To echo the Washington Post columnist David Ignatious, America is a nation both glowing and showing unmistakable signs of decline. “Our social cohesion has unravelled so much,” he writes, that “we often feel like two nations rather than one.” Trump and his administration presented one of those nations to the world using the commemoration as a vehicle for divisive propaganda and political gain.

The contrast with the celebrations for the bicentennial back in 1976 is stark. America was emerging from the traumas of the Vietnam war and Watergate; the economy, foreign policy and race were all cause for concern. Yet there was also a sense — as Gerald Ford said when he became president in August 1974 following Richard Nixon’s resignation — that America’s “long national nightmare is over” and the guardrails of democracy had held. People remember the feelings of patriotism and nostalgia those celebrations inspired.

Looming over this year’s celebrations are the midterm elections and the very real possibility of the Republicans losing the House and even the Senate. Either scenario would bring most of Trump’s autocratic and corrupt behaviour to an end — a fact that he and Republicans fully recognise.

House speaker Mike Johnson summed up their fears: “If we were to lose the midterms, heaven forbid, these Democrats, y’all, impeachment’s not even the big concern. They will turn every committee of Congress into an investigative body, and they’ll go after the president’s family, the cabinet, his donors and friends, half of you in this room will be targeted.”

But while Republicans facing voters in November are justifiably worried about their prospects, Trump seems to have little interest in helping them out, either on policy or electoral finances. Voters are most concerned about the cost of living, especially the impact of the Iran war on gas prices and the soaring costs of health insurance, healthcare and housing. Yet Trump has endlessly mocked mounting concerns about affordability, calling it a “hoax” perpetrated by Democrats, and has downplayed Republicans’ efforts to tackle cost-of-living pressures by refusing to sign a bipartisan housing bill.

“I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation,” he said in May. “I don’t think about anybody.” He was referring to the attention he was giving to negotiating an end to the unpopular war with Iran (still pending) but the remark went down like a lead balloon.

At the same time, with campaigning starting in earnest, Trump is sitting on some US$350 million in campaign funds lodged in his MAGA Inc. super PAC. Perhaps to hold close the funds he personally controls, perhaps to boost his standing in the polls, he has proposed a midterm election convention — a “Trumpapalooza” — to be held in September in Texas (a red state where, unusually, a key Senate race is virtually a dead heat). The Republican National Committee has proposed that state parties use the convention to raise funds for their local candidates.

Trump’s playbook for the midterms encompasses two broad approaches. The first involves undermining the upcoming elections and overturning voting rights. These include having Republican states gerrymander electoral boundaries at the expense of Democrats; illegally attempting to charge the US Postal Service with determining who can vote by mail and refusing to deliver ballots sent by anyone not included on federal mail voter lists; and demanding via the Department of Justice that states turn over sensitive voter information.

Trump is increasingly obsessed with having the SAVE America Act passed. This bill requires citizenship proof to vote, strict ID requirements for in-person and mail voting, and complete voter rolls to be submitted to the Trump administration by the states. He thinks this would eliminate noncitizen and fraudulent voting (extreme rarities); it would certainly make it harder for many disadvantaged Americans to vote.

The SAVE America Act doesn’t have the needed sixty votes in the Senate to overcome a filibuster, and Republican leaders are reluctant to get rid of the filibuster to pass the bill, as Trump has suggested. In a speech given at Mt Rushmore as part of the 4 July celebrations, he stated bluntly why he thinks this is so important: “If we terminate the filibuster as we should do and immediately vote for the SAVE America Act, then we will not lose an election for a hundred years.”

Trump’s second strategy for the midterms is a resort to the hoariest of right-wing tropes, with accusations that Democrats and immigrants are communists. This was a recurrent theme in his 4 July speeches — indeed, Reuters reports he warned about communism eighty-one times in the two weeks between 23 June (when a string of left-wing Democratic candidates won primary contests in New York) and 8 July.

“There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land,” he said at Mt Rushmore, “including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success. You can be a communist, or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.” Elsewhere, he described the Democratic Socialists, who have been surprisingly successful in recent primaries, as “animals.” He went on: “We have to stop this… horrible threat of cancer that’s permeating our country called communism.”

Here, Trump is attempting to revive the “red baiting” of the McCarthy era, which he learned about from his mentor, the sinister lawyer Roy Cohn. Trump sees the communist threat as an easy sell.  “All we have to do is define our opponent as being a communist or a socialist or somebody who is going to destroy our country,” he said last week.

For Democrats, the upcoming midterm elections are about just one goal — taking back the legislative branch of government. To do this they will need to convince voters, Democrats and Independents alike, that they can deliver on the issues that matter. Part of this involves dealing with young voters’ concern that the current, ageing generation of lawmakers is unable or unwilling to mount strong and consistent opposition to Trump.

Many younger and swing voters are looking for what can be called progressive populism — Medicare for All, taxing the rich, help with educational fees and childcare, and more social housing. So it’s not surprising that candidates who identify as Democratic Socialists have been successful in recent primaries. This success can be read as a rebuke to elected officials and a shift by Democratic voters to the left, but there is also clear evidence that a range of Democratic voices are choosing the candidates most likely to win in their districts.

It’s important to note that Democratic Socialist candidates — often with endorsements from elected officials including Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani — have only succeeded (at least to date) in solidly Democratic-leaning cities where their progressive policies (and, in most cases, their strong criticisms of Israel) are more popular.

In Texas, James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for the Senate seat currently held by John Cornyn (who lost the Republican primary to Trump’s candidate Ken Paxton), is one of those new voices. Probably best described as a liberal Democrat, Talarico is a thirty-six-year-old state legislator appealing to Texans looking for an alternative to the corrupt status quo most obviously demonstrated by Paxton, who was impeached by the Republican-controlled Texas House in 2023.

Talarico’s campaigning is an interesting blend of religion and progressive Democratic politics and optimism. His campaign messages appeal because they are so unlikely in this partisan era. He is against greedy billionaires who want to divide people, and for the power of love; he has shown a willingness to embrace political difference and invites the support of independents and Republicans who once supported Cornyn. His appeal has translated into fundraising far outpacing Paxton’s and polls that suggest the race is too close to call. Worried Republicans have resorted to vicious personal attacks.

The mood of Democratic voters is exemplified in the results of the Colorado primaries, held late last month. A surge of primary voters, angry at a do-nothing Congress, picked candidates without ties to Washington. House member Diana DeGette, a thirty-year incumbent also best described as a liberal Democrat, lost her primary to a youthful and somewhat controversial Democratic Socialist, Melat Kiros, who ran a savvy social media campaign arguing that DeGette was part of the party’s out-of-touch establishment.

In the race to succeed Democrat Jared Polis as governor, Colorado attorney-general Phil Weiser decisively won against senator Michael Bennet. Weiser argued that the sixty-nine lawsuits he has filed or joined against the Trump administration makes him better equipped to protect the state and its communities than Bennet, who is well-liked but whose eighteen years in Congress didn’t persuade voters he is the governor they want.

Given the list of Trump’s egregious actions against the state, it’s easy to see why Weiser’s argument appealed to voters. Trump has shifted the US Space Command headquarters out of the state, is trying to shut down Colorado’s globally recognised climate research centre and vetoed a water pipeline for drought-stricken farmers. Now he is requiring states to change the way they conduct elections or risk losing tens of millions of federal terrorism-prevention funds. Colorado has had mail-in and email voting for more than a decade and so Trump’s efforts to have the US Postal Service implement voting restrictions is being strongly resisted.

Trump is deeply unpopular in the state and residents are telling candidates they are tired of combative, partisan, us-versus-them political battles that are not solving their problems. Once a Republican state, Colorado’s rapidly growing population has become younger and highly educated. Political analysts largely attribute the collapse of the Republican party there to the rise of MAGA, which has created fertile ground for Democratic Socialists. Four of the ten Coloradans serving in the US House of Representatives are Republicans; of these, only Jeff Hurd (District 3) and Lauren Boebert (District 4) are expected — without Trump’s support — to retain their seats. Jeff Crank is slightly favoured in District 5 and Gabe Evans’s race in District 8 is considered a toss-up.

But the midterm elections are still four months away. With fighting continuing between Ukraine and Russia, an unresolved war in the Middle East, petrol prices, food prices and employment fluctuating, and Trump’s increasingly erratic language and vindictive decision-making, it’s impossible to predict how the American electorate will feel on 3 November. And, as the implosion of Graham Platner’s campaign in Maine demonstrates, it impossible to predict how candidates from both parties, especially those who are untested politically, will appear to those they seek to represent.

In a nation where getting out the vote is essential, having candidates with voter appeal will be vital. In a nation where the president has threatened the upcoming elections multiple times by multiple means, it is essential that state election officials and voters take coordinated action to defend democratic processes. And in a nation where trust in the federal government is at an all-time low, it is imperative that capable, ethical, and community-driven individuals to step forward and are voted into political service. •

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Who gives the orders? Who follows orders? What is the nature of the order, ranging from trade to wars?

Start with a dose of optimism. Much of the order still works. The General Postal Union, established in 1874, continues to deliver, no matter what the distance. Earlier ages would be agog at the global reach of the simple letter. To double the amazement, add the phone-as-computer we all carry in our pockets. Distance and time compress. Every previous age would be in awe of the golden age of globalisation that’s now receding.

The order we have suffers even as it delivers enormous benefits. Those benefits — past, present and possible — mean we have entered an ad hoc era of patches and fixes to keep important bits ticking or intact. Workarounds become system essentials. We are in a time of ordering rather than order.

See how patching operates with the World Trade Organization, the body designed to set the rules and judge the disputes of international commerce. The WTO is “a bit of a mess these days” and “largely dysfunctional,” judges the Washington economist Marc Levinson.

Yet, with the notable exception of Donald Trump, “faith in the benefits of a globalised economy is very much alive around the world,” Levinson writes. “The international value chains that define modern manufacturing are not breaking apart, and the number of containers passing through the world’s ports reached a record level in 2025. Rather than stifling trade, the WTO’s decline has fuelled an array of less sweeping agreements intended to lower barriers to trade and foreign investment.”

Short of the optimum, reach for options. They’re more ad hoc than the great multilateral promise of the WTO, but that’s where we are — amid barriers, breaches and government intervention. Lots of fixes needed. Keep the mail and merchandise moving, despite the messiness.

The “peace” deal between the United States and Iran is built on mends, make-dos and mistrust. But the workaround should get 20 per cent of the world’s oil flowing again through the Strait of Hormuz.

All sorts of fixes are needed because we are mourning that glorious time after the end of the cold war when tech and trade flooded across borders and peace was on the rise. That belle epoque ran from 1989 until the global financial crisis (America’s 2008 economic nervous breakdown). While the Belle Epoque that spanned the forty years before the first world war was a European experience, our two decades of golden globalisation was enjoyed by the whole world, and much still glows.

The biggest challenge of this century will be to do a better job of avoiding the world wars Europe imposed on the last century. The dire trend is that combat deaths around the world in the past four years have been the highest since the end of the cold war. “Smarter Tech is Making War a Dumber Choice,” the Economist editorialised, yet leaders are still drawn to the dumb: “Bullets and bombs killed nearly three-quarters of a million people in wars between 2021 and 2024. Many more died from the indirect effects of conflict, such as hunger and disease.”

Oslo’s Peace Research Institute adds up the figures in a report on combat trends since 1946, finding that “2025 was one of the most violent years since the cold war, with sixty-five active conflicts across thirty-five countries — the highest number recorded since 1946 — and more than 255,000 fatalities.” International conflicts had doubled from four in 2024 to eight in 2025, and “several latent border conflicts… have become violent, reflecting the current growing global tensions.”

