That is the argument of Professor Jonathan Haslam’s book, Hubris: The American Origins of Russia’s War Against Ukraine. After reading it, and after talking to him at length, I think the title is earned. Not because Russia bears no responsibility for launching a war. It does. But because the road to that war was paved, over three decades, by American policy after the Cold War — and by a Western inability to understand responses from Moscow that were, in fact, highly predictable.

Haslam did not set out to write a book about Ukraine. His publisher asked a simpler question: why, after the end of the Cold War, did things not get better?

The answer he found in the archives was not a mystery of Putin’s psychology. It was a record of American decisions.

Fear of being pushed out of Europe

The United States did not greet the Soviet collapse as an unalloyed gift. George H. W. Bush and his advisers feared that the rationale for American power in Europe would disappear with the enemy.

NATO had been the instrument that kept Washington in the European security order.

If that order no longer needed an American security umbrella, the United States might be edged out of a market and a political theatre it considered essential.

Haslam’s point is not that Europeans were clamouring to evict America. They were not.

It is that Washington acted as if they might — and concluded that NATO had to be preserved, then enlarged, then given a purpose beyond the defence of Western Europe.

When Bush floated the idea of expanding NATO’s remit globally, François Mitterrand’s reaction was blistering. The Soviet Union had just collapsed. Why expand the alliance’s mission across the planet?

Bush retreated.

Then he lost the election.

Bill Clinton inherited the problem, and with it a political opportunity.

Clinton, votes and the louder voices

Clinton was not a foreign-policy president. He was a politician who wanted to be re-elected.

NATO expansion appealed to migrant communities in the United States whose families had suffered under Soviet domination. It also appealed to a bureaucracy that, Haslam argues, had learned to need enemies.

Russia was down.

The assumption was that it would not get up in time to matter.

The people who did know Russia were cut out. George Kennan — the architect of containment, no romantic about Moscow — opposed enlargement as a provocation that would end in confrontation.

Analysts at RAND said the same.

Sam Nunn said the same.

Paul Nitze said the same.

Strobe Talbott, Clinton’s own point man on the former Soviet Union, wrote that putting Ukraine on a NATO membership list was dangerous and would lead to conflict.

Haslam found that memorandum in the files. Read it now and the hair goes up on the back of the neck.

Almost everything Talbott feared came true.

Clinton took no notice.

The louder voices inside the system won.

That is not a uniquely American story. It is what happens when policy is made by people who know how to dominate a meeting, not by people who know the other side.

Ukraine was the object, not the subject

One of the most important features of Haslam’s book is also the most easily missed.

When he first submitted the manuscript, his publisher said there was nothing about Ukraine in it!

Haslam’s reply was that that was the point.

Ukraine was the object of American and Russian policy.

It was not the subject.

It was not, in origin, the cause.

The cause was American policy.

From the mid-1990s, Washington was already contemplating Ukraine as a future NATO member, even while selling Moscow the Partnership for Peace as something other than enlargement by another name. The Russians noticed the gap between the language of partnership and the practice of expansion.

They were meant to.

Or rather, they were not meant to be taken seriously when they did.

To Russian military planners, Ukraine and Crimea were not sentimental extras. They were part of the southern strategic depth of the state — as Canada or Mexico are to American security thinking, as Cuba was in 1962.

Lose that space and the old American war plans through the Black Sea look different.

You do not have to accept Moscow’s claims to understand why Russian officials treated this as a red line.

You only have to accept that they would.

Haslam asked the recently recalled Russian ambassador in London, Andrei Keilin, when Putin decided he would probably have to go to war over Ukraine.

Haslam expected 2020 or 2021.

Keilin said 2004: the year the Baltic states entered NATO, and the point at which Putin concluded that George W. Bush would push enlargement to the limit.

A predictable response, treated as unthinkable

The West’s failure was not only strategic.

It was imaginative.

Diplomats who do not know Russia still talk to Russians as if they were dealing with a slightly awkward version of themselves.

Irony is taken literally.

Newspaper swagger is treated as government policy.

Old suspicions, some of them ugly, some of them earned, are dismissed as propaganda until they become operational.

The bombing of Belgrade in 1999 mattered here more than many in London or Washington still admit. It was NATO’s first war, undeclared, without a UN mandate. In Russia it was watched on television for seventy-eight days. Elite opinion and ordinary opinion moved together.

After that, the hardliners were much harder to displace.

Haslam is clear that the way the war was fought taught Moscow a lesson about what NATO had become: not a status-quo defensive alliance, but an instrument that could be used out of area.

From there the pattern repeated.

Rapprochement in public.

Enlargement in private.

Warnings filed.

Red lines tested.

When Russia was weak, the conclusion in Washington was that Russia could do nothing.

It could.

It did.

What follows

None of this is an argument for Russian victory, or for pretending the invasion of 2022 was a policing action. It is an argument for ending the habit of describing a war as unprovoked while refusing to study the provocations that were obvious to every serious Russia specialist from Kennan onwards.

Haslam’s conclusion is the one many officials still cannot say in public: the United States did not start the fighting. It started the reasons for the fighting.

If that is even half right, then more weapons and more slogans will not substitute for a settlement. They will only prolong the economic cost and the human misery.

I have spent enough years on the Russia account, including in Moscow, to know how unpopular that message is in Whitehall. It remains no less true.

Policy built on the assumption that the other side will not respond is not moral clarity.

It is negligence with a press office.

Haslam’s book is the archival case for that view. Our conversation just scratches the surface of what is a meticulously researched work that should be essential reading for politicians, policy makers and pundits in the west.

Read Hubris.

Then ask why the people who were right in the 1990s were treated as old men who did not understand the new world — a world that has since delivered exactly the confrontation they described.

You can watch conversation here:

Wherever you are in the world, whatever your nationality and religion, I wish you much peace.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hubris-Origins-Russias-Against-Ukraine/dp/1804548227
https://www.amazon.com/Hubris-American-Origins-Russias-against/dp/0674299078

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This is not a two-party war. It is a five-party war: Russia, Ukraine, the European Union, the United States and Britain. Each is trying to finish it on its own terms. None of them has built a peace process. That is why the search for a single “deal” keeps failing.

A single peace deal won’t be enough to settle four different conflicts at once, something I wrote about for Responsible Statecraft in June.

Jeff’s answer is similar to mine; a multi-treaty settlement.

He draws on the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 — the practical fact the catastrophe of the Thirty Year War was ended with several treaties, not one.

He also draws on the Cambodia settlement of the early 1990s. That war mixed a civil conflict, an East–West confrontation and a split inside the communist world.

The way out was a UN mandate and a UN transitional authority that gave China a face-saving off-ramp from the Khmer Rouge.

The parallel with Western sponsorship of the present Ukrainian government is uncomfortable, yet unavoidable. Peace for Ukraine will emerge from separate interlocking tracks: Russia–Ukraine terms to end the fighting; a deal on EU–Ukraine accession, which will be as complicated as ending the war; an agreement on the long-term Europe/UK relationship with Russia; neutrality for Ukraine in treaty form; and a long-term settlement between Washington and Moscow.

Jeff would add a UN authority inside Ukraine, treat Britain as its own actor rather than an EU afterthought, and sees the reconstruction of Ukraine as a practical work through that helps Europe and Russia remember how to deal with each other as neighbours.

On “perfidious” Britain he is blunt. London has played a particularly damaging role in Eastern Europe and should stop tagging along after a European union it chose to leave.

I did not dissent. British policy since 2014 has been long on posture and short on a theory of how the conflict ends. Buying American LNG at three times the price of piped Russian gas is not strategy but the behaviour of a vassal.

That is the larger problem.

Eighty years after 1945, Britain and Europe remain unable to conduct a foreign policy that is not first cleared in Washington.

Jeff calls NATO the enemy within Europe’s own institutions. I have come to see the EU, as it now operates, in much the same light: not a peace project amplifying states, but another instrument of American compliance.

John Mearsheimer’s claim that the United States military presence was the “pacifier” of Europe is an American story. Germany’s return as a prosperous neighbour did more for European peace than garrison politics.

The obstruction is political.

European states have progressively given away political sovereignty and forgotten the economic, social and cultural glue that made the European project a successful peace project until the early Noughties.

The diplomatic embargo of Russia was a British idea in 2014 that has gradually infected all European Member States and is gleefully endorsed by the mainstream media.

What is missing is a Western statesman prepared to treat Russia as an equal rather than a defendant, and to fly through a hailstorm of press flak to pursue peace through diplomacy.

Until Britain and Europe recover the habit of acting for themselves, they will keep reinforcing failure and calling it resolve.

China, as the only permanent member of the Security Council not a direct party to the war, and India, should play a role in the overarching peace process to provide more balance to the talks.

Watch the full conversation on The Peacemonger here.

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Wherever you are in the world, whatever your nationality and religion, I wish you much peace.

Having just returned from my family holiday in Canada we began with the renewal in tension between both countries. Tariffs and the bilateral trade deficit with Ottawa is not the story.

Beebe’s read is triangular: the White House thinks China is using Canada as a backdoor into the American market, and Ottawa is not playing along. Same pattern as Greenland and the Arctic.

Melting ice, rare earths, space and communications geography, and Trump’s habit of opening with an outrageous threat to manufacture leverage.

However, threatening to take Greenland by force, Beebe argues, did not create a better deal. It hardened Denmark and the rest of NATO and made a manageable arrangement less likely.

The more important rupture is Iran.

Beebe thought the Trump National Security Strategy was a genuine improvement on the post-Cold War documents that promised the world and funded a fraction of it. It tried to close what Walter Lippmann called the gap between ends and means.

The Western Hemisphere first.

