UK ever carried out”. When I asked why the Swedish officers kept insisting he and Weinberger had been misquoted, he gave me the truest sentence in this whole saga: “Everyone is trying to cover their backs.”

I tried to reach Thatcher herself; she was ailing, and her office declined. I went to the National Archives at Kew to read the British diplomatic file on Anglo-Swedish relations for 1982 – the very year of the intrusions – and found it withheld. Sit with that.

Routine diplomatic correspondence with a peaceful Nordic neighbour, sealed for national security, decades on. I rang the Ministry of Defence press office to ask about Royal Navy operations to destabilise Sweden, and a cheerful press officer laughed and told me it sounded like “something from a spy movie”. Listen carefully: this is not actually a denial.

I interviewed David Owen, the former Foreign Secretary, in his elegant Mayfair office. He had sat on Palme’s own disarmament commission, in the very year of the intrusions, and he told me the submarines had never once been mentioned around that table – though, he said, they must have hung over it unspoken. Who did he think was behind them? He didn’t know. But he allowed himself a guess: a “rogue MI6 operation”. He gave me a trademark wolfish grin. I have wondered since what Owen meant by a “rogue” operation. In the years of writing about intelligence services that followed, I learned how much work that one word is made to do. Plausible deniability runs in a chain: governments pretend they give no orders to the agencies, and the agencies pretend they give none to their operatives. “Rogue” is the term of art at the end of it – the word that lets a minister disown what was authorised all along. I have come to suspect that the grin meant exactly that: not that the operation had slipped its leash, but that it had been planned from the centre, and that Owen knew it.

I chased the submariners’ own chroniclers. I met Jim Ring, who had written a warm history of the Royal Navy’s Oberon-boat captains, some of whom were said to be Baltic veterans. Over coffee at the British Library he was intrigued and promised to ask his old contacts who had manned the “O-boats”. At our third meeting he asked, “How far have you got?” – and then admitted his sources had given him nothing. “They all said, ‘Not me, guv.’” Perhaps they had told him nothing. Perhaps he had decided not to pass it on, out of love for a service he revered. I emailed the son of the NATO Northern Flank commander whose headquarters in Oslo had overseen the relevant years; he was writing his father’s biography, and his reply tacitly acknowledged the operations while making clear that none of it would be going in the book. Everywhere I went I met the same thing: not denial, exactly, but a soft, clubbable, infinitely polite refusal to let the story breathe.

What happened when I tried to publish

Reporting a story is one thing. Printing it is another, and this is where I learned how the machine actually works – not through censorship, but through the quiet management of what counts as a serious subject.

I placed a careful article in a British naval magazine, Warships IFR, whose editor was genuinely intrigued and who knew, as naval men do, how clannish and secretive the submarine service is. It ran. It sank without a ripple. I wrote a more high-profile piece for the Sunday Times, on Tunander’s work, under the headline “Margaret Thatcher told Navy to raid Swedish coast”. Before it appeared, an ally of Carl Bildt – a man I will call Erik – got in touch to offer me a helpful counter-narrative about Russian intrusions, sourced from his naval contacts.

I knew exactly who he was. He was Bildt’s old mate and fixer, the heavy brought in for delicate PR problems. In the small duck pond of Stockholm, his voice carried the easy authority of a man long accustomed to deference. Carl Bildt had done very well indeed since sitting on that Submarine Commission, as a young MP. He became Prime Minister for one term from 1991-1994 and then a Foreign Minister for two terms from 2006-2014. I knew what taking Erik’s dictation would commit me to: the whole elaborate architecture of the official theory, the improbable miniature submarines, the Soviet octopus – the very picture Bildt had laid before the Royal Swedish Academy of War Sciences, which duly inducted him. By then I knew his method: state a thing with complete confidence and not a shred of evidence, and by the time the contrary case had been gathered, simply brazen it out. He was, in that one narrow respect, a kind of Swedish Boris Johnson. What Erik was offering me was a turn at the same game, and I wanted no part of it.

He rang off in a huff and lobbied the paper to spike the piece. It ran anyway. And then: nothing. No follow-up was commissioned. The story did not “have legs”, as editors say, for the simple reason that nobody with the power to give it legs wished to.

This is the texture of the thing, and it is worth dwelling on because it is so much more effective than crude suppression. In Sweden, the serving naval officer Göran Wallén, who had publicly branded Tunander an idiot and a conspiracy theorist, declined to be interviewed by me on the grounds that he was “busy decorating the house”. A younger academic colleague had agreed to talk to me; minutes after Wallén’s refusal, he too discovered he was unavailable. Tunander has told me that academic and security journals reject articles on this subject as simply not up for discussion – one editor told him so in 2016, thirty-five years after the events. Conferences on the submarine question at Swedish universities have a way of being cancelled by the administration. Another researcher had a piece pulled at the last minute in a German security journal on “orders from the top”. Incredibly, even a video game on the topic of submarine hunts was cancelled. The young Swedish software team were given some impossible conditions to complete their project and it died. You are never told no. You are told that this is not a serious subject for serious people, and that you would do well to write about something else, and the message is delivered with a smile.

I have come to think this is the most important thing I have to report – more important, even, than the submarines. A free society does not need a censor if its journalists have already agreed, among themselves, what the respectable opinions are. The Swedish press did not have to be told to call the submarines Soviet. They wanted to. It flattered their self-image as plucky little Sweden standing up to the Russian bear, and it spared them the far more uncomfortable thought: that their real patrons, the Americans and the British, might be the ones in the water.

But surely it was the Russians?

Here I have to be fair to the other side, because the other side has a case, and its most respectable version is not a tabloid scare but a book by General Bengt Gustafsson, the man who was Sweden’s Supreme Commander from 1986 to 1994. If anyone was placed to know, he was; and he spent his retirement arguing, at length and with evident sincerity, that the intruders really were Soviet. His case deserves to be put at its strongest before I explain why I think it fails.

It runs like this.4 The Soviet Union plainly had the kit – fleets of midget submarines, some fitted with caterpillar treads for crawling along the seabed, and dedicated naval Spetsnaz and GRU units (the “Delfin” formation, stood up in 1970) whose whole purpose was covert reconnaissance and sabotage against foreign bases. It had the motive – training, intelligence, and the wartime sabotage of NATO’s nuclear and undersea-cable infrastructure. And there is testimony: defectors, a handful of Soviet reservists interviewed on Swedish television in the 1990s, the odd ministerial half-admission that no more submarines would be sent. The grounding of the Whiskey-class U-137 outside Karlskrona in 1981, Gustafsson argues, was no navigational blunder but a deliberate incursion that went wrong. Add the long Russian and German habit of lurking in Swedish skerries through two world wars, and you have a coherent story in which the obvious suspect is also the guilty one.

It is a serious case and I do not wave it away. But notice what it is made of. It is an argument from capability, motive and pattern – they had the means, they had the reasons, it fits – and almost none of it is forensic. There is no recovered hull, no photograph of an intruder in Swedish water, no captured craft save U-137, whose nationality was never in dispute. The physical evidence Gustafsson leans on – the seabed caterpillar tracks, the cut anti-submarine nets – he does not show you; he reports, second-hand, that Swedish forensic scientists distinguished them from anchor-drags, while conceding that much of the relevant material has gone missing. (And caterpillar tracks as such are not determinative of nationality.) He is honest enough to admit that the navy’s underwater recordings were so unreliable that the service eventually realised some of its “submarines” were swimming mink, and honest enough to admit that no commission ever proved the nationality of a single deep intrusion except the one that ran aground. This is a man defending the verdict of the institution he led, against the researcher who accused his own admirals of treason. He is not a neutral witness, and he does not pretend to be.

Which brings me back to the quieter puzzle. If the Soviets really were gadding about the inner archipelago all those years, why, after the Cold War, did not one of them come forward to say so? In the 1990s the old Soviet navy was broke, humiliated and gloriously indiscreet; men sold far darker secrets than this for the price of a dinner. Yet the testimony is thin and second-hand, and the most precise thing anyone on the Western side will say cuts the other way: Bobby Inman, the former deputy director of the CIA, told a Swedish researcher the Soviets breached the twelve-mile limit but never the inner archipelago – the very waters the British boats, by his account, were running around in.5 The dog that does not bark is the Soviet submariner with a story to sell. The men who did, in the end, talk – cheerfully, over coffee, “We had good fun in your waters” – were British.

Why a Great Power would do such a thing

The obvious objection, the one I have heard a hundred times, is: why? Why would the West run a dirty operation against a peaceful, friendly Western democracy?

The answer is that Sweden, under Palme, was not as harmless as it looked, and Palme was not as marginal as the West pretended. In an age when the Reagan administration’s whole project was to defeat the Soviet Union – not coexist with it, not reform it, defeat it – Palme stood for the opposite. He was the last prominent standard-bearer in Western Europe of the policy of dialogue and trade with the East, the policy the West Germans called Ostpolitik. His friend and ally Helmut Schmidt, who carried the same banner in Bonn, had just been levered out of office in the same month Palme returned to power. Palme ran an independent disarmament commission whose ideas, carried into the Kremlin by a Soviet member who became one of Gorbachev’s closest advisers, helped furnish the vocabulary of “common security” that Gorbachev later used to end the Cold War – on terms of reconciliation rather than surrender.

To a certain kind of Cold Warrior, that was the nightmare. Not a Soviet victory, but a Soviet survival – a reformed, humane, social-democratic USSR that could take its place in Europe and remain, indefinitely, a great-power rival to the Anglo-Americans. Palme was the man building the bridge to that future. And Sweden sat on NATO’s strategic northern flank, its long Baltic coast the perfect neutral shield for the Soviet soft north-western Baltic flank the US Navy was, just then, rewriting its war plans to attack in the event of war. A neutral Sweden was excellent for Moscow and a problem for Washington. A Sweden frightened into anti-Soviet hysteria, with its peacenik prime minister discredited and its public clamouring to rearm, was very much better. What London could not abide was never Swedish dialogue with Moscow in itself – plenty of allies traded with the East – but dialogue pursued on Sweden’s own account, without Britain conducting the orchestra.

Submarines were the instrument. You cannot see them; you cannot prove who sent them; and after U-137 everyone already knew, in their bones, that they were Russian. They were, as Tunander put it to me, a way of sending a signal to a whole nation. The signal was: “Be afraid of the Russians.” And it worked beautifully. The Soviets, baffled and furious, denied everything and offered to withdraw every submarine they had from the Baltic; the offer was dismissed as a trick. Palme, against his own better judgment, was forced to hand Moscow a formal protest over an aggression that Moscow claims it never committed. His authority bled away. Six weeks before he was due to fly to Moscow, in February 1986, he was shot dead in a Stockholm street. The murder has never been solved (the 2020 naming of a dead man was overturned in 2025)6. I make no claim here about who pulled the trigger. I only note that the man who had spent his last years building a bridge the great powers did not want built did not live to cross it.

The last Household Ghost

Looking back, the whole episode has the shape of a ghost story – and like the best ghost stories its power lay in the fact that you could never quite see the thing in the room with you. I have come to suspect it was something colder than a haunting: a proving ground for the psychological operations of a later age, and the cement of a quiet intimacy between the British and Swedish militaries that survives, unadvertised, to this day. It is how Britain has always handled its smaller partners – soldier to soldier and spy to spy, over the heads of the elected and the independent-minded, who are made to feel naïve for wishing to run their own affairs. If there was to be détente, it would be on London’s and Washington’s terms, or on none.

It helped that Swedes live close to nature, in a vast and thinly peopled country where the dark does much of the work unaided. Their farming ancestors had filled the long winter nights with gnomes and trolls – the household spirit to whom every mislaid object, every good harvest, every scratch at the pane that was only the cat, could be assigned. The Russian submarine was merely the modern tomte: with a benign land turned suddenly malign with intent, the snap of a twig imagined as the first frogman of a Spetsnaz landing. There was no late-night television to talk one down; the broadcast day ended soon after the evening news, and the admirals had the broadcasts at dusk to themselves.

None of it felt quaint to a teenager whose schoolfriends played American football on the beaches outside Malmö, drove themselves to school, listened to Depeche Mode and the Cure and read whatever London’s The Face and i-D youth magazines printed that month – a country, in other words, Californian to its bones and nobody’s satellite. That is the cruelty of it. The submarines that no one ever caught was the great event of my Swedish childhood, an ambient dread like the nearness of death – and it was, I am now certain, conjured.

Why I am telling it here

The mechanism I’ve described – the quiet management of what counts as a serious opinion – is not a Cold War relic. It is how the security state has always operated, and it is alive today in every editorial meeting where a story is gently steered away from inconvenient truths.

I could pretend this is ancient history. It is not. In 2022 Sweden tore up two centuries of neutrality and applied to join NATO, with no referendum, almost no debate, and almost no opposition – a country sleepwalking, it seemed to me, into the very alignment that an earlier generation of Swedes had fought so hard to avoid. Four months later, somebody blew up the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic, an act of industrial sabotage against Germany’s economy, and Sweden and Germany conducted the kind of desultory investigation you conduct when you would rather not know the answer. The strong suspicion points west, not east. The pattern is old. A great power consults its own interests, not those of its clients, and the clients are encouraged not to notice.

I am a realist, in the old and unfashionable sense. I think small nations have interests of their own, that peace is generally better than war, that the men who run intelligence services are not wiser or more honest than the rest of us, and that a journalist’s first loyalty is to the reader and not to the club. None of these opinions is welcome in the present climate, in which to question the Western security consensus is to be filed, instantly, under “Kremlin talking points” – the modern version of Carl Bildt’s insinuation against Hasselbohm – the questioning of a man’s purpose when his findings point the wrong way. It is a lazy slander and an effective one, and I have decided to stop being intimidated by it.

So I am writing it here, in the open, where no editor can spike it.

Hasselbohm was eased off the story for telling it, and focused on a career abroad. Tunander has spent thirty years being called a crank for it. The submarines that terrified my childhood were ghosts, and the more I have learned, the more convinced I have become that they were our ghosts – and that the people who conjured them are still, to this day, counting on the rest of us not to look too closely at the water.

In 1985, a retired MI6 officer named Norman Darbyshire – who had run the service’s Persia station from Cyprus, and the coup with it – gave an interview to Granada Television’s End of Empire in which he described, with startling candour, how Britain helped overthrow the elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadeq.

Darbyshire would not appear on camera, and his account never reached the broadcast. The typescript surfaced only in August 2020, recovered by the makers of the documentary Coup 53 from, of all people, Mossadeq’s grandson, Hedayat Matine-Daftary, and published in full for the first time by the National Security Archive in Washington.1

In it Darbyshire is asked whether the Anglo-Iranian oil negotiations had been, in essence, face-saving theatre. Yes, he says: London wanted Mossadeq gone whatever he signed. The coup that removed him in August 1953 cost £700,000. “I know because I spent it.”

For half a century the overthrow of Mossadeq has been told as an American story. Kermit Roosevelt told it that way in Countercoup; so did the CIA’s own internal history, written by Donald Wilber in 1954 and leaked to the New York Times in April 2000, which was received as the authoritative inside account. Even the official American contrition – Madeleine Albright’s carefully worded regret in 2000 – accepted the frame: a Cold War operation, regrettable in hindsight, to stop Iran sliding into the Soviet orbit.

The trouble with the American story is that it was a British war. The historian Ervand Abrahamian demonstrated as much in 2001, reconstructing the coup not from the leaked report but from more than a thousand Foreign Office files. His conclusion was that the Wilber history is heavily sanitised – it omits the American ambassador’s role, the US military advisers, the hiring of local fascists and sectarian terrorists, the use of assassination as a destabilising tactic – and that its deepest distortion is one of genre. It reframes an Anglo-Iranian oil crisis, nationalism against empire, as an episode of the Cold War.2

The origins had nothing to do with Moscow – the Majlis had already proved as much. Before it ever moved against the British, the Iranian parliament threw out a Soviet bid for an oil concession in the northern provinces, though Moscow offered equal shares in profits, management and distribution – better terms than London ever put on the table3; the law banning such concessions, to any foreign power, had been backed by Mossadeq himself. The man Whitehall cast as Moscow’s stalking horse had fought the Soviet concession harder than anyone, warning it would both entrench Russia in the north and set off a new stampede of Western concession-hunters across the country. The British Ministry of Fuel understood perfectly, warning the Foreign Office that “it would weaken our position if countries began to develop their own oil.”

By 1950 the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) ran the largest refinery on earth at Abadan, supplied 85 per cent of the Royal Navy’s fuel and kept three-quarters of the profits, while running its company town effectively on colour-bar lines – and congratulating itself on its civilising mission. The Iranians, British diplomats told each other, were by nature “childlike” and “tiresome and headstrong”.

Water fountains were marked “Not for Iranians” and stores, amenities and clubs discriminated against the natives. When Iran, citing the American fifty-fifty deal with Venezuela, asked for the same, the company offered a rise from 17 to 24 per cent. In response, the Majlis nationalised the industry in the spring of 1951 and made the incorruptible Mossadeq prime minister.

London’s response, recorded in its own files within days, was to draw three conclusions: Mossadeq was serious; he wanted national resource sovereignty. But as Britain could not permit Iranians to control Iranian oil, he had to go.4

The recurring word in the Foreign Office memoranda is not communism but control. Britain could be flexible on profit shares, on administration, even on the appearance of ownership – the ambassador, Sir Francis Shepherd, would have accepted 60/40 provided Britain “retained control”; the minister Richard Stokes privately conceded he would swallow the “façade” of nationalisation if the substance stayed in London. Every subsequent negotiation – Harriman, Stokes, the UN, The Hague, the World Bank – was conducted in public good faith and private bad faith. Darbyshire’s cut interview confirms it from the inside: Robin Zaehner’s brief, as early as 1951, was to secure Mossadeq’s overthrow “by legal or quasi-legal means”.

And the communist danger? Both governments knew privately that the Tudeh party had no plans for armed insurrection. Mossadeq, an elderly constitutionalist landowner, was in fact distrusted in Moscow. An American CIA national intelligence estimate, declassified as recently as 2017, admitted that Mossadeq would almost certainly avoid any action which would subject Iran to Soviet domination.5

The “Soviet threat” was a rhetorical device – Dean Acheson later admitted as much. What was real was the economic siege: sterling assets frozen, an embargo enforced by the majors’ stranglehold on the world’s tankers, loans blocked, technicians withdrawn. Darbyshire again, helpfully candid: the worse Iran’s economy got, the better for us.

The coup itself began as Operation Boot before it was folded into the joint plan Churchill signed on 1 July 1953 and Eisenhower ten days later. The Americans brought money, the embassy compound and the Roosevelt name; the eagerness of the new administration owed something to the fact that both Dulles brothers had been partners in the law firm that represented the AIOC. But the operational machinery was British: the seasoned Iran hands, the network of royalist officers built up since the war, the military “Who’s Who” the CIA did not possess, and above all the Rashidian brothers’ bribery channel, pushing £10,000 a month to clerics, deputies and editors.