Australia’s region feels the rumbles too. “The Asia-Pacific can no longer be classified as fully at peace” is the first sentence of the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ annual Asia-Pacific Regional Security Assessment. The study says Asia faces a “combustible mix” made potent by Asia’s power to reshape a global order created by Western/European ideas about the role of the nation, the purpose of the state and the rights of the people. To restate the questions, who gives the orders and what’s the nature of the order?

“The crisis in the concept of world order,” Henry Kissinger declared in 2014, is “the ultimate international problem of our day.” Kissinger’s book World Order called for “a reconstruction of the international system” because global rules and norms had to be based on “common convictions.” Kissinger worried that “a multipolarity of power” produces “a world of increasingly contradictory realities.”

The ultimate international problem Kissinger described keeps growing. With plenty of new shoves from Donald Trump, we are going deeper into The Post-American World, the title of Fareed Zakaria’s 2008 book, published amid the great financial crash, describing America’s relative decline and “the rise of the rest.”

The rise of the rest is the point. After the bipolar cold war frigidity, America basked in a unipolar moment that coincided with a golden globalisation based on America’s idea of how the world works and trades. Since the financial crisis, globalisation has become slowbalisation. The multipolar era is upon us in all its fascinating messiness.

America is still a military superpower, but as Zakaria argued nearly two decades ago, “in every other dimension — industrial, financial, educational, social, cultural — the distribution of power is shifting, moving away from American dominance. That does not mean we are entering an anti-American world. But we are moving into a post-American world, one defined and directed from many places and by many people.”

Trump’s “America First” policy is a declaration that the hegemon is declining to the status of normal big power, worried more about itself than the international system it once ordered. In the unmaking and reshaping of the global order, Trump is the first president of the post-American world.

What Trump has done within the US — smashing at laws, norms and institutions — he repeats internationally, battering at everything from the United Nations to the WTO to NATO. Many regimes around the world are happy to follow Trump’s lead. Helping the US president dismantle the order created by the US means others have less to fear from Washington, and less reason to follow US orders. Trump’s war against Iran showed the limits of US hard power. His words hack at US soft power, sapping the international influence of America’s culture and values.

Multipolarity means every nation is constantly re-ordering its choices about the issues and partners that matter. A term borrowed from financial markets — “hedging” — has become the new normal of international relations. States hedge to seek options, balance risks and protect interests. The hedging calls for continuous attention and lots of motion.

Writing in the journal Foreign Policy, Suzanne Nossel flips the discussion of superpower “hegemony” to the new age of hedging which — with elegant wordsmithing and an added “d” — she dubs “hedgemony.” She argues this is not a tactic limited to emerging powers or a response to particular geopolitical shake-ups:

Hedging has become central to international relations, shaping how powers great and small approach trade, technology, finance, energy, and security. States are no longer hedging within a system that is episodically volatile but out of a recognition that there no longer is much of a system at all. The rise of what we might call “hedgemony” is both a response to the reshuffling of the global order and an accelerant of this transformation. Although these moves are being pursued by individual governments in search of stability and security, the net result may be a world that is less predictable and even more dangerous.

Hedging is both tactic and strategy for an era busy working on “ordering” because of the fracturing of the liberal international order. The “ordering” analysis comes from Bruno Maçães, a Portuguese academic and writer who served as Portugal’s Secretary of State for European Affairs (2013–15).

“The age of world order is finished,” Maçães writes. “What we have now is ordering, world building, a process without end.” If a world order is a snapshot, ordering is a never-ending film. Principles of change and choice are thinner but more durable that the norms of the liberal order. Maçães offers two principles of ordering:

• Technological revolutions reshape global hierarchy: the country that wins the tech race moves to the centre. China’s arrival as an economic power launches a revolutionary project to reshape the global system to place China closer to its core.

• Every country is free to choose: “China is now the largest trading partner of more than 120 nations,” Maçães observes. “Most of them do not want a bloc; they want optionality.” Ordering is about getting competing offers, not being conscripted. This is “a standing election in which the great powers must canvas continuously for support.”

Our multipolar time is much like the soccer World Cup: the competition engrosses the globe, many more teams are on the pitch, little nations can take on the giants, and it’s hard to predict the leaders, much less the winners. Three nations host this tournament, run by a body with four official languages (English, French, Spanish and German). Notably, China didn’t qualify this year, but Xi Jinping has ordered catchup on the football front, along with all the other international expansions.

The biggest difference between the World Cup and our world order is that soccer still follows the rules. Players must obey the referee’s whistle.

Unlike the world game, the world order has a problem with referees and rules. We have no ref’s whistle to police disintegrating international laws and norms and habits. With no referee, nations must try to do the ordering even as they run around the pitch. It makes for a chaotic match. Many can score, but fouls and rough play abound. •

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The immediate cause is Thursday’s parliamentary by-election in northwest England. But the roots of Starmer’s demise go back to his election as party leader six years ago.

This week’s by-election was one of the most remarkable to have taken place in a century of British parliamentary democracy. It was called after the Labour MP in the little-known Makerfield constituency stood down to allow Starmer’s chief Labour critic, Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, to return to Westminster as an MP and challenge for the party leadership.

The result was by no means a foregone conclusion. Makerfield, a former mining district, is typical of many parts of small-town England: it lost its economic purpose and prosperity under Margaret Thatcher’s deindustrialisation and has never recovered. A solid Labour seat up until the Brexit referendum in 2016, it voted overwhelmingly to leave the European Union; since then its Labour majority has declined in successive elections under pressure from far-right parties led by Brexiteer-in-chief Nigel Farage. Just last month, Labour was wiped out in the local council elections, with more than 50 per cent of voters choosing Farage’s latest party, Reform UK.

Andy Burnham hails from the area, and — having served in Gordon Brown’s cabinet between 2007 and 2010 — has been a successful and popular mayor. But Makerfield’s recent voting history meant he was by no means bound to win. It was a brave place from which to launch his challenge to Starmer.

But the result was not even close. On a higher turnout than in the general election of 2024, Burnham stormed to victory with 54 per cent of the vote. His Reform UK opponent managed just 35 per cent, and Restore Britain, a splinter party with an even further right anti-immigrant platform, won 7 per cent. The Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Greens got a mere 3 per cent between them.

The result is a personal triumph for Andy Burnham. Canvassers on the doorstep reported what the polls had already suggested: Labour is deeply unpopular and few people were prepared to vote for the party. It was Burnham himself people were supporting, often precisely because they wanted to get rid of Starmer. Burnham’s “Vote Andy” election leaflets didn’t even mention the party; any other Labour candidate would undoubtedly have lost.

If Burnham’s popularity is remarkable — he has been mayor for nine years and his approval ratings have risen the longer he has been in the job — Labour’s unpopularity isn’t hard to fathom. Under Keir Starmer it has squandered the opportunity that he himself had created to reverse the public’s growing disillusionment with politics.

Starmer was elected to the Labour leadership in 2020 after his predecessor, left-winger Jeremy Corbyn, lost his second general election to the Conservatives. Though not as radical as Corbyn, Starmer promised his party he would govern from the left. But since winning a remarkable victory in the 2024 election — taking the party to a huge majority of 174 seats over all other parties in parliament — he has abandoned almost all his pre-election promises. Having campaigned on the basis of “change,” he is widely perceived as having delivered very little of it.

Starmer only became an MP in 2015. Having previously been a human rights lawyer and director of public prosecutions (for which he was awarded a career service knighthood) he had almost no background in politics or political activism. What his parliamentary colleagues and party members have since discovered was that he also has few political ideas or values.

His rapid rise to a shadow cabinet position in 2016 was largely due to the refusal of many leading Labour MPs to serve under Corbyn. But when Corbyn stood down in 2019 Starmer’s calm, even dull demeanour and technocratic experience looked appealing, and he was comfortably elected leader. When he took the party from the depths of defeat to a landslide victory in 2024, party members’ choice appeared to have been triumphantly vindicated.

His two years at 10 Downing Street, however, have been a disaster for himself and for the party. The tone was set early on. Inheriting an alarming fiscal position from the outgoing Conservative government, his first policy announcement was not to, say, raise taxes on the wealthy, but to cut a welfare benefit given to pensioners to help them heat their homes in winter. It caused an uproar, and Starmer eventually had to (partially) reverse it. But his approval ratings never recovered. Later he tried to balance the books with a £5 billion cut to welfare spending, mainly targeted at disabled people, which was defeated by his own backbenchers.

In all, Starmer has been forced to retreat no fewer than thirteen times from policies he has announced — not because of anything the Tories have done (they have far too few seats to make a difference) but because of public opposition and anger. He has increasingly been seen as simultaneously unprincipled and incompetent.

That impression has been exacerbated by his apparent inability to communicate any principles that might define his or his government’s purpose. Starmer has insisted that he is a pragmatist — that there will never be such a thing as “Starmerism” — but the result is that opinion polls consistently say the public no longer knows what Labour stands for. When Starmer made a hardline speech on immigration last year whose language evoked that of an infamous racist of the 1960s, calls for him to be replaced as leader started gaining ground.

This is not to say there have been no achievements. Starmer’s government has instituted a new set of workers’ rights, especially for those in the ultra-flexible gig economy. It has limited private landlords’ rights to evict tenants for no reason. Health service waiting lists are falling. Starmer has personally managed a difficult relationship with Donald Trump, leaving Britain with lower American tariffs than its European peers.

But such wins have barely cut through to the public. Starmer’s approval ratings have declined month on month and now stand at nearly minus 50 per cent. Labour fell behind Reform UK in the opinion polls in early 2025 and has been languishing ever since. In the elections to the Scottish and Welsh parliaments and English local councils last month Labour suffered huge defeats, both to Reform on its right and the Greens on its left. At national level Labour is now on 17 per cent, half its 2024 election vote share, with Reform on 26 per cent and the Conservatives 18 per cent.

If this situation were sustained to the general election in 2028 or 2029, Nigel Farage would be the next British prime minister. It is this prospect that has led Andy Burnham to declare his desire to challenge Starmer for the Labour leadership.

So what happens now? There are three possibilities. One is that Keir Starmer refuses to give up his position and says he will fight Burnham in a leadership contest among Labour’s members. In those circumstances another candidate, former health minister Wes Streeting, would almost certainly join the race too. It is hard to see either of them beating Burnham, however, which would mean Burnham becoming Labour leader, and prime minister, at the end of such a contest in September.

A second possibility is that Starmer acknowledges his unpopularity and says he will stand down, but Streeting refuses to pull out. Again, there would be a leadership contest Burnham would almost certainly win.

Burnham’s own favoured option, unsurprisingly, is for there to be no such contest, with both Starmer and Streeting acknowledging the inevitable and standing aside (in Streeting’s case presumably in return for a senior job in a Burnham cabinet). In that case he would ask Starmer to conduct an “orderly transition” over the next three months, which would allow Burnham to appoint a team and prepare new policies and then to take over at 10 Downing Street in mid-September.

You may have noticed that all of these possibilities have the same end result. But if it is now more or less certain that Andy Burnham will soon be entering the famous front door, the political conversation will quickly turn to what he will do when he gets there. He has promised more radical policies to reduce the cost of living, bring the privatised energy and water industries under control public control and “reindustrialise” forgotten areas like Makerfield. He has also pledged reform of the electoral system. Most of all he has promised to restore “hope” to an increasingly disillusioned and fractious British public.

But there are plenty of cynical commentators who point to Britain’s struggling post-Brexit  economy, constrained public finances and divided public opinion and, electoral miracle-worker though he may be, doubt Burnham can do any of it.