Ambitions tied to capacity.

Venezuela, whatever one thinks of it, could be stretched to fit that frame.

Iran could not.

His explanation is unsentimental. Operational success in Venezuela bred overconfidence. The analysis underneath the Iran strikes was wrong. The Iranian regime was treated as a house of cards. Knock out the leadership, and the theocracy falls.

It did not fall.

Rather, the attacks produced a rally-around-the-flag effect.

The United States is now in a cul-de-sac: damaged reputation, strained forces, a distracted White House, and no clean exit that does not involve concessions.

That matters for Ukraine because attention and political capital are finite within the Trump White House.

Beebe’s strategic case for ending the war has not changed. A forever proxy war leaves Europe unstable, incentivises a tighter Russia-China partnership, and makes a China-first American strategy impossible.

Russia, in his view, would still prefer a compromise closer to Istanbul and the later Anchorage discussion than the occupation of the whole of Ukraine.

Governing a hostile country is not Moscow’s first choice.

What has changed is Washington’s ability to deliver.

Iran has taken the oxygen out of the room.

Trump needs political juice to force a deal through a hostile Senate and a permanent bureaucracy that still treats detente with Russia as heresy.

Beebe does not think he has that juice.

Midterms loom.

The president is fighting an unpopular war with a precarious economy. Other countries are already pricing him as a lame duck.

If Moscow concludes the administration is not agreement-capable — cannot lock in NATO limits, cannot move sanctions — Plan B is the battlefield.

That is not the conquest of Kyiv. It is a rump Ukraine, too weak to be rebuilt as a Western military outpost, and a worse peace for Ukrainians, Europeans and Americans alike.

Then comes what Beebe calls it a hard crash.

Time is not on Ukraine’s side.

Manpower is failing.

Energy infrastructure is already in tatters ahead of another winter.

Russia can hit harder than Ukraine can endure.

When the gap between Western media victory narratives and the facts becomes undeniable, Washington does not usually say “we did our best.”

It goes into “do-something” mode.

That is how mismanaged wars become direct NATO-Russia crises.

I agree with him.

Europe has no plan.

It has a reflex: ask for more Patriots, flatter Trump, keep Kyiv fighting.

That is not friendship.

It is spending Ukrainian lives to delay an admission of failure.

Beebe’s alternative is old-fashioned and unfashionable: a concert among the United States, Russia and China, starting with Iran and Ukraine, based on self-interest rather than trust.

Whether this White House can still do that is the live question.

Watch the full conversation here.

George Beebe: quincyinst.org ·

x.com/GeorgeBeebe13

Wherever you are in the world, whatever your nationality and religion, I wish you much peace.

In our conversation on The Peacemonger, Matlock is characteristically precise and unsparing. The Cold War ended by negotiation, he reminds us, because both sides concluded it served their interests.

The subsequent breakup of the Soviet Union was driven by internal pressures, not American design.

What followed, however, was a series of historic mistakes that have left us in a far more dangerous world.

Chief among them was NATO expansion. Matlock was present when Secretary of State James Baker assured Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO’s jurisdiction would not move “one inch to the east.”

Those assurances were repeated multiple times.

They were never written into a formal treaty covering Eastern Europe, but they formed the political understanding on which the peaceful settlement of the Cold War rested. Expanding the alliance eastward, Matlock argues, transformed a defensive organisation into an offensive one and was strongly opposed by almost all of the American officials who had actually negotiated the end of the Cold War.

He is equally clear about Ukraine.

The conflict is not a simple morality play of a large aggressor attacking a small democracy. It is rooted in complicated history, contested borders created by Stalin and Khrushchev, and Western policies that ignored Russian red lines — particularly the prospect of NATO bases or membership on Ukraine’s territory.

The 2008 Bucharest Summit promise, the 2014 events in Kyiv, and the subsequent de facto treatment of Ukraine as a NATO member all contributed to a predictable confrontation.

Matlock is scathing about the abandonment of diplomacy. Even after 9/11, when Putin was the first foreign leader to offer support, opportunities for a normalised relationship were squandered.

By 2010 Putin still described the United States as a “principal partner.” Western policy chose instead to pursue influence in Russia’s near abroad and to place missiles in Eastern Europe under dubious pretences.

The result has been the progressive isolation of Russia, the devastation of Ukraine, and a Europe that is less secure, not more.

At 96, Matlock speaks with the authority of someone who has seen history from the inside.

He warns that NATO no longer has a coherent purpose, that talk of regime change in Russia is reckless, and that the current path risks nuclear escalation while ignoring the real existential threats of climate, pandemics and economic instability.

This is a conversation that cuts through decades of myth-making. If we are ever to rebuild a stable European security order, we will need to recover the diplomatic seriousness that Matlock and his colleagues once practised.

You can watch the full discussion here.

Wherever you are in the world, whatever your nationality and religion, I wish you much peace.

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Horton’s eight-hundred-page account is not a polemical rant but a meticulously documented timeline. Drawing on thousands of primary sources, he traces the story president by president—from George H.W. Bush through Clinton, the younger Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden.

The central argument is straightforward and devastating: successive U.S. administrations systematically dismantled the post-Cold War settlement, broke explicit assurances given to Moscow, and treated Russian security concerns with open contempt.

The most consequential early breach concerned NATO expansion.

During the negotiations over German reunification in 1990, James Baker, Helmut Kohl, Hans Dietrich Genscher, Robert Gates and others repeatedly assured Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move “one inch to the east.”

Those assurances were not casual asides. They formed the basis on which Gorbachev agreed to allow a reunified Germany to remain inside the alliance while Soviet troops were still stationed in the east.

Later State Department reviews under Warren Christopher quietly confirmed that the Russians had every reason to believe those promises were binding. Yet the Clinton administration proceeded with expansion anyway, first into Central Europe and later, under George W. Bush, into the Baltic states—leaving the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad stranded behind NATO lines.

Opposition to this course was widespread and bipartisan. With great prescience, George Kennan, the architect of containment, warned that the policy would produce a “devastating reaction” from Russia and that the very people dismissing those concerns would later claim the reaction proved their point.

Two-thirds of the Council on Foreign Relations opposed expansion. Career diplomats, military officers and even hardline hawks such as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski argued that Ukraine required a special neutral status—something resembling the Cold War Finland or Austria model—precisely to avoid a catastrophic collision.

Those voices were ignored.

The pattern continued.

The 2008 Bucharest Summit promised eventual membership to Ukraine and Georgia without a membership action plan or credible security guarantees—the “worst of all worlds,” as several analysts later described it.

Color revolutions, the deliberate sidelining of the Partnership for Peace, and the refusal to implement the Minsk agreements further eroded any residual trust.

When the same cohort of officials who had driven the policy under earlier administrations returned under Biden - most notably Daniel Fried - the trajectory accelerated toward open conflict.

Horton is careful not to justify Russia’s invasion. He simply insists that calling the attack “unprovoked” is an exercise in willful blindness.

The word itself, repeated endlessly by Western governments and media, seeks to close off inquiry rather than invite it.

Horton’s book reopens that inquiry with forensic detail—names, dates, cables, memoirs—leaving readers free to draw their own conclusions.

What makes Provoked essential is precisely this refusal to operate on the short time horizon of the daily news cycle.

Most public discussion still treats either 2014 or 2022 as year zero. Horton shows that the roots stretch back to the moment the Cold War ended, when a victorious America chose (to quote the title of Professor Jonathan Haslam’s also excellent book) hubris over restraint.

The result is a tragedy that was both foreseeable and avoidable.

I am taking the book with me on holiday.

It is heavy—literally and figuratively—but the weight is justified.

Anyone who wants to understand how we arrived at the present catastrophe, rather than simply recycle the slogans of the moment, should read it.

You can see the full conversation here.

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Baud’s central argument is simple but profound. During the Cold War, both NATO and the Warsaw Pact organised their forces around three interlocking levels of warfare: tactical, operational and strategic.

After 2001, Western armies largely abandoned the operational level as they shifted to counter-terrorism.

Fighting insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan reduced war to a series of tactical engagements.

When the same mindset and equipment were transferred to Ukraine, the results were predictable.

Russia never made that shift. Its art of war remains built on the classic three levels.

Early in the Special Military Operation, deep operational thrusts toward Kyiv and Kherson were designed to create strategic pressure and force negotiations. When that phase ended, Russia adjusted — not by descending into pure tactics, but by systematically destroying Ukrainian forces while still linking tactical actions to operational and strategic goals.

Ukraine, trained and equipped largely by the West, has remained stuck at the tactical level.

This difference explains much of what we see on the battlefield. Russia’s objectives have been consistent: protect the population of the Donbas, prevent Ukrainian NATO membership, and secure a neutral buffer.

The Istanbul draft of March 2022 already reflected these goals, drawing on historical models of neutrality such as Austria in 1955 and Switzerland in 1815.

The West, by contrast, has never articulated clear, measurable political objectives beyond the vague slogans of “weakening Russia” and “supporting Ukraine.”

Without clear objectives, there can be no coherent strategy and no exit plan.

Industrial capacity reinforces the disparity. Russia’s state-influenced military-industrial complex can prioritise and scale production — whether of artillery shells, missiles or drones — with a flexibility that privatised Western industry lacks.

Lead times for systems such as Patriot missiles are measured in years.

Once Russia recognised the importance of drones, it moved from relative disadvantage to local superiority through industrial mobilisation.

Baud is careful to stress that understanding an adversary is not the same as endorsing them. Intelligence, he reminds us, comes from the Latin intelligere — to understand. Without that understanding, diplomacy becomes impossible and force becomes the only remaining instrument.