Darbyshire describes the tradecraft without embarrassment: burn the offices of pro-Mossadeq newspapers and let the mob take the blame, “which is what we intended.” He says he and a colleague drafted the coup plan and carried it to the Americans, who at first had “cold feet”.

When the shah refused to sign the decree dismissing Mossadeq, Abrahamian concludes from the record, the royal signature was forged – the operation’s single fig leaf of legality was bogus.6

On 19 August royalist brigades took Tehran, rented crowds supplied what the planners called “acoustical side-effects”, and 27 Sherman tanks besieged the prime minister’s house.

What did victory look like? Not restitution but a consortium: BP 40 per cent, Shell 14, the American majors 40, the French 6 – the substance of control restored beneath a fifty-fifty façade, exactly as Stokes had privately specified. If the coup had really been about communism, its spoils would not divide so neatly into oil shares.

A caution is in order. Darbyshire was about twenty-nine in 1953, claims great personal centrality, and was later dismissed from the service. But on the architecture – British initiative, sham negotiations, bribery, the paid-for rent-a-crowds – his interview with Granada TV confesses what Abrahamian could infer from the files. The two sources converge from opposite directions.

Consider, too, what happened to the evidence. The CIA’s Iran archive was reported destroyed – “unknowingly,” in the early 1960s – an explanation that invited scepticism. And, in fact, in 2017 the full documentation was quietly released, bar 10 documents withheld at British recommendation. MI6’s archive has never released a page.7

What defined the narrative, and what defines it still, was one document that told the story Washington and London preferred: Wilber’s. The Americanisation of the coup is thus a second layer of concealment. Recast a British imperial-economic war as an American Cold War rescue and you obscure both who initiated it and why.

Cairo 1956

Iran was not an aberration; it was a method. Three years later the same machinery turned on Nasser. From 1956 MI6’s picture of Egypt ran substantially through a single Cairo asset codenamed “Lucky Break”, whose briefings were little more than diatribes against the Egyptian leader’s alleged subservience to Moscow. In briefings to the CIA, MI6 officials explained that Nasser was the Kremlin’s man, about to topple the thrones of Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Libya, the spider at the centre of every Soviet design on the Middle East.

The scholars Scott Lucas and Alistair Morey later judged that not one of these claims was ever corroborated by another source; intelligence officers eager for action had “used their own imaginations to convert their nightmare vision into a plausible semblance of reality.” On the strength of it, Anthony Eden – by junior Foreign Office minister Anthony Nutting’s account – telephoned angrily from the Savoy Hotel. Nutting writes in his autobiography:

“I was horrified to get a telephone call over an open line... in which Anthony Eden said, ‘What’s all this poppycock you’ve sent me about isolating and neutralising Nasser. I want him destroyed, can’t you understand?’” Nutting later admitted that Eden had actually said “murdered”.

Eden demanded Nasser’s destruction four months before Nasser had nationalised anything; when the Canal seizure came in July it supplied the casus belli for a verdict already reached. Once again the loss of an imperial property was described, for Washington’s benefit and posterity’s, in the language of communism.

Suez failed because Eisenhower refused to underwrite it – the run on the pound did what no argument could, and Harold Macmillan, until then the most fervent hawk in the Cabinet, flipped overnight. The lesson London drew was not that the age of resource wars had ended. It was to be more careful, and next time to have the Americans inside the tent.

Katanga 1961

Five years later came the Congo. Within a fortnight of independence in June 1960, the mineral province of Katanga seceded under Moïse Tshombe, with Belgian and British backing. Its mines, run by Union Minière, held the copper and cobalt of central Africa – and the uranium that had gone into the Hiroshima bomb, as Susan Williams showed in Spies in the Congo. The chairman of the British company holding the largest Union Minière stake was Captain Charles Waterhouse – leader of the Suez Group in the British parliament, a group of right-wing MPs who had pushed for Nasser’s removal. Plenty of Tory money sat in those shares, and on the British right it was an article of faith that decolonisation meant expropriation.

So when the United Nations under Dag Hammarskjöld set about reintegrating Katanga into the Congolese state, the British government reacted precisely as it had reacted to Mossadeq. Macmillan’s diary, 15 September 1961: unless Britain and America acted, “Congo will be handed to Russia on a plate…The Union Minière properties will be ‘nationalised’ and run by Russian communists.”8 The scare quotes around “nationalised” are Macmillan’s own. Substitute Abadan for Élisabethville and the sentence could have been written in 1951.

Days earlier, enraged by the UN’s military operation against the secession, Macmillan, Edward Heath and Lord Lansdowne had agreed that a way must be found to have Hammarskjöld “pulled up short”.9

On the night of 17–18 September 1961 the Secretary-General’s DC-6 came down in the forest short of Ndola airport, in British-ruled Northern Rhodesia, where he was flying to negotiate with Tshombe. The airport closed for the night with the plane unaccounted for; the search was not ordered until 9.42 the next morning, and the wreck was found that afternoon, nine miles from the runway. The Rhodesian federal Clayden commission settled on pilot error – overruling the first technical board, which had refused to rule out “the wilful act of some person or persons unknown”.

The UN’s own 1962 inquiry returned an open verdict. There the matter rested for fifty years, until Williams’s Who Killed Hammarskjöld? forced it open and the UN appointed a new investigation in 2015, still ongoing – which has since repeatedly asked Britain for the signals intercepts and intelligence records it has reason to believe exist.10

The key files have not been produced. And the UN’s language has hardened with each report. Mohamed Chande Othman, the Tanzanian former chief justice leading the inquiry, has found it “almost certain” that Britain holds important undisclosed information; that the Ndola meeting Hammarskjöld was flying to was personally arranged by Neil Ritchie, “a confirmed agent” of MI6, on authority given by London11; and that not one MI5 or MI6 record has ever been disclosed. Zimbabwe’s own investigator found that, before independence, colonial authorities “meticulously removed almost every record or archive associated with the Dag Hammarskjöld Crash”.

Those records were taken into British custody. They have never resurfaced.

Was it assassination? The honest answer is that the evidence trail runs to a locked door in London. What is documented is motive: the Macmillan diary, written three days before the crash. Documented, too, is the pressure for action: Tom Bower, the biographer of MI6 chief Sir Dick White, records that White – who resisted American talk of assassinating Castro and Sukarno, insisting his officers were not “freelance angels of justice” – was pressed by Macmillan and by CIA officers to “embark on more wet jobs to defeat communist subversion”.12

In intelligence and espionage jargon, a “wet job” or “wet work” refers to an assassination or killing carried out by a state or its agents. Bower goes silent on whether the pressure succeeded; the archive that would tell us is closed. Add opportunity – a colonial airfield, an unpoliced night sky, mercenary pilots across the Katangese border – and afterwards the conduct of a state with something to hide: the dilatory search, the dismissive inquiry, the withheld files.

According to the 2012 Sedley inquiry into the Hammarskjöld crash, in 1968 the Telegraph’s correspondent, Ian Colvin, wrote that at 9.00 in the morning he had flown over the crash site in a chartered small aircraft and seen “police already moving about the clearing among the grey ash of the wreckage”. Col. Don Gaylor, the US air attaché ordered to Ndola from Pretoria, wrote in his memoirs that he left in his own aircraft at “the crack of dawn” and eventually found the crash site. He contacted the radio tower. And yet it took another nine hours for the wreckage to be officially found.

The testimony of Lemonson Mpinganjira and Steven Chisanga, two charcoal burners who watched the night sky from behind an ant-hill in the Ndola West Forest Reserve, has never been satisfactorily explained.

Roughly three-quarters of an hour after they heard Hammarskjöld’s DC-6 go down, two grey Land Rovers – “definitely not Police Land-Rovers, because these are painted black” – raced along the bush track towards the crash site, each carrying two white men visible by the vehicles’ interior lights. Ten to fifteen minutes later came a sudden, huge burst of flames, and the Land Rovers sped back the way they had come.

“I have no doubt,” Mpinganjira told the UN Commission, “that they had something to do with increasing the flames.” Set beside the strangest forensic fact of the whole affair – that Hammarskjöld’s body alone bore no burns, while fourteen of his fifteen companions were charred almost beyond recognition in a blaze that consumed three-quarters of the fuselage – the testimony invites a dark inference: that the men in the Land Rovers reached the wreck hours before the official search party, pulled the Secretary-General’s body clear, and then fired the remains of the aircraft, whether by puncturing the fuel tanks, by gunfire, or with petrol they had brought with them, destroying whatever evidence the wreckage might have held.

It cannot be proven. But it would explain, as the official inquiries never did, both the unburned body and the fire that grew fiercer long after the crash.

Readers may draw their own conclusions. Sixty-five years on, Britain is still keeping them from being drawn on evidence.

The pattern, and the alibi

Three theatres, one pattern. A nationalist or non-aligned figure threatens British control of a resource – Iranian oil, the Canal, Katangese copper. London concludes early and privately that removal, not compromise, is the object, while negotiating in elaborate public good faith. The threat is translated into Cold War vocabulary, partly to recruit Washington, partly because anti-communism was the only language in which a fading empire could describe its losses respectably. And when the story finally surfaces, it surfaces as an American story.

Why do the British escape the blame the Americans attract? Not because they did less, but because they confess less. The CIA leaks, testifies before Congress, publishes its “family jewels”, loses its secret histories to the New York Times. MI6 did not officially exist until 1994; its records are exempt from freedom-of-information laws; its mistakes never become mistakes because they are never examined. Lucas and Morey, surveying the Egyptian fiasco, describe a culture of impunity:

“MI6 was beyond the supervision and control of the Foreign Office, the Cabinet, and probably even the Prime Minister. Their plans, buttressed by little more than the temperamental outbursts of Eden and the conniving of his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Harold Macmillan, would be the primary cause of the disastrous British assault upon Egypt,” they write.

The impunity is structural: a service that admits nothing cannot be blamed for anything, and the blame flows downhill to the ally that admits everything. The British deep state’s greatest operational asset has always been the assumption that Britain doesn’t have one.

The Americans paid for the arrangement, and are paying still. Abrahamian’s last word on Iran is blowback: the United States inherited the colonial taint that had been Britain’s, secular nationalism was destroyed as a force in Iranian politics, and the road was cleared for Khomeini. Ali Khamenei, then a young cleric, drew the lesson aloud in 1981: “We are not liberals, like Allende and Mossadeq, whom the CIA can snuff out.”

In the Congo, what died at Ndola was the idea of an international order with the independence to police the strong; no Secretary-General since has dared what Hammarskjöld dared.

Macmillan lived into honoured old age, the grand uncle of British politics, and was asked about Ndola by nobody who mattered. The files that would settle Tehran, Cairo and Ndola alike sit in the same closed archive, under the same Act. Britain fought a twenty-year rearguard action against decolonisation, billed it to the public as anti-communism, and billed it to history as American. The empire is gone; its alibi is still working.■

NOTES

That world is gone. Walk into a Swedish supermarket today and the headline placards by the till for the Aftonbladet and Expressen are lined with the same headline you saw yesterday and will see tomorrow: “Putin is dying”, “Putin has cancer”, the Russians are scavenging washing machines for microchips, the “tide has turned”. Roughly a thousand of these things have now been devoted to one man since the “Special Military Operation” began. Near where I live, the country road between Gothenburg and Stockholm is being widened to NATO standard so that military vehicles may travel from the Atlantic port to the capital. The chief of the Swedish army warns that Russia may seize Gotland any day now. Rubio comes to Helsingborg and calls Sweden America’s best ally. New deals are struck. At the Såtenäs airbase, the jets take off and land all day.

Two small nations, Sweden and Finland – which spent much of the twentieth century perfecting the art of staying out of other people’s conflicts – have, in the space of two years, effectively handed their foreign policy to Washington. To understand how reckless that is, you have to understand what they threw away.

The muscular peace

The word for it was coined as an insult. Franz Josef Strauss minted ‘Finlandisation’ in the 1970s and the American neoconservatives picked it up with relish – a byword for a small country crawling before a great one. The reality was almost the opposite. Finlandisation, properly understood, was not lying down. It was a hard, unsentimental, and rather brave policy of accommodation, conducted from strength.

Its finest exponent was Max Jakobson, Finland’s most gifted diplomat of the era and very nearly its first UN Secretary-General–blocked in 1971 not by the West but, with some irony, by the Soviets, who could not abide a bourgeois conservative in the chair. Jakobson wrote the best defence of accommodation that anyone has written, and his books have been allowed to fall out of print, which tells you something about which arguments a wartime culture wishes to forget. (My previous essay here on Substack is devoted to his works.)

Jakobson’s case was never that Finland should grovel to survive. It was that Finland could keep its free press, its prosperity, its Lutheran faith, and its Western consumer lifestyle precisely by taking the Russians seriously instead of laughing at them. The Finns refused Marshall aid because Moscow disliked it. They paid their reparations to the last rouble. They signed their treaty of friendship. And in return, they were left alone.

The decisive test came in 1948, the same year the communists seized Czechoslovakia. The Finnish communists planned their own coup; the prime minister, Juho Kusti Paasikivi – the very man who had negotiated with Stalin in 1939 and counselled accepting the least bad deal – simply put it down. And Moscow did nothing. It did not protest, did not intervene, did not care. This is the heart of the matter, and it overturns half the theology of the Cold War. Stalin was not, in the Finnish case, interested in spreading the ideology. He wanted a regime on his border that would not be used as a corridor for an attack on Leningrad. Give him that security and he was indifferent to the form of rule. A conservative, capitalist, church-going Finland suited him perfectly, so long as it could be relied upon.

The realist tradition – the one to which I belong – needs this history badly, because it is the cleanest available proof that security, not ideology, drove the men in the Kremlin. The Finns grasped it and built a whole statecraft upon it. Urho Kekkonen ran the country for a quarter of a century, met the KGB resident in the sauna once a week, and went rafting in Siberia with Kosygin to settle whatever needed settling. Wags called his Finland ‘Kekkoslovakia’ – a country with a free press in everything but its coverage of Russia. The joke flattered the comparison. You could buy the same goods in Helsinki as in Copenhagen or London, watch the same TV programmes, and travel where you pleased. The Russian threat was, if anything, talked up at home, because it was useful to Kekkonen to be the one man who understood the Russian soul.

And the dividend was extraordinary. The Helsinki Accords of 1975 – which smuggled human rights into the language of East–West relations and gave the dissidents their charter, used by Václav Havel and others – were brokered by Finnish diplomats trusted by both sides. It is not Reagan and his spending that broke the moral backbone of the Soviet empire. It was, in no small part, the Finns. They were the indispensable interlocutors, neutral ground close enough to Leningrad that the Russians felt safe arriving there. They were trusted.

The Swedish disease

Sweden’s instinct ran the other way, and it ran deep. Call it the eastern addiction. The Vikings colonised the Russian river routes; the Rus took their name from the men of Roslagen, a region north of Stockholm. The early Swedish kings made Stockholm a mustering point for eastern crusades; the young state’s psychology was simple: conquer the East. Alexander Nevsky defeated the Swedes in 1240, two years before he saw off the Teutonic Knights, and the two enemies were near enough the same thing. Charles XII led the first of the three great invasions of Russia, before Napoleon and Hitler, and broke himself on it at Poltava in 1709. Poltava is to Sweden what Waterloo is to France – the end of something.

The addiction outlived the empire. In the First World War, the aristocracy itched to fight the Russians and reclaim Finland; common sense and a Social Democratic government held it back. In the Second, the Swedish navy was honeycombed with Nazi sympathisers, the general staff drew up bombing runs on Leningrad, and on Hitler’s fiftieth birthday in 1939, the nation’s top military officials visited him in Berlin. The entourage brought with them a statuette of Charles XII from a Swedish-German friendship association and a message. The statuette was a gift from “Swedish men and women who see in the German leader and People's Chancellor Adolf Hitler the saviour of Europe”, and held that Charles XII, in “his hard historical struggle, was animated by the same spirit” that they believed they had found in Hitler's “world-historical achievement for the founding of Greater Germany and the upholding of Europe”. 1

The meaning needed no caption. Here was one invader of Russia; there, perhaps, was the next one. The Social Democrat government held off the militarists’ pressure and ensured that Sweden did not fall back into its old ways. Neutrality held, the Jews were taken in, the iron ore flowed to Germany at a handsome profit, and Sweden emerged from the war richer than Switzerland, its industry intact and its reputation spotless. Had the militarists got their way, it would have ended on the losing side and been severely punished like the rest of the Axis.

The man who first broke the eastern addiction was a Frenchman. Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, Napoleon’s marshal, was recruited to the Swedish throne in 1810 by an aristocracy that wanted him to fight the Russians, and instead, he read his adopted countrymen better than they read themselves. He saw Napoleon would overreach, chose the winning side, and turned Sweden inward towards self-mastery, education, and industrialisation, rather than mastery over others. His dynasty sits on the throne still. The lesson of the Bernadottes is the lesson of all good Scandinavian diplomacy: the discipline to want less than you could grasp at.

The price of forgetting

Which brings us to Olof Palme, the Swedish Kennedy, shot dead in a Stockholm street in 1986. Palme came from precisely the aristocratic families that had funded the crusade against the Russians, and grew into their renegade.

For the Palmes, the crusade was not a distant inheritance but the family trade. Thanks to the Tsar’s habit of exiling Finnish nationalists, a lively traffic of émigrés passed through the Palme home – first the great timber villa at Djursholm, then the apartments of Östermalm. Exile Finns were a fixture of Stockholm after the turn of the century, “international yet ur-Finnish figures”, as Sigfrid Siwertz put it in his 1916 novel, “who reeked of tangled deals, liquor, strong tobacco, French novels and the Kalevala”.

Palme’s grandfather Sven ran the life-insurance house Thule, whose offices at Kungsträdgårdsgatan 14 served as a clearing-house for the Finland cause – it was said, only half in jest, that here was the true address of the Finnish foreign ministry. Rivalries within the family, over who should lead the movement and over an inheritance left by a death in 1907, did nothing to cool the cause.

And when the hour came in 1917–18, it was Sven who organised the brigade of Swedish volunteers that went to fight for Mannerheim’s Whites in the civil war. His son Olof, the prime minister’s uncle and namesake, dreamed aloud of reuniting Finland to the Swedish crown. He granted that the Finnish-speaking majority had no wish to become Swedish subjects again – “In every Finn”, he wrote, “there hides, despite centuries of cultivation, a barbarian, who still requires care and chastisement”– and concluded that this was the very reason to strike: “Finland wishes only to be freed from the claws of the Russian eagle. If Sweden intervenes, Sweden too shall have its reward.”2

Decades later, his nephew, the prime minister, well understood the Swedish disease, the anti-Russian mentality, the latent Swedish imperial instincts, and steered hard around it, pouring his countrymen’s idealism into Vietnam, the anti-Apartheid struggle, the non-aligned world – causes safely distant from his own country’s eastern border. For this, the military, the intelligence men, and a good many businessmen with their eyes on London judged him a traitor and a Soviet stooge. The assassination remains unsolved.3

Conclusion

The secret of Scandinavian diplomacy was never neutrality as a posture. It was the realist’s discipline: take your great neighbour’s security seriously, refuse the moral vanity that mistakes proximity for principle, and keep your own counsel. Bernadotte wrote the manual. The Finns under Paasikivi, Kekkonen and Max Jakobson embodied it. Palme died for a version of it.