It is not as if others haven’t tried, they point out. When Andy Burnham in due course replaces Keir Starmer at Number 10, he will become the UK’s seventh prime minister in ten years. •

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When Donald Trump went to Beijing last month he didn’t have to bend the knee, at least literally, to Chinese president Xi Jinping, as Macartney had to Qianlong. But the American president’s visit had echoes of that 1793 mission. Trump was the importunate barbarian, Xi the aloof possessor of all the advantages. Trump was effusive in his praise of Xi, who reciprocated in stiffly formal terms.

For the United States, the export pay-off was desultory: just the usual Chinese purchases of soy bean for its pigs and Boeing jets for its airlines. Hard questions about tariffs, semiconductors and rare elements were passed to new bilateral trade and investment boards. Xi offered no help with Iran.

In return for these meagre results, Trump bowed to China on two fronts. One was to concede equal status in world affairs, at least in the economic sphere. The other was to cross a bipartisan line on Taiwan, to some alarm in both Taipei and Washington.

In the first case, Trump agreed to Xi’s concept of a “constructive relationship of strategic stability.” Xi expressed the hope this would “transcend the so-called Thucydides Trap and create a new paradigm of major country relations.” (The reference was to the ancient Greek historian Thucydides, who recorded Sparta’s fatal effort to thwart the rise of Athens.)

If Trump understood and agreed, he seems to have willingly committed America to accepting that China is here to stay as a great power and abandoned any hope of squashing its strategic ambitions. The concession builds on the G2 (Group of Two) concept Trump and his team took away from their meeting with Xi in South Korea last October, a concept that alarmed America’s China hawks and some US allies as an implicit retreat from US “primacy” in the Western Pacific. Not only are many Americans unsettled but the Chinese and their neighbours in Asian are trying to deconstruct Xi’s words and Trump’s response.

A survey of Chinese-language commentary published in Sinification, an independent American newsletter that translates and unpicks policy debates within China, gives an insight into how Chinese analysts see the visit and its aftermath.

According to initial analysis at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, an arm of Beijing’s Ministry of State Security, the Trum-Xi meeting puts US–China rivalry in “a new phase of strategic stalemate” — though it still needs careful attention to avoid “capsizes.” Another analyst under the State Security umbrella, Zhang Jian, sees May’s successive visits by Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin as signs China was becoming a key “connecting point” in the emerging multipolar world.

Zhao Minghao of Shanghai’s Fudan University sees Trump’s willingness to accept “constructive strategic stability” as an important adjustment on the American side, demonstrating that flexible realism had become the foreign-policy principle US president favoured. America specialists Da Wei and Zhou Wuhua at Beijing’s Tsinghua University merge the concepts of the G2 and multipolarity into a “dual-core multipolar order” with China and the United States as the key players but middle powers having the space to hedge selectively between them, avoiding the hardening of cold war–style blocs.

But others see America aiming to hold on to the commanding heights in a new global economy. Among them is the Shanghai Development Research Foundation’s Jia Min, who dismisses the notion of “the East rising and the West declining” and points to the United States entering a new cycle driven by artificial intelligence. Far from having retreated from the globe, says Jia, the US has grown more flexible, more strategically attuned and more expansionary.

Di Dongsheng and Ji Xianbai at Beijing’s Renmin University argue that an emerging “techno-industrial complex” is driving the United States to abandon free-market orthodoxy for state-led industrial policy, civil–military fusion and resistance to regulation. This digital-age heir to the military–industrial complex would fuse big tech, the national-security state and venture capital into a single-interest bloc.

As the line between public power and tech capital blurs, Di and Ji expect the big technology companies’ grip on Washington to intensify. The increasingly powerful data and AI company Palantir has already shown how government contracts, revenue and valuation could rise together. Abroad, this techno-industrial complex is harvesting “war dividends” in the Ukraine, Gaza and Iran conflicts while using “small yard, high fence” containment to preserve American technological hegemony.

Even some of the optimists think that constructive stability can quickly be upset. “Since Washington’s overarching goal of strategic competition with China is unchanged,” writes Peking University’s Jia Qingguo, “relevant US government departments are still likely to roll out policies that Beijing reads as confrontational, thereby undermining the stability of the relationship.”

Contrasting with those mixed views, China’s strategic analysts have generally been cheered by remarks Trump made about Taiwan immediately after his talks with Xi. The Chinese leader had warned of “clashes and even conflicts” if the US and Taiwan began overtly asserting the island’s independence.

Trump’s response was to tell Fox News he was holding back a US$14 billion package of arms exports to Taiwan, comprising missiles, anti-drone defences and a powerful air defence command system. The arms deal is “a very good negotiating chip for us, frankly,” he said, without making clear what he would be seeking from the Chinese in return for withholding the weaponry. “It’s a lot of weapons,” he added.

Using arms sales to Taiwan in talks with China would cross a red line laid down by president Ronald Reagan in 1982 as part of his “Six Assurances.” His administration had transferred diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979 and was seeking to maintain stability in the region.

Trump also took an implicit swipe at Taiwan’s president Lai Ching-tei, whose Democratic Progressive Party has been arguing Taiwan is effectively independent of the mainland while retaining a formally status as part of a Republic of China. Trump said the US remained neutral on Taiwan’s position, but added: “I will say this: I’m not looking to have somebody go independent. And, you know, we’re supposed to travel 9500 miles to fight a war. I’m not looking for that. I want them to cool down. I want China to cool down.”

Trump’s remarks have caused deep unease in Washington, among opponents and Republicans alike, as well as in allied capitals. “The net effect of his comments,” says the Brookings Institute’s Ryan Hass, “was to suggest that his views on Taiwan independence were closer to Beijing’s preferences, that Taiwan had a greater responsibility to avoid provoking conflict, and that America’s security support for Taiwan was negotiable with China.”

Hass adds: “Trump’s public openness to negotiating with Beijing over America’s posture on Taiwan will serve as the diplomatic equivalent of a matador waving a red flag in front of a bull. It will cause Beijing to intensify its efforts to test the boundaries of what it can gain in terms of loosening America’s commitment to Taiwan’s security.”

Trump’s words certainly cheered a late-May roundtable of Chinese specialists on Taiwan, Sinification reports. Xiamen University’s Li Peng acknowledges Trump’s unpredictability but argues that repeated interactions between Trump and Xi could stabilise the American president himself and thereby support stability in cross–Strait and US–China relations. Shao Yuqun of the Shanghai Institute of International Studies sees Trump’s willingness to discuss arms sales with Beijing as a partial abandonment of the Six Assurances, while his refusal to endorse Taiwan independence implies a policy of non-intervention if conflict intensified between Taiwan and China.

Wang Hailiang of the Shanghai Institute of East Asia Studies, says Beijing must use the next three years — more or less the remainder of Trump’s term, though he did not spell that out — to create a positive, irreversible trend in China–US–Taiwan interactions and push Washington towards “informal honourable neutrality.” In other words, China has to work on a pliable US president while it can.

The importance of using the next two or three years to draw in Taiwan is underlined for some Chinese observers by the entry of a third player, Japan, into the equation. Recent changes to Japan’s defence exports rules would strengthen that country’s defence-industrial base, sustain wartime production capacity, and push the country towards becoming a regional “source of trouble,” write Xu Yongzhi and Duan Zhiyou, two Japan-watchers under State Security’s academic arm. Exports to the United States, Australia, the Philippines and other partners would reinforce a “grid-like” US alliance system, deepen first-island-chain military integration, and help Japan court neighbouring states into a potential China-containment network.

“China’s immediate strategic focus with regards to Taiwan should remain on the United States under Trump, but Japan may become a far more dangerous obstacle after 2028,” writes Renmin University’s Jin Canrong. “First, Japan is moving from backstage involvement to open confrontation, hollowing out its pacifist constitution, expanding arms exports and joining first island chain military activity, yet it still depends heavily on US intelligence, space and strike systems. Second, if constitutional revision succeeds after the 2028 upper-house election, a fully militarised and potentially nuclear-armed Japan would greatly complicate China’s Taiwan strategy, thereby compressing the current window of opportunity for resolving the Taiwan issue.”

Up until the late 1980s, many in the US and other parts of the West might not have been too worried if Taiwan had been taken over by the People’s Republic and merged with the mainland. The island was governed by a harsh one-party dictatorship, first under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and then under his son Chiang Ching-kuo. Censorship was pervasive and the regime’s secret police weren’t averse to working with criminal triads to assassinate critics, including exiles in the United States.

But the younger Chiang’s death in 1989 freed up Taiwanese politics. Elections were held under his successors in the Kuomintang (the Chinese Nationalist Party, or KMT), with the KMT and the new Democratic People’s Party alternating in power. Despite having fought the communists ardently in the years before 1949, the KMT today is more sympathetic towards reunification than its main rival party.

In Beijing, meanwhile, attitudes hardened after the 1989 killings in Tiananmen Square, and flickering hopes of political “convergence” were rekindled after Xi Jinping came to power in Beijing at the end of 2012. In the West, Taiwan acquired new importance as a gain for democracy and supplier of the world’s main source of semiconductors — the latter an attraction for the Chinese too.

On taking office, Xi made clear that the reunification of Taiwan was one of his key goals. It was not an issue that could be passed along from generation to generation, he told a visiting KMT leader in 2013. The build-up of China’s naval and air power intensified, aimed at making it harder for American forces to operate safely around Taiwan. In about 2019, China dropped the word “peaceful” from its formula for reunification.

But this very maritime ambition, transforming China’s military from land power to one with extensive reach into the oceans, had the effect of quietly enhancing Taiwan’s importance to American strategy. As UNSW strategic analyst Clinton Fernandes pointed out last month, Taiwan has become more and more important in bottling up this Chinese naval power. “Taiwan is a critical node in a chain of islands consisting of US allies and partners: Japan to its north and the Philippines to its south,” he wrote, adding that US forces in Japan and the Philippines control vital sea routes for the Chinese.

“The US can detect, track and follow Chinese submarines as they cross the sensor barrier,” Fernandes went on. “It can trail them covertly with its own very quiet submarines, or use maritime patrol aircraft and ships equipped with antisubmarine warfare helicopters to trail them overtly. It can sink Chinese ships if ordered to do so in a crisis.” This makes the strategic calculations easy to understand: “For China, incorporating Taiwan allows it to deter hostile forces off its own coastline. For the US, if China were to take Taiwan, it would be free to project power into the Pacific Ocean.”

With Xi about to turn seventy-three and positioning for a fourth five-year term as leader, the question is how patient he will be. He is quietly working on the current KMT chairman, Cheng Li-wun, who visited Beijing in April. There, Cheng emerged from a meeting with Xi urging a resumption of cross-strait exchanges.

Back home, the KMT and its allies in Taiwan’s legislature have been blocking and cutting President Lai’s defence budget, reducing the funds available to take up the US$14 billion arms package Trump is holding back. Now in America talking to congressmen and think-tanks, Cheng is presumably arguing for the increasingly unpredictable Trump to keep sitting on it the aid. •

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The International Society for Infectious Diseases ProMED website, which provides an early warning system for infectious diseases, has a long and disturbing list of reports from around the globe. Beyond the growing number of Ebola cases — now also from Uganda and suspected in Italy — come reports of the Andes Hanta virus spreading from an initial outbreak on a cruise ship as passengers have travelled further after disembarking. Covid-19 cases in Singapore have risen dramatically; measles cases have broken out in Spain and Mexico; Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever has resurged in Iraq.