The tragedy is that a clearer grasp of Russian thinking in 2022 might have spared Ukraine much of the destruction that followed.

The conversation ends with a sober conclusion. Russia has a coherent political-military strategy underpinned by industry, energy and time.

The West and Ukraine are fighting a war by committee with no clear strategic destination.

In such conditions, the side that knows what it wants — and organises itself accordingly — almost always prevails.

You can watch the full conversation here:

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Davis pushed back immediately on the idea of American supremacy. The U.S. can dominate its near abroad—Venezuela, Cuba, even speculative talk of Greenland—because no regional peer exists to contest it. Beyond that, the picture collapses.

In the Middle East, Europe, and the Indo-Pacific, “we are definitely in the backseat.”

The notion of winning a decisive victory anywhere outside the Western Hemisphere “is gone.”

Iran is the clearest demonstration. Despite months of buildup and a massive armada, the stated goal of preventing a nuclear weapon was always a ruse. As Trump, his Secretary of War, and others repeatedly claimed, the nuclear program had already been destroyed in Operation Midnight Hammer. The real objective was regime change.

Assassinating the Supreme Leader and senior commanders failed.

A ground invasion was never feasible: Iran is three to four times the size of Iraq, protected by vast mountain ranges that would turn any advance into suicide.

An air-only campaign was equally futile. Iran spent two decades burying missile cities under granite mountains, rendering them impervious to conventional—and even nuclear—weapons.

The result?

The Strait of Hormuz remains constrained, U.S. assets are being wasted, and the lesson remains unlearned.

The same pattern plays out in Ukraine.

Western air defenses are effectively nonexistent. Russia’s military-industrial complex has surged—producing hypersonics, jet-powered drones, and volume that the West cannot match.

Ukrainian stocks are exhausted; American and European inventories have shrunk to “minuscule levels.”

Russia is stronger than in 2022.

The United States is weaker.

“There is nothing the United States can do to win a war… against a quality opponent” in the Middle East, against Russia, or against China.

This is not merely a tactical problem. The $1.5 trillion defense budget is pouring money into proven failures—another $22.9 billion for Tomahawk missiles, thousands more vulnerable PAC-3 and THAAD interceptors—while ignoring the industrial reality.

Russia and China plan in five- to twenty-year horizons. America tinkers for short-term contractor profits.

Without a fundamental rethink, the U.S. risks not just stalemate but outright military defeat and eventual bankruptcy, forcing the abandonment of hundreds of overseas bases.

Public opinion has already offered its verdict. The Iran conflict is the most unpopular American war since polling began—worse than Vietnam or Iraq at comparable stages.

MAGA voters are peeling away as diesel tops five dollars a gallon and fertilizer costs soar.

Trump’s claim that the price is “worth paying” lands on deaf ears. The midterms, Davis predicts, will be a Republican bloodbath. The rational exit—declare victory, “put lipstick on a pig,” and leave—remains available, yet unused.

Twenty-first-century warfare has moved far beyond Desert Storm or World War II. Electronic warfare, rapid drone iteration, and sustained industrial output now decide outcomes more than traditional formations.

The United States lacks the organizations, mentality, and capacity to compete.

Expeditionary warfare itself should be retired. Short, punitive operations once worked—if America had left after achieving limited aims. Instead, as Davis recalled with a Hotel California lyric, “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”

The conversation ends on a sober note: power has limits. Recognizing them is not weakness. It is the only path that avoids sowing the seeds of America’s own defeat.

You can watch the full video here:

In a conversation on my Peacemonger channel, we discussed his 2018 book The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities — a work that remains, in my view, essential reading for anyone trying to understand the catastrophic state of Western foreign policy.

The book was written at the tail end of the unipolar moment, that brief and unique period after the collapse of the Soviet Union when the United States stood alone as the sole great power.

With no peer competitor, balance-of-power politics was temporarily taken off the table. Washington was free to pursue what Mearsheimer calls liberal hegemony: an ambitious project to remake the world in America’s image.

The strategy had three core goals. First, spread liberal democracy everywhere. Second, deepen economic interdependence and globalise capitalism. Third, build and expand international institutions so that every state would become a “responsible stakeholder.”

The intellectual foundation was Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” thesis — the idea that humanity was marching inexorably toward a world of liberal democracies.

As Mearsheimer told me, this required a highly interventionist foreign policy. And the results have been disastrous.

Instead of a more peaceful, democratic world, the United States found itself trapped in endless wars that it could not win. Worse, the militarism required to sustain liberal hegemony began eroding liberal values at home.

“Liberalism abroad,” he wrote in 2018, “leads to illiberalism at home.”

That sentence looks prophetic today.

The unipolar moment, Mearsheimer argues, ended around 2017 with the rise of China and the return of Russia as a great power. Multipolarity is back. Great-power politics is back.

And yet the habits of liberal hegemony have proved extraordinarily difficult to break.

We discussed Donald Trump’s complicated relationship with this worldview. In his first term, Trump ran explicitly against liberal hegemony. The 2025 National Security Strategy, Mearsheimer notes, is in many ways a realist document. Yet in practice Trump has repeatedly reached for the same tools of social engineering he once rejected — most dramatically in Iran.

Regime change by force of arms is not liberal hegemony in the classic sense (Trump has no interest in exporting democracy), but it is still the same fatal delusion: the belief that a foreign society can be reshaped at the end of a rifle barrel.

History, Mearsheimer insists, is unambiguous on this point. Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran — the common denominator is not communism, terrorism or theocracy.

It is nationalism.

Nationalism remains the most powerful political ideology on the planet. People will fight and die in extraordinary numbers to preserve their right to self-determination. Any power that forgets this runs into a buzzsaw.

The same logic applies to Ukraine. Mearsheimer traces the roots of the current war directly to the decisions of the unipolar moment — specifically NATO expansion. The drive to push the Western institutional order eastward was not primarily about containing a Russian threat that barely existed in the 1990s. It was an expression of liberal hegemony.

The Russians eventually drew a red line.

The result has been a catastrophic war that has already shattered Ukrainian statehood and will likely produce a frozen conflict accompanied by ethnic cleansing on both sides of the new front lines.

What makes the conversation particularly valuable is Mearsheimer’s insistence on the deeper theoretical tension between liberalism and nationalism. Liberalism, with its emphasis on universal, inalienable individual rights, has a powerful universalist impulse. Taken to its logical conclusion, that impulse struggles to justify national borders at all.

Nationalism, by contrast, is particularistic. It is about “us” versus “them,” about national identity, culture and sovereignty.

This tension plays out in immigration policy, in the European Union’s battles with figures like Viktor Orbán, and in the growing backlash against “Davos Man” — the thoroughly internationalised elite that feels more at home in global institutions than in any particular nation.

Mearsheimer is frank that people like himself (and, he notes, people like me) are in many ways Davos men. The difference is that we do not treat the rest of the world as a mission field for liberal conversion.

The tragedy of the past thirty years is that Western elites became so intoxicated with the idea of liberal hegemony that they lost the ability to see the world as it is. They dismissed nationalism as a spent force, treated realism as a dirty word, and convinced themselves that social engineering was both possible and moral.

The bill for that hubris is now being paid in blood in Ukraine, in Iran, in Gaza and in the growing domestic polarisation across the West.

Mearsheimer does not argue that liberalism and nationalism are oil and water. He believes they can coexist — and historically have coexisted — in liberal nation-states such as Britain and the United States.

But the balance has to be struck carefully. Liberalism can temper the sharper edges of nationalism; nationalism can prevent liberalism from dissolving into universalist overreach.

Getting that balance right is the task of any serious statesman. And, right now, there is a statesmanship vacuum in the west, as I have noted many times before.

As always, talking to John Mearsheimer is both bracing and clarifying.

He does not offer comforting illusions.

He offers a framework for understanding why so many of our foreign-policy disasters were not accidents, but the predictable consequences of a particular set of ideas.

The Great Delusion should be required reading for anyone who still believes that the West can simply will a liberal world order into existence.

You can watch the full conversation here.

I strongly encourage you to watch it in full.

Wherever you are in the world, whatever your nationality and religion, I wish you much peace.

What we are witnessing now — self-harming wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, extreme inequality, and Europe’s deepening crisis — are the classic symptoms of imperial decline.

Wolff places the present moment in a long historical arc. Modern capitalism, from its beginnings in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, has always required expansion. That expansion produced European colonialism, which reached its apogee and then its catastrophic end in the two world wars.

The United States, largely spared the physical destruction of those wars, stepped into the vacuum and built an informal empire of unprecedented power and reach. For roughly three-quarters of a century it dominated the global economy, the dollar, and the military order.

That special historical moment could never last.

Germany and Japan recovered, China rose, and the rest of the world refused to remain permanently subordinate.

American exceptionalism — the comforting belief that the United States was uniquely immune to the rise-and-fall cycle of empires — prevented elites from recognising the shift until it was too late.

When empires decline, the costs are not shared equally. Those at the top use their political and economic power to protect their wealth, while the burdens are pushed onto the middle and working classes.

The celebration of Elon Musk’s path to becoming the first trillionaire, Wolff notes, is a grotesque illustration of this process at a time when social needs are screaming for attention.

The same logic explains the relentless demonisation of Russia.

After the New Deal of the 1930s — Social Security, minimum wages, unemployment insurance, and public employment programmes paid for by taxing the rich — the American corporate elite made “rolling back the New Deal” its central political project.

Inventing an existential Soviet (and later Russian) threat provided the perfect justification for that project and for the permanent expansion of military power. NATO became the fort that locked American influence into Europe and kept any alternative order at bay.

Europe, meanwhile, made a strategic error after 1945 by outsourcing its military security to the United States.