Alas, tomorrow morning the placards by the supermarket till will carry the same headline they carried yesterday, and the day before that, and Sweden will believe a little more of it.

A country that once specialised in not being lied to has agreed to be lied to in chorus. IPSOS now finds Swedes the most willing of any Western nation to send their soldiers to Ukraine: the descendants of Bernadotte's prudence outpacing every other people in eagerness for someone else's war.4 The wisdom is not lost; it is mislaid, somewhere between the Charles XII statuette and Bernadotte's grave. One hopes it is found before the bill comes due.5

In the lexicon of the contemporary Atlantic foreign-policy class, no word carries more reflexive shame than “Finlandization.” It is reached for to describe craven compromise, to warn smaller nations against accommodating predatory neighbours. The word has become an epithet — a moral verdict masquerading as historical description.

Max Jakobson, the dean of Finnish diplomatic historians and Finland’s UN ambassador, saw what was happening before most others did. The label, he wrote, amounted to “a kind of character assassination through the use of the term ‘Finlandization’ to denote supine submission to Soviet domination.”ⁱ He returned to the charge in 1998, calling it “a form of collective character assassination.”ⁱⁱ The term had been launched by Franz-Josef Strauss as a slogan against Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik. “Finlandization never was addressed to Finland herself,” Jakobson wrote. “It is not a description of historical reality but a warning of the fate awaiting the nations of Western Europe if they were foolish enough to trust the Russians and lower their guard.”ⁱⁱⁱ

Jakobson belongs to that small category of small-state diplomats whose judgment outran their formal authority. Born in Vyborg in 1923 to a Finnish-Jewish family, he served as a young artillery officer on the Karelian Isthmus during the Continuation War 1941-1944 — a Jew in Finnish uniform while his country was co-belligerent with Nazi Germany, a paradox that left him permanently sceptical of ideological schemes that ignored facts on the ground. After the war he passed through the BBC’s Finnish service in London and emerged as President Kekkonen’s most candid adviser, one of the few permitted to disagree with the President to his face. The doctrine that outsiders christened Finlandization, and which Jakobson preferred to call neutrality, he did as much as anyone to articulate. His opening image in Finnish Neutrality — that to steer the rapids one must keep rowing, but not attempt to row upstream for long — was the Paasikivi-Kekkonen line compressed into a sentence.

In 1971, the Soviets vetoed his bid for Secretary-General of the United Nations, contradicting the claim that he was some kind of compromised friend of the Soviets. The post went to Kurt Waldheim. He spent his last years writing a three-volume reckoning with the twentieth century from a Nordic perspective, often sharper on the page than the men he had served.

What Finland Faced

To recover the merits of Finlandization, one must recover the Finnish position in 1944. Karelia was gone, with 400,000 refugees resettled in a country of fewer than four million. A Soviet naval base sat at Porkkala, twenty kilometres from Helsinki. The Allied Control Commission, dominated by Andrei Zhdanov, watched from the Hotel Torni. The Baltic republics had been digested entire; Czechoslovakia would go down in 1948, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia again in 1968. That Finland alone on the Soviet rim preserved parliamentary government, a free press, private property, and an open border with the West is not an accident. It is the fruit of policy. Jakobson stated the achievement with a precision the foreign-policy class still has not equalled: “In one country only have post-war political developments conformed, in a manner acceptable to both sides, to the pattern envisaged at Yalta. Finland has consistently pursued a policy that has satisfied the Soviet craving for security. Finland has also maintained her independence and parliamentary democracy in the sense that the Western Powers understood these terms.”^iv

The point about Yalta is usually missed. Roosevelt and Churchill recognised that the Soviet Union, which played the greatest military role in defeating Nazism, with staggering sacrifices of manpower, was entitled, in the name of its security, to make sure governments installed along Russia’s borders would be “friendly”; Stalin agreed they must be “independent and democratic.” Within weeks the misunderstanding behind these words became visible. To the West, Yalta meant free elections; to Moscow it meant security. Stalin’s interest along his borders was the corridor across which two German invasions had come, not communism as such. Where security and communism were consistent — across Eastern Europe — they were imposed together. Where they were in tension — in Finland — security prevailed and ideology bent. “The Yalta agreement reflected the realities of the Finnish situation, rather than those prevailing in the rest of Eastern and Central Europe.”^v What the West called the Yalta betrayal in Warsaw and Prague was, in Helsinki, simply the deal — kept by both parties.

The Paasikivi Doctrine

The Finnish architect was Juho Kusti Paasikivi: banker, former Conservative chairman, Moscow negotiator in 1939, president from 1946. Jakobson summarises the doctrine in a sentence that ought to be carved over the door of every realist foreign ministry: “No one in Finland disputed the Paasikivi doctrine, according to which the best defence of Finnish independence was to convince Moscow of Finland’s reliability in matters of security.”^vi Not posture. Reliability. Trust earned in the only currency that mattered, paid in restraint.

Under Kekkonen the doctrine acquired its name. “Having led his people to the promised land of neutrality Paasikivi retired from the presidency in March 1956 and died before the end of the year at the age of 86. His successor Urho Kekkonen pledged himself to continue Paasikivi’s policy. The phrase ‘Paasikivi-Kekkonen line’ was coined to reassure the Soviet leaders.”^vii Jakobson was unsentimental about the price: “Moscow wants to deal with the man who can deliver his end of the bargain.”^viii So does any great power. Moralist diplomacy refuses to deliver, then is surprised by the consequences.

The policy refused an abstract principle no liberal hawk could now bring himself to write. “National policy cannot be a pursuit of abstract principle: ‘Let justice be done, though the world perish,’ cannot serve as guideline for political leadership in a world ruled by power.”^ix What replaced abstract principle was Finnish agency: “At all times the decision as to what course to follow has been taken by the Finns themselves, rather than imposed upon them by a foreign power.”^x

How Trust Was Earned

Between 1944 and 1948 the doctrine accumulated four concrete demonstrations of Finnish reliability, and Jakobson is unambiguous about the priority Moscow assigned to each.

First, the war reparations. Finland was, in his words, “probably the only country in modern history that has voluntarily paid its war reparations in full,” and on schedule.^xi Three hundred million dollars at 1938 valuations, delivered in steel and shipbuilding, completed by 1952 — a multi-year demonstration that the Finns kept contracts. No Czech or Polish equivalent existed.

Second, the war-crimes trials of 1946. Under a retroactive law repugnant to its own judges, Finland convicted eight wartime political leaders, including former President Risto Ryti, for the alliance with Germany. Jakobson calls this “a less tangible, but in a sense an even more painful act of appeasement.”^xii It mattered because it demonstrated that Finland would, when required, sacrifice its own legal principles to satisfy Soviet anxieties — and do so through Finnish courts. None of the eight was dishonoured at home; they all served drastically shortened sentences. Linkomies became rector of Helsinki University; Ryti was given a state funeral by Kekkonen in 1956. The sacrifice was strategic and known to be so.

Third, the resettlement of four hundred thousand Karelian refugees in six to eight years, accomplished without their becoming a revanchist political force. A potentially explosive issue was simply taken off the bilateral agenda.

Fourth, and Jakobson is unambiguous that this was the single most decisive act, the refusal of the Marshall Plan in July 1947. Finland declined the American invitation “so as to avoid arousing Soviet suspicions.” The cost was substantial. So was the benefit. “It was a decision that cost the country many millions of dollars, but probably did more than anything else to reinforce the credibility of Paasikivi’s policy in the eyes of the Soviet leaders. The Marshall Plan was designed to save Europe from Communism, but Finland may have saved herself from Communism by saying no to the Marshall Plan.”^xiii

By the end of 1947 the architecture was visible to Moscow: reparations paid, trials held, refugees settled, Marshall Plan declined. “There can be no doubt,” Jakobson writes, “that the Finnish performance… impressed the men in the Kremlin.”^xiv

April 1948 and the Paradox of Trust

The capstone came in April 1948. Stalin’s letter of 22 February proposed a mutual-assistance treaty modelled on the pacts Moscow had just signed with Hungary and Romania. Paasikivi spent five weeks consulting parliament before responding — “an assertion of Finnish independence and a demonstration of the democratic process.”^xv The treaty signed on 6 April was drafted to terms Paasikivi himself had set: Finland’s commitment confined to the defence of her own territory; Soviet assistance only at Finnish request; no political consultations; an explicit preamble recognising “Finland’s desire to stay outside the conflicts of interest between the great powers” — the kernel of the future neutrality.

At precisely this moment rumours circulated of a Communist plan to seize power, modelled on the Czechoslovak coup eight weeks earlier; the Communist-controlled Interior Ministry under Yrjö Leino had been stocking the police with Communists since 1945. Paasikivi ordered countermeasures. Troops stood by; the police were alerted; a Finnish Navy gunboat was anchored in Helsinki harbour opposite the Presidential Palace. No coup was in fact attempted, and Jakobson is careful: “It is today impossible to say with certainty whether this was because of the precautions taken or because no coup had even been planned.”^xvi The political consequence is not in doubt. In the July elections the Communist front was decisively defeated and the Communists excluded from the next government. Moscow did not react.

Here is the paradox at the heart of Jakobson’s reading: “Paradoxically his anti-Communist stand at home gained him support for his foreign policy of friendship with the Soviet Union. Thus the events of April 1948 were a double triumph for President Paasikivi.”^xvii Stalin tolerated the crackdown because the crackdown did not impinge on Stalin’s actual interest. Communist participation in Finnish government had been a means to security — useful while Stalin doubted that bourgeois Finland could deliver it. By April 1948 Paasikivi had been demonstrating for three years that bourgeois Finland would deliver it. Once that was demonstrated, the Communists became dispensable.

This is the part of the Finnish story the moralisers cannot accommodate. Trust with great powers is earned by sacrifices that are visible and costly — and once earned, it permits things rhetoric would never have permitted. Paasikivi could exclude the Communists in 1948 precisely because he had paid the reparations, held the trials, declined the Marshall Plan, and signed the treaty on his own terms. The order of operations was not negotiable.

Why Helsinki and Not Prague

The Czech contrast is exact and uncomfortable. Beneš’s coalition had pursued, until the summer of 1947, a strategy not unlike Paasikivi’s: Slavophile foreign-policy goodwill toward Moscow combined with the preservation of parliamentary democracy at home. Then came the Marshall Plan invitation. The Czech cabinet first accepted, then was summoned to Moscow and forced to retract under direct Soviet pressure. Jakobson’s verdict on the consequence is the sharpest single paragraph in Finnish Neutrality:

“It is of course futile to speculate how the Soviet Union might have reacted had Finland decided to choose the Marshall Plan. But the fate of Czechoslovakia may be a case in point. The Czech Government first announced its acceptance of the American invitation, and although it was quickly withdrawn as a result of Soviet pressure, the incident may well have fatally impaired the ability of the existing democratic regime to convince Stalin that Czechoslovakia would not once again turn against the Soviet Union. Six months later that regime was overthrown.”^xviii

Could the Czechs have replicated the Finnish strategy had they refused the Marshall Plan from the outset? Jakobson does not commit; “may well have fatally impaired” is not “would have.” But the whole architecture of his argument is that credibility with Moscow, once forfeited, is recoverable only at enormous cost — and that one good-faith acceptance was, in Stalin’s calculus, evidence that the Czech political class could not be relied upon when the choice came. Beneš had no architecture of demonstrated reliability to fall back on: he had not paid war reparations, because he was a victim, not a loser; he had not prosecuted his own wartime cabinet, for the same reason; he accepted the Marshall Plan, then withdrew under pressure. When the Czech Communists moved in February 1948, his credit in Moscow was already exhausted.

For Poland the answer is harder still. Polish geography was strictly worse — Poland was the corridor itself, not the flank — and the political class capable of a Finnish-style deal had been hollowed out by Katyn, the deliberate Soviet abandonment of the Warsaw Uprising, and the Lublin Committee that pre-empted Yalta. Outside Helsinki only Beneš’s circle had the materials to attempt the Finnish option, and they bungled the test.

The point is not that Finnish prudence was available because the Czechs were less brave. They were, in some respects, braver. It was available because the Finnish political class grasped earlier and at higher cost than any other state on the Soviet rim that geography is the first fact of foreign policy, and that bargains with great powers are kept by refusing Western inducements at the moment they would damage the bargain. That is the lesson the Atlantic foreign-policy class still cannot teach itself, because to teach it would be to admit that the Marshall Plan, the brightest deed of post-war American statesmanship, was also — in the one country where the choice was sharpest — the proximate cause of a communist coup.

The Metternich Precedent

Jakobson’s most striking move — and the one most foreign to the present Atlantic mind — was to set the Finnish settlement inside the older European tradition of statesmanship in defeat. He turned to Henry Kissinger’s A World Restored, the 1957 study of post-Napoleonic diplomacy, and its portrait of Klemens von Metternich at two distinct moments of Austrian history.

Metternich became Austrian Foreign Minister in October 1809, three months after Napoleon had broken the Habsburg empire at Wagram. The Peace of Schönbrunn cost Austria some three and a half million subjects and vast tracts of Galicia, Salzburg, and the Illyrian Provinces. From this position — defeated, dismembered, ringed by French client states — Metternich constructed a policy of apparent collaboration with the new master of Europe that astonished and disgusted patriots across the continent. He arranged the marriage of the Archduchess Marie-Louise to the Corsican upstart in 1810. He kept Austria nominally neutral, then nominally allied with France, through the disastrous Russian campaign of 1812. He was, in the eyes of every honest Habsburg loyalist, a dupe.

He was not a dupe. He was waiting. When Napoleon’s Grande Armée returned broken from Moscow in 1813, Metternich switched: Austria joined the Sixth Coalition, fought at Leipzig, and marched on Paris. The pretence had been dropped at the precise moment circumstances permitted, not a day earlier. The years of acquiescence had bought time to rearm and the coherence to enter the war’s final phase on Austrian terms rather than as a vassal or corpse.

This is the first lesson, the one most directly applicable to Finland between 1944 and 1989: accommodation with a hegemon, undertaken without illusion, is not surrender. The genuine collaborationist believes the hegemon is right and assents. The Metternichian statesman knows the hegemon is wrong and waits.

A second moment in Metternich’s career is equally instructive, and too often forgotten in the popular memory of conservatism. At the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15, Austria was no longer the defeated power but the architect of the post-war settlement. Now Prussia and Russia wanted to punish France — to dismember it, occupy it indefinitely, extract maximum reparations. Metternich and Castlereagh refused. They insisted on a restored Bourbon France with its 1792 boundaries largely intact, modest indemnities, and full readmission to the Concert of Europe within a handful of years. The principle was identical to that of 1809, applied in reverse: a durable peace requires mildness toward the loser, just as a durable survival requires patience with the winner. Equilibrium, not victory, is the object of intelligent statesmanship.

The Vienna settlement kept the general peace of Europe for nearly a century. France was contained without being humiliated; restoration without revenge proved the most stable formula. It worked because its architects understood that the temptation to maximise immediate gain is the source of the next war. Versailles in 1919 — the punitive settlement Metternich would have refused — produced the war Metternich would have foreseen.

This is the tradition Jakobson invokes by placing Paasikivi alongside Metternich. Both were men formed by defeat — Metternich by 1809, Paasikivi by 1944 — who refused to read defeat as a permanent verdict, and who used the breathing space accommodation bought to preserve the institutions and eventual diplomatic agency of their nations. The principle is not appeasement and not subservience: it is the recognition that the dignity of a defeated nation lies in its long preservation, not in the satisfying gesture that destroys it.

The operative passage in Kissinger, which Jakobson quoted to define what Paasikivi was doing, runs as follows:

“It is a policy which places a peculiar strain on the domestic principles of obligation, for it can never be legitimised by its real motives. Its success depends on its appearance of sincerity, on the ability, as Metternich once said, of seeming the dupe without being it… In such periods the knave and the hero, the traitor and the statesman are distinguished, not by their acts, but by their motives… Collaboration can be carried out successfully only by a social organism of great cohesiveness and high morale.”^xix

The last sentence sums it up, and is what the Atlantic critique of Finlandization has never grasped. The strategy of seeming the dupe without being one cannot be conducted by a country internally divided about whether it is being a dupe. The whole policy depends on a tacit national agreement that the pretence is just a pretence — that the leadership which bows in public is not betraying in private, and that the citizen who keeps silent is not assenting in the heart. In such a country everyone knows the truth, and everyone knows that everyone else knows. The President can sauna with the KGB station chief on Friday and be understood by the Helsinki shopkeeper on Saturday morning as defending Finland, not selling it out. The leader who looks like an idiot to an American foreign correspondent is a hero to his countrymen, and both interpretations are accurate at their respective levels. The hero is producing the appearance of the idiot on purpose.

The Western Misreading

The Western critique focused on self-censorship and the “policy of silence.” Jakobson rejected the diagnosis: “Finland’s ‘policy of silence’ was believed to reveal a limitation of sovereignty, an abdication from the pursuit of the national interest. It was, of course, the very opposite: an expression of the “sacro egoismo” of the small nation, a rejection of the claims of ideological solidarity. By refraining from open criticism of Soviet violations of international law or human rights, the Finnish government sought to protect the human rights of Finnish citizens and defend the integrity of the Finnish state.”^xx Sovereignty exercised for one’s own people, not performed for distant observers — this is what realism in a small country sounds like.

The “decibel test”, Jakobson called it: the louder a country condemned Moscow, the more independent the Atlantic press judged it to be.^xxi Hungary in 1956 passed the test handsomely. They paid in deportations, executions, and decades of after-effects. Finland failed it, on purpose, and kept its parliament, press, army, currency, and language. Jakobson was not blind to the costs: “It would be foolish to claim that the Finnish performance over the past decades has been flawless… But the validity of a political concept is not nullified by human failing in its execution.”^xxii

What Was Bought

What the discipline bought, measured against the alternatives on the Soviet rim, is not in dispute. Finland kept its democracy — free elections from 1944 to 1991, governments rising and falling on the floor of the Eduskunta. It kept its flourishing capitalist economy: bilateral clearing trade with Moscow built shipyards, ice-breakers, and machine tools that after 1991 redeployed to the world market and produced Nokia. It kept its sovereignty: no Soviet soldier was stationed on Finnish soil after Khrushchev returned Porkkala in 1956 — the only such instance in the history of the Soviet empire. It kept its place in Europe: the Nordic Council, EFTA, the OECD, and finally the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, a Finnish diplomatic project and the foundation of the human-rights pressure that helped erode Soviet legitimacy from within. Jakobson’s verdict, written in 1968, has not been improved upon: “Today Finland is no longer the tragic hero of the Western world — a nation, as a British journalist once put it, ‘much admired, often pitied, never envied’. There is today perhaps not so much to admire. But there is no cause for pity. And for some peoples, there may be something to envy.”^xxiii

The Containment Architect Endorses

There is a small detail in the bibliographic record of Jakobson’s last English book that the Atlantic foreign-policy class has done its best to overlook. Finland in the New Europe appeared in April 1998, published by Praeger in association with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and it carried a foreword by George Kennan. Kennan was then 94. He had spent the preceding 14 months making, in print and in person, the most sustained public dissent of his late career: that the eastward enlargement of NATO would be, as he put it in the New York Times of 5 February 1997, “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.”^xxiv He composed the Jakobson foreword that April; the Senate ratified the first wave of enlargement on the 30th of the same month, 80 votes to 19. The architect of containment used the closing weeks of the argument he was visibly losing in Washington to put his name to the work of a small-state realist who had spent a career making, from the other end of the old front line, an adjacent case.