Little of what we learned from the Covid-19 pandemic and previous outbreaks of Ebola has been implemented effectively. Despite widespread agreement that the risk of pandemics is increasing, only lip service is being paid to preparedness and global cooperation.

The Ebola epidemic, which appears to have been reported only after early cases went undetected for many months, is spreading rapidly and outpacing containment efforts. As of 27 May, the Democratic Republic of the Congo had reported more than 1077 suspected cases and 246 suspected deaths. Neighbouring Uganda confirmed seven cases and one death. With the DRC also sharing porous borders with Burundi, Rwanda and South Sudan, the fear of cross-border transmission is rising. The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention warns that ten African countries are now considered to be at risk.

Most of these countries have limited healthcare resources and many are experiencing major population movements as a result of political violence, famine and climate change. In Ituri province, where the outbreak began, multiple attacks have been reported on Ebola treatment centres, on hospitals treating patients with suspected and confirmed cases, and on the morgues that receive the dead, further hindering control efforts.

Fast detection and response are obviously crucial. But programs designed to support local health systems and international organisations at work in these countries — vital to detecting outbreaks and alerting communities, building medical stockpiles and dispatching response kits and personnel — have had their funding reduced or eliminated.

Particularly damaging has been the abrupt cutting of hundreds of millions of dollars in international health funding by Donald Trump’s administration. The United States used to fund robust disease surveillance networks across Africa and maintain emergency teams to respond to crises like this one. Most of this work ended with the shutdown of USAID and cutbacks at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A National Institutes of Health laboratory designed for Ebola work was closed last year and expert staff laid off.

The formal withdrawal of the United States from the World Health Organization has created a US$553 million gap in the organisation’s budget. While emergency response funds have been allocated by WHO and a number of other nations, the systemic damage is not easily repaired.

Making the situation worse is the fact that the outbreak involves the rare Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, for which no approved vaccine or treatment exists. Urgent efforts are underway to develop an effective vaccine, but American laboratories and expertise are notably absence from the push. The Oxford Vaccine Group is working to produce and scale doses of a monovalent Bundibugyo Ebola virus vaccine in partnership with the Serum Institute of India.

World Health Organization officials calling call for international cooperation caution that “no single country can respond to this magnitude of outbreak alone.” What the Trump administration fails to see is that American leadership delivered real benefits for the United States. It allowed US public health officials to learn first-hand about emerging threats and the coordinating of countermeasures; it decreased political and economic instability in fragile states; it protected American citizens at home and abroad in a world where any pathogen is just a plane flight away.

When Ebola tore through West Africa in 2014 and threatened to become a global catastrophe, the White House installed an “Ebola czar” to coordinate a massive response across agencies and governments. A detailed playbook was developed for responding to future outbreaks. The Trump administration has dismantled all that. Many US health agencies now lack key political leadership and senior staff.

Instead, the American focus is on minimising any direct impact on the United States. “We cannot and will not allow any cases of Ebola to enter the United States,” declared secretary of state Marco Rubio earlier this week. This approach extends to sending any Americans likely to be infected to offshore facilities in Kenya. In one case, reports the Washington Post, an American doctor with Ebola was flown to Germany for treatment after being refused entry to the United States.

Reports indicate the administration is blocking key US researchers from attending global virus response talks and, reflecting the current anti-vaccine stance of senior health personnel, no apparent efforts are being made to develop a vaccine against the Bundibugyo strain. Instead, American health officials are working with a small biotech company to provide an experimental treatment (a monoclonal antibody) that may be used in patients exposed to Ebola. With limited production and significant costs, this approach is clearly designed to help only those from wealthy countries.

The Ebola threat to Australia is also just a matter of one infected person arriving on an overseas flight. But the current response here seems rather too laissez-faire. The Department of Health, Disability and Ageing hasn’t made any changes to management strategies for airport arrivals. The website of the Australian Centre for Disease Control states the risk to Australians is very low and Ebola has never been diagnosed in Australia. If Australian volunteers working in Ebola areas become infected, or simply want to return home, how will they be managed?

The list of other recent failures in outbreak management doesn’t inspire confidence either. The Hanta virus outbreak on the Hondius cruise ship has produced thirteen cases and three deaths, with infected patients travelling to a number of countries and several isolated islands visited by the ship threatened with outbreaks. But international law still lacks clear rules for public health emergencies on cruise ships, despite the lessons learned from the Diamond Princess and the Ruby Princess during Covid-19

The Hanta virus’s transmission dynamics mean this outbreak won’t become a pandemic, but its long incubation period (up to forty-two days) and high mortality rate nevertheless require appropriate precautions to be taken. In a number of cases, people who might have been infected were allowed to travel without any precautionary measures to reduce airborne transmission.

In the United States, where Hanta virus infections are often reported in western rural areas, the news of a foreign strain soon had social media spreading rumours, speculation and falsehoods, including inevitable claims that the MAGA favourite, ivermectin, was an effective treatment. Health and human services secretary Robert F. Kennedy announced on 23 May that he had signed a targeted declaration to support the development and deployment of medical countermeasures to the Andes Hanta virus, noting specifically that this would not include the development of a new mRNA vaccine.

Worldwide, healthcare systems are being confronted with significant disease outbreaks entirely preventable with effective vaccination programs. They may not reach epidemic levels, but they cost lives, use up healthcare resources and demonstrate system failures, often as a result of political interference.

A measles outbreak in Bangladesh is estimated to have reached more than 67,000 and killed more than 500, mostly small children, since March. Bangladesh was getting measles under control until, in 2024, a new government upended vaccination efforts by attempting to revamp the program and how vaccines were ordered. Malnutrition, common in many parts of Bangladesh, is one reason this outbreak has hit hard; the number of severe cases and the death rate is considerably higher than typically seen in high-income countries.

Significant measles outbreaks in first world countries have been attributed largely to growing anti-vaccination sentiment. The United States is currently experiencing its largest measles resurgence since the disease was declared eliminated in 2000. A recent outbreak in Mexico, with some 17,000 infections and at least forty deaths mostly among unvaccinated people, is attributed to a young Mexican boy who visited relatives in Texas, a state where conscience- or religious-based exemptions for childhood immunisations have allowed a measles upturn.

Below-target vaccination rates are driving measles transmission across England — so much so that the WHO stripped the United Kingdom of its measles elimination status in January this year. This follows Canada losing its measles-free status in November 2025. Measles is extraordinarily infectious and for outbreaks to occur countries don’t need to slip much below the required 95 per cent immunisation rate needed for herd protection. The resurgence of measles transmission in England in 2024 occurred when coverage for the first dose of vaccine was 92.3 per cent and for the second dose 84.4 per cent.

In Australia, diseases like measles, whooping cough and diphtheria, once considered banished or rare, are making a comeback as childhood vaccination levels drop below herd-immunity levels and adults are missing booster shots. More cases of measles have been reported in Australia in 2026 (106 cases) than the same period in 2025 (seventy-eight). Most have been in unvaccinated or under-vaccinated people who acquired their infection overseas and then transmitted the disease locally to unvaccinated or under-vaccinated contacts.

Australia is facing the worst diphtheria outbreak in decades, with 223 notifications made as of 19 May. The majority have been cases of cutaneous diphtheria, but around 30 per cent have been more serious respiratory infections. The vast majority (94 per cent) of the affected have been Indigenous Australians. Factors contributing to the outbreak include low immunisation rates, specifically in adults whose immunity levels have fallen, the prevalence of skin infections in affected communities, overcrowded housing and limited access to healthcare services.

Other viral threats — old and new — loom. A paper from Gavi, the vaccine alliance, lists the following as immediate threats to global and regional health: conflict-associated outbreaks of disease such as cholera; climate change’s reshaping of the geography of diseases caused by mosquito-spread arboviruses; and Marburg virus, which is related to Ebola. Other viruses — including the H5N1 avian flu, which has acquired some ability to infect humans and for human-to-human transmission, and Mpox (related to smallpox), now been reported in 145 countries and territories — also demand timely reporting and monitoring and a coordinated global response.

It’s also important to note that a 2025 international workshop found that high-burden, endemic diseases of poverty — tuberculosis, hepatitis, cholera, malaria and others — are considered to pose a greater infection threat than novel or emerging pathogens.

At a time when the need is very obvious, it is concerning that WHO member states failed to finalise the pathogen access and benefit-sharing annex (which guarantees access to medical tests, vaccines and treatments in exchange for sharing information on emerging pathogens) to last year’s WHO Pandemic Agreement ahead of the World Health Assembly on 18–23 May this year. This annex is legally required for the broader treaty to enter into force, and so it remains in limbo until negotiators can bridge some stark divides.

As the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board points out, the growing distrust of public health expertise, attacks on science, global inequalities and geopolitics and nationalism are all undermining pandemic preparedness. •

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This new Pope Leo faces another such moment, this time fuelled by artificial intelligence, the subject of his first church encyclical. These documents are reserved for the most important facets of modern society, the very topics requiring the appearance of direct communion with the Almighty to resolve.

In the first generation of the digital age, the technology being created by the new geniuses was transformative. It could destroy the boundaries of time and place to allow people to find community alongside one another. A revolutionary act, it created a new form of political power.

For a long time, we understand that power to be held by citizens themselves, managed only in trust by the technology companies that facilitated (with search engines and social media platforms) but did not intervene. The internet was a sort of benevolent but absent God.

The AI age came with a renegotiation of that bargain. Power was no longer held in trust but actively managed by a small group of individuals and corporations who suddenly had the capability to decide what the rest of the world could understand to be true. At first, they were protected by a broadly shared acceptance of the value that they brought to the democratic world. Laws could be carefully interpreted to their benefit because it was in the public interest that a counterweight to political power be not just available but cultivated.

That logic has now flipped. The power these platforms have gained has surmounted the very institutions that they once held in check.

There have been small but meaningful reflections of this reality. Earlier this year two court cases in the United States reinterpreted the very laws that once protected Silicon Valley from liability for user-generated content. Now, the courts found, the companies have a responsibility to monitor content for its potential to cause harm.

But Pope Leo’s encyclical is the most important and substantial acknowledgement of the challenge. While it holds no legal weight — no tech company is headquartered in Vatican City — it reflects the opinion of one of the most powerful institutions on earth. These old regulatory institutions must come back to life, says the encyclical, to protect the human dignity being put at risk by a new technology that understands people as data points primed for optimisation.

Leo takes as his object both the technology and the people behind it. Of the technology, he is concerned by its ability to trick people, to remove the very idea of truth from human society. Of the people involved, he believes the concentration of a new form of power in the hands of a very few is as great a threat as any authoritarian regime. He nods to this parallel in his citation of Hannah Arendt’s On the Origins of Totalitarianism.

In both instances, citizens have been reduced to instruments of efficiency, revoking the agency that offers people their humanity. The Pope writes of a “crisis” in our relationship with life itself. That the limits of human life are now “seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself.” When a society pushes itself relentlessly toward optimisation, we lose the good and necessary possibility of humanity.

Institutions like the Church and many courts are beginning to acknowledge this new reality. The assumptions that underwrote the arrival of the AI revolution are changing, with moral authority and the law moving in the same direction.

And yet the Pope stands as the sole global figure to offer a meaningful perspective on the regulation of AI. In the United States, the Democratic Party has not bothered to put forward an agenda to counter the Republicans’ inclination to let these companies run amok, their profit motive being more important than any social or ecological disaster they may summon.

Europe has chosen the predictable path of bureaucratic nightmare, stifling the possibility of innovation in the name of endless red tape. The experience of European modernity is to permanently be stuck in the shallow end of the pool. Safe, but never able to grow. All the while, China’s model of AI acceleration operates in lockstep with its authoritarian regime, no daylight possible between its technological development and the anxiety of the state.