Now that American willingness and capacity to underwrite European prosperity are fading, and cheap Russian energy has been cut off, the continent finds itself trapped.

Military Keynesianism — spending on war preparation to stimulate economies — is being sold as a solution, with Russia cast once again as the necessary enemy.

The result, Wolff warns, risks turning Europe into little more than a historically interesting tourism peninsula on the edge of Asia.

The conversation ends on a note of cautious possibility. Political reactions to decline are already visible. The language of “peacemongering” is no longer an insult in the way it once was.

Understanding that the American empire’s special moment has ended is the first step toward imagining something better — for the United States, for Europe, and for the rest of the world.

You can watch the full conversation here:

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In my latest conversation on The Peacemonger channel, leading Russia expert Mark Galeotti explains why this approach has become deeply self-harming — and why someone, somewhere, is going to have to break the logjam.

Galeotti, honorary professor at UCL, director of Mayak Intelligence and host of the widely followed podcast In Moscow’s Shadows, is characteristically clear-eyed.

The war is no longer delivering strategic benefits for Europe (I’d argue that it has been a disaster from the start).

Russia is slowly advancing in the Donbas.

Ukraine is paying a catastrophic human and economic price.

Europe is bankrolling the conflict while outsourcing its diplomacy to Washington and preparing to phase out the last of its Russian gas imports — a move with predictably severe economic consequences.

Yet no one wants to be the first to say out loud what many now admit privately: that a negotiated end is necessary, and that talking to Russia is not a concession but a necessity.

Galeotti is particularly interesting on Britain’s potential role.

Outside the European Union and still regarded by Moscow as both a serious antagonist and a serious player, the UK has a rare opportunity to act as a pragmatic interlocutor.

The “only Nixon could go to China” logic applies.

Under a possible Burnham government more focused on domestic priorities, that opportunity may be greater than under previous administrations — but it will still require political courage.

The conversation ranges widely beyond the battlefield.

We discuss the urgent need to restore military-to-military contacts, law-enforcement cooperation and academic exchanges — the practical, professional channels that have been allowed to atrophy.

Galeotti is scathing about the hollowing-out of British diplomatic and academic expertise on Russia, and the long-term cost of cutting off the next generation of specialists from time on the ground.

He is equally clear-eyed about the Russia–China relationship: transactional, competitive and far more fragile than the “friendship without limits” rhetoric suggests.

Western policymakers who talk of a seamless “Dragon Bear” alliance are, in his view, peddling dangerous nonsense.

When the war eventually ends — and Galeotti, like me, does not expect it this year — European politicians will face the awkward task of polishing a strategic failure as success, as I have long said.

The longer the fighting continues, the more expensive and politically toxic the post-war period will become.

This is a sober, realistic conversation free of both Russophobia and wishful thinking.

If you want to understand why Europe is stuck, and what it would actually take to start moving toward a settlement, I strongly recommend watching the full discussion which you can find here.

Wherever you are in the world, whatever your nationality and religion, I wish you much peace.

On Boxing Day 2004, Ian Proud heard about severe flooding in southern Thailand as he drove to a cinema in downtown Bangkok. During the film, his phone rang: the British Embassy, calling him in for an emergency meeting with the Ambassador. Within two hours he was in a car heading south on a nine-hour drive, with almost no information, towards a disaster that would eventually be confirmed to have killed more than 225,000 people across fourteen countries, including 149 Britons, the majority of them in Thailand.

Few British officials of his generation have stood closer to more of the last quarter-century’s catastrophes. Ian Proud was a member of His Majesty’s Diplomatic Service from 1999 to 2023 and became one of the Foreign Office’s most accomplished crisis experts. He was involved in the Foreign Office response to the Gujarat earthquake, 9/11, the 2002 Bali bombing, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the Arab Spring, the New Zealand earthquake and Japanese tsunami of 2011, the 2018 Salisbury nerve agent attack, and the global repatriation of British citizens during COVID.

Alongside that record sits an unusually varied diplomatic career. He served in Helmand Province as Head of Strategic Communications during the most intense period of the fighting, organised the 2011 London Conference on Libya and the 2013 G8 Summit at Lough Erne, wrote and launched the Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict initiative, and spent nearly five years at the British Embassy in Moscow as Economic Counsellor and Chair of the Crisis Committee — the subject of his first book, A Misfit in Moscow. He finished his career as Vice Principal of the Foreign Office’s International Academy, and he speaks fluent Thai.

But it is Thailand that has never let him go. As Head of the Political Section at the British Embassy in Bangkok, Proud was the first to deploy to the tsunami disaster zone and the last to leave it, working thirteen days before taking his first break. What he saw there has stayed with him for more than two decades. So has the anger — at a system that was slow, distant and bureaucratic when it needed to be fast and human, and at his own inability, however hard he worked, to make anything better for the people in front of him. His novel, Searching: A Love Story, published in June 2026, is drawn from that experience.

In this conversation, we spoke about what a state owes its citizens when catastrophe strikes abroad, why institutions reach for process when they should be reaching for judgement, what breaks people in disaster work, and why a diplomat who spent a career writing telegrams chose to write a love story instead.

Q: Boxing Day 2004. You are at the cinema in Bangkok, and within two hours you are in a car heading south — nine hours, almost no information. Take us back to that. What did you think you were driving towards, and what went through your mind as you crossed the Sarasin Bridge?

[Ian Proud] The day itself began completely ordinarily. I first heard about severe flooding in southern Thailand as I was driving to a cinema in downtown Bangkok, and during the film I took a call from the Embassy calling me in for an emergency meeting with the Ambassador, David Fall. He told the handful of staff still around at Christmas that a tsunami had struck. The news was scant, but it was already clear that many people had been killed and that the airports were closed to civilian traffic. Within two hours I set off with David, the incredible Khun Amnat from the Embassy’s Thai staff, and a driver, facing a nine-hour journey. I had woken at eight that morning. I would get my first brief sleep forty hours later, around midnight on 27th December.

If I am being completely honest, my first thought in the car was: what on earth am I going to talk to David Fall about for nine hours? I am sitting next to the Ambassador, we have a perfectly good relationship, but the week before I had performed a spoof This Is Your Life skit about him at our Christmas party.

Very quickly, though, we realised we were simply going to be incredibly busy, because the phones never stopped ringing. This was 2004. Amnat, our excellent Thai colleague, had a cardboard box filled with fully charged Nokia block phones. Whenever one phone ran out of battery, we just moved the SIM card into another handset that was fully charged. It sounds crazy now, but that is what we had.

We did not really know what we were heading towards, except that large numbers of people had died. When we left, the figure was in the hundreds. By the time we got there, it had gone over a thousand people confirmed dead.

My only real thought was that this is our job. This is our responsibility. That is why I suggested to David that we had to get in the car and go straight away. I had been involved in the response to the 2002 Bali bombing, where we sat on our hands for two days, not deploying anybody to the scene, and thirty-two British people had been killed there. We were rightly criticised in the press for that. So I said, look, we need to act right now. British people need our help. Let’s go. The airports are shut, we are going to have to drive, and that is all we are going to have to do.

That is genuinely all I thought about, driving towards the Sarasin Bridge.

I phoned my parents on the way. My late mum picked up the phone and, in quite a brusque way — and I loved her dearly — I said, put Dad on the phone. That is all I said to her. I’m okay, put Dad on the phone. Dad had been in the British Army. He would understand. I told him I was fine, that we were going into the disaster zone, not to worry about me, and that I would call in a few days. And that was it. Once that was out of the way, family business done, it was straight into the job at hand.

Q: You have written that the UK response was the failure of a system — one that was ill-prepared, with staff in London who were disconnected from the reality. What does a state realistically owe its citizens when catastrophe strikes abroad, and why do rich, capable governments so repeatedly fail to meet that obligation in the first hours?

[Ian Proud] We have a consular responsibility to help British citizens overseas. Of our three core strategic national interests, one is obviously our prosperity, the second is our security, and the third is keeping British people safe wherever they are in the world. You can look at any set of Foreign Office objectives and there will always be a key objective on keeping British people safe and helping them overseas. This is our job.

But sometimes people lose sight of the immediacy of the circumstances — the devastating circumstances that people face in natural disasters, after terrorist attacks, and so on — and they do not apply sufficient grip to the situation, because they are far away from it. It was Boxing Day. People were still getting over Christmas Day. Lots of people were on holiday.

So a wait-and-see mentality creeps in, where people in London sit back, look around and say, well, let’s calibrate with the Europeans, let’s see what they do; let’s have a chat with the Americans and see what they do. And all that time, people are dead, injured, missing, without possessions, grieving, helpless, desperate for somebody to come and help them. And all that time we are sucking our teeth and looking around.

We are missing opportunities to show intent and to deliver capability — to give British people not just the help they need, but the help they deserve, and which it is our responsibility to provide.

Our actions as an organisation relentlessly gave the impression that we did not care about the plight of Britons who had suffered so terribly. That was our responsibility as an organisation, and it was our duty as diplomats. We were lions led by lambs.

It is a mentality thing. That is what it comes down to.

Q: There was that extraordinary example where you requested a military aircraft from Krabi and were told to submit a business case. Even under extreme pressure, institutions seem to reach for process rather than judgement — which is precisely the wrong instinct in an emergency.

[Ian Proud] You are absolutely right. In terms of the command-and-control structure, insufficient control is given to the people on the ground. We are reliant on people who are far from the scene making the big calls, when we should be far more empowered to make those calls ourselves, or at least to have real influence on them from the ground.

Bureaucratic inertia sets in. We fall back into old bureaucratic habits of how we do things. We are not equipped for dealing with the far more urgent, far more pressing, far more immediate calls that have to be made in the circumstances of a devastating event. And it is a real failure.