The endorsement is the more striking for what it does not do. Kennan does not flatter; he does not paper over Finland’s peculiarity; he does not claim that the Finnish case maps tidily onto the American one. He observes, drily, that Finland is “a relatively small country” whose population is “roughly that of the state of Massachusetts” and which has “remained a relatively inconspicuous object on the horizons of international life.” What Kennan does instead is to argue a methodological point that runs against the entire grain of the Washington of 1998. Finland is instructive, he writes, “precisely because Finland’s life continues to be played out on a smaller, more remote, and simpler historical stage,” with the consequence that “its problems stand out, when perceived from our distance, with a vividness and starkness often obscured when the same problems emerge among all the confusion and cacophony of our own complicated lives.”^xxv The small country is the laboratory, not the curiosity. Its lessons are not exotic but clarifying: the same questions that haunt the great powers, with the rhetorical fog of great-power vanity stripped away.

Kennan then poses two questions of Finland that are unmistakably questions of the West. How, he asks, was “a deep-seated and traditional policy of neutrality to be reconciled with the movement toward European unity and membership in any of the individual international associations — NATO, the European Union, the Economic and Monetary Union, et cetera” — given that “to join any of these organizations could of course be seen as a means of associating others in Finland’s security problems”? And: would not membership “imply an impairment of the complete neutrality to which those very same Finns have traditionally been, and remain today, passionately attached”? The questions are framed as Finnish; the audience is American. Kennan ends the foreword with the operative concession: “It is, as will readily be seen, not for Finland alone that questions of this nature are now posing problems.”

This is not the language of a man endorsing a parochial monograph. It is the language of a man passing arms. Kennan had spent half a century arguing that containment, properly understood, was about the patient cultivation of equilibrium with a great rival, not the moral crusade his successors had made of it. Jakobson had spent half a century arguing that the same principle, scaled to a small country on the same rival’s border, was the only available form of national survival worth the name. Both men, in April 1998, were watching Washington abandon the principle on the grounds that, with the Soviet Union gone, prudence was no longer required. Kennan’s foreword is a quiet record of his refusal to assent. ■

i Max Jakobson, Finland: Myth and Reality (Helsinki: Otava, 1987), 9.

ii Max Jakobson, Finland in the New Europe (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1998), 3.

iii Jakobson, Myth and Reality, 121.

iv Max Jakobson, Finnish Neutrality: A Study of Finnish Foreign Policy since the Second World War (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969), 109.

v Jakobson, Finnish Neutrality, 109–110.

vi Jakobson, Myth and Reality, 111.

vii Jakobson, Myth and Reality, 107.

viii Jakobson, Myth and Reality, 108.

ix Jakobson, Myth and Reality, 110.

x Jakobson, Myth and Reality, 110.

xi Jakobson, Myth and Reality, 61.

xii Jakobson, Myth and Reality, 61.

xiii Jakobson, Myth and Reality, 61.

xiv Jakobson, Myth and Reality, 62.

xv Jakobson, Finnish Neutrality, 39.

xvi Jakobson, Finnish Neutrality, 44.

xvii Jakobson, Finnish Neutrality, 44.

xviii Jakobson, Finnish Neutrality, 60.

xix Henry Kissinger, A World Restored, quoted in Jakobson, Myth and Reality, 111, and again at Finland in the New Europe, 85–86.

xx Jakobson, Finland in the New Europe, 85.

xxi Jakobson, Myth and Reality, 120; the same formulation appears in Finland in the New Europe, 84.

xxii Jakobson, Myth and Reality, 123.

xxiii Jakobson, Finnish Neutrality, 110.

xxiv Jakobson, Myth and Reality, 122.

xxv George F. Kennan, “A Fateful Error,” New York Times, 5 February 1997, A23.

In the established Western imagination, the Winter War of 1939–1940 occupies an honoured place as a moral fable: the small, plucky democracy resisting a totalitarian colossus, vindicated by skis, sniper rifles, and superior pluck. Today, with Kiev exhausted and Western capitals scouring history for usable analogies, the Finnish example is invoked with the regularity of a metronome. Resist Russia, the moral of the story runs, and the bear retreats.

The trouble is that Finland did not win the Winter War. It lost. It then lost the Continuation War comprehensively. And it was the wisdom Helsinki acquired after both defeats — not the heroism of 1939 — that built the prosperous Nordic democracy the West now claims as its own success story.

Sweden’s Eastern Myths

Some of the biggest mythmaking about the Winter War comes from Finland’s neighbour, Sweden, which, along with Finland, joined NATO after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Some myth-busting is in order: Sweden was for centuries the upstart imperial power of the North, an ambitious and aggressive state that built itself by seizing territory from neighbours and treating its peripheries — Sami country, Lapland — as extraction colonies. Finnish-speakers were the grunts who fought Swedish wars against Denmark and Russia; the Finnish elite hid behind Swedish surnames well into the nineteenth century.

Viking appetite

Wars between Sweden and Russia have run in both directions across many centuries. Both sides have sinned and been sinned against. But there has been, in Swedish strategic culture from the Vikings onward, a persistent sense that Russia is a space available for Swedish expansion. Swedes founded a fortress at the same location where Peter the Great later built Saint Petersburg. A huge shock came when Finland was lost in 1809. The conviction that a third of “their” territory was unjustly seized by the Tsars coloured the aristocracy and the officer corps for generations, and a ghost of it lingers in today’s Stockholm consensus on Ukraine.

It is one of history’s small ironies that Russia, not Sweden, gave Finland a real opportunity to develop as a nation. After 1809, the Grand Duchy of Finland enjoyed a constitution, parliamentary self-government, and access to the vast imperial market — privileges no other corner of the Tsar’s domain possessed. While Russia was undoubtedly autocratic, the Finnish literary language (as expressed in the Kalevala), Finnish art, Finnish national consciousness — all flourished under the first eight decades of Russian rule as they had not under Swedish rule.

Enter Paasikivi

Of all the figures in modern Finnish history, none was clearer-eyed than Juho Kusti Paasikivi, the bourgeois banker who served as chief negotiator with Stalin in October and November 1939, and who would later become president of the republic. His memoirs — sober, mordant, and almost wholly absent from contemporary Western discussion — record a Stalin who was patient, almost professorial, sketching maps on the table, conceding minor points, but immovable on the strategic core.

Finnish fears were real and grounded. But Stalin’s reasoning, as Paasikivi understood it, was strategic rather than ideological. Leningrad lay 32 kilometres from the Finnish frontier. The 1918 Finnish republic had been backed by Germany; its Whites had crushed its Reds; its political class was openly anti-Bolshevik. From Moscow’s vantage, White Finland was a plausible conduit for German power, as it would prove to be in 1941. “We cannot move Leningrad,” Stalin remarked in effect, “so we must move the border.” In exchange for a strip of the Karelian Isthmus, a lease on Hanko as a naval base, and a handful of islands in the Gulf, Finland would receive twice as much territory elsewhere.

Paasikivi was no fellow traveller. He returned to Helsinki convinced that the terms, however painful, were intelligible and negotiable. He is unsparing on Foreign Minister Eljas Erkko, whom he portrays as having persuaded himself that Stalin was bluffing. The cabinet’s misreading of Soviet aggression, he concluded, cost Finland the Winter War. The terms imposed at Moscow in March 1940, after tens of thousands of Finnish dead that a small country could ill afford, were considerably worse than what had been on offer four months earlier.

The catastrophe of co-belligerency

Worse followed. In 1941 Helsinki tied itself to Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, joining the siege of Leningrad in pursuit of a Greater Finland. The result was something close to a million civilian dead in the besieged city, and a network of Finnish camps for Russian civilians and prisoners whose mortality rate, in materials published by the Finnish National Archives, has been documented as roughly 50% higher than that of corresponding German camps in the same region, as detailed by official Finnish historian Lars Westerlund1:

“The treatment of the POWs would, in a broad sense, include issues such as food
supply, accommodation, clothing, health care, and discipline, but it is my intention
in this survey to focus solely on the death rate among the POWs. In Norway this
was about 14%, among the POWs in German custody, in Finland it was perhaps
roughly 20% for POWs in German custody, and among Soviet POWs in Finnish
custody it was approximately 30%.”2

These are not Russian propaganda figures. They bear the imprimatur of a Finnish political class that, in an earlier and more honest era, was prepared to acknowledge them.

Abuses in the Finnish camps

Behind the statistical disparity lay a regime of systematic deprivation. Captured Red Army soldiers had their serviceable boots and uniforms stripped on arrival, re-dyed grey-green, and reissued to the Finnish Army; the prisoners themselves were left in old ragged uniforms which, in the words of the Danish war correspondent Holger Hörsholt Hansen, could not have been used at the front. In summer they were forbidden footwear altogether — a measure which, as Colonel Lauri Tiainen of the home army staff frankly explained, both saved leather and reduced the temptation to flee. Frostbite ran through the medical huts.

Rations were skimmed at every level of the camp hierarchy — by guards, command staff, and trustee prisoners alike — so that, as Westerlund puts it, a tiny fraction of the prisoners gained weight while most somehow stubbornly held on, and the rest starved. The euphemism “stomach disease” in the camp registers, he notes, almost certainly conceals widespread “diarrhea caused by hunger.” Men in this condition were then put to heavy labour, including, in plain breach of the Geneva Convention, the clearing of mines.

The violence was as routine as the privation. Westerlund’s chapter records that “dozens and dozens” of Soviet prisoners were killed in the camps without just cause and that “many thousands” were grossly or moderately maltreated; he reckons that many thousands of official floggings or beatings with truncheons preceded interrogations during the Continuation War — itself, he notes, a practice in conflict with the convention. The arithmetic is hard to soften.

The Finnish National Archives’ own tabulation records 1,019 Soviet prisoners of war and 19 civilians shot dead by camp guards and command staff: the equivalent of an entire battalion executed in detention.

Antti Kujala, in the same volume, reconstructs the everyday rationale: rear-area camp guards, he writes, “upheld discipline through unlawful executions,” and the typical victim was a recaptured fugitive or an insubordinate prisoner killed as a warning example to his fellows. A parallel German operation on the same peninsula — Organisation Todt’s labour pool of roughly a thousand Soviet POWs in northern Finland — lost 216 men to exhaustion and illness in the two months to early 1943, a mortality rate of nearly 22 per cent in a single winter, and was described by a Finnish liaison officer simply as a “dying crowd.” That this German figure was the lower number on the peninsula is itself the point.

When the Continuation War ended, Finland had again backed the wrong horse. And yet — and this is the part the moralisers rarely mention — Stalin let Finland off lightly. The 1940 territorial losses were confirmed, a strip connecting Finland to the Arctic Sea was lost, but a military base at a new location on the Finnish coast, at Porkkala, was returned in 1956. No Soviet troops were stationed on Finnish soil after that. Finland kept its parliament, its press, its democracy, its place in the Western cultural and economic order. The country that had helped besiege Leningrad emerged with its sovereignty intact.

The merits of ‘Finlandization’

The decades that followed — the much-derided era of “Finlandization” — saw Finland become one of the wealthiest countries in Europe. There was censorship, certainly, and President Urho Kekkonen is said to have held weekly saunas with the KGB station chief. But Finnish democracy was real, Finnish culture was free, and Finnish industry profited handsomely from privileged access to the Soviet market. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Finnish unemployment surged precisely because the relationship had been so commercially valuable.

The narrative now ascendant in Stockholm and Helsinki — that Finland prevailed in the Winter War, that the outcome established lasting deterrence, that the alternative was slavery — inverts the historical record. Finland lost the Winter War and the Continuation War alike. It then prospered through a sober accommodation with the larger neighbour it could not defeat. Small countries adjust to large ones. Mexico and Canada do the same.

The Ukrainian comparison

The relevance to Ukraine is uncomfortable but unavoidable. The Minsk agreements, whatever their flaws, were considerably milder than what Stalin demanded of Finland in 1939. Had Kiev treated them as Paasikivi treated Stalin’s terms — as a strategic problem to be negotiated rather than a moral affront to be defied — the country might already have arrived at something like the profitable post-1945 Finnish settlement. Instead, encouraged by Western capitals enchanted by the Winter War myth, Ukraine fought, and is now contemplating losses that no negotiated settlement would ever have imposed.

Minsk Treaties

What Minsk actually demanded of Kiev was modest by any historical comparison. Minsk I, signed in Belarus in September 2014 by Ukraine, Germany, France and Russia, called for a ceasefire, a prisoner exchange, the withdrawal of heavy weapons, OSCE monitoring and a promise of “special status” and local elections for the Donbas. Minsk II, signed in February 2015 and endorsed unanimously by the UN Security Council in Resolution 2202 with Obama’s approval, elaborated on that autonomy and called on Kiev to amend its constitution to allow federalism for the eastern provinces and to protect the Russian language. As Scott Horton documents in Provoked, the Rada promptly passed a law making implementation impossible by inverting the sequence of obligations, while Berlin, Paris and Poroshenko himself would later admit that the Minsk process had served them chiefly as a stalling device, a way of buying Ukraine time to rearm rather than a framework to be honoured.3

Soviet terms

The terms imposed on Finland in 1944 — territorial cessions, a long lease on the Porkkala naval base, heavy reparations and a forced ban on its far-right organisations — were considerably steeper than what Minsk asked of Kiev. The difference is that Helsinki had a Paasikivi who could read the geopolitical balance and pay the bill, while Ukraine, encouraged by Washington and Brussels, treated a binding international framework as a tactical convenience to be discarded the moment the army was ready.

Paasikivi understood, in a way our own foreign-policy class no longer can, that prudence is not cowardice and that geography is not negotiable. Finland’s eventual flourishing was not built on the sniper rifles of 1939 but on the realism of 1944. It is the lesson the Atlantic security elite cannot bring itself to teach, because to teach it would be to acknowledge that the moralism of liberal hawkery has costs measured in cities, generations, and republics. The ghost of the old banker still has things to say. Whether anyone in Washington, Brussels, Helsinki or Stockholm is prepared to listen is another question entirely.

The Realist Review, edited by the estimable James Carden, has just published an article of mine which I wrote on Count Folke Bernadotte, the United Nations negotiator who was assassinated in 1948 by the Israelis for proposing a peace deal that would have allowed for an equitable distribution of land in Palestine and permitted the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians already driven out by Israeli actions to return. He was killed by the Lehi terrorist movement, headed by a future Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir. (Shamir was then in his thirties. He later served as Israel’s prime minister from 1983–84 and 1986–92.) But who stood behind Lehi? My article, which also examines Sweden’s weak response to the killers of its own statesmen, begins as follows:

Over the course of a single century, Sweden lost all four of its greatest international figures to assassination or state violence: Raoul Wallenberg, the diplomat who saved tens of thousands of Jews in Budapest; Folke Bernadotte, the first United Nations Mediator in Palestine; Dag Hammarskjöld, the UN Secretary-General; and Olof Palme, Cold War prime minister and voice for global peace and nuclear disarmament. In each case the trail points toward a foreign state actor. In each case Sweden looked away.

It seems strange when Sweden itself has been so peaceful. That none of the deaths was ever satisfactorily resolved says a great deal about how the Swedish state failed to follow through on the consequences of being a so-called moral superpower.

Read the rest here:

The Realist Review

The Price of Moral Superpower: Sweden, Israel, and the Assassination of Folke Bernadotte

Pelle Neroth Taylor is a British-Swedish journalist, film-maker, and political writer. The author of several books, his work has appeared in the Financial Times, the European, Africa Today, the Sunday Times, New Scientist, the Lancet, and the Economist. He is the co-host of the popular CapitalsUncovered podcast on YouTube…

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4 months ago · 8 likes · 1 comment · Pelle Taylor

Some years ago, when I served as the science and engineering columnist for one of Britain’s largest technology magazines, I wrote a series of pieces arguing that the consequences of Chernobyl had been systematically exaggerated, to the lasting detriment of civil nuclear power. The articles were well received.

They were also, I gradually came to understand, almost entirely useless. I was preaching to the converted: engineers who already inhabited a world of dose curves, fault trees, and ALARP principles.

At the same time I was filing for The Lancet, the United Kingdom’s premier medical journal, and attending its conferences. I remember watching a young health minister quake before a roomful of medical trade unionists (who were also working senior medical consultants) demanding higher salaries and ever more NHS spending — neither of which, decades on, has translated into the British public actually rising up in the European health outcome or mortality rankings.

Doctors lobby. Engineers explain. Forty years after Reactor No. 4 went up at twenty-three minutes past one on the morning of 26 April 1986, that asymmetry remains the most underappreciated reason why Europe has sleepwalked into its present energy predicament. We will be discussing this on the Capitals Uncovered podcast with Martin Sieff, myself and Hall Gardner. They are both more sceptical of nuclear power than I am.

A disaster, but a small one

The immediate facts of Chernobyl have been settled and uncontested for decades. Two workers were killed in the explosion itself; twenty-eight more plant workers and first responders died from acute radiation syndrome within three months. There were 15 fatal thyroid deaths among children and adolescents in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus. This is the most cited actually confirmed post-accident mortality figure. The Soviet youngsters near the contamination zone had drunk milk contaminated by radioactive iodine which had delivered substantial doses to their thyroid glands: fortunately it was a condition with a very high survival rate. Nearly 99% were successfully treated. Still, that leaves 15 deaths: the only confirmed deaths of the whole affair, beyond those 28 first responders and plant workers.

The official long-term projection, agreed in 2005 and 2006 by the joint Chernobyl Forum — eight United Nations agencies, including the IAEA and the World Health Organisation, working alongside the governments of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine — settled on roughly 4,000 possible eventual deaths among the most exposed populations. The WHO’s cancer arm, applying broader assumptions across the wider European region, allowed for up to 9,000 over a lifetime. These estimates remain the figures the working scientific consensus has converged upon.

But the signal is almost drowned out by the noise. The European generations alive in 1986 will, over their lifetimes, suffer cancer deaths numbering in the tens of millions, the overwhelming majority from diet, smoking, genetics, and ordinary background exposure. The Chernobyl contribution, estimated at roughly one death in ten thousand within that total, is a fraction that can never be isolated with epidemiological precision — it lives below the threshold of detection, a statistical inference rather than a measurable fact.

Outside the three most affected republics, lifetime average doses across Europe were estimated at about 1 millisievert. The natural global background dose is roughly 2.4 millisieverts a year. A child in Cornwall, sitting on the local granite, receives more radiation than a child in Lyon ever did from the plume.