This has left countries like Australia waiting. It is clear that letting Silicon Valley run wild will only hasten economic and social crises, but there has yet to coalesce a vision for a future that sees a harnessed AI, one that can help power the future without destroying it entirely.

The Pope’s offering won’t directly cause any immediate changes. No technology company will fire its chief executive because of the commands of the Pontiff. And yet the very existence of the encyclical says a great deal about the moment we are in.

The governments that once cultivated the fruit of Silicon Valley as a democratic counterweight have found themselves impotent in the face of their own creation. The US administration has decided to leave the AI industry to regulate itself, and Europe is drowning itself in process. Everyone else is left watching, hoping to not be found wanting in the end.

Leo chose his name to invoke a moment when the Church stepped into a void and spoke about power and human dignity. But this encyclical is an act of moral authority, not political power. For that, we are still waiting. •

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Britain doesn’t have American-style mid-term elections, of course: last week’s voting was for the Scottish and Welsh parliaments and local authorities in England. But Labour’s extraordinary rout has seismic implications for national politics. If the results were replicated in a general election, Britain’s next prime minister would almost certainly be Nigel Farage, leader of the far-right populist party Reform UK, chief architect of the Brexit referendum and figurehead of the anti–European Union “Leave” campaign.

Projected nationally, Reform’s 26 per cent vote last week would see it comfortably ahead of the newly populist and leftist Greens, who finished in second place on 18 per cent. Labour would limp in joint third with the Conservatives on just 17 per cent, with the centrist Liberal Democrats on 16 per cent.

Britain doesn’t need to hold a general election till June 2029, so none of that is imminent. But it already marks an extraordinary turn in British politics. Less than a decade ago, in the general election of 2017, the country’s two major political parties, Labour and the Conservatives, won 82 per cent of the popular vote between them, with the Liberal Democrats on 7 per cent. The remainder was shared mainly between the Scottish and Welsh Nationalists and the separate Northern Ireland parties. The Greens won just 1.6 per cent (and one seat). Reform’s predecessor, the UK Independence Party, won 1.3 per cent, and no seats.

Now Britain has entered the uncharted waters of seven-party politics. Not only that: the most popular two parties are on the far right and the left, and neither has any experience of government. The Conservative Party is facing an even more existential threat than Labour, having effectively been replaced by Reform as the principal party on the right of British politics.

Britain’s antiquated first-past-the-post electoral system looks likely to buckle under the strain. Labour’s victory two years ago was broad but shallow, with a vote share of less than 34 per cent. Depending on how the various parties’ votes are distributed across constituencies, Reform could win a parliamentary majority in 2029 with just 27 per cent of public support (and less if non-voters are included). That risks looking not merely disproportionate, but illegitimate.

Last week’s results have sent shockwaves through the Labour Party. It has been the dominant party in Wales since 1922 and has governed there continuously since the devolution settlement of 1998. (Wales and Scotland have devolved powers comparable to those of Australian states.) Last week its representation in the Welsh parliament, the Senedd, fell from forty-four seats to nine, and it was beaten by both the Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru, which will now form the Welsh government for the first time, and Reform UK.

In Scotland, Labour looked on course two years ago to retake the government from the Scottish Nationalists, or SNP, who have ruled since 2007. But last week it lost a fifth of its seats and had the humiliation not just of seeing the SNP retain power with fifty-seven out of the parliament’s 129 seats, but also of ending up level with Reform in second place with seventeen.

In the local elections in England (which are also contested between the national parties), Labour shed more than 1400 council seats, the worst result in its history, and lost more than half the authorities it controlled. The defeats came thick and fast, right across the country, with seats and councils lost to Reform in many of Labour’s traditional working-class heartlands, and even more voters lost to the Greens in London and other cities.

Labour’s door-to-door canvassers reported the same message from the public in every constituency. Voters are angry that the cost of living seems to be rising without end, with skyrocketing energy prices, unaffordable rents and food prices increasingly reflecting the impact of the Iran war. (Charities warn that millions of families are going without food to make ends meet.) Labour was elected on the slogan of “change,” but little change seems visible: healthcare waiting lists are still high (though falling), town centres still depressed, potholes still unrepaired.

Most of all, though, the public has taken against Keir Starmer. He is now on some measures the most unpopular prime minister since such records began, with a public approval rating between minus 50 and minus 57 per cent. Even more significant is the personal vitriol meted out on the doorstep: for reasons no one can quite explain, Starmer is viscerally loathed by very large proportions of the public.

It’s this personal animus heard by Labour MPs in their constituencies that has led many of them to move against him. By Tuesday this week eighty-seven MPs had called publicly for him to stand down, four junior ministers had resigned from the government, and several cabinet members had apparently told him privately that he could not carry on. The media were delightedly reporting on the content of Labour MPs’ WhatsApp groups and the plotting of potential leadership challengers.

Starmer declared he had no intention of resigning of his own free will. On Monday he sought to save his premiership with a speech inevitably billed as his “most important ever.” Declaring that he took responsibility for the election losses but was determined to stay on and “prove my doubters wrong,” he announced policies he hoped would represent a new start: nationalisation of the stricken British Steel company, moving the UK back to “the heart of Europe” and a new youth employment guarantee.

It didn’t work. The reaction of his MPs was almost universally negative. Indeed, in many ways the speech exemplified the problem. He said nothing about the issue most of concern to voters, the cost of living. And none of the policy announcements was actually new: each had been trailed before. The “back at the heart of Europe” claim was just empty rhetoric: so far from committing to rejoin the EU, as many in his party have urged, Starmer couldn’t even bring himself to say that the government would seek to rejoin the EU’s Customs Union or Single Market, which would at least be meaningful steps to stimulate economic growth.

Starmer emphasised his commitment to traditional Labour values, but still offered no overarching vision or story by which his government or his personal beliefs might be defined. He acknowledged Labour needed to offer people more “hope.” But as one Labour observer bitterly noted, acknowledging it is not the demand being made of him. People want him actually to do something that offers it.

Two paths are available for the party to remove Starmer. One is for more ministers to resign from his government, making his position untenable. That is how Boris Johnson was persuaded to leave office in 2022. You can’t be PM if no one will serve under you. If that happens, Starmer could say he will resign in September, say, and initiate a party leadership election to identify a successor by then.

Alternatively, Labour’s rules make an election mandatory if one-fifth of the Parliamentary Labour Party (currently that means eighty-one MPs) declare in favour of a challenger. Starmer could then choose whether to contest it or not.

Two people have long seemed the most likely challengers. On the Blairite right of the Labour Party, the combative health secretary Wes Streeting has been accused for some time of preparing a leadership bid (a charge he has of course denied). On the party’s left the overwhelming favourite is the popular mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham.

Burnham is not just liked within the Labour Party. He is by far the most popular politician in the country. He was a minister in the last Labour government under Gordon Brown and stood for the Labour leadership in both 2010 and 2015 (in the latter case when it was won by left-winger Jeremy Corbyn). But he resigned his seat in 2017 to become the mayor of Britain’s fourth-largest city.

In that role he has been a vociferous champion of devolved government and especially for the interests of the North of England. Manchester has enjoyed an investment boom, and Burnham’s policies of integrated public transport and social housing have been widely admired. He has been re-elected twice, the last time, in 2024, with a remarkable two-thirds of the popular vote.

Affectionately known as the “King of the North,” Burnham has an ability to speak to voters in a manner unmatched by any other British politician. Over the last year he has articulated a political project he has called “Manchesterism,” founded on the belief that if governments are to control the cost of living they need to own the major price levers. He favours not just integrated public transport under local authorities, but rent controls, mass public house-building and public ownership — in some form — of the energy and water sectors.

While this is not yet a fully fledged program for government, these ideas and Burnham’s popularity have made him the leading candidate of Labour’s centre-left — but only if he can get back into parliament first. Only MPs can stand for the leadership.

And this is where his problem lies. Just a couple of months ago Burnham successfully encouraged a Labour MP in Manchester to resign their seat, creating a by-election for which Burnham put himself up to be the candidate. But Starmer blocked his candidature, demanding that Labour’s National Executive Committee, or NEC, refuse him permission to give up the Manchester mayoralty. The Greens subsequently took the seat. Polls suggested that, had Burnham been the candidate, he would have won it.

So the questions on everyone’s lips this week were: can Burnham persuade another Manchester MP to fall on their sword for the greater good? If so, would Starmer and the NEC change their minds and allow him to stand? And when is Streeting going to announce he has eighty-one MPs on his side and initiate a leadership election – before Burnham can get back into parliament?

After days of feverish speculation, on Thursday both Streeting and Burnham made their moves. At lunchtime Streeting resigned from cabinet, issuing a scathing letter of criticism of Starmer’s leadership. A few hours later a Labour MP in Greater Manchester said he was resigning his seat to allow Burnham to return to parliament, and Burnham declared he would put himself up for the consequent by-election.

But it didn’t then go the way the media has assumed. Much to everyone’s surprise, Streeting didn’t trigger a leadership election. On the contrary, he said that he thought that in any such contest Andy Burnham should be able to stand. It almost looked like they were collaborating.

So there is no leadership election for now. Rather, there is a very difficult by-election for Burnham to win. Members of Labour’s NEC have already said they will not stand in his way this time. But the constituency of Makerfield, which lies on the edge of Greater Manchester, voted Reform in last week’s local elections. The party took all the council seats available on a vote share of 50 per cent, more than double Labour’s 23 per cent. Burnham is by no means guaranteed to win.

In a curious way, whether he does or not will settle the leadership question. If Burnham loses to Reform he is finished: no longer mayor and not an MP. But if he wins, he will have proved precisely what his party want to know: that this is indeed the leader who can defeat Reform and win the 2029 general election, an election last week’s results showed Labour under Keir Starmer would almost certainly lose.

At that point — the by-election will be on 18 June — Labour MPs and members won’t need convincing that Starmer should stand down. Either he goes of his own accord, setting out an orderly timetable for Burnham to become leader and prime minister, or Burnham will challenge him and he will be defeated in a membership vote.

Starmer’s one hope of remaining in office is therefore that Burnham loses the by-election and he then fends off an alternative challenge from Streeting. It’s not a good look for a prime minister to want to see his party defeated, just to save his own skin. •

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On bitterly cold January mornings I’d sometimes cycle to school on a route that took me past a private school where two or three dozen men in white shirts and khaki shorts were doing “lathi drill” — practising combat with metre-long staves. They were members of the RSS, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (national volunteer corps), which championed an aggressive Hindu nationalism.

One or two teachers at my school were, I think, members of the RSS, and a few others spoke of it sympathetically. But my teacher friends mostly regarded the “knicker-walas” as grown-up boy scouts.

About this time, a thousand kilometres away in the state of Gujarat, a boy in his early teens was lapping up RSS doctrine and discipline. Ten years later Narendra Modi was a full-time RSS worker and on the path that took him, the RSS and its affiliates to the dominance their doctrines enjoy in India today.

The results of elections in four Indian states, released this week, gave Modi, prime minister since 2014, a prize that he, the RSS and its offspring, the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, have hungered for: the election of a BJP government in West Bengal and control of its capital Kolkata. Once upon a time, Calcutta (the name was changed in 2001) was the intellectual centre of India, home to anti-colonial organisation, cosmopolitan thought and many of the ideas, events and heroes celebrated by the RSS and BJP.