The C-130 is a good example. We had enormous military capability in Afghanistan at that point. We are just really slow, and it cripples us. And of course, people conclude that we simply do not care enough to act now.

London showed a complete lack of grip. Several colleagues told me they had phoned the Office begging to fly out to Thailand and had never received a call back. It was two whole weeks before a rapid deployment team arrived.

You can never fail in a crisis if you just act now — if you just do it, and think about the cost later. Think about the billions we pumped in to save dodgy banks after the global financial crisis. It would cost hardly anything by comparison to just act now when these things happen. Ditch the spreadsheets and the process to one side.

Q: You have written that the colleagues who broke down were often the ones carrying the pressure of trying to make bereaved families feel better — that it created a kind of helplessness. What did you learn from that? There is something in it about empathy becoming dangerous to the person offering it.

[Ian Proud] Exactly right. What British people want — what anybody wants in that situation, when they are helpless, when they are lost, when they have lost a loved one, when they are injured — is two things: compassion and practical help. That is what people want from us, and nothing else.

They feel terrible. We cannot make them feel better. What we can do is ensure that, through our actions, through our kindness, through our practical help, we do not make the situation a great deal worse for them.

But of course, if you are an official on the ground, you are meeting people. In one case, a colleague of mine took under their wing two young children whose parents had both been killed in the wave. Of course that person would have felt incredible empathy and care and love for those desperate children. I have got kids. It makes me emotional even talking about it now. But what they were experiencing at that time was that they just wanted to make them feel better — and you cannot make them feel better. You cannot make people feel better in those circumstances. You can be kind. You can help them. You can give them the practical things they need right then.

I think people lose sight of that, because they feel the brokenness and the emotional pain, and they just want it to go away, and they cannot make it go away. In my experience it becomes overwhelming, and it breaks people emotionally. So many staff had emotional breakdowns.

The biggest insight I took from the colleagues who suffered breakdowns was the pressure they placed on themselves to make bereaved relatives feel better. Their inability to alleviate another person’s pain produced a feeling of helplessness they could not escape from.

I have thought about this a great deal, as you can imagine. It always comes back to the same thing: you provide the compassion, you provide the practical help, you do the best you can to help those people — but do not expect that it will do anything other than avoid making their situation any worse than it already is. That is my maxim in crisis work. Acts of kindness and practical assistance can help people get what they need when they need it, but they cannot make them feel better. Callous, insensitive handling, on the other hand, can make things a great deal worse.

Q: What about you as the leader? You are not isolated from those same emotions, and you walked into the most extreme end of what anyone could be expected to see. How did you cope at the time — and afterwards, because you have been very open about how hard the recovery was?

[Ian Proud] When you are leading, I think the worst thing you can do is project your anxiety, and particularly your stress. I do not really tend to get angry at work, I do not tend to lose my cool, but people leak, right? We are emotional carriers. The last thing you can do as a leader in that situation is to show that you are struggling, or to project your stress onto the people you are working with.

Your job is really to lift them up: make them feel empowered, make them feel valued, try to help them when we are getting utterly battered from every side by the press in terms of negative coverage — because we did get it wrong. We did not send enough people. We were not quick enough. I get that. But all the people on the ground were doing their very best, and it was my job to lift them up and say, come on, just focus on what we are doing. That is the best that we can do.

So many colleagues had mental health breakdowns during that time, including my own PA and a Thai member of my team. The American therapist they eventually sent out to help us withdrew before long with emotional exhaustion. And I suppose the bloody-minded part of me was determined not to show any weakness at all. That is why I was the first to deploy to the disaster area, and the last to leave it.

But of course, while you are doing that, you still have all those emotions, as you say, and they mount up. And when you are doing it in the office, you are also doing it outside of the office. So you have this veneer of it’s fine, let’s just do what we are doing, do the best we can, make a difference. But you cannot talk about how badly you feel — and I did not want my family back home worrying that I was falling apart inside either. So that becomes a habit. Quite a negative habit.

So you do other things instead. When you get back to Bangkok, you sit in your apartment and you drink all night and chain smoke, because that is what you have found as your way to cope.

And that is PTSD. That is what it is. It is a feeling of intense loneliness and isolation and helplessness that can only be resolved by negative habits which you believe will take away the pain, but which don’t.

Q: This feels like one of the hidden aspects of diplomatic tradecraft. What do you wish people understood about the reality of diplomatic life? The image is pink gin at an embassy reception, when the reality is that when a crisis hits abroad, your teams are the ones going in first.

[Ian Proud] It is not a nine-to-five job. It is a lifestyle more than a career — and by lifestyle, I do not mean a pink gin-sipping lifestyle. It is a commitment to public service. It is twenty-four-seven at times.

Believe me, if you have been to one reception you have been to them all. The novelty of Ferrero Rocher and free wine wears off very quickly when you are at your fourth reception of the week.

But it is when things happen that it matters. You just have to step up and go, right now. There is no room for well, it’s not very convenient, I’ve booked a spa treatment, I’ve got a nice meal tonight. You just have to go and do it. That is your job. And that is what makes it invigorating and exciting, because you are there to represent your country, the United Kingdom, and to help British people. If you are not driven by that sense of public service, then it will not be for you.

It is not nearly as glamorous as people believe, but it is a hell of a career, because you get to do things that really matter. I was in Moscow when the Salisbury nerve agent attack happened. There was the tsunami. I was in Helmand Province during the most intense period of the fighting. These are the moments that matter. That is why you do it. It is about serving your country. It is a terrific career.

Q: What did you learn about the best of humanity? These are the situations where you see how different cultures respond to crisis.

[Ian Proud] I grew up overseas as a kid, and I spent a lot of my adult life living overseas as a diplomat. My best friends are Buddhists. My longest-standing friends are Hindus from the East African diaspora that came to the UK in the 1970s. For me, people are people.

In any society you get racism and intolerance and all of these dreadful things, which I absolutely detest. But when something really bad happens, all of that goes away. None of it matters. The only thing that matters is people — and people connect with other people’s fears and worries and the strife they find themselves in, and they help them as people, irrespective of the colour of their skin, their religion, their sexuality. None of that matters.

I think, sometimes, things like racism emerge out of boredom, where people just do not have enough in their lives, where they do not get out of the house enough to really see what the world is actually like.

Amidst all the death and the grief, I witnessed the best of humanity. Race, religion, gender, sexuality, upbringing — none of it matters when people are thrown together in the most harrowing circumstances. People talk to each other and try to help each other in ways they simply would not in peacetime, and real, lifelong bonds of friendship are forged out of it.

Well, when the tsunami happened, you really got to see what the world is like — and how powerful humanity can be in connecting people in the most difficult of circumstances.

Q: I am curious about the journey into writing. After a career of diplomatic telegrams, what prompted Searching? And what does a novel let us understand that a documentary account could not?

[Ian Proud] There are a couple of aspects to that. The first is that I have always needed — not wanted, but needed — to write about the tsunami. And of course it is now twenty-two years down the track. Writing a memoir or a documentary account of it would frankly be a bit stale by now.

I did consider a memoir. But as I was still a serving diplomat, that would have required me to resign, and despite everything I still felt a great commitment to public service. The characters in Searching are entirely fictional; I have not drawn on the experience of British or other victims to create them. There is one small exception — a British Embassy official called Nick Evans, who appears occasionally, and who is a lightly fictionalised rendering of me.

The second connects to the tsunami itself. One of my ways of healing and finding catharsis, even today, is engaging with romance movies and literature. I am not saying Searching is cheesy, but that is where it comes from. My wife and kids joke that whenever Katharine takes the children to see their grandparents in Weston-super-Mare, I just binge-watch romance movies on the telly.

Not long after the tsunami, the Nicholas Sparks adaptation The Notebook came out, and I just loved it. It is a properly old-fashioned love story. I personally find that very healing.

Why? Because when I was at my most broken — my mum had died, I was still drinking too much, my life had no direction — I fell in love with my wife. Having that kind of stability in life is one of the best ways to heal and to live your life to the fullest: through the memories you create, through the habits and the patterns, through the joy you get when the kids come along and everything you do with them.

Searching, ultimately, is about searching for how you find inner peace in your life. For me, that came through loving relationships — with my wife, with my family, with my two beautiful children.

So when it came down to it, writing the novel was really about writing two people who loved each other so much that they could endure the worst, come out the other end, and just about figure out how to piece it all back together again after a devastating ordeal.

Q: Is that something you saw in people there? A friend of mine was in Thailand at the time; his friends and their family died. He talks about the ignition of something in people searching for loved ones, and a complete mental reset about what actually matters. Did you observe that, or is it something you noticed later, in yourself and others?

[Ian Proud] I think it changes people. I think everybody who experienced it would probably come out of it feeling their lives were lesser in some way afterwards — but they still have a life to live.

Events like the tsunami are so tragic because they take away, through death or through despair, the people who form part of our mental health ecosystems. They steal our emotional certainty and our stability. Humans are essentially social beings; we gain strength and support from being around others.

We had a colleague who was killed with his three children, survived only by his wife. This is not in any way linked to the novel, but I know through friends who know her that she has figured out ways to continue to live her life. Part of that is through the friendships she has, which have been able to support her through an ordeal that I frankly cannot even imagine the horror of.

It changed so many people. But ultimately, in terms of healing for a lot of people, it comes back to a question: what are the loving relationships you have that can support you? And at the time it was about how people were expressing their love — not romantic love, but human love, through the things they did to help you right then.

When you are in a difficult time, it always comes back to that. Basic humanity. Caring for our fellow men and women, whatever their background and circumstance. That will always be the core theme for me.