Greenpeace, in its 2006 anniversary report, projected between 93,000 and 200,000 eventual deaths, with one estimate flirting with a million. The methodology rests on the linear no-threshold model — the convenient assumption that any dose, however vanishingly small, scales linearly to cancer risk — applied across hundreds of millions of people who received less radiation than a transatlantic flight delivers. The chairman of UNSCEAR, the UN’s standing body on radiation, called the report “full of unsubstantiated statements that have no support in scientific assessments.” Greenpeace has never withdrawn the figure.

The quiet defections

Far more interesting than the institutional environmentalists who held their line have been the thoughtful greens who broke from it. James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia hypothesis and as senior an ecological figure as the twentieth century produced, declared himself an active proponent of nuclear energy in 2004 and remained so until his death in 2022. “I am a Green,” he wrote, “and I entreat my friends in the movement to drop their wrongheaded objection to nuclear energy.” He was no industry consultant.

Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and one of the formative figures of American counterculture environmentalism, recanted his earlier opposition in his 2009 book Whole Earth Discipline, conceding only that he had promised, all along, to change his mind as needed. George Monbiot, The Guardian’s most prominent environmental columnist, used the Fukushima accident in 2011 — the very moment when greens worldwide were doubling down — to make the opposite move, observing that an old plant with inadequate safety features had been struck by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami and that, as far as anyone could tell, no one had received a lethal dose.

James Hansen, the NASA climate scientist whose 1988 Senate testimony all but launched the modern climate debate, has spent the last decade pleading with the environmental movement to abandon its anti-nuclear position. Mark Lynas, Michael Shellenberger, Jared Diamond, Gwyneth Cravens — the list of defectors lengthens each year.

While these very clever people have changed their minds, the inertia among the NGOs has remained very great. And we see the results in our power generation mix.

A fleet frozen in time

Nuclear’s share of global electricity generation peaked in 1996 at 17.5 per cent. By the IAEA’s (International Atomic Energy Agency) 2025 reckoning, the share has fallen to roughly 8.7 per cent — less than half its high-water mark. Absolute generation has held roughly flat for a quarter-century; what changed is that the rest of the world’s power supply grew while nuclear did not.

The numbers are sobering. As of mid-2024, 408 reactors were operating worldwide, thirty fewer than the 2002 peak. In 1990 the average age of the global fleet was 11.3 years. It now stands at 32. Of the 63 reactors under construction in 2025, more than half — 32 — are in China; only four countries are building at more than one site. Italy abandoned nuclear power eighteen months after Chernobyl and has spent the four decades since importing French nuclear electricity across the Alps, having outsourced its moral cleanliness without ever ceasing to consume the product. Lithuania, Kazakhstan, Taiwan, and Germany have followed.

The German lesson

Germany is the case that should haunt every European policymaker. In 2010 Chancellor Merkel had just extended the operating lives of Germany’s seventeen reactors. Three weeks before a difficult state election in Baden-Württemberg, where the Greens were threatening sixty unbroken years of CDU rule, the Fukushima accident occurred on the other side of the world. The Merkel government reversed itself, announced the Atomausstieg, and the Bundestag passed it with about eighty per cent support.

It must be said plainly: not one inland German reactor sits on a Pacific subduction zone. None of them faces a fourteen-metre tsunami. The decision was a domestic political reflex dressed in engineering vocabulary. And no one died from immediate radiation at Fukushima: the difference from Chernobyl is total, but the panic was the same.

The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), in its successive reports culminating in the 2020/2021 update, has consistently concluded that “no adverse health effects among Fukushima residents have been documented that are directly attributable to radiation exposure.” No member of the public received a dose sufficient to cause acute radiation syndrome. No worker died of acute radiation syndrome. One person died later of cancer. Didn’t matter. Germany panicked anyway.

The bill is now visible. In 2011, Germany’s nuclear fleet supplied roughly a quarter of its electricity. The last three reactors — Isar 2, Emsland, and Neckarwestheim 2 — were closed in April 2023, in the depths of the Russian gas crisis, while German industry was openly pleading for a stay of execution.

Instead, BASF — the world’s largest chemical concern — has closed ammonia, caprolactam, and toluene-diisocyanate units at Ludwigshafen, announced 2,600 European job cuts, and is sinking ten billion euros into a new complex at Zhanjiang in China. Volkswagen is considering moving Golf production to Mexico. The German chemical industry association now warns, in language an industrial federation does not use lightly, of a “structural collapse” of the industrial base. Thousands of chemical jobs have gone since 2022. German GDP contracted in both 2023 and, by some estimates, in 2024.

The cost of a borrowed panic

The accounting is uncomfortable. Chernobyl, by the working consensus, will have killed somewhere between four and nine thousand people among Europeans alive in 1986. The political and cultural response to it — the panic that metastasised into Fukushima panic, that issued in the German Energiewende — has plausibly killed more, once one counts the additional lung disease deaths from the coal that filled the gap left by shuttered reactors. The Soviet engineers who built an unstable graphite-moderated reactor without a Western-style containment building did one disaster’s worth of damage. Forty years of activism, working outwards from that single event, have arguably done rather more.

There is a point buried here, and it is not really about kilowatts. It is that prudent, technical, undemonstrative people — the engineers I once wrote for — lost a public argument they were factually winning, because they did not understand that politics is not adjudicated on facts. The activists understood this perfectly. They built institutions, captured ministries and policy-making, and shaped the assumptions of two generations. The price has been a deindustrialising Europe, a continent more dependent on imported American gas and Chinese supply chains than at any point since the start of the Ukraine and Iran wars, and a rising power in the East that is quietly building reactors while we close ours. Reactor No. 4 burnt for ten days. Its political afterlife has lasted forty years and is not finished yet.

A writer’s note before we begin: the conversation that prompted this piece is not from my own podcast. It was recorded last week on Larry Johnson’s Counter Currents, with the Tennessee attorney Robert Barnes as the guest. I listened twice, because what Barnes describes — if one-tenth of it is accurate — ought to rattle anyone still clinging to the five-dimensional-chess theory of this presidency.

Robert Barnes is not a hostile witness. A Yale graduate with a Wisconsin law degree, he has been a serious commentator on the populist right for years. His favourite book as a young teen was Trump’s Art of the Deal (and he supported Trump through his first term). He runs a civil-liberties shop — the 1776 Law Center — that represents, among others, the Amish farmers currently under siege from the federal behemoth. He is also, by his own account and by the evidence of his access, a friend of the Vice President. What he reports about the inner weather of this administration therefore has the weight of first-hand intelligence, filtered through a sympathetic but no longer credulous observer.

The portrait is of accelerating decline.

Barnes says the President has regressed since the autumn of last year in ways familiar to anyone who has watched an ageing parent lose the governors on his temper and the filter on his speech. White House staff, he reports, were told months ago to shield Trump from negative information — a bizarre protocol that Susie Wiles, the Chief of Staff, is said to have only recently reversed, after concluding that it was unwise to keep a man with the nuclear codes dimly aware of the world as it is. In the interim, Cabinet officials had been reduced to leaking unwelcome news to the New York Times, which the President still reads, because facing him directly invited one of his rages.

There is a clinical term for what Barnes describes: confabulation. It is the condition, familiar in dementia, of sincerely recounting things that never happened. The President, Barnes says, now genuinely believes he chose the current Pope, that Iran has been begging for mercy, and that American munitions obliterated Fordow, the Iranian underground enrichment facility. The messianic Easter imagery — which even the temperate Riley Gaines mildly criticised, earning an explosive presidential denunciation — came, Barnes suggests, from a circle of sycophants actively feeding the delusion. The old Art of the Deal balance of positive thinking tethered to worst-case preparation has dissolved. Only the positive thinking remains.

Vance, in this telling, is the one adult with both the standing and the nerve to push back. He took the lead on the Iran ceasefire, then watched the President rug-pull it mid-negotiation; he is now working a formula under which Tehran accepts permanent limits on enrichment while Washington lifts sanctions, repackaged for presidential consumption as “making Iran rich.” Barnes believes the Vice President is not running in 2028. He believes several of Vance’s senior staff have already quietly begun looking elsewhere. The goal, simply, is to keep the country, and the world, in one piece until January 2029.

The political forecast Barnes offers is biblical.

He cites internal polling showing Democrats leading the generic ballot by eleven or twelve points. Republicans, on present trends, lose their Senate seats in Maine, Alaska, Iowa, Ohio and North Carolina, and fight to hold Nebraska, Texas, Florida and South Carolina — where, he claims, a third of Republicans polled say they will not vote for Lindsey Graham in a general election. Nancy Mace has decamped to run for governor; Lauren Boebert, in Colorado, is struggling to survive. Even Whittier, California — Richard Nixon’s Quaker-country hometown — voted Democrat by twenty points in recent council races. The comparisons Barnes reaches for are 1946, 1966, 1974, 1994 and 2006: the tsunami midterms that broke governing coalitions for a generation. The anti-war base, the working-class Hispanic and black voters, and the young voters who gave Trump his popular-vote victory last November are, he says, in open revolt; a rumoured amnesty bill for seventeen million would finish off the remaining pillar of the coalition.

I do not vouch for every claim, and wonder sometimes if a Tennessee lawyer really does have a level of access that appears to exceed the Washington media’s, but what he says is definitely worth taking seriously.

Don Vandergriff (homepage here, books page here) took almost the opposite view on our podcast yesterday: a calmer reading of the President’s faculties, optimism about the Iran outcome, a belief that the administration will right itself.

Leaning on his good contacts in the US military, Vandergriff invites us to consider the following: the real Trump strategy is an energy chokehold, not a territorial one. The US has blockaded Iran, seized a Chinese-sourced weapons-materials ship, and Hegseth has just signed a defence pact with Indonesia to close the Strait of Malacca — the other Chinese oil chokepoint. Iran only has ten days to two weeks of oil storage, its wells can't be shut down, it has nowhere to put the crude, and it is bleeding $400–500 million a day. That, not bombing, is what will break Iran’s rulers.

Meanwhile the energy picture for the United States is encouraging: Venezuelan reserves, Alberta (which he notes has just voted on a secession amendment), US domestic production rivalling Saudi and Russia combined, plus heavy Trump investment in nuclear — all converging on control of the key oil flows. In Europe, we have much bigger energy problems thanks to Trump’s war. But that is our problem, and Trump was not elected to serve Europe’s interests.

A few shows earlier, Martin (co-host) and I questioned Trump’s mental faculties (in line with what Robert Barnes is saying), and perhaps I should say plainly why I let contradicting voices air their case in full. It is a general remark that underpins the philosophy of the show.

Partly it is self-protection. I could be wrong. My guest could be right. I would rather find that out in conversation than in the newspapers.

Partly it is respect — for the guest, who has thought things through and deserves to reach the end of his argument, and for the listener, who is better served by a complete train of reasoning than by the interruptions of a presenter pleased with the sound of his own objections. I would rather let a man finish speaking and let the audience judge.

Barnes may, in the end, be proved wrong. So may Vandergriff. But when a friend of the Vice President tells you that the President is King Lear somewhere in the third act, it is worth listening to what he has to say to the end. We live in uncertain times.

Pelle Neroth Taylor, the writer of this substack, is co-host of Capitals Uncovered.

Viktor Orbán has been defeated. Péter Magyar and his Tisza party, a formation that barely existed eighteen months ago, have swept into power.

Today’s show on Capitals Uncovered, “Budapest Falls”, talks about the elections on Sunday and we have one of the top experts on our podcast, George Szamuely, one of the sharpest minds writing on Hungarian politics and modern European history.

Szamuely argues this is not merely a change of government but a potentially fatal blow to the last serious centre of resistance inside the EU: resistance to mass migration, resistance to the militarisation of Europe for a long twilight struggle against Russia, resistance to Brussels itself.

Brussels, of course, knows this and the list of Eurocrats celebrating the fact of Orbán’s departure is a long one. In characteristic imperious language, Ursula von der Leyen talked about welcoming Hungary back to Europe. The mainstream European press was scarcely less gleeful. The Guardian managed to compare Orbán to Albert Speer and welcomed the “restoration of democracy”.

Well, one can disagree on that. We offer a different take. For what that loss truly means — for Hungary, for Europe, and for the prospect of peace on the continent — listen in to the latest show.

Szamuely’s portrait of Péter Magyar is withering. The new prime minister is a cipher, an empty suit with no record, no programme, and no interviews of substance — a leather-jacketed vessel filled with public relations and foreign money, better known until recently as the estranged husband of former justice minister Judit Varga than as a political figure in his own right. Juicy headlines have been circulating about their marriage. It may be an exaggeration what they say there but he doesn’t seem like a particularly nice guy, see link.

His campaign said almost nothing beyond attacking Orbán, and commentators claiming he is a nationalist of the right have no basis whatever for the assertion.

Our conversation with Szamuely traces how a man of Orbán’s twenty-year international standing could lose to such a novice. Szamuely points to the relentless financial pressure from Brussels, the collusion of multiple Western intelligence services interfering in the vote, and a slick public-relations operation that mobilised young women and first-time voters around empty slogans — crowds on election night chanting Ruszkik haza, “Russians go home,” in a country where the last Soviet soldier left thirty-five years ago and whose only current gift from Moscow is cheap energy.

Donald Trump, Szamuely argues, bears no small share of the responsibility. The cancelled Budapest summit, between Trump and Putin, for a grand European peace bargain, last September deflated Orbán at a crucial moment. Sanctions on the Russian oil majors that supply Hungary hammered the economy. The line of credit Orbán sought — the kind extended to President Javier Milei in Argentina — arrived only twenty-four hours before polls opened, far too late to shift votes. Trump’s unpopular strike on Iran undercut Orbán’s entire peace-leader brand in the final stretch. And JD Vance’s visit landed in a country where most voters could not have named the American vice president.

The broader European picture for European populism is bleak. Marine Le Pen is, as things stand, barred from running in 2027. Călin Georgescu’s Romanian victory was annulled on dubious pretexts and the man himself kept off the ballot on criminal charges. The AfD is cordoned off by Germany’s establishment cartel. The Dutch populist Geert Wilders was blocked from the premiership despite winning the most votes. Slovakia’s Robert Fico runs a country of only four million and faces his own election next year, with the full Brussels machinery certain to be brought against him. The nationalist-populist movements of Europe, to adapt a quote from Benjamin Franklin, seem destined to hang separately because they cannot figure out how to hang together — and even when they do reach office, they cannot get their hands on the levers of the deep state.

What comes next for Hungary is, in Szamuely’s reading, grim and predictable. Prosecutions of Orbán and the Fidesz leadership are almost certain. Migration quotas long refused will now be accepted, because the thirty-odd billion euros Magyar promised voters will not flow from Brussels until Hungary plays ball. The euro bid Magyar floated is, given Hungarian inflation and industrial weakness, closer to fantasy than policy. And most consequentially of all, the last powerful European voice for peace with Russia has been removed from the board just as the continent’s most important capitals accelerate their preparations for a long war.

Martin closes with an image borrowed from Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint: a character living in what he takes to be prosperous 1950s California, until — until there is a glitch in the Matrix, where the character realises he is living a staged existence, served by an army of extras and controlled by powerful forces who need him, and his apparently psychic abilities, to defeat the adversaries in a missile conflict. The utilisation of that psychic ability is dependent on him being calm and at ease in a domestic environment, reminding him of his real childhood. The real world outside is in a London Blitz-type state of constant anxiety from occasional nuclear missiles raining down from a rebel colony based on the moon. The revelation comes to him after seeing objects around him disappear and be replaced by labels bearing their names. He finds more slips — DOOR, FACTORY BUILDING, BOWL OF FLOWERS. Labels that are useful to the prop men moving objects around. (This idea of the main character living a staged existence is very similar in theme to the Truman Show, which was made into a Hollywood film. It was written by Andrew Niccol but inspired by Philip K. Dick’s work. )

Europe today, Martin suggests, is full of similar props, and when the prop men are moving things around, you see the labels on pieces of paper, “democracy,” “rule of law,” “free elections”, “Enemy of the European people: Orbán”. Realise this is just fake and not the real thing, just props to keep the population quiescent while the elites fight their conflict. Ukraine, after all, is supposed to be the democracy we are fighting for, and it has not held an election in two years. Nobody was able to vote for Ursula von der Leyen and the rest of her unelected European Commission, technocrats who believe they know best how to run the world. Hungary, meanwhile, was the “dictatorship” whose “dictator” conceded defeat when just forty per cent of the vote had been counted. It’s a fascinating comparison that Martin draws, and I’m going to explore it in more detail.

Check out our sober conversation about what Europe loses when its one genuinely independent head of government is removed — and who stands to gain. Orbán has been wheeled offstage, but the label “Enemy of the European people” remains in the prop master's hand. It will be pinned to someone else by morning. The only question is who.

Long before he occupied the Oval Office a second time, long before the bombs fell on Tehran, Trump had been talking about Iran with a fixation that bordered on the pathological. Scroll back forty years, and you will find the New York real estate mogul in television interviews naming Iran as the gravest threat facing the United States. He was thirty-three years old during the hostage crisis of 1979, and that formative trauma appears to have settled into his psyche like sediment. When he justified his recent strike on Iran, he reached instinctively for grievances from the 1970s and 1980s—as if the intervening decades had never quite resolved the original insult.

Whoever wished to manoeuvre Trump into this war understood his Achilles’ heel with surgical precision.

The many reasons for a strike

The conventional post-strike analysis has offered a tidy menu of explanations for why Trump ordered the attack.

There was the official pretext Trump himself offered—that Iran was on the verge of attacking the United States. This claim is worth pausing over. Trump’s Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has stated repeatedly, most recently last month, that Iran remains a considerable distance from possessing a functional nuclear weapon, let alone a delivery means to cross oceans. The imminent threat, as so often in American war-making, was not especially imminent.

But commentators have also spoken of the Israeli dimension: the administration’s calculation that without American conventional cover, Jerusalem would escalate toward nuclear use. In other words, that Netanyahu was saying: unless you go in with us, we will hammer Iran with tactical nukes. And that was supposed to have forced Trump’s hand.

Another, less speculative part of the Israeli package of causes that have also been aired: that Israeli lobby donors like Miriam Adelson certainly wanted their pound of flesh. The Adelsons (husband Sheldon died in 2021) were among the biggest of the MAGA megadonors: spending 600 million dollars on Trump and Trump-aligned congressmen since 2015. Mrs Adelson was a former IDF officer and Sheldon once proposed firing nuclear weapons into the Iranian desert, as a warning to the Mullahs. They were hardline Zionists, and Trump was also close to Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner, the latter’s family being close friends with Netanyahu and so instinctively so close to Israeli positions on everything that when they acted as negotiators on Iran on the eve of the war (apparently misconstruing the generous deal Iran offered) third-party diplomats, who also attended the talks, called the real estate duo “Israeli assets.”

There was possibly a strategic calculation involving China, deeply dependent on Iranian oil, with a presidential summit with Premier Xi originally scheduled for late March now pushed to May—the war presumably a negotiating chip. There is the crass arithmetic of midterm politics, a man who believed, or perhaps only hoped, that a swift decapitation strike would read as strength at home.