For nearly fifty years, however, West Bengal has been ruled either by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or the Trinamool Congress of Mamata Banerjee, a three-time chief minister. A confident lawyer and battle-scarred stirrer, Banerjee, seventy-two, successfully presented herself to voters as both the defender of Bengal and as “Didi,” a caring, elder sister to the poor and weak.

The BJP threw a kitchen full of sinks at Banerjee and her party. Modi and his menacing home minister, Amit Shah, spent days campaigning in West Bengal. Preparations had begun a few years earlier when the central government began constricting funding to West Bengal from various national programs.

The Modi government also changed the process for appointing the chief commissioner of India’s once-admirable election commission to ensure the central government got the appointee of its choice. The new commissioner began a hastily contrived “special intensive review” of the voting register (long overdue) and quickly deleted nine million voters from the list, 2.7 million of whom claimed to have submitted citizenship documents establishing their right to vote. Because the process was hurried and poorly executed, it is not clear — and may never be — how many deleted names were Muslims, who constitute more than a quarter of West Bengal’s population and were considered to be Mamata Banerjee supporters.

Ten days before polling began, the Enforcement Directorate, a central government entity with wide powers to pursue financial crime, detained members of the consultancy firm advising Banerjee’s campaign. They were released after polling was completed.

The result was everything Modi could have hoped for. Banerjee’s fifteen-year-old government had long overstayed its welcome, and she lost her own seat by 15,000 votes to a former member of her party running as a BJP candidate. This BJP recruit, who had deserted her when she made a relative her deputy leader of her party, worked so hard for his new party that he now aspires to become its chief minister in the state.

The BJP won 70 per cent of West Bengal’s seats (206 in a house of 294) with 46 per cent of the vote. Banerjee’s party was not far off the voting pace with 41 per cent, but gained only eighty-one seats.

Banerjee’s CV has never claimed “gracious loser” as one of her attributes, and her reaction to the loss was captured in the page one Indian Express headline: MAMATA LOSES SEAT, SAYS “LOOT, LOOT, LOOT… AN IMMORAL VICTORY.”

The Modi mystique had taken a hit after the 2024 national elections. He began that election campaign proclaiming that the BJP aimed to increase its strength in parliament to 400 seats. Instead, the party lost sixty seats and its majority. In the current parliament, it needs support from two small regional parties.

The victory in West Bengal, and Modi’s part in it, repairs much of the damage and provides a powerful boost to the “Hindutva” project that aims to transform India into a Hindu-supremacist state. The ultimate goal is an all-powerful central government dedicated to infusing every level of Indian life with the RSS version of what it is to be Hindu. That means erasing much of India’s Muslim history of the past thousand years and treating 200 million Indian Muslims not so much as citizens as inhabitants.

What makes Modi and the Hindutva project so ominously impressive is its relentlessness. Partly, that’s because there is always another past grievance or present threat to rectify — another case of poor, uneducated people being converted by crafty Christians, another innocent Hindu girl converted to Islam by sly Muslim youths, another illegal structure put up by Muslims and needing to be bulldozed.

The Economist’s Asian columnist “Banyan” asked the cheeky Monty Python question: “What did the Mughals ever do for India?” The answer: “They gave political Hinduism its eternal, indispensable villain.”

In the other states where elections were held, one incumbent government was re-elected and, in the other two, governments were defeated in ways characteristic of each state’s political culture.

In Assam in the northeast, the BJP and its vituperative chief minister won a third term, cruising to an increased majority with a campaign riddled with anti-Muslim slurs. Assam is about one-third Muslim, the numbers padded, the BJP assures voters, by “illegal immigrants” from neighbouring Bangladesh.

Tamil Nadu in the southeast changed one movie-industry protégé for another. For nearly a hundred years, Tamils have demonstrated their love of Tamil movies, and the film industry, its fan clubs and welfare groups have been integral to Tamil life. Most of its chief ministers since the late 1960s have been associated with the industry as stars, writers or producers.

M.G. Ramachandran and J. Jayalalitha were legendary film stars before founding political parties and becoming long-time chief ministers. The outgoing chief minister, M.K. Stalin, born 1953, is the son of a chief minister who was a veteran scriptwriter.

The new chief minister is expected to be… you guessed it — another film star. His full name is Chandrasekhar Joseph Vijay, but his film name is simply Vijay. His mother is Hindu, his father Christian, and both were in films. Vijay has been acting in films since he was twelve. When he formed his own political party, he brought his fan clubs with him: the new party won 108 of the 234 seats; the outgoing government managed only fifty-nine. He is expected to form government with support from half dozen minor parties.

Vijay’s films have made him a fortune, but his record as an administrator remains to be proved. He arrived very late at rally of thousands of avid fans in September 2025, crowd management was appalling and forty people were killed in the crush.

In Tamil Nadu, the BJP won just a single seat.

In Kerala, in the southwest, the election result was so matter-of-fact that the New York Times failed to mention it at all in a wrap-up of these state elections. An irate Keralan wrote to the editor to complain, pointing out that Kerala, though a mere thirty-six million people, led India in health, and (most of the time) harmony among Hindus, Muslims, Christians and, long ago, Jews too. Just because the state was the most sane and sensible in India, he added, it should not be ignored. (The letter does not seem to have been published.)

Since the 1950s, Kerala has had a virtual two-party system. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) forms the core of one, and the Congress Party the other. Until 2021, they alternated at an election every five years. In 2021, the communists broke the mould and won two elections in a row, but it got its comeuppance in the latest poll. The Congress alliance won ninety-six of 140 seats and will form the next government.

The BJP won three seats in Kerala and about 10 per cent of the vote. But it will be back, just as it will be in Tamil Nadu. Its unattainable yet easily imaginable goal means it can keep on keeping on. And now it has a new how-to manual from West Bengal to work from. •

The post À la Modi appeared first on Inside Story.

Democrats need to flip just three seats in the House of Representatives to secure the majority. In the Senate, where Democratic gains were until recently considered unlikely, some pollsters see a possibility of a Democratic majority, with four seats in play.

A president’s job approval always strongly influences congressional losses in midterm elections and Trump’s is at an all-time low. (One poll average on 14 April had it at 39.7 per cent.) Approval of Trump among population groups that provided key support in 2024 — young voters, Hispanics, and independents — is low enough to more than offset gerrymandering by some Republican-led states. (California’s and Virginia’s retaliatory redistricting will help too.)

Trump — ever one to deny the facts — recently insisted in a Fox News interview that the Republican party is “going to do good” this year. Yet he also acknowledged the size of the task, telling host Maria Bartiromo: “When somebody gets elected president, that party always loses the midterms. I don’t know why. I don’t know why. Nobody can explain it. I ask people who are deep into the psychological world. I said, ‘Why is it that a voter votes for the opposite party?’ even when you have a good president. It doesn’t make sense to me. So we’re going to try turning it around.”

He’s worried because he knows what the loss of the narrow but unified Republican majorities in the House and perhaps the Senate would mean. There would be no more legislative victories (not that he has been keen on legislating this term) and lots more congressional oversight, potentially including more impeachment hearings. History also points to the likelihood of down-ballot losses in governorships and state legislatures.

Despite his concerns about the outcome, Trump’s focus has so far been scattered. He has implemented measures to undermine election integrity, issued orders to Republican states about gerrymandering, pushed to restrict mail-in voting (which could also work against his own supporters) and limit voting rights in general, and made selective endorsements of MAGA candidates. But his administration is doing little to tackle the issues voters are most worried about: cost-of-living pressures, the affordability of healthcare, jobs and the economy. Trump’s rallies almost always end up being about him and his grievances, and his insistence that the economy is booming is meeting with scepticism even among his supporters.

Republicans are increasingly worried that the Middle East conflicts, violent immigration enforcement and tariffs, along with Trump’s obsession with Washington buildings and monuments and nasty, unnecessary fight with Pope Leo, are making a difficult election even more so.

“Everything is made more difficult by the nonsense coming out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” a Republican close to the White House told Politico, which also reported a senior adviser to Trump’s 2024 campaign as saying, “The road to victory runs through a consistent economic message. Unfortunately, President Trump ignores the road map.”

Outside the United States, Trump is increasingly seen as out-of-touch, even unhinged, a bully on the issues he cares about, and an unreliable ally. Foreign policy and international opinion are rarely significant for American voters, but this year might be an exception.

Trump campaigned on a promise of American isolationism, pledging to end foreign military engagements and focus on domestic renewal. Instead he has inserted himself incessantly into global affairs — threatening Canada, Greenland and Cuba, bullying Ukraine, supporting right-wing politicians in Europe, violently changing the leadership in Venezuela, setting up a personally selected Board of Peace to run Gaza, and launching a war with Iran without any apparent exit strategy. Small wonder voters are anxious about global issues, and especially Iran.

Polling shows a majority of Americans (59 per cent, including 29 per cent of Republicans) say striking Iran was the wrong decision, with 61 per cent, including 31 per cent of Republicans, disapproving of Trump’s handling of the conflict. The fighting in the Middle East has led to MAGA factionalism and a significant drop in support among young Republicans.

It isn’t just that voters are concerned about increasing military involvement and the use of nuclear weapons. The enormously expensive war must be paid for, and Trump’s budget for the financial year that starts of 1 October demands a record-breaking US$1.5 trillion for defence. That means cuts to the social programs so many Americans rely on. At an Easter lunch, Trump said it’s “not possible” for the federal government to fund Medicare, Medicaid and childcare costs and argued these programs should be the states’ responsibility because “we’re fighting wars.” On top of that, petrol prices — always a consumer obsession — are continuing to climb.

In the months ahead, Trump and Republicans must walk a political tightrope to keep happy a number of key constituencies beyond those worried about the costs of Trump’s engagement in foreign affairs.

There are the many women are worried about how the Dobbs decision on Roe v Wade is limiting their access to reproductive healthcare, counterposed with the anti-abortion activists who have blasted Trump’s “lack of action” and claim he has “fooled” the pro-life movement with his failure to restrict abortion pills and decision to approve a new, generic version of mifepristone, which is used for medical abortions. There are Catholics appalled at his war of words with the Pope and his co-opting of religious imagery, and the ultra-conservative evangelicals and media figures (not to mention vice president J.D. Vance and House speaker Mike Johnston) who support this blasphemy. And there are the Make America Healthy Again supporters who are angry that Trump and his health secretary are supporting increased production and use of the toxic weedkiller glyphosate and want to see more done to eliminate vaccine mandates.

With Republicans’ planned hyping of Trump’s economy now looking less like a winning strategy, indications suggest the party will use the threat of impeachments to get MAGA out to vote. It will be interesting to see how individual members of Congress up for re-election behave over the next few months, especially as 15 April, the deadline for tax returns, is seen as the unofficial start to the midterm campaign.

A huge wave of Republican retirements can be read as a sign of congressional frustration. While none of those sticking around for re-election so far seem likely to speak out publicly against Trump — his control over congressional Republicans remains complete and unrelenting — their concerns about their own electoral futures might see them overcome this obeisance if his approval ratings continue to sink.

Democrats, meanwhile, have been buoyed by strong fundraising and some spectacular wins in special and state elections. Partly the wins reflect shrewd candidate picks, including Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger in the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races. Democrats have flipped four state legislative seats in special elections this year after flipping seven in 2025.

Congressional Democrats know they can’t just be anti-Trump. They are reported to be focusing on affordability and the Trump administration’s fiscal policies, and planning to highlight healthcare, housing, electricity and other utilities, and caregiving. They will need to outline legislative solutions to these problems. To fund improvements in the social safety net, progressive Democrats have proposed (yet again) raising taxes on the rich. This time it might fly, after all, even if Trump has considered it.