Q: Is that what you hope people take from the book? One of the things I took from it is that the things we think matter usually don’t — and that it is sad we so often have to wait for the worst to happen before we understand the true value of the person in front of us.

[Ian Proud] Most people just want to be happy. You grow up, life is tough, life is short, it is brutal at times, you go through some awful things — but underneath all of it, we all just want to be happy. That is true almost everywhere you go, and whoever it is you happen to be talking to.

The media in particular gets obsessed with wars and enemies and people we do not like and should try to defeat in some way. We have children dying in Gaza. These are somebody’s children. We have had schoolgirls killed with a Tomahawk cruise missile in Iran. I have got friends who are Jewish, friends who are Muslim, whatever — but these are just people.

We have a war going on in Ukraine which, by all estimates, has killed or injured over two million people. Two million people, over four and a half years. And our narrative gets stuck in: well, we have to win, we have to beat the horrible people. Why not try to talk to them instead, and ask whether we can find a way to coexist peacefully — because people’s kids are dying while we sit back and talk about how we can win.

Nobody is winning in this situation. Humanity is not winning. We are all losing from it.

People need to step back and say: these are somebody’s kids. These are somebody’s parents and grandparents. These are somebody’s friends. And remember that war serves nothing at all, except to make a small number of people richer while making millions of others much worse off. That is all it achieves.

I suppose a natural disaster or a terrorist attack is a kind of microcosm of that. And the question is the same in both cases: how do you come out of that situation in a way that helps people as best you can?

Q: As an interlocutor — a word I very rarely get to use — how do you cope with a sense of powerlessness? Many of the situations you have encountered are far beyond the control of one nation, let alone one individual. And in war you intersect with a political reality that does not much care what you say about children dying on the ground.

[Ian Proud] You have to try your best to influence from within. I am a firm believer in that: speak out for what you think is the best policy route forward. Everybody will have a different perspective on it, of course, but you have to raise your voice and make it heard in an inclusive way, listening to other people’s views too.

Ultimately, I think a lot of these problems come down to the fact that we simply do not care to listen to another point of view. People view what is happening in the Middle East differently. People view what is happening in Ukraine differently. The only way out is to listen to both sides and to engage in dialogue.

But how do I cope? It is about always having that at the front of my mind: there is always a different way of looking at this. My view will not be decisive. It is not the only way that people are interpreting what is going on. The only way out is to reach a common understanding about what we actually want from this — and that ultimately has to be peaceful coexistence between people, in which innocent people are not being harmed and people’s boundaries are not being invaded.

So focus on the strategic issue at hand. I think too often these days in foreign policy terms — and in the media especially — we forget the question of why are we doing this? Why do we care about this situation? What are we trying to achieve? We quickly lose sight of that as we focus in on the glamorous videos and photographs of bombs exploding, and somebody winning and somebody dying, and we’ll prevail in the end. We lose sight of what it is we are actually trying to achieve.

So I always try to focus on: what am I here for? What is my job? In the tsunami, what was I there for? I was there to help British people. That was my number one priority. Focusing on those questions is what helps you cope with some very difficult situations. It narrows the problem down to something you can actually act on, rather than something that simply overwhelms you.

Fundamentally, there is nothing complicated about crisis work, however harrowing it is. It is about having the right number of staff, with the right skills, deployed in sufficient numbers to meet the challenge at hand — and keeping a close eye on everybody, to manage the mental health risks. The tsunami response was the failure of a system that was ill-prepared, with staff in London who were disconnected. I determined never to let that happen again in any crisis I was responsible for.

Q: How can the rest of us understand this? There is an odd consequence of relative peace and stability in the UK — no war on our shores, nothing on the scale of the disasters you have seen — which is that people do not appreciate how fragile peace and stability actually are. How do we convey that without people having to live through what you have?

[Ian Proud]

Travel. Visit countries you would never think about visiting. One of the great damages COVID did to humanity was closing off borders and reducing the possibility for people to interact with people from other countries.

Go to Iran. Go to Russia. Go to China. Pick the country you least want to go to, and go there, and talk to people. Break bread with them. Have a meal. And then, when you come back, think about it — are they really any different from you in terms of what they want from life?

Watch Race Across the World. I cannot promote that BBC show enough. Realise the joy you get from connection with people who are completely different from you and yet somehow just the same in terms of what they want: happiness, love, family, all the rest of it. We are all just the same when it comes down to it.

You see that after a natural disaster, when everybody is in exactly the same boat. When people realise that, they find a human connection that is wonderfully positive and uplifting.

I used to go to refugee camps along the Thai border with Myanmar. Those people had nothing. Everything they had was provided by international NGOs — the materials to build their houses, the medical care, the micro-business support in terms of setting up sewing and textile work, even the religious provision. And with nothing at all, you still saw kids smiling and playing happily with each other. Because at the end of the day, when you are a kid, the most important thing is having your mum and dad around. These are the basic human needs that we so often forget about.

And I hope readers are reminded that the best curative in life is love and human connection. If you meet a traumatised person, an act of kindness and compassion will matter far more than you realise, and they will never forget it. Even if you find them distant, the real person is probably still inside, desperate to feel well again and to discover the life and the love they yearn for. Your kindness will offer them an emotional lifeline.

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Desai, author of Geopolitical Economy and a sharp Marxist analyst of multipolarity, begins with the immediate fallout from the conflict involving Iran.

Oil-exporting states outside the combat zone may temporarily enjoy higher revenues, but the rest of the developing world faces fuel shortages, soaring input costs for fertilizers, and the real risk of a food-price crisis later this year.

Agriculture has become far more energy-intensive since the 1970s oil shocks; when fertilizers fail to arrive or yields collapse, the knock-on effects will hit the poorest hardest.

Remittances from Gulf construction and service workers—vital for balancing payments in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the Philippines—are also under threat as the region’s business model of high-end tourism and finance under a U.S. security umbrella unravels.

The Mecca Agreement between Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan is one early signal that even longtime partners no longer trust that umbrella.

The discussion then turns to the monetary bind facing the Federal Reserve. Persistent inflation should, in theory, force rate hikes. Yet raising rates high enough to matter would puncture the asset bubbles on which the dollar system rests. Leave rates low and inflation simply erodes the dollar’s value.

Either path, Desai argues, puts the post-Bretton Woods order in serious trouble.

Developing countries already battered by the pandemic, the Ukraine war, and now this latest shock will face higher debt-service costs precisely when the IMF and World Bank have spent decades stripping them of the policy tools needed for productive recovery.

Trump’s domestic agenda fares no better under scrutiny.

Promises of re-industrialization have produced little more than performative tariffs and a massive wager on generative AI—a “pie-in-the-sky” project Desai likens to expecting monkeys with typewriters to produce Shakespeare.

Without a coherent industrial policy capable of disciplining capital, tariffs remain empty theater.

Meanwhile, the U.S. capitalist class itself pulls in contradictory directions: anti-China rhetoric coexists with CEOs desperate to keep doing business in China. The National Security Strategy’s “Donroe Doctrine” is exposed as domestic political theater rather than a workable grand strategy.

Perhaps the most bracing section concerns the longer arc. Asia was the center of the world economy before industrial capitalism; its demographic and geographic weight makes a renewed shift inevitable.

But this is not a simple replay of 1914-style great-power rivalry. A declining capitalist power confronts a large socialist country - China - that has delivered growth, innovation, and rising living standards the West can no longer match.

Sanctions, once billed as an elegant alternative to war, have lost their bite because the West’s economic magnetism has faded. Russia’s adaptation since 2014 is the clearest proof.

We also examine India’s trajectory under Modi—an economy whose manufacturing share is shrinking, whose statistical integrity has been compromised, and whose growth figures increasingly rest on creative accounting.

The contrast with China’s model of state-directed industrial capacity could not be starker.

This is not abstract theory. It is a clear-eyed map of the volatile reaction now brewing in the global political economy. Desai’s analysis is rigorous without being dogmatic, urgent without being alarmist.

Watch the full conversation to hear how the northwest corner of the world continues to export chaos while its own internal contradictions intensify—and why the “world majority” is already voting with its trade, investment, and security choices.

The video is live now and you can watch it here:

Settle in; the implications will stay with you long after the credits roll.

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Mary described a Whitehall that appears to be on autopilot. Neither the new Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, nor the Prime Minister rushed to Kyiv as an opening gesture, yet both have doubled down on the previous government’s maxim that “Ukraine’s defence is our defence.”

In recent days this has extended to reports of British-made drones striking deep inside Russia. The Russian embassy in London responded with warnings of consequences; British officials expressed indignation.

Mary found both the escalation and the surprise at Russia’s reaction astonishing.

There has been no meaningful parliamentary debate, no clear statement of heightened risk to the United Kingdom itself, and no recognition that such support may actually prolong a proxy war that is already catastrophic for Ukraine’s demographics and future viability as a state.

This policy sits uneasily alongside Britain’s diminished military capacity. Submarines are in repair, stocks of munitions have been drawn down, and the army is a fraction of its former size.

Russia, by contrast, fields a far larger force and a shipbuilding programme that eclipses our own. Any retaliation is more likely to occur in the legal grey zone of the high seas—seizing vessels—than through direct attack on British soil.

Yet the absence of a defence attaché in Moscow for over a year, and the collapse of earlier post-Cold War naval cooperation, leaves little room for de-escalation.

As Mary observed, Europe has forfeited any plausible role as mediator in the Ukraine war and now appears content to keep the conflict alive long after American enthusiasm has cooled.

Threaded through our conversation was the Arctic dimension, where commercial rather than purely military competition is gathering pace.