And then there is a more uncomfortable cluster of motives: that Trump has developed rapid onset dementia, the possibility of Zionist-linked compromise material, kompromat, from as yet unconfirmed Epstein tapes.

But one motive may stand above the others: Trump’s growing personal conviction that he was being stalked, systematically and lethally, by an Iranian assassination network. This belief, carefully cultivated by his Zionist advisors, by Netanyahu himself, and—as the available evidence increasingly suggests—by the FBI, deserves more scrutiny than it has received.

The curious case of Asif Merchant

On July 12, 2024—the day before Trump was shot in Butler, Pennsylvania—a Pakistani national named Asif Merchant, said to have Iranian family connections, was arrested on charges of plotting to kill American politicians, including Trump. He is now awaiting sentencing. His case was cited as proof that an “army of assassins” had stood ready to strike.

Look more closely, however, and the architecture of the prosecution begins to resemble something familiar to students of FBI counterterrorism theatre. Merchant was on a terror watchlist, yet was deliberately permitted to enter the United States—a “Fast and Furious”-style surveillance operation, in the words of the investigative journalist Ken Silva, who has researched the case extensively and appeared on our show, Capitals Uncovered, earlier this week. Every American contact Merchant made turned out to be either an FBI informant or an undercover agent.

The sequence is worth tracing in detail. Upon entering the country, Merchant was directed toward a supposed business partner operating under the alias “Nadeem Ali”, a man who was, in reality, an FBI asset. He proposed no crimes. A hotel meeting on June 4, 2024, was wiretapped. The linchpin of the entire Department of Justice indictment rests on a grainy hidden-camera recording in which Merchant appears to make a “finger gun” gesture while discussing unspecified “opportunities.” The alleged plot he supposedly outlined for Nadeem Ali to organise—requiring two hitmen, twenty-five protesters as a diversion, and female reconnaissance operatives—was, if real, remarkably ambitious for a man who could only propose his contact five thousand dollars in seed money, a sum he did not even possess. Conveniently, a source in the Muslim Hawala network was able provide precisely that sum in cash, which Merchant handed to two “hitmen” recommended by Nadeem Ali, in actuality two undercover FBI agents.

Merchant never named Trump by name. He possessed no weapons, no independent associates, no verifiable operational network. The Bureau of Prisons Director, Colette Peters, authored a memo, uncovered by Silva’s digging, confirming that Merchant had no contact with any actual Iranian intelligence assets in the United States. As Silva notes, the only “assassins” in this story were the FBI’s own undercover operatives.

By the time Merchant offered testimony suggesting an Iranian handler, he had spent over a year in 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement. He was unable to review discovery because the keyboard in the prison library was broken.

His assigned lawyer, Avraham Moskowitz—a self-described committed Zionist who had previously recused himself from the 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed case on grounds of conflicting loyalties—offered him no meaningful defence.1 The foreign intelligence information that originally identified Merchant before his entry into the United States likely came from Israel. The hacked phone that produced key DOJ evidence? Almost certainly compromised using Israeli spyware. Israel’s fingerprints have been all over this.

Confused Pakistani businessman?

The prosecution linked Merchant to Tehran primarily through Merchant's own words — which creates a significant evidentiary problem that went largely unremarked in mainstream coverage. It was a mistake of Moskowitz to allow Merchant to testify. He was seeking the duress defence, claiming that the IRGC was threatening his family in Tehran if he didn’t do as they told him. As a result, a number of unverifiable stories about his contacts with Iranian intelligence were presented openly in court.

But the duress defence is actually very hard to sustain, legal experts say, and the jury convicted him despite his open confession of Iranian involvement. The prosecutors were handed a case on a plate with serious geopolitical implications: that Iran had plotted to kill Trump.

However, Merchant’s case was all very ramshackle and half-assed. As Colette Peters’ case memo pointed out, there was no evidence that Merchant had any contacts with IRGC assets. It is not impossible that he was, in fact, just a businessman out to impress who got in over his head when he was caught up in an assertive FBI sting operation.

The difficulty for journalists was that in the courtroom, both the prosecution and the defence had different motives but the same purpose: to talk up a theory of Iranian sponsorship.

D’Antuono and the spider’s web

The Merchant case may have been only the latest Iranian-connected assassination plot the FBI assembled into a coherent picture of Iranian menace. In 2022, there was Shahram Poursafi, an Iranian national alleged to have hired an assassin to murder John Bolton. The supposed hitman was, once again, an FBI informant. The plot bore, once again, every hallmark of federal manufacture. The result was a Washington security establishment — Trump’s former CIA director Mike Pompeo chief among them — convinced that a million-dollar Iranian bounty hung over their heads. No credible evidence for this ever materialised.

What Ken Silva identified, and what deserves emphasis, is the connecting thread: the same FBI official, Steven D’Antuono, oversaw both the manufactured Bolton plot and the Detroit field office that used paid informants to concoct the 2020 plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer — a plot a federal appeals court later acknowledged amounted to government encouragement of the defendants’ plans. The same official was also involved in the investigation into the pipe bombs planted at Republican and Democratic Party headquarters in Washington in January 2021, where some commentators have seen a law enforcement false flag role, to implicate the MAGA movement, then protesting alleged election fraud and soon to march on the Capitol in support of Trump. A pattern, at minimum, is visible.

Feeding a traumatised man’s fears

After Butler, the psychological conditions for the manipulation of Trump were nearly perfect. A bullet had passed within inches of Trump’s head. His instinct for revenge, never dormant, was now volcanic. Into this environment came two additional data points that the intelligence apparatus appears to have wildly misconstrued. Ryan Routh, the second would-be assassin, had contact with Ukrainians regarding anti-aircraft weapons in his time serving as a mercenary for Kiev. A handful of peripheral Iranian connections existed in the broader case file.

These ingredients were apparently combined and repackaged into a terrifying threat picture in the autumn of 2024: having entered the country, covert IRGC operatives, armed with MANPADS purchased from Iran, were preparing to shoot down Trump’s aircraft. Trump responded by conducting a kind of shell game with his planes, with him and Susan Wiles, his future Chief of Staff, travelling separately from his own staff for the final months of the campaign. Trump secretly travelled on Witkoff’s plane, while most of his team were in TrumpForce 1, the 757 painted in the candidate’s livery.

To believe this threat picture required believing a great deal on slender evidence. But Trump was not in a condition to weigh evidence dispassionately. Here he was, on another man’s plane, a traumatized man, in intellectual decline, surrounded by people—including Netanyahu, whose former campaign organizer happened to be Susie Wiles—who had strong interests in directing his trauma toward a particular target.

That target, Iran, was struck with full force on February 28 when operation Epic Fury was launched to the epic distaste of his MAGA supporters, and Netanyahu finally got the war he has wanted, and pushed successive presidents to initiate, for 40 years. Most presidents, knowing the economic cost to the world of closing the Straits of Hormuz, have had the sense to turn Netanyahu and the Israelis down. But, with the Merchant trial in full flow, Trump went along, and how: A senior US official confirmed that during the first 12 hours of Operation Epic Fury, the US carried out 900 strikes against Iranian targets. Many thousands more strikes have followed.

At a Pentagon briefing on March 4, 2026, Hegseth declared: “Iran tried to kill President Trump, and President Trump got the last laugh.”

Trump himself, speaking to ABC News about the joint US-Israeli operation that killed Supreme Leader Khamenei, said: “I got him before he got me. They tried twice. Well, I got him first.”

When the pretext becomes the reality

The deepest irony of this entire episode is not that Trump was manipulated. It is that the manipulation may now have achieved the very outcome it falsely claimed already existed. Iran had, prior to the American strikes, limited genuine motivation for a direct assassination campaign against Trump. Whatever plots the FBI manufactured, whatever threat pictures were assembled from misread intelligence, they did not represent an authentic operational commitment from Tehran. Now, with Khamenei dead and Iran pummeled by American bombs, that motivation may finally be real. Trump was sold a war on the premise of stopping Iranian retaliation. He may have guaranteed it.

According to Ken Silva talking in our podcast, Trump has told his Vice President, JD Vance, to “obliterate Iran”—which could be interpreted as going much further than any current campaign envisages, and with nukes?—as his first act as president if Trump himself is assassinated.2

There are still missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. For example, the exact relationship, if any, between Israel and the FBI: whether the relationship is direct or one is piggybacking off the other and working from different motivations. It is clear, though, that somewhere in the forty-year loop of Trump’s Iran obsession, the actual interests of the American people were lost entirely—along with any serious reckoning with the costs that come due when phantom threats are allowed to write real history.

‘

People who know my work know that I am very interested in political assassinations (and attempted political assassinations) as actuators of wars. If you scroll up and look at my other Substack posts, you’ll see that I’ve released a free edition of my book on the origins of the First World War, titled War Guilt Question. It is free to download and read for a limited time.

I am very interested in exploring any possible connections between the Iran war and the two assassination attempts against Donald Trump in 2024.

Ken Silva, a brilliant investigative journalist with 15 years of experience, provided some general details in an interview on our Capitals Uncovered podcast recently.

On this week’s show, he gave a much more detailed account that is thoroughly satisfying and opens up an entirely new landscape of hypotheses. I believe these perspectives are essential, yet the mainstream media has completely ignored them.

So, why did Trump attack Iran? There has been a lot of speculation regarding his motivations. I am not saying all of them—or any of them—are necessarily true; these are simply the arguments being made:

Fear of Israeli Escalation
Did Netanyahu threaten a nuclear strike on Iran unless Trump joined in a conventional capacity?

The Venezuela Trick
Perhaps Trump was convinced he could execute a swift two-day war—a quick decapitation strike to remove Iran’s top leadership and replace it with a pro-Trump figure. This would have allowed him to enter negotiations with China (scheduled for late March) having already driven a wedge into the Russia-Iran-China axis. The move would also have secured the continued flow of oil from the Gulf, giving him leverage against both European allies and Chinese adversaries alike. (They are far more dependent on Gulf oil than the United States.)

Midterm Politics
Even before the Iran war, Trump was doing poorly in the polls. He may have believed a quick military victory would provide a much-needed boost, especially as he feared impeachment.

Potential Blackmail
There is also the possibility of Epstein-related blackmail, suggesting the Israelis had compromised Trump. While there is no concrete evidence for this, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Simple Hawkishness
Trump oversees the world’s most powerful military, yet it hasn’t been tested in a major conflict recently—unlike Russia’s. Although he was relatively restrained about war during his first term, he attended military school as a young man and may have felt an irresistible urge to “play with those toys” or to blood his forces in a battle that was unlikely to escalate to nuclear war. By defeating an opponent as formidable as Iran, he could demonstrate American military capability to both Russia and China.

Finally—and this is what we discussed with Ken Silva—is the idea that Trump’s anger at having been the target of an Iranian assassination attempt (possibly multiple attempts), combined with the fear that they would try again, drove him to act.

He genuinely believed the Iranians were out to get him and wanted to hit back. In his own mind, this also gave him a moral justification for the strike.

I will post a full analysis of the show (which is out now) later.

The Capitals Uncovered podcast has reached its 65th episode. Our interview with FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley — whose team might have prevented 9/11 — can be watched here.

Coleen Rowley joined the FBI in 1981, spent years working organised crime cases in New York, and by the summer of 2001 was doing what lawyers in field offices do: teaching constitutional law, reviewing warrants, keeping her agents on the right side of the rules. She was not the lead investigator on the case that would define her career. But she was close enough to see everything, and honest enough not to pretend otherwise.

A suspicious student and a blocked warrant

The trail began on 9 August 2001, when a French citizen named Zacarias Moussaoui enrolled at the Pan American International Flight Academy’s commercial simulator programme in Eagan, Minnesota. His instructors were immediately uneasy. Moussaoui had no pilot’s licence, no prior flight experience, had paid $7,000 in cash, and told instructors he had no interest in earning a licence — he only wanted to learn to take off and land. He was arrested in his hotel room on 16 August for overstaying his visa. His roommate confirmed he held radical religious views. The arresting FBI agent, Harry Samit, said he was convinced one hundred percent that Moussaoui was a jihadist with destructive intent.

The FBI’s Minneapolis office then sought a warrant to search his laptop and personal belongings. What followed over the next three weeks was one of the most consequential bureaucratic obstructions in modern American history.

The request went to Washington’s Radical Fundamentalist Unit, where it landed on the desk of supervisory agent Michael Maltbie. Minneapolis had worked hard to make the case. The FBI’s legal attaché in Paris had liaised with French intelligence, which confirmed that Moussaoui had recruited at least one individual to go and fight in Chechnya for Ibn al-Khattab — a Saudi jihadist commander who had fought alongside Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan during the 1980s and had effectively become al-Qaeda’s franchise holder in the Caucasus. The French further confirmed that Moussaoui had been deeply radicalised at London’s Finsbury Park Mosque and was, in their assessment, entirely devoted to bin Laden’s brand of extremism. The Minneapolis agents were not speculating. They had corroboration from a foreign allied intelligence service about a man sitting in a jail cell.

Maltbie edited the bin Laden connection out of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant application, on the grounds that al-Qaeda did not constitute a recognised foreign government. Dozens of further requests followed from Minneapolis. All were denied.

A legal fiction built on sand

Later inquiries established that the standard Maltbie applied was simply wrong. FISA requires no such thing as a “recognised foreign government.” Any international terrorist organisation qualifies. The Minneapolis agents had spent three critical weeks trying to meet a legal threshold that existed only in the imagination of their Washington colleagues. Marion Bowman, the FBI’s own Deputy General Counsel, testified as much before the Senate — an acknowledgement of error that came, as these things tend to do, far too late to be of any use.

There was also the matter of the Phoenix Memo. On 10 July 2001 — five weeks before Moussaoui’s arrest — Special Agent Kenneth Williams of the FBI’s Phoenix field office had sent an urgent communication to headquarters warning that a suspicious number of individuals with possible terrorist ties were enrolling in American flight schools. He recommended that the bureau compile a nationwide list of civil aviation training programmes and screen for similar patterns. He speculated that al-Qaeda might be conducting a coordinated effort to place operatives inside the American aviation system. The memo was sent to the Osama bin Laden unit and the Radical Fundamentalist Unit. Neither acted on it. Neither shared it with other field offices.

The attorneys at FBI headquarters who blocked the Moussaoui warrant later conceded that had they been aware of the Phoenix Memo, they would have approved the FISA application. The pattern would have been unmistakable: a nationwide recruitment of Islamic radicals into flight training, and a man in a Minnesota jail who had paid cash to learn how to steer a 747. Two pieces of a picture that headquarters never assembled because headquarters had organised itself to prevent the pieces from meeting.

What the search almost revealed

After the towers fell, a search of Moussaoui’s belongings took minutes. Agents found Boeing 747 flight manuals, notebooks filled with aviation notes, information on the aerial application of pesticides, knives, an aviation radio — and a notebook containing several foreign telephone numbers with the German national dialling code prefix, +49.

Those numbers were the thread that could have unravelled the plot. The numbers connected to Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a Yemeni operative working out of Hamburg and Düsseldorf, who had paid Moussaoui $14,000 through wire transfers to fund his aviation escapades. bin al-Shibh was also the logistics coordinator of the 9/11 plot. Bin al-Shibh was a roommate of Mohammed Atta in Hamburg. Atta was one of the three pilot hijackers along with Marwan al-Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah — and they were fully trained and in America by August 2001, in the final weeks of preparation.

Tracing those phone numbers and that wire transfer back to Düsseldorf in August rather than September would not have guaranteed the plot’s exposure. The window was narrow and the bureaucratic and investigative missteps could have got in the way. But it was a thread. By ignoring requests for a search warrant and by failing to combine incoming pieces of information about hijackers from different sources, it became the thread that the FBI failed to pull.

Bureaucratic failure or something more troubling?

Rowley has been careful, characteristically lawyerly, about what she alleges and what she merely describes. In her May 2002 memo to Mueller — thirteen pages delivered by hand to DC headquarters, leaked to the press within days — she told the Director that “a delicate and subtle shading and skewing of facts” had occurred at the highest levels of FBI management. She stopped short of calling it a cover-up. But she noted, with dry precision, that when she recounted the pre-attack events to colleagues in other divisions, almost everyone’s first reaction was to ask why headquarters personnel would deliberately sabotage the case. The question, she said, was sometimes accompanied by dark jokes about moles working with the hijackers. She recorded this not as accusation but as evidence of how inexplicable the obstruction seemed to the people closest to it.

Whether the failure was criminal negligence — the term Samit used at trial — bureaucratic turf protection, or something darker remains, to this day, unresolved. What is not unresolved is the institutional structure that made it possible: a bureau in which headquarters supervisors could rewrite field agents’ warrant applications, delete inconvenient evidence, and cite legal standards they had invented, while field agents were admonished for being “spun up” and warned that “things work better when our agencies communicate HQ to HQ.”

The republic and its guardians

Rowley retired in 2004, having spent twenty-four years inside a system she had tried and failed to reform from within. She received a Time Person of the Year award, (along with two corporate whistleblowers) delivered congressional testimony, and watched FBI chief Robert Mueller (who died earlier this month, incidentally) accept the credit for reorganising the very bureau whose leadership had, on her direct evidence, misled the public about what it knew before the attacks.

The 9/11 Commission found no deliberate misconduct. Perhaps that verdict is correct. But it is worth sitting with the alternative for a moment: that the most consequential intelligence failure in American history may have been produced not by enemies of the state, but by the notional guardians of the state, for one reason or another.

War Guilt Question Neroth Taylor

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How did World War I actually begin? And who started it? Who was guilty? Every schoolchild knows the Sarajevo assassination.

Fewer know what came before it: the lies, the intrigues, the miscalculations, the illusions, the hunger for war.

It was a war that was supposed to last a few weeks, yet defined the 20th century. This is a journalist's investigation into the most consequential cover-up in modern history — the real origins of the First World War. Click to download and read.

War Guilt Question Neroth Taylor

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There is an old diplomatic maxim that one ought to understand one’s adversary’s mind before presuming to counter his moves. It is a principle honoured more in the breach than the observance, particularly in London, where the commentariat has spent the better part of a decade treating Donald Trump’s America as a riddle wrapped in vulgarity—something to be deplored rather than decoded. The result is a transatlantic gulf in perception so wide that British and American elites now inhabit what amount to separate political universes, each operating under its own narrative logic, each largely blind to the other’s.

This matters. Narratives are not merely stories people tell themselves for comfort. They are operating systems—frameworks that define aspirations, identify enemies, and determine what counts as legitimate political action. And the narrative divergence between Britain and the United States has reached a point where it threatens to produce genuine strategic miscalculation on both sides of the Atlantic.

The British View from the Parapets

British commentary on Trump’s America tends to oscillate between two positions, neither of which is adequate. The first holds that Trump has recklessly abandoned the “rules-based international order,” that blessed dispensation under which civilised nations supposedly conducted themselves like law-abiding members of a global community. The second, marginally more honest, concedes—as Mark Carney recently intimated—that this order was always essentially a Western order, with America as its enforcer and its European allies as willing vassals who prospered under its umbrella while congratulating themselves on their multilateral virtue.