Inspired by the ouster of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, Democrats are also looking to use the anti-corruption playbook against Trump, his family and his administration. House Democrats have just announced a taskforce to overhaul ethics rules, protect access to the ballot and examine the Trump family’s business dealings, corruption in the executive branch, and the president’s transformation of the federal government.

At the same time Democratic representative Jamie Raskin, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, has introduced a bill to establish a “Commission on Presidential Capacity to Discharge the Powers and Duties of the Office” to examine whether the president is fit to serve in office (as per section 4 of the 25th Amendment). This bill won’t go anywhere in this Congress, but it signals how Democrats in the majority will push back against Trump and his administration.

While Democrats are demonstrating how they might function should they take back the House, Senate Republicans are acting to safeguard the conservative nature of the US Supreme Court (a sure sign they are worried about the outcome of the midterms). Trump has been nudging Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas to retire so he can appoint their replacements (they both say they are sticking around). Senate majority leader John Thune has said the Senate is prepared to confirm a replacement for Alito before the midterm elections should he retire — clearly indicating that Thune would not abide by the rule his predecessor Mitch McConnell invoked to block Merrick Garland from succeeding Justice Antonin Scalia (but then ignored so Amy Coney Barrett could succeed Ruth Bader Ginsburg).

More broadly, there is much uncertainty and anxiety about whether this will be a normal election year. As historian Robert Kagan has pointed out, it would be a mistake to think Trump will be happy to let adverse results stand: “There’s no chance in the world that Donald Trump is going to allow himself to lose in the 2026 elections, because that would be the end of his ability to wield total power… They could not be more obvious about what their intention is.”

Earlier this year, a Washington Post article showed how Trump, guided by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and what he and his advisers learned in 2020, is using “every tool he can find to try to influence the 2026 midterm elections and, if his party loses, sow doubt in their validity.” He may not have the authority to make many of these interventions, but history shows that doesn’t mean he won’t try. •

The post Big target strategy appeared first on Inside Story.

Had the grown-ups already voted? There was no sign. In any case, when my relative, warned to expect a long wait, emerged to announce that “almost nobody was there!”, my only thought was to waft an arm and repeat a mantra: “Japan is dying!” I didn’t ask how she had voted, nor did she offer, as if this vivid Sunday morning was silently casting its own.

A sixteen-day campaign, the shortest in memory, had foretold the result. Thus the 8pm exit poll, showing a big victory for prime minister Sanae Takaichi’s Liberal Democratic Party, came with a twist. Head of government only since October — the first woman in the job, opposed by many on her own side, well regarded by the public — Takaichi had gained the most seats for a single party (316 out of 465 in the lower house, or House of Representatives) in any post-1945 vote. She had reduced the combined, divided opposition to 113 seats, and seen a regional coalition partner take 36 seats.

More, she had secured the two-thirds “supermajority” required to pass constitutional amendments, if necessary by overriding objections of the upper house, or House of Councillors. For once, the word “historic” could be used without blushing.

The twist is that so might the word “undramatic.” For only the snap election’s opening days had brought any suspense. Takaichi had called the vote at a time of pinched livelihoods, jittery markets, perilous geopolitics, worries over demography and immigration, and extreme weather in half the country. Many in the LDP, no fans of their leader, were happy to echo vox-pops scorning (to summarise) a rushed, ill-timed decision with no rationale. A splashy merger of two centrist parties with sizeable voting blocs — one of them Komeito, an LDP coalition partner from 1999 to 2025 — then pitched to oust the LDP. A flurry of columns echoed the international press in citing Japan’s rising bond yields, ultra-low interest rates and Takaichi’s spending plans to warn of an impending crunch.

Such elements failed to coalesce. The unified opposition party, two old stagers at the helm, fell flat. Everyday worries — mainly about prices — stayed just that. The bond vigilantes held off. The minimal suspense faded. More salient, Takaichi commanded the stage and never surrendered it.

Two of her remarks are illustrative. First, announcing the election at a press conference on 19 January, she declared that the choice to “serve at the helm” was between “Takaichi Sanae” and (naming her paired rivals) “a Prime Minister Noda, a Prime Minister Saito, or someone else entirely.” Second, in a leaders’ debate on 26 January, she promised to resign if unable to turn her coalition’s lower-house seat advantage into an actual majority.

Unnerving as Takaichi’s third-person syndrome may be, and allowing for a tactical element, that double elevation — of the contest as political life-or-death, and of her rivals as avowed democratic equals — confirmed a boldness, clarity and urgency that no one else came near to matching.

It would be wrong to overstate things: turnout was 56.26 per cent, up just 2.41 per cent from the previous contest. When politics call, Japanese voters are not a compliant bunch. That said, Takaichi was the foremost election winner, far ahead of her party. (The LDP, never truly popular, if almost always in office, had a constituency vote share of 49.09 per cent; in February, its public approval rate was 30.1 per cent.)

In retrospect, it was the LDP’s post-2020 drift that accelerated Takaichi’s reputable if slow-burning career. From a modest salaried background with no connections, she served as a lower-house member from 1993 (a three-year gap aside) and as a versatile minister. In 2020 her mentor Shinzō Abe, strategist of the country’s modern right, resigned after eight years in office. (Abe was killed in 2022 by a troubled young man firing a self-made gun.) A trio of ineffectual, shortlived PMs proceeded to alienate the public.

Then, after the LDP lost seats in the 2024 and 2025 elections to each of Japan’s parliamentary chambers, an end-of-regime mood took hold. Takaichi had finished third and runner-up in successive votes for the party “presidency”; this time she took the role by defeating Shinjirō Koizumi, an ex-PM’s son whom she went on to appoint defence minister. In this context, a hint of her drive — and of the system’s constraints — is that three of these five erstwhile colleagues-rivals are PM’s sons. Dynastic politicians in Japan’s Diet account for a third of the total, and that 14.6 per cent of lower-house lawmakers are women. In the face of such primacy, her latest leadership pitch revealed Takaichi to have another asset that distinguished her from PMs of the it’s-my-turn type: a certain quirkiness.

The novelty of a woman PM amid domestic politics’ staleness would always have provided the ingredients of a classic — which also means evanescent — Japanese “boom.” (Takako Doi’s emerging to lead the Socialist Party in 1986, also a first of its kind, was a sensation.) In the symbolic part thus assigned to her, Takaichi has so far played a blinder. Admiration for Margaret Thatcher, tick; motorcycle-loving, rock-chick phase, double-tick; intriguing family story (remarrying her ex-husband, adopting his children, caring for him post-stroke), treble-tick; handing Trump a putter owned by his golf-buddy “Shinzō,” a gift from Abe’s widow, quadruple-tick; skilled K-Pop drumming with a plucky Republic of Korea president, their meeting’s cordiality a bonus, off the scale.

Approval ratings for her cabinet between October and January were often upwards of 70 per cent, and higher still among women and young people. In the election itself, her cross-generational appeal was evidenced in large crowds at some of her public speeches and additional demand for her reputedly favourite clothing, shoe and stationery brands.

Broad credit for a pioneer will doubtless stick even as adulation wanes. Far more weighty is that the Takaichi phenomenon has a political core with connected and still-fluid elements. Japan’s voters want change; Takaichi’s rise to PM, and triumph on 8 February, made herself its vehicle; her great task now is to give it shape and build a consensus around it.

There are no guarantees. The tone of her 19 January address was in parts daunting: “To make the Japanese archipelago stronger and more prosperous, we must start now, or else it will be too late… I also want to resolutely take up challenges that include bold policies and reforms that could split public opinion… These three months have given me a painfully clear sense of the unstable state of Japanese politics and the harsh realities of Nagatacho [Tokyo’s political district]. As the ancient saying goes, ‘Without trust, nothing can stand.’”

Japan’s underlying problems in coming years will likely test her abilities to the max. Pressing disputes already arise over this year’s budget, an onerous but lucrative food-sales tax, and public spending as a whole. The punchy finance minister Satsuki Katayama, one of two other women in the cabinet, will be at their centre.

At least as grave are questions of national security amid a vacuum of global order, where Japan — with Takaichi planning upgrades in defence, intelligence and cyber capacity — has three unbenign nuclear-armed neighbours (China, North Korea and Russia) and is exposed to the whims of a fourth (Trumpland.) On regional matters, Takaichi is an advocate of the concept mooted by Shinzō Abe in 2015, a “free and open Indo-Pacific,” and of defence projects with variable clusters of allies (Australia, India, Italy, and the Philippines, as well as the US, among them).

Looming over all such initiatives is the perceived challenge posed by China to Japan’s security, even national integrity. If Beijing’s military harassment of Taiwan escalates to invasion in 2027, the year Xi Jinping has identified as decisive, all appraisals of the region’s future become moot. In any event, the proximate effects on Japan — concerned that democratic Taiwan survives intact — would be seismic.

Takaichi was always going to be a chief target of Beijing. The chance came, or was devised, on 7 November at, of all things, a Diet budget committee meeting. In response to insistent, non-relevant questions, the PM mused (probably unwisely) that a Chinese maritime blockade of Taiwan involving armed force, which the US then asks Japan to help counter, could become “a survival-threatening situation” for Japan. Cue Beijing’s instant, contrived delirium: sanctions, a clampdown on Japan-bound tourism, abuse from its Osaka-based consul, reported airforce-radar interference.

That Takaichi’s interrogator was Katsuya Okada, an ex-foreign minister with durable ties to the Chinese Communist Party who had hosted the Chinese ambassador the previous day, was barely mentioned in the kerfuffle. On 16 December Takaichi told an Okada ally, with a touch of lesson-learned: “I recognise that my answer was understood as going beyond the government’s established stance, and I will take this as a point for reflection as I approach future Diet debates.” Her calm attitude to the hysteria, without retraction or retort, prompted a widespread view — consolidated by the election weeks later — that she was now on firmer ground in being, as she has said, “open to dialogue” with China.

But if Beijing whisked Takaichi’s words into a diplomatic cauldron, the episode has a lesson for domestic politics too. (Here I draw on an article by Asahi University’s Hiroaki Kato, while adding my own gloss.) In brief, the sterile mode of political debate about security matters in Japan — above all, about the need for legislation to comply with the constitution’s Article 9, renouncing war — exalts a “theological” style of contention above one of substance. Thus, opposition voices routinely employ nit-picking questions to do with “defining terms and debating hypothetical scenarios” in an effort to make Japan’s constitutional doctrine immutable; and government and LDP figures, wanting to keep options open, respond with ambiguities. The result is an evasive style of dialogue that traps both sides. Now, in a social media age where “a dry Diet debate” can spark a Japan–China firestorm, the “peculiarities inherent in Japan’s security policy discourse” may act less as a bulwark of the country’s security than as a potential menace to it.

In this light, an opposition prepared to think anew would benefit Japan — and raise the stakes for Takaichi, who needs a big political argument she believes she can win. (Here references to Thatcher, and to Giorgia Meloni, for once may actually work.) But this would require her foes to go beyond name-calling and constitutional what-iffery alike.

Takaichi herself has long faced the former on account of her — oft-described — rightwing, ultraconservative, ultranationalist and anti-feminist views. (For what it’s worth, the Japan Times reporter Gabriele Ninivaggi unearthed an interview, admittedly given during Takaichi’s later LDP leadership run, where she said she was no longer “an uncompromising conservative” but “more of a moderate conservative, maybe even a conservative centrist.”)

Her detractors’ labels, often with scant or context-free detail, find an echo in authoritative outlets including the Asahi Shimbun newspaper and the public broadcaster NHK. The antipathy, overt and coded alike, is then often recycled in influential overseas media. It is a closed circle for the incurious.