Mary’s recent voyage along Greenland’s west coast revealed a sparsely populated, logistically forbidding territory still heavily dependent on Danish subsidies.

Chinese attempts to secure mineral footholds failed on commercial grounds.

Yet Beijing has now announced a regular “Silk Ice Road”—a summer trade route hugging Russia’s Arctic coast and destined, in practical terms, for European ports such as Felixstowe.

This is not primarily a challenge to American maritime primacy in the Pacific; it is a bid to tighten commercial ties with Europe and reduce transit times.

Therefore, Washington’s renewed interest in Greenland—bases, the Northwest Passage, and the so-called Golden Dome—can be read partly as a bid to lock in European allegiance in the face of a growing reality of Eurasian interconnectedness, driven by China.

Russia, already possessed of the world’s longest Arctic coastline and its own Northern Sea Route, has little incentive to seek additional territory but does, ultimately, see itself as a key Eurasian power broker.

Taken together, these strands expose a deeper problem.

Britain continues to trade on past martial glories while its strategic reviews dissolve into unfunded pick-and-mix lists and domestic voices—concerned with jobs, infrastructure and everyday security—remain largely unheard.

The result is policy that heightens risk in the absence of strategy.

Conversations such as this one with Mary Dejevsky are a small counterweight: an insistence that peace, not perpetual escalation, remains the more responsible national interest for Britain and Britons alike.

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His recent article examining Russia’s Special Military Operation through a longer historical and cultural lens — reaching back to the Second World War and even Imperial Russia — offers a welcome corrective to the shallow tropes that dominate much Western coverage.

One of the strongest themes that emerges from both his writing and our conversation is Russian adaptability.

Western media still leans heavily on the idea of a rigid, unthinking military that relies on “human wave” tactics and supposedly values its soldiers’ lives less than we do. Neither claim stands up to academic scrutiny.

As Hill notes, early instances of rushed assaults were neither the norm nor long-lasting. Lower-level commanders innovated and found ways to reduce casualties; the army shifted toward the kind of small-scale storm-group tactics that have historical parallels in the Great Patriotic War.

The same pattern appears with drones.

Russia began the war well behind Ukraine and over-reliant on Iranian drones. Grassroots production and local initiative filled the gap until the central system recognised drone development was a priority. Once it did, industrial-scale manufacture followed.

Today Russian forces frequently out-drone their opponents locally and have integrated unmanned systems into combined-arms operations more coherently than Ukraine, which still struggles with a patchwork of different foreign systems.

Hill draws a useful parallel with the Soviet concept of deep battle. The theoretical ideas of the 1930s were ambitious, but only wartime experience turned them into something workable.

The same process is visible today in Ukraine.

Adaptation is often slower at the top of a centralised Russian system, yet once lower-level solutions prove themselves, they are adopted.

The early reliance on battalion tactical groups proved fragile; Russia abandoned them and adapted formations and tactics to the realities of drone-saturated warfare.

On the political side, Hill sees Putin’s core war aims as relatively limited and consistent: the complete liberation of the Donbas, Ukrainian neutrality (no NATO membership and no foreign troops on Ukrainian soil), and the protection of Russian-speaking populations.

Regime change was attempted at the outset, but the more enduring objectives remain.

Crossing the Dnieper in force looks unlikely; securing Donetsk and Luhansk and then battering Ukraine into a political settlement with long-range strikes appears more probable.

The conversation also returned to the deeper origins of the conflict.

NATO expansion, the broken assurances of the 1990s, and the sense of Western betrayal still shape Russian strategic thinking far more than most Western commentary admits.

Professor Jonathan Haslam’s book Hubris documents this history in forensic detail.

The war is not simply about Ukraine; it is the latest chapter in a much longer story of how the post-Cold War order was constructed.

Perhaps the most important strategic observation is that you cannot fight a war by committee. Russia’s more centralised decision-making, for all its flaws, allows sustained political will and industrial mobilisation.

European leaders, by contrast, are constrained by short electoral cycles, fragmented resources, and the need to maintain a narrative of Ukrainian battlefield success that becomes harder to sustain by the month.

Political legitimacy in Berlin, Paris, Brussels and London may well run out before Russian resolve does.

Hill’s analysis is a reminder that serious study of Russian military culture and history still has something valuable to offer. The alternative — recycling 1990s tropes and ignoring adaptation — has already cost Ukraine dearly.

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The discussions there, and our subsequent conversation, offer a clear-eyed look at a phenomenon - Russophobia - that has intensified dramatically since 2022.

One striking difference emerged immediately between western and Russian participants at the conference.

Russian participants tended to view Russophobia as a deep-rooted cultural feature of the West, particularly Britain, stretching back two centuries to Russia’s emergence as a great power after the Napoleonic Wars.

Western speakers, including Roberts, saw it as far more contingent and episodic — a political instrument that surfaces when it serves a purpose and can recede just as quickly.

Roberts argues that today’s Russophobia is primarily an elite phenomenon.

It thrives in the Westminster bubble, among sections of the media, the intelligence services, the defence industry and the chattering classes.

Ordinary people are often more open-minded. Taxi drivers still express genuine curiosity about life in Moscow rather than reflexive hostility. Public opinion has proved remarkably resistant to years of daily propaganda; the extreme narrative has failed to mobilise a durable popular majority for confrontation.

Within the elite itself there are different strands: a large “herd” that follows the prevailing narrative for career reasons; those with financial or institutional interests in keeping the confrontation alive; and a smaller group of true believers.

The late Lord Robert Skidelsky, whose writings on Russophobia formed the basis of Roberts’ own paper in Pskov, described it as a ready-made repertoire of stereotypes and attitudes that can be activated when political circumstances demand.

Its current intensity is instrumental — it helps mobilise support for Ukraine and for the West’s proxy war against Russia.

History suggests such episodes can reverse rapidly.

Britain and Russia fought as allies in both world wars.

The anti-Soviet version of Russophobia collapsed with surprising speed under Gorbachev.

Roberts remains cautiously optimistic that a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine would undermine the extreme forms of Russophobia and open space for more pragmatic voices. Without an end to the fighting, however, the instrumental value of the narrative remains high.

The conversation also touched on deeper strategic realities.

You cannot fight a war by committee.

Russia’s more centralised decision-making and industrial capacity have allowed it to adapt and sustain the conflict, while Western policymakers continue to underestimate Russian resilience and overestimate the prospects of Ukrainian victory or regime collapse in Moscow.

The result is a prolonged, self-defeating policy that has already cost Ukraine dearly and eroded the legitimacy of European governments at home.

Roberts’ message is ultimately a hopeful one. Most people in any country want peace. Ending the war would not only stop the bloodshed; it would also deprive Russophobia of its most powerful current fuel and create the conditions for a more rational relationship between Russia and the West.

In the meantime, moderate, evidence-based voices remain essential.

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In our latest conversation he delivered one of the bluntest assessments of the current geopolitical rupture I have heard: the West has finally achieved what it always claimed to want — the permanent exclusion of Russia from “Western civilisation.”

The twist is that Russian society has now fully reciprocated. The old Soviet-era mixture of admiration and envy toward the West is gone. In its place sits a cold, high-intensity hostility.

Ordinary Europeans who move to Russia are still welcomed. But European governments, media and political classes are regarded as existential enemies.

Martyanov argues this shift is irreversible. Daily elite Russophobia, open Western celebration of Ukrainian nationalism with neo-Nazi elements, and calls to “kill more Russians” have destroyed any remaining illusions.

Russians no longer believe a normal relationship is possible. When the fighting eventually ends, there will be no return to the pre-2022 status quo.

“Never again,” he says, will Russian blood or Russian soldiers be spent stabilising or defending Europe.

Europe itself, in his view, is already finished as a coherent civilisation. France is demographically transforming beyond recognition and will not survive as a unified state in its current form. Germany was never properly denazified after 1945 — the Western allies deliberately preserved Wehrmacht and SS expertise for the coming confrontation with the Soviet Union — and today’s leadership continues that lineage.

The continent is de-industrialising, energy-poor, and ruled by what Martyanov calls credentialed idiots and political prostitutes. Its mainstream media (BBC, Financial Times, New York Times, Washington Post, The Economist) are not news organisations but propaganda outlets complicit in war crimes.

Meanwhile Russia has completed a strategic reorientation toward Asia. Energy, trade and long-term partnership now flow east. The European market is no longer the prize it once was.

Ordinary Russians, Martyanov notes, are in many material respects living better than their European counterparts — higher real wages in manufacturing, widespread car ownership, and a tangible sense of national purpose. The mythology of Western superiority has collapsed.

The conversation also covered the moral and institutional decay of Western political systems, the transformation of the US Congress into what he calls “Knesset 2.0,” and the military reality that Russia cannot be defeated on the battlefield.

His forthcoming book Obsolete will expand on the West’s comprehensive loss of the arms race.

There was little optimism about near-term reconciliation. The divorce, in Martyanov’s judgement, is final. Europe chose this path. Russia has simply stopped pretending otherwise.You can watch the full interview here:

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Wherever you are in the world, whatever your nationality and religion, I wish you much peace.

Britain and Europe have trapped themselves—politically, economically, and culturally—with little prospect of escape.

And the irony is that the Americans built the cage for us.

Tracing the trajectory from Clinton through Bush, Obama, Biden and Trump, Martyanov described a steady descent into mediocrity and worse. Quoting H.L. Mencken, he noted that democracy eventually delivers the “downright moron” the people deep down desire.

What we now see in Washington, he argued, is not aberration but culmination: a political class of “credentialed idiots” whose only real skill is self-preservation.