What both views share is a fundamental inability to grapple with what the MAGA movement actually represents. British commentators, flailing like dinosaurs at the edge of their era, cling to the conceit that Europe’s middle powers must now forge their own path—a kind of Commonwealth-plus-EU arrangement that will restore dignity to international affairs. Implicit in this framing is a quiet demonisation of Trump’s America, which is lumped, almost unconsciously, into the company of rogue states. It is a remarkably self-serving analysis, and it forecloses the possibility that something genuinely different—and not merely cruder—is happening across the Atlantic.

The Coalition the Commentariat Missed

Trump was not elected by the Republican old guard. He was carried to office by a broad, unruly coalition that included libertarians, disaffected Democrats, Kennedy-style reformers suspicious of corporate capture, and a vast podcasting ecosystem whose audience dwarfs the readership of any legacy British broadsheet. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. brought with him Democrats disillusioned by a party that had become an improbable marriage of cultural radicalism and Wall Street obsequiousness, having abandoned the working class and the old Democratic commitment to peace in international affairs. Elon Musk opened X to a genuinely diverse marketplace of ideas. Joe Rogan and scores of lesser-known podcasters mobilised tens of millions of young men who had been written off by polite opinion.

These were, in their own estimation, truth-tellers and debunkers—people who had watched the lockdowns, the masking mandates, and the suppression of dissent during COVID, and concluded that the institutions were lying to them. From Sweden, which pursued neither lockdowns nor mask mandates and emerged with better economic outcomes than Britain, the British COVID Inquiry’s conclusion that more restrictions would have saved lives looks less like sober analysis than institutional self-justification. Trump, whatever his personal limitations, was reckoned to be the best available vehicle for this insurgent energy.

The Ghost of the American System

Beneath the surface politics lies a deeper ideological current that most British observers have never encountered. Within the MAGA intellectual world, there exists a coherent historical narrative holding that the globalist order which has governed the world since 1945 is, in essence, an heir of the British Empire—one that mutated, migrated into American institutions, and parasitised the American host organism for purposes that were never truly American.

This narrative reaches back to the nineteenth century and the so-called American System associated with Friedrich List: high tariffs, internal improvements, industrial self-sufficiency—the programme that built the railroads, protected infant industries from British free trade, and made the United States an industrial colossus. In this telling, Britain’s commitment to free trade was never benign; it was a mechanism for keeping peripheral nations—including America—in their place as raw-materials providers. The Civil War itself is recast as partly a contest between British-aligned Southern elites, whose cotton economy served London’s textile mills, and a Northern industrial class determined to build an independent American power. The British establishment, it is noted, overwhelmingly favoured the Confederacy—much as it is seen to favour Ukraine against Russia today.

The assassinated presidents of the Gilded Age—Lincoln, McKinley—were devotees of the American System. The Anglophile Theodore Roosevelt, who embraced Kipling’s “white man’s burden,” represented its repudiation. Historians such as Anton Chaitkin have traced indirect British connections to the Lincoln assassination through Confederate intelligence networks based in Montreal, with several of the plotters later finding comfortable exile in Britain. Whether one accepts every link in this chain, the broader pattern it suggests—of an Anglo-American imperial establishment at odds with the American heartland—is taken as axiomatic in MAGA circles.

The Revenge Tour and the Road to 2026

If this ideological backdrop explains the why of Trumpism, the administration’s immediate agenda reveals the what. Far from the purposeless chaos portrayed in the British press, Trump’s inner circle, I was told by a Mar-a-Lago insider a few weeks ago, was at least as late as January 2026 pursuing a methodical programme of institutional reckoning. The investigation into the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia, is proceeding under the FBI. The January 6th narrative was being revisited, with the administration framing it as a legitimate protest infiltrated by hostile federal agents acting as provocateurs. The origins of Russiagate—which some in Trump’s orbit believe was hatched in London between the CIA station chief Gina Haspel, the local FBI representative, and elements of MI6, with Christopher Steele serving as a convenient cut-out—were being excavated with an eye toward accountability. Even the attempted assassinations of Trump himself are under renewed scrutiny.

This was not mere score-settling. It was strategic preparation for the 2026 midterms, where the stakes could hardly be higher. Trump surely understands that a Democratic recapture of the House or Senate would produce an unending series of impeachment efforts designed to render him a lame-duck president. The revelations he I was told he intended to orchestrate—on election integrity, on intelligence community malfeasance, on foreign interference in American democracy—were ammunition for that fight. Whether one finds this programme admirable or alarming, dismissing it as incoherent is a category error.

The Iran Gamble and Its Discontents

The war on Iran, however—whatever its legal standing, and however unpopular it has proven—has thrown a considerable spanner into these calculations.

Set that aside for another article. Just to reiterate. Until recently, the administration’s domestic strategy seemed coherent and, on its own terms, disciplined: expose and dismantle deep-state structures, rehabilitate the integrity of the electoral system, point to early economic wins, and trumpet the reduction in illegal immigration. The underlying message, conveyed by insider accounts from circles close to Mar-a-Lago, was that the best was yet to come—that Trump was fighting a multi-front war in which results take time to materialise, and that he could cast himself in the mould of George Washington holding out against a globalist empire both at home and abroad.

Iran has complicated that narrative. It is still too early to render a final verdict on Trump’s motivations, and the fog of war over the Middle East remains dense. There is a case, heard in some quarters, that Iran is more vulnerable than it appears and that Trump may yet extract a rapid, presentable victory—a rabbit from a hat that his voters would be willing to accept, allowing him to return, feather in cap, to the broader domestic reform agenda for which his MAGA base actually voted. After all, they wanted regime change at home, not abroad.

But the fears run in the other direction too. One theory, circulating in geopolitically-minded circles, holds that the deep states of Europe—working through Israeli channels and leveraging the remarkable access that Trump’s major donors afford—were able to nudge the president toward military action in ways that British soft power alone could never have managed. If true, this would represent a significant achievement for those who had most to gain from embroiling America in a new Middle Eastern conflict. Like many second-term presidents burdened with complicated domestic agendas, Trump may have found the appeal of a high-profile foreign “victory” irresistible—and Trump is, by temperament, a man notoriously averse to the slow, grinding strategic manoeuvring that durable victories require.

The Iran intervention has already proved a profound disappointment to the libertarian, old-left, and MAGA-nationalist coalition that propelled Trump to power. He is, at root, a deal-maker and a gambler, and this particular gamble carries steep downside risk. If the outcome in Iran remains ambiguous or the conflict drags on without a clear victory to point to, the fact that he has comprehensively broken faith with his voters on the question of foreign adventurism is likely to exact a heavy toll in the midterms—assuming, of course, that Trump has not already calculated he was going to face headwinds there regardless. There is even a darker reading: that the pressure from both his base and the Democratic opposition could shorten his presidency well before its natural end, a possibility he may have weighed and decided to outrun with this gamble.

Can America First Survive Trump?

Which raises the question of whether the ideas outlast the man. Among Trump’s supporters, a distinction is increasingly being drawn between MAGA—Trump’s personal political vehicle—and the broader America First tendency, which predates him and whose intellectual roots run far deeper than any single personality. Trump has always claimed to be the authentic embodiment of the movement, but the more honest account is that he recognised and rode an existing network of ideas with a skill and showmanship that no rival could match.

If he is seen to have betrayed those ideas—particularly on the central question of his foreign entanglement, where the Russians worryingly think of him increasingly as literally a demon—there is a plausible argument that the movement simply reassigns its loyalties. The libertarian current, with its instinct to disengage from “wicked Europe” and its entangling alliances; the Tea Party rebelliousness, the sense that one is living through 1776 again—these are not Trumpian inventions. They will survive him. People may come to say that Trump was the best available vehicle for getting certain ideas into power, that the vehicle turned out to be imperfect, but that the destination remains valid.

The harder question is whether the movement will find another figure capable of combining those ideas with the bombast, the instinct for spectacle, and the peculiar coalition-building genius—however chaotic in appearance—that Trump brought to bear. In the short to medium term, there is no obvious substitute. Trump still has three years of his presidency to run, and if the Iran gamble fails or produces only murky results, the damage to the America First project will be severe. A betrayal of that magnitude does not merely wound a politician; it sets back the ideas he claimed to champion, and the window for their implementation may close for a generation.

High-minded Rally

In Stockholm, as the fourth anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine arrived, the city’s main square was bathed in the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian colours projected inside the glass monument at the centre.

Well-dressed Europeans in winter coats gathered to hear a succession of high-minded speakers declare their solidarity with a distant and bleeding country. Among them was Björn Ulvaeus of ABBA, who told the assembled crowd that supporting Ukraine was not charity but self-defence, that “half-hearted support lengthens the war, wholehearted support can end it,” and that when Ukraine wins, “freedom wins, democracy wins.” It was moving, no doubt. It was also, in the cold light of military and economic reality, almost entirely disconnected from the facts on the ground.

This is the problem with wars conducted through sentiment rather than strategy. The gap between what European elites feel about Ukraine and what is actually happening to Ukraine has become so wide that it now constitutes a danger in itself. Four years—longer now than the Second World War lasted for the United States—and the dominant public posture of Western commentators and politicians is still one of imminent Russian collapse, if only we can summon the will for one more push.

What the headlines insist

Scan the prestige press of the last several weeks and a picture emerges that bears only passing resemblance to the conflict as documented by serious analysts. The Telegraph reports that Putin is secretly conscripting young men into a “meat grinder,” that Russian battlefield losses run to 35,000 a month, that the former head of the British Army sees a “perfect storm” of sanctions and economic headwinds converging on the Kremlin. In Politico, the British and Swedish finance ministers write with remarkable confidence that Russian economic propaganda is crumbling and that “this is the weakest Russia’s economy has been since the start of the war.” In The Guardian, a columnist named Simon Tisdall went further still—calling for European troops to deploy to Kiev, a no-fly zone over Ukraine, cyber attacks, sabotage inside Russia, asset seizures, fleet interdiction, and a general military-economic-diplomatic offensive against Russia, conducted without the Americans, whom he regards as having catastrophically betrayed the continent. The hundreds of reader comments beneath his piece were, apparently, enthusiastic. Many felt he had not gone far enough.

This is the mood: not grim determination, but something closer to war euphoria—the dangerous condition in which a prolonged stalemate is reinterpreted, through sheer force of moral conviction, as a situation requiring only a final decisive push.

What the best analysts quietly acknowledge

Meanwhile, in Foreign Affairs—not a journal known for dovish tendencies or undue sympathy toward Moscow—a rather different assessment has been offered. Russia, it acknowledges, cannot easily take the rest of Ukraine. But Ukraine has no realistic prospect of recovering the territory Russia currently controls. Russia can sustain combat operations “at this scale indefinitely.” Ukraine’s defensive troop concentrations fall below levels generally considered adequate for holding against Russian pressure. Russia retains the capacity to mount concentrated offensives at times of its choosing, and continues to field volunteers rather than conscripts—producing, as a rule, more capable soldiers. Ukraine, by contrast, is not only conscripting but, by the Foreign Affairs account, press-ganging elderly men off the streets to fill depleted units.

The materiel picture is equally grim. Ukraine is massively outgunned across nearly every category. The much-celebrated wonder weapons—the long-range missiles, the drone swarms, the precision-guided artillery—have not produced strategic advantage. Russia adapted, and now produces drones at a ratio of roughly ten to one over Ukrainian production. The economics favour Moscow in almost every dimension: Russia’s war expenditure is largely domestically financed and functions as something of a domestic stimulus; Ukraine depends on external funding for roughly half its national budget, making it structurally vulnerable to every fluctuation in Western political will.

Most revealing, perhaps, is the Foreign Affairs acknowledgment that Russia’s core strategic demand has always been relatively limited: Ukrainian neutrality, meaning the guarantee that Kyiv would not join NATO. Russia did not, at the outset, seek to absorb Ukrainian territory beyond Crimea. It was the failure to reach an agreement on that fundamental question—NATO membership—that drove the conflict to its current catastrophic dimensions. Ukraine, for its part, has pursued maximalist objectives it possesses neither the military strength nor the manpower to achieve.

The self-defeating sanctions regime

The economic case for continued pressure rests on an increasingly shaky foundation. Russia’s economy is stressed but far more resilient than the headline writers suggest. Before the war, Finance Minister Mikhail Mishustin oversaw what amounted to a revolution in tax administration—the tax take expanded by some 20 percent while the nominal burden rose by only 2 percent. Russia carries government debt of roughly 20 percent of GDP. It runs a current account surplus. A country in that fiscal position is extraordinarily difficult to sanction, because it has little need to tap the global financial system for external financing.

More damning is the record of Western sanctions policy itself. In the first year of the war, European governments continued to pay Russia for oil and gas at prices elevated by the very crisis the war had induced. That decision handed Moscow hundreds of billions of euros at precisely the moment its economy was most vulnerable. Brussels should have refused payment and faced its own energy crisis—or at minimum placed the funds in escrow. Instead, it financed Russian resilience. Russia has since rebuilt its energy logistics, replaced European customers with Asian ones, and is now less exposed to European economic pressure than at any previous point in the conflict. Russia still, in 2025, exports more ($419bn, see left column) than it imports ($302 bn, also left column), unemployment is non-existent, disposable income has increased by 30 percent since the war started due to military Keynesianism, and the war feels remote, practically non-existent, in the great population centres of Russia, in contrast to Ukraine, which suffers frequent blackouts.

The 20th EU sanctions package—currently stalled by Greek and Maltese objections protecting their shipping interests, while EU-flagged tankers continue to carry Russian crude as part of the very “shadow fleet” Western governments claim to be targeting—captures the essential absurdity of the enterprise.

The non-oil-and-gas share of Russian federal revenues has grown to roughly 80 percent. VAT alone now contributes more to Kremlin coffers than energy exports. You cannot sanction a bottle of Russian vodka sold inside Russia.

The cruelest calculus

There is something particularly painful in the Foreign Affairs argument’s conclusion: that a negotiated settlement, however painful and imperfect, offers Ukraine a future—a chance to align more closely with Europe, to defend and develop the territory it holds, to begin the work of demographic and economic recovery. The alternative is the continuation of a conflict in which Ukraine’s stated objectives are unachievable, its manpower is being consumed at a rate its population cannot sustain (see article on Ukraine’s losses elsewhere on this substack), and its economy is deteriorating far faster than Russia’s. By some estimates, Ukraine’s GDP contracted by 21 percent in 2025 even as Russia’s expanded by 4 to 5 percent over the preceding years.

The Guardian‘s Simon Tisdall calls a negotiated settlement “almost as bad as endless war.” But this inversion—in which prolonging a losing war is recast as moral courage and ending it as appeasement—represents the most dangerous form of magical thinking. Men are dying, the article in Foreign Affairs notes, for the principle that borders cannot be changed by force. It is a worthy principle. It is not, by itself, a military strategy.

The price of virtuous sentiments

There is an old distinction, not much honoured in contemporary Western foreign policy discourse, between interests and feelings. People with feelings, like ABBA’s Björn, say: Ukraine must win because freedom must win. Interests ask: what outcome is achievable, at what cost, and to whom? Four years of prioritizing the former over the latter have produced a war that has lasted longer than the Second World War, likely consumed more than a million casualties on the Ukrainian side alone, devastated a country’s demographic future, and left Europe economically weakened—as Mario Draghi’s comprehensive report on European competitiveness documents with uncomfortable clarity—without producing anything resembling the decisive outcome Western publics were promised.

The fifth year of this war has now begun. Negotiations are underway between, the Ukrainians, the Russians and Americans, most recently in Geneva. The temptation to dismiss them—as Tisdall does, as Boris Johnson does, as the Stockholm crowd would—is powerful. It is also, on the available evidence, a temptation that has already cost Ukraine dearly. Stopping the Ukrainian meaningless loss of lives, at this late stage, is not surrender. It is the only form of solidarity with Ukraine that counts.

Please Note: I am not saying the Russians don’t carry out assassinations and other bad things. Almost certainly they do. However, the western reader must know two things. Western intelligence agencies also do bad things, including assassinations, possibly more of them, and that at least some of the bad things the Russians are said to do, and which the western media make a huge song and dance about, are Western-intelligence manufactured hoaxes to put the Russians in a worse light than they deserve.

Now, onto the topic at hand.

Those of you who follow this Substack know that one of our many interests is the Skripal Affair—look elsewhere on the Substack for articles and links to talks about it. Last week I posted on our YouTube channel for the Capitals Uncovered podcast a long interview with Tim Norman, who is perhaps the UK’s premier expert on the Skripal Affair. An investigative journalist based in Brighton, he works as a production editor for Brighton’s main newspaper—an enormously responsible job. He is one of the very few who has attended all the hearings and read all the reports, and I was very pleased to spend a couple of hours with him. For those who don’t have time to watch an entire hour-long programme, our conversation is summarised in the 50 bullet points below.

In this Substack post I’d also like to flag up a future programme coming out later this week on the Capitals Uncovered podcast—an interview with the Australian journalist John Helmer, who has written several books on the Skripal Novichok hoax.

A recent blog post of his argues that the “frogichok”—that is, the Ecuadorian frog-based poison which allegedly killed jailed Russian dissident politician Alexei Navalny—a fresh claim which emerged last week, has to be examined very sceptically.

Navalny was a political figure heavily promoted by Western intelligence services but considerably less popular inside Russia itself, and the last fortnight’s specific poisoning claims about the manner of his death two years ago, in a Russian prison, dominated the British news for several days.

This was followed by further claims and calls from Boris Johnson—a by now thoroughly discredited figure—for British troops to be deployed in Ukraine immediately, a front-page BBC interview with Zelensky in which he declared that World War III has already started and that Putin must be stopped, and so on.

All the old hits trotted out once again, conveniently timed on the eve of the fourth anniversary of the war, and at a time when the Americans are desperately trying to nail down a peace deal between Moscow and Kiev.

On the frogichok itself: we will get more details in the upcoming John Helmer interview. The Ecuadorian poison dart frog produces epibatidine by processing toxins from the insects it eats in the wild. Captive frogs cannot produce it without access to the same toxic insects. Scientists have developed over 50 ways to synthesise epibatidine in the laboratory, making natural frog secretions entirely unnecessary for state actors. So while the vivid headlines pointed to frog poison being used to kill Navalny, it need not have been derived from actual frogs—and even if epibatidine were found in Navalny’s body, that would not point exclusively to Russia. The US and UK synthesised epibatidine first, back in the 1990s, followed by China. Russia reportedly did not openly synthesise it until 2013.

None of this prevented a press conference and a joint press release from the UK, Sweden, France, Germany and the Netherlands claiming that epibatidine had been found in Navalny’s tissue samples, and asserting that only the Russian state had the means, motive and opportunity. Helmer draws the obvious parallel with the Novichok allegations, noting that Porton Down, Britain’s own chemical warfare laboratory, had previously produced the very agent that the British political and media class at the time blamed on Russia. The tissue sample evidence from Navalny’s body was prepared over a six-month period in undisclosed laboratories and collected two years after his death — it is forensically compromised and potentially tampered with. The evidence, as it stands, claims Helmer in a blogpost, is meaningless.