Congress, in his view, functions less as a deliberative body than as “Knesset 2.0,” plastered with the logos of donors and foreign interests. Honesty, he suggested, would require members to walk the halls wearing corporate and lobbying patches like Formula One drivers.

The media fares no better. Martyanov labelled leading outlets—from the BBC and Financial Times to the New York Times and Washington Post—propaganda arms and, more bluntly, “war criminals.” Their product is not journalism but narrative enforcement, often so crude that it exposes the incompetence of the intelligence services feeding them.

Competence has collapsed on both sides of the Atlantic; the lies are no longer even believable.

France, Martyanov believes, will not survive as a unified state; demographic realities that officialdom refuses to acknowledge make recovery impossible. Germany never underwent genuine denazification after 1945, and today’s leadership—von der Leyen, Merz and others—represents continuity rather than rupture. Britain’s elite live in a nineteenth century delusion, that the UK remains an industrial, imperial power that can take on the dastardly Russians.

The result is a continent that is demographically transforming, economically hollowed out, and strategically irrelevant.

Citizens die in heatwaves while green orthodoxy remains untouched. Protest is met with policing, not reform. No one really cares what the working class think. Democracy finally revealed as a figleaf for ‘those that have’ to remain in charge however idiotic they may be.

The war in Ukraine has simply solidified Europe’s cringing dependence on the US, like a domestic abuse victim unable to see that the only way out is to find a new partner.

The most consequential change, however, is in Moscow. Russians no longer view Europe as a civilisation to which they aspire. The hatred that has replaced earlier ambivalence is, Martyanov insists, existential and broadly shared.

Europe’s open support for what many Russians see as a Nazi-adjacent project in Ukraine has closed the door permanently. Cheap energy, cultural exchange, and the old European market are gone. Russia has reoriented its energy flows eastward, lives better than much of Europe, and feels no obligation to come to the rescue.

Martyanov is writing a new book, Obsolete, arguing that the West has already lost the arms race by knockout. The United States remains a great power, but no longer the decisive one. Europe is a peninsula of diminishing consequence.

The only remaining hope he offers is that the unravelling ends in a whimper rather than a bang—though history, he reminds us, suggests violence remains humanity’s favourite pastime. The conversation left little room for optimism about near-term bridge-building. Yet for those willing to listen, Martyanov’s diagnosis is consistent: the West is not being defeated from outside. It is defeating itself.

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Hudson begins by placing Trump’s current demands in a longer historical context.

This is not a sudden improvisation. During his first term, Trump already dreamed of extracting tribute from the Gulf states — a US-imposed toll on the Strait of Hormuz — to force OPEC and American allies to cover the cost of a U.S. military presence which has always served US interests.

It is, Hudson says, a classic landlord’s mentality: keep adding extra charges to the rent. The same logic now drives the pressure on Japan, South Korea and Europe to pay ever larger sums for their own “security.”

The problem is that these demands are colliding with an oil shock that has not yet fully hit.

Once the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is depleted and Iranian (and potentially wider Gulf) exports are disrupted, Asian economies that depend on Persian Gulf energy will face severe balance-of-payments crises.

Japan’s promised $650 billion investment in the United States and South Korea’s $350 billion pledge will become impossible to fulfil.

Countries will be forced either to sell U.S. bonds and stocks or to raise interest rates sharply — both of which threaten the dollar system itself.

Hudson is blunt: we are looking at the real possibility of a depression on the scale of a hundred years ago. This time the crisis will combine a real-goods shortage (oil, gas, fertiliser, food) with already crushing levels of foreign-currency debt.

The Federal Reserve’s response so far — printing money to buy bonds and absorb the U.S. budget deficit — has inflated financial assets while the real economy of production and wages remains under debt-deflation pressure.

Home ownership in America has already fallen below 50 percent of families; higher mortgage rates will push it lower still.

Temporary “swap” arrangements invented by Treasury Secretary Bessent with the UAE, Japan and others merely defer the pain. When those currencies weaken in the autumn, the cost of unwinding the swaps will fall on the foreign partners, not on Washington.

Europe, already de-industrialising under the weight of expensive American LNG, will feel the squeeze particularly hard.

The deeper issue, Hudson argues, is structural. The post-1945 system was designed as a pro-creditor, dollar-centred order. The coming wave of unpayable debts — national, corporate and household — will force the same conversation that Keynes tried (and failed) to have at Bretton Woods: how to write down debts and credits when structural imbalances become chronic.

Without a new international architecture that restores genuine trade and financial sovereignty, countries will remain trapped in a system that no longer serves their interests.

Russia’s experience after 2014 offers one cautionary lesson. Cut off from Western capital markets, it repatriated its surpluses and accelerated re-industrialisation. Other nations may soon face the same choice: continue submitting to a financial empire that extracts tribute, or begin constructing an alternative.

The oil war has made the contradictions impossible to ignore. The only remaining question is how long the rest of the world will accept a system that prioritises one country’s financial dominance over everyone else’s economic survival.

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Wherever you are in the world, whatever your nationality and religion, I wish you much peace.

In my latest conversation on The Peacemonger, Marta Havryshko does not hold back.

She is not a Kremlin mouthpiece. She is a Ukrainian, a war refugee, a scholar of the Holocaust and Ukrainian nationalism, and a woman who still has family living through the daily nightmare. That is precisely why her words cut so deep.

Marta describes a reality that Western media prefers to ignore. The war is no longer primarily about territory or “victory.” It has become a highly profitable enterprise for a narrow elite around Zelensky.

Defence contracts, energy deals, Western aid – the money flows upwards while the bodies pile up.

Corruption is not a side-effect.

It is the operating system.Meanwhile, ordinary Ukrainians – especially the poor, the working class, the Russian-speaking – are treated as raw material. Men are dragged off the street, beaten in draft centres, declared fit even when they weigh 200 kilograms and barely understand the war is happening. Some die before they ever reach the front.

Families receive a phone call and a body left outside a building. This is not patriotism. This is industrialised disposability.

Gallup’s own data shows the majority of Ukrainians now want the war to end as soon as possible. Yet the official narrative continues to claim the opposite. Optimistic victory polls are treated as gospel while the lived experience of the population is dismissed as “Russian propaganda.”

Marta calls this what it is: a deliberate disconnection from reality designed to keep the machine running.

She is equally clear about the internal divisions. Language policing, public humiliation of Russian speakers, and the casual contempt shown towards people from Donbas by some in power have created resentment that no amount of Western cheerleading can paper over.

When elite units record recruitment videos in Russian while ordinary citizens are attacked for speaking it, the hypocrisy is impossible to miss.

The most chilling part of our conversation is the quiet realisation that Ukrainian lives simply do not count the same way in the calculus of those driving this war from a safe distance.

Western politicians and commentators demand more Russian deaths while showing little interest in the widows, the fatherless children, the traumatised soldiers, or the mothers still waiting for sons who will never come home.

Ukrainians have been turned into instruments.

Their deaths are statistics.

Their suffering is background noise.

Marta does not offer easy answers. She simply refuses to lie. The war is catastrophic. The human cost is being borne by those with the least power. The people who profit from its continuation have every incentive to keep it going.You can watch the full interview here:

It is not comfortable viewing but it is necessary viewing.

If you believe ordinary people should not be sacrificed so that elites can grow richer and politicians can avoid admitting failure, share this conversation.

The silence around these truths has lasted long enough.

Wherever you are in the world, whatever your nationality and religion, I wish you much peace.

The starting point was simple and damning. A couple of years ago NATO countries accounted for 53 per cent of global military spending. That share has only grown as European governments have scrambled to increase defence budgets. Yet in the space of four years the Western alliance has suffered two major geostrategic defeats — first in Ukraine, now in the Persian Gulf against Iran. That is unprecedented in my lifetime.

Macgregor put it bluntly. The force structure the United States (and by extension much of NATO) has built over the last thirty years was designed for short, offensive wars against weak opponents who lacked serious air and missile defences. Commit that force against a large, prepared adversary with mountains, underground facilities and modern stand-off weapons, and the limitations become obvious very quickly. “Wrong force, wrong mission, wrong place, wrong time,” he said.

Jermy approached the same problem from the other side of the Atlantic. He pointed out that Western armed forces are configured primarily as air-sea powers, while the opponents we have chosen to confront are land powers capable of denying us both air superiority and sea control. He also returned to a theme he has written about for years: industrial capacity and energy remain the real foundations of military power. Without them, no amount of money spent on exquisite platforms will deliver victory.

The Royal Navy’s collapse from roughly seventy major surface combatants in his day to a handful of frigates and destroyers today is not just a British problem — it is a symptom of a wider Western failure to match resources to strategy.

Both men were scathing about the absence of honest strategic thinking. Politicians equate money spent with security achieved. Senior officers too often tell ministers what they want to hear rather than what they need to hear.

The result is a succession of campaigns that fail the basic tests of strategy: they are neither effective, efficient, nor enduring.

We talked about historical examples that still matter — Campbell-Bannerman’s refusal to commit a British army to the Continent, Eisenhower’s acute awareness of manpower limits, George Kennan’s clear-eyed distinction between vital and peripheral interests. The common thread is the same: great powers that refuse to define their actual interests end up exhausted and broke.

The most sobering line came near the end. Macgregor noted that going broke may ultimately force the reform that political will has so far refused. We are reaching the point where the West can no longer afford the wars its leaders keep starting.

You can watch the full conversation here.

It is not comfortable viewing, but it is necessary. If we are serious about peace rather than perpetual conflict, we first have to stop lying to ourselves about the balance of power.

As always, I remain grateful for every reader and viewer who prefers hard realism to comforting slogans.

Wherever you are in the world, I wish you much peace.