I will certainly be asking him to prove his case, so tune in to the Capitals Uncovered channel if you are interested in this follow up poisoning story. Since the Skripal poisoning was a hoax, it is at least possible than the Navalny poisoning was a hoax.

Now on to the main 50 bullet points from my talk with investigative journalist and Skripal hoax expert Tim Norman, which you can watch in full here.

Here are 50 key points from the Tim Norman interview:

The Official Narrative and Its Problems

1. The official British account claims Putin sent two GRU agents to Salisbury to poison retired double agent Sergei Skripal by smearing Novichok on his front door handle, just three months before the 2018 World Cup.

2. The two men allegedly walked up to Skripal’s front door at midday on a Sunday, when the entire neighbourhood was at home, and applied the poison without being seen.

3. Both Sergei and Yulia supposedly touched the poison as they left the house, yet spent three to four hours enjoying drinks at a pub, a meal at an Italian restaurant, and feeding ducks before collapsing simultaneously on a park bench.

4. The simultaneous collapse is medically implausible given the significant difference in body mass between a large elderly man and a fit young woman — doctors were confused about how two people of such different sizes could be overcome at the same time.

5. Nobody died in Salisbury on the day of the poisoning — not the Skripals, not any pub or restaurant patrons, and not any wildlife, despite the agent supposedly being more deadly than VX.

6. The ducks the Skripals fed with their supposedly poisoned hands survived, though Donald Trump was told the ducks died — a claim that emotionally influenced his decision to expel 60 Russian diplomats.

7. A consultant named Stephen Davis wrote a letter to The Times stating that three people were admitted to Salisbury hospital but none showed signs of nerve agent or organophosphate poisoning, before being silenced.

The Two Russians

8. Tim Norman believes that the two Russians, subsequently identified as Alexander Mishkin and Anatoliy Chepiga, were in Salisbury but questions whether they were there to kill Skripal, suggesting instead they may have been there to meet him, possibly for an information exchange or even to facilitate his exfiltration back to Russia.

9. After the alleged poisoning, the two Russians showed no urgency whatsoever — they went window shopping at a stamp and coin shop called Dauwalders, missed an earlier train, and waited 40 minutes at the station.

10. CCTV from the Dauwalders shop (supplied independently by the shop to both police and press) shows the two men casually browsing, with one tugging the other’s elbow to look at something in the window and trying to enter the shop, which was closed on a Sunday.

11. The enquiry believes the two Russians actually returned to the Skripal house a second time to observe the Skripals leaving and check that they touched the door handle — a claim the interviewee considers too improbable for words.

12. At one point, based on CCTV timestamps, the two Russians and the Skripals were within approximately 100 metres of each other, which could support the theory of a planned rendezvous rather than an assassination.

13. The interviewee argues that genuine secret agents who botched an assassination would never voluntarily appear on their own national broadcaster (RT) six months later without having prepared a proper cover story.

The Novichok Question

14. Novichok simply means “newcomer” or “newbie” in Russian, and the Russian-sounding name was sufficient in propaganda terms to convince the British public it was a Russian operation.

15. The Novichok formula has been in the public domain since its publication in a book in 2008, and is not distinctively Russian.

16. Professor David Collum of Cornell University set his first-year organic chemistry students the task of synthesising Novichok on paper — every student except one got it completely right.

17. The practical question is not knowledge of the formula but access to safe manufacturing facilities with proper fume cupboards, which many chemical laboratories worldwide possess, not just Russian ones.

18. VX, which until Novichok was considered the most deadly nerve agent known, was actually developed at Porton Down in the 1950s — by the logic applied to Novichok being “Russian,” all VX attacks should be attributed to Britain.

19. Porton Down, the British chemical weapons facility closely linked to intelligence services, is located barely eight miles from Salisbury.

The Dawn Sturgess Case

20. Four months after the Skripal incident, Dawn Sturgess died in Amesbury, about eight miles from Salisbury, and her death was linked to the Skripal event by British authorities.

21. The entire narrative connecting a discarded Novichok bottle to Dawn’s death rests solely on the testimony of her boyfriend Charlie Rowley — an alcoholic, heroin addict, convicted petty criminal, and convicted fraudster.

22. Rowley’s previous girlfriend had died of a heroin overdose in his flat two years earlier, making Dawn the second girlfriend to die in his presence at his home.

23. Rowley was never called to testify at the Dawn Sturgess public enquiry because he was deemed “too drunk” — the key witness to the entire bottle narrative was excluded from the proceedings.

24. The Skripals were also never called to give evidence at the enquiry, not even by secure video link or in the private closed-door sessions that British public enquiries are permitted to hold.

25. Rowley had no memory of where he found the bottle and was clearly suggestible during police interviews, with officers appearing to lead him toward the idea that he had found it.

26. However, Rowley was emphatic in post-hospital interviews that the bottle was wrapped in thick plastic, boxed, and contained in two pieces — creating a major narrative problem for the official account.

27. To explain the plastic wrapping, the enquiry’s lead counsel Andrew O’Connor advanced the theory that the two Russians went to a public toilet, disassembled their bottle (exposing themselves to lethal risk), heat-sealed it in plastic using a portable sealer, and dumped it in a bin — a scenario the interviewee considers absurd and reverse-engineered to fit Rowley’s testimony.

28. The bottle was found after 10 days of intensive police searching of Rowley’s flat, sitting in plain sight on the kitchen work surface next to an empty beer glass — strongly suggesting to the interviewee that it was planted while Rowley was in hospital and after Dawn’s life support had been turned off.

29. The enquiry accepted Rowley’s drug-and-alcohol-impaired account as essentially true while dismissing Yulia Skripal’s blink testimony as unreliable because she was recovering from sedatives — a contradictory standard of evidence.

Dawn Sturgess’s Toxicology

30. The pathologist Professor Guy Rutty was not given the quantitative drug levels found in Dawn’s system — only told which drugs were present, a significant and anomalous omission.

31. Dawn’s blood contained cocaine metabolites, sedatives, antidepressants at high levels, and fentanyl — the combination of sedatives, antidepressants, and alcohol alone represented a significant risk of death.

32. The hospital claimed it administered fentanyl to Dawn after admission, despite her being admitted for a suspected opiate overdose (making further opiates medically inappropriate) and despite her suffering catastrophic brain damage that rendered painkillers unnecessary — this claim made it impossible to determine whether fentanyl was present before admission.

33. An NHS laboratory in Birmingham specialising in sensitive drug screening found no evidence of organophosphate poisoning in Dawn’s blood — organophosphates being the chemical class that includes all nerve agents from pesticides to sarin, VX, and Novichok.

34. Porton Down, which took separate samples, claimed to have identified Novichok markers — and internal documents show Porton Down anticipated that the Birmingham lab would not find organophosphate evidence, requesting their own samples in advance.

35. The enquiry concluded in December that Putin was “morally responsible” for Dawn Sturgess’s death despite all these anomalies.

The Blink Interview

36. Four days after the Skripals’ admission, ICU consultant Dr. Stephen Cockcroft (24 years’ experience) was called to Yulia’s bedside after a sedation hold ordered by Dr. Haslam, who had then left the hospital.

37. Yulia was fully awake, trying to get out of bed, pulling at her cannula and lines — displaying high-level neurological function that astonished Cockcroft, who had expected her to be effectively brain dead based on what Porton Down had told the hospital.

38. Using his standard blink-communication technique with intubated patients, Cockcroft asked Yulia a series of questions: she blinked “no” to having taken something at home, “yes” to remembering being sprayed, and “yes” to being sprayed in the restaurant — before losing consciousness just as he asked if she knew who sprayed her.

39. Rather than being placed on a swift rehabilitation pathway as her neurological recovery warranted, Yulia was returned to sedation and kept unconscious for approximately 20 days with no further sedation holds attempted.

40. The hospital’s medical director, Dr. Christine Blanchard, threatened Cockcroft with professional misconduct charges, forbade him from mentioning the episode to colleagues, and removed him from the ICU until the Skripals were discharged. He resigned within six months, ending a 25-year career.

41. The enquiry dismissed Yulia’s blink testimony on the grounds that she was still affected by sedatives and that insufficient Novichok traces were found in the restaurant — reasoning the interviewee considers circular, as it assumes Novichok was the agent in the first place and retrofits evidence to undermine the witness.

The OPCW and the Tracheostomy

42. The exact weekend the OPCW team visited Salisbury to take verification samples, both Skripals had tracheostomies performed — surgical holes cut into their throats — creating a physical impossibility for them to speak to anyone, including the international inspectors.

43. In Yulia’s case, the tracheostomy was removed just four days after the OPCW departed and she left hospital about two weeks later, indicating the procedure was wholly unnecessary.

44. The OPCW operated a quadruple-blind system with four laboratories (two for environmental samples, two for blood), and the samples given by Porton Down to the OPCW were of unusually high purity — inconsistent with material supposedly recovered from a weathered doorknob but consistent with a fresh laboratory sample.

45. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov revealed that Russia had intelligence from the Swiss OPCW-verified laboratory (Spiez) indicating BZ — a non-lethal incapacitant and powerful hallucinogen — had been identified in the Skripals’ blood. The OPCW did not deny this but claimed BZ was added as a “control substance,” an explanation that conveniently made it impossible to determine whether the Skripals had actually been exposed to BZ.

The Skripal–Steele–Trump Connection

46. Skripal’s MI6 handler Pablo Miller was associated with ex-MI6 intelligence officer Christopher Steele at Orbis Business Intelligence, who was paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign to produce the Trump dossier consisting of information from alleged Russian sources, which triggered the years-long Russiagate hoax that claimed Trump was a Russian “manchurian candidate”" — making it very likely Skripal was brought in to give the fabricated dossier a patina of authentic Russian intelligence.

47. This left Skripal sitting on extremely sensitive information about his role in the fake dossier, which he could potentially use to bargain his return to Russia or sell — making him a liability to British intelligence, particularly with Trump’s planned Helsinki summit with Putin in summer 2018.

48. There is a suggestion in Hillary Clinton’s memos that she wanted mention of Novichok suppressed early on, holding it in reserve as a propaganda instrument to be deployed when the time was right.

The Navalny Parallel

49. The Bellingcat investigator stated on camera in the Oscar-winning Navalny documentary that Novichok is the “perfect assassination weapon” because all traces vanish from the body within hours — directly contradicting the claim that Novichok was identified in the Skripals’ blood two weeks later and in Navalny’s blood after evacuation to Germany. Putin also allowed Navalny’s medical evacuation to Germany, which makes no sense if he had ordered a Novichok poisoning that German doctors would then detect.

Broader Geopolitical Stakes

50. The interviewee draws a direct parallel between the Skripal case and the Iraq WMD lies, noting that Novichok is itself classified as a WMD and that the British establishment appears to be repeating the pattern of fabricating weapons claims — but this time against a nuclear-armed superpower, with the stakes being incomparably higher, and warns that a cornered British establishment facing strategic defeat in Ukraine represents a heightened risk of further false flag operations.

Geneva and the theatre of negotiation

The trilateral talks in Geneva lasted two hours before collapsing, and the usual suspects were quick to celebrate. The Telegraph’s correspondent declared the meeting had broken up “in acrimony”—a formulation designed to foreclose hope rather than report fact. It is worth noting, parenthetically, that the same correspondent described Geneva as Switzerland’s capital. It is not. Bern holds that distinction. One wonders, then, how confidently we should receive his intelligence on matters we cannot personally verify.

This small error is, in its way, emblematic of the broader epistemic problem surrounding Western coverage of the Ukraine war. When reporters cannot be trusted with a geography textbook, their casualty figures deserve proportionate scepticism.

The Geneva breakdown is, in any case, neither terminal nor surprising. Russia’s chief negotiator, Vladimir Medinsky, acknowledged that discussions had been “difficult but business-like” and confirmed that further meetings would follow. Peace negotiations have always been grinding, non-linear affairs. Korea and Vietnam dragged on for years while the guns kept firing; setbacks and walkouts were features of those processes, not exceptions to them. A two-hour session that ends without a communiqué is not a catastrophe. It is Tuesday in the history of diplomacy.

More revealing was the contrast between early February’s Abu Dhabi session, where military representatives met with notable cordiality, and the politically charged Geneva gathering. Military men tend to operate in the realm of fact—logistics, terrain, casualty ratios. Politicians must navigate ideology, domestic audiences, and the management of narrative. The more ideological the room, apparently, the less productive the conversation. This should surprise no one who has watched the “blob” operate for the past quarter century.

What the official numbers conceal

The received wisdom in mainstream Western outlets runs roughly as follows: Russia has suffered catastrophic losses—the UK Ministry of Defence placed total Russian casualties, dead and wounded, at 1.2 million as of late 2025—while Ukraine, though beleaguered, remains viable. President Zelensky himself has cited approximately 56,000 Ukrainian war dead. CNN invoked the CSIS figure of around 450,000 Ukrainian casualties against Russia’s 1.2 million as recently as several weeks ago, deploying it as evidence that President Trump is wrong to suggest Russia holds the upper hand.

There is, however, a conspicuous asymmetry in how these figures are assembled and presented. The British Ministry of Defence publishes Russian casualty estimates with some regularity; it publishes no parallel Ukrainian figures. The official explanation is a combination of visibility limitations and concern for Ukrainian morale and recruitment. One is invited to accept that the architects of British intelligence support to Kyiv’s military operations simply lack the data. This strains credulity.

A more plausible explanation is that the true Ukrainian casualty picture is, as the paleoconservative critics of this war have long suspected, dramatically worse than anything the Western public has been asked to absorb—and that publishing it honestly would corrode the political will to continue.

Two credentialled voices the Telegraph doesn’t cite

The first is Alexander Grable, a doctoral candidate at King’s College London’s Institute of War Studies—an institution not exactly known for sympathy towards Moscow. (Link to the seminar below) Grable presented his findings at a seminar hosted by the Finnish Defence University, itself a reliably pro-Western venue. Working from Ukrainian government data on amputees—approximately 100,000, sourced from the National Institute of Strategic Studies, a Ukrainian state body—he applied ratios drawn from historical conflicts to estimate the death toll. The ratio of killed-in-action to amputees varies significantly by conflict: roughly 18-to-1 in World War One, where poor battlefield medicine meant the wounded frequently died before evacuation; around 11-to-1 in Vietnam; and as low as 6-to-1 in the post-9/11 wars, where air evacuation and forward surgical teams were exceptional. Grable, generous to the opposing argument, applied a ratio of 4-to-1—lower even than the Gulf War baseline, implicitly crediting Ukraine with superb medical infrastructure. Even at that optimistic ratio, his estimate arrives at 400,000 to 500,000 Ukrainian dead. That figure is roughly ten times Zelensky’s public claim and three times the CSIS estimate embraced by American cable news.

On the Russian side, Grable drew on what is described as leaked Ministry of Defence data—a whistleblower’s USB drive containing official Russian prosthetic and amputation records—which, combined with officer casualty figures scaled against historical norms, yields an estimate of approximately 80,000 Russian dead. (For what it’s worth, the BBC affiliated Mediazona website, drawing on public data, estimates at least 200,000 dead, lower than many estimated) If accurate, Russian losses represent roughly one-fifth of Ukrainian losses: a ratio that coheres uncomfortably well with the reported 30-to-1 disparity in body exchanges during prisoner and remains swaps in recent months.

The second voice is Alex Vershinin, published by the Royal United Services Institute—the venerable London think-tank that is, in the ordinary course of things, as Atlanticist and Russophobic as any institution in Britain. Vershinin’s analysis of the war’s attritional character concludes that Russia has prosecuted a deliberate strategy of degrading Ukrainian combat capacity rather than occupying territory for its own sake. Seizing cities invites insurgency, generates civilian casualties, and produces images that inflame global opinion; destroying the Ukrainian army in the field accomplishes the strategic objective without those liabilities. His demographic work, drawing on the “Antiseptic” Telegram channel’s painstaking comparisons of pre-war and current satellite photography of Ukrainian cemeteries—measuring the literal expansion of graveyards across a representative sample of localities—suggests that by mid-2024, Ukrainian war dead had approached 800,000. That figure, extrapolated to approximately two per cent of Ukraine’s pre-war population, implies losses at British World War One rates in a somewhat smaller country.

The silence that speaks

If these figures are even approximately correct, the implications are uncomfortable not merely for Ukraine but for the Western capitals that have managed this war’s information environment with such care. Intelligence agencies in London and Washington possess, one may reasonably assume, considerably better data than doctoral candidates working from open-source cemetery photography. The persistent refusal to publish Ukrainian casualty figures alongside Russian ones is not an accident of methodology. It is a policy decision.

The policy serves several purposes simultaneously. It sustains Ukrainian recruitment and morale by suppressing evidence of the true cost. It preserves Western public support by avoiding the moral reckoning that would follow honest accounting—the recognition that Ukraine is being bled at a rate the Western alliance has been unwilling either to prevent or to acknowledge. And it permits the continuing denunciation of anyone who suggests that Russia may be winning as a propagandist, a useful idiot, or worse.

Commentators like Douglas McGregor and scholars like John Mearsheimer have absorbed years of reputational assault for saying aloud what these two credentialled, establishment-adjacent researchers are now saying in conference rooms at Finnish military universities and RUSI seminar series. The blob’s preferred method of argument is not evidence but delegitimisation.

What realism demands

Against this backdrop, the Geneva talks acquire their proper significance. President Trump has been called a Kremlin asset by the Telegraph’s readers for pursuing negotiations. He is, whatever else one may say of him, a president with access to the full intelligence picture. The commentariat that mocks him for realism relies, one suspects, on the same newspapers whose correspondents cannot locate the Swiss capital on a map.

Peace negotiations are messy, slow, and humiliating. They require conceding that the battlefield has spoken and that the ledger of losses cannot be wished away by bolder rhetoric. The Ukrainian army has displayed a resilience that is genuinely extraordinary—absorbing losses that would have broken most modern Western armies without the political collapse that many predicted. That resilience deserves acknowledgement. But resilience is not a strategy, and courage cannot substitute indefinitely for manpower.

The realist tradition in American foreign policy has always insisted that the gap between what nations wish to accomplish and what they can sustain is where catastrophe breeds. The United States and its European partners chose to stake enormous prestige, treasure, and—most importantly—Ukrainian lives on an outcome they have been unwilling to honestly assess. The bill is now arriving. A negotiated settlement concluded on unfavourable terms today is a lesser evil than a Ukrainian military collapse that would send Russian forces surging towards terms far worse than anything currently on the table.

Prudence, not defeatism, demands we understand the numbers. The numbers are not on Ukraine’s side. That is not Putin’s propaganda. It is what the satellite photographs of the cemeteries are telling us.

LINKS

Finnish Defence University seminar with Alexander Grable

(at 2h46 onwards)

Vershinin from RUSI on death tolls

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/ukraine-battlefield/