That much of Japan’s political argument has indeed migrated to social media, to be soaked in the latter’s often far more explicit and extreme bias, is partly a by-product of such quasi-moderate partisanship. The shift may now be irreversible, as the great coarsening of public life — to which Japan’s genuine far right is an alarmist contributor — has become sui generis. But were establishment coverage to become more inquiring and scrupulous (in Japan as elsewhere) it might yet regain public trust and fortify democracy.

For the moment, the Takaichi cabinet “is” a repository of trust. In late February it had 63.8 per cent approval and 18.4 per cent disapproval. Much will no doubt go wrong: obstacles abound, luck and contingency make leaders their plaything. Those figures are more test, and perhaps hope, than reward. But Japan has a prime minister with serious vigour and purpose. Now comes the hardest part of all. •

The post Playing a blinder appeared first on Inside Story.

In its 2018 report on limiting global warming to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels (the Paris climate agreement’s widely accepted goal), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was somewhat coy about this. It stated unambiguously that all its 1.5°C scenarios included significant use of carbon dioxide removal, or CDR, and it listed possible CDR methods. And then it described all of these as “subject to multiple feasibility and sustainability constraints.”

That’s a scientifically careful way of saying that none of the methods yet looks capable of safely storing the quantities of CO₂ — tens of gigatonnes per annum — required to achieve net zero.

But the good news is that the race is on to identify and develop processes that might do this. And in that race a possible winner seems to be emerging: carbon sequestration in the world’s oceans.

There are essentially three ways to remove carbon from the atmosphere. (Carbon removal is a separate field from “carbon capture and storage,” which uses industrial processes to capture emissions produced by chemical or power plants before they enter the atmosphere.)

The first is via vegetation. Photosynthesis is carbon removal: the more vegetation planted, the more carbon removed. Since trees and other forms of plant life can also support local livelihoods and biodiversity, considerable efforts are being made in many parts of the world to restore degraded and deforested land.

But this method has its limits. Using land for carbon storage means not using it for food production. And the increase in vegetation must be permanent, which is hard to guarantee. Only if the vegetation is burned to produce energy and the emissions directly captured and stored (a process called “bioenergy with carbon capture and storage”) is carbon definitely removed.

The second possible method of carbon removal is direct air capture, or DAC. CO₂ is retrieved from the atmosphere by solid or liquid absorbents operating either in a vacuum or at high temperature, then stored underground or in building materials. DAC technologies are in their infancy; since they use highly energy-intensive processes they are dependent on abundant and cheap renewable energy as well as accessible storage sites. Eighteen DAC facilities are currently operating in Europe, Canada and the United States, but even the largest of them, in Iceland, will only be able to capture 36,000 tonnes (0.000036 gigatonnes) of CO₂ a year.

This is why attention is increasingly turning to ocean-based methods. The world’s oceans already absorb more than a quarter of all carbon emissions; in principle they have the physical capacity to sequester the many additional gigatonnes required in the IPCC’s scenarios. This is the new scientific and commercial field of “mCDR” — marine carbon dioxide removal. The question is whether it can be done safely and cheaply enough to make net zero possible.

Some mCDR is well under way. Around the world, coastal ecosystems — mangroves, reefs, seagrass meadows and tidal salt marshes — are being conserved and restored to enhance “blue carbon” uptake. Such methods offer vital economic benefits to local communities, but their carbon removal potential is relatively small. The major gains can only be made by enhancing the oceans’ natural “carbon cycle” — the processes by which carbon is redistributed between the atmosphere, surface waters and deep waters.

One way of doing this is by adding alkalinity to the ocean. Human-made CO₂ has made the oceans more acidic, with adverse ecological effects including damage to coral reefs. Adding alkaline minerals to the ocean would convert dissolved inorganic CO₂ into carbonates and bicarbonates, which are stable forms of carbon with lifetimes of thousands of years. CO₂ equilibrium would then be restored in surface waters by natural carbon removal from the atmosphere. De-acidification would also have significant ecological benefits.

The ocean alkalinity produced naturally by the runoff from slowly weathering rocks could be greatly enhanced. Billions of tons of alkaline minerals — olivine, basalt, limestone — are readily available to be mined and could be applied to beaches or the open ocean. A number of commercial firms are developing “enhanced weathering” processes of these kinds. Others are looking at the electrochemical filtration of seawater to remove excess acid caused by human-made CO₂ and return alkaline seawater in its place.

A different element of the marine carbon cycle is powered by photosynthesis. Microscopic algae living in the ocean’s surface waters — known as phytoplankton — photosynthesise dissolved CO₂. This again pulls in more carbon from the atmosphere in a natural rebalancing, with a portion of the organic matter sequestered in the ocean depths. The more phytoplankton, the more carbon removed and stored.

Phytoplankton growth can be stimulated by adding mineral nutrients, particularly iron, to the ocean. This could be done either in engineered substrates — a controlled but expensive method — or in the open ocean. Artificial pumping could then push greater quantities of organic matter downward for sequestration. Perhaps surprisingly, large areas of ocean have almost no microalgae, and therefore little life of any kind. Fertilising these areas with iron to stimulate phytoplankton could therefore have wider ecological benefits as well as removing carbon from the atmosphere.

Equally, though, it could be environmentally damaging. Any interference with the sensitive ecology of the oceans risks unforeseen and adverse effects, and it makes environmentalists nervous.

In the United States, Friends of the Earth has little doubt: “These technologies would have to be implemented at truly massive scales to have any impact on the climate, imposing disastrous side-effects on ocean ecology, marine life [and] coastal communities.” Arguing that carbon removal is a distraction from the primary task of reducing emissions — and thereby lets polluting companies off the hook — they oppose all forms of what they call “marine geoengineering.”

But other NGOs are keener to engage. In the US the Environmental Defense Fund is taking part in scientific mCDR research. The EDF accepts that, even with rapid emissions reduction, carbon removal will be essential to achieve global warming goals, and believes that trials of the different removal methods are necessary to explore their technical and commercial feasibility and environmental impact.

Iron fertilisation is generating particular attention because it looks likely to be the cheapest method of large-scale carbon removal. Phytoplankton are very efficient at absorbing carbon dioxide and iron is cheap. It is estimated that the cost of carbon removal could be less than $50 a tonne, against a benchmark of $100/tonne generally used as the threshold for commercial viability.

In the last few months the scientific prospectus for mCDR has seen some important advances. In November the European Marine Board, an independent advisory body, recommended a set of standardised protocols for research and feasibility studies. In January a network of scientific bodies, NGOs and philanthropies, Ocean Visions, published a detailed research framework for investigating phytoplankton-based carbon removal, identifying how remaining uncertainties and knowledge gaps can be reduced.

The next stage is major field trials. More than twenty small-scale experiments in ocean iron fertilisation have already been conducted, but larger and longer studies are needed to understand sequestration potential and environmental impacts. The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the US has set out a program for such trials, with the Gulf of Alaska in the Northeast Pacific a particularly promising location.

But the obstacles to large-scale deployment of mCDR remain formidable. For a start, the international ocean waste governance regime will need to be amended; the 1972 London Convention and its 1996 London Protocol forbid “dumping” of materials in the ocean. And mechanisms for financing mCDR deployment still need to be devised: if this were through “offset” markets allowing polluting companies to substitute cheap removal for more expensive emissions reduction it would almost certainly generate furious opposition from environmental NGOs.

Yet the attraction of marine carbon dioxide removal is also evident. Ocean-based solutions wouldn’t compete with other uses of scarce land, such as food production. Because they use naturally occurring biological and chemical processes of carbon absorption they will almost certainly prove cheaper than direct air capture methods. Most of all, the sheer abundance of the world’s oceans — if the ecological impacts can be proven positive — makes it possible to imagine global carbon removal on the scale that will be needed to keep 1.5°C of warming within reach. As that goal becomes more pressing over the next two decades, the world’s major emitting countries may be willing to pay for such solutions.

Last week Fiji and Tuvalu were announced as hosts of the “pre-COP” meetings in October that will prepare the next UN climate conference, COP31. It might not have escaped the attention of the Pacific islands that they have some of the largest territorial ocean waters in the world. •

The post More than a drop in the ocean appeared first on Inside Story.

He complained about his party’s handling of election laws: “Amazing that the Republicans aren’t tougher on it. The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over.’ We should take over the voting in at least — many — fifteen places. The Republicans ought to nationalise the voting.”

Trump’s call for a partisan takeover of the electoral apparatus understandably triggered reciprocal panic in Democratic circles about voter suppression and outright vote stealing. Considering how far Trump was willing to go to steal the 2020 election — from disparaging mail ballots to pursuing dubious litigation to egging on an unruly mob hellbent on obstructing the Electoral College count — every American committed to free and fair elections must remain on the highest alert until Trump has fully left the political sphere.

But what Trump precisely said, how the White House is cleaning it up, and what congressional Republicans are doing, suggests less of a coordinated plan to commandeer the midterms and more of a Republican Party in disarray amid a rising Blue Wave. It doesn’t mean that Democrats should be overly sanguine about MAGA’s capacity to disrupt the midterms. A tragic imagination is helpful in these times. But both the current state of the Republican Party’s vote-suppression efforts and, importantly, its past failed attempts are well worth keeping in mind.

Parsing Trump’s verbiage may be a fraught exercise. But to my ear, it is notable that Trump didn’t tell Bongino he wanted to take over voting in fifteen states, but rather that the Republicans — presumably Republicans in Congress — should do so. That’s not plotting, that’s just complaining. That’s not taking ownership, that’s passing the buck.

The day after Trump made the “nationalise the voting” comment, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked what Trump meant. “What the president was referring to is the SAVE Act,” Leavitt replied, “which is a huge commonsense piece of legislation that Republicans have supported, that President Trump is committed to signing into law during his term. And he spoke with the speaker directly about that yesterday, about the need to get that bill on the floor for a vote because it provides very commonsense measures for voting in our country, such as voter ID.”

Leavitt’s answer may have used misdirection to avoid acknowledging Trump’s democracy-killing fantasies. Yes, the SAVE Act requires photo identification for voting. It also requires proof of citizenship — such as a passport or birth certificate because a driver’s licence wouldn’t cut it, for voter registration. (A Senate version of the bill also requires proof of citizenship for voting.) It threatens election officials with prison if they mistakenly register someone to vote without the necessary paperwork. It revokes states’ right to hold universal vote-by-mail elections. It requires election officials to conduct voter-roll purges every thirty days, even if they’re just before elections. As the Brennan Center for Justice notes, the bill would “block millions of American citizens from voting,” “inject chaos into election administration,” and “place a massive unfunded burden on state and local election officials.”

Here’s the other thing about the SAVE Act: it’s never going to become law. At least, not without scrapping the filibuster, which Senate majority leader John Thune, the South Dakota Republican, has long ruled out. Much like how Democrats sniped at each other in 2021 when they couldn’t get a voting rights bill through the Senate, the prospect of failing to secure this voter suppression bill is prompting Republicans to form a circular firing squad.

The House passed a version of the SAVE Act last spring, but it has yet to receive Senate consideration. Last month, different versions were introduced in each chamber, and advocates have been ramping up pressure on Thune.

Earlier this week, some House Republicans, led by Representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, briefly withheld their votes on the bill to keep the government open. They relented once they received “assurances” from the White House that the Senate would vote on the SAVE Act and that Thune would consider allowing an old-school “standing” or “talking” filibuster process, in which a filibuster lasts as long as at least one senator can keep talking on the floor. Once the voices have given out, the bill can pass with a simple majority.

Despite lingering misconceptions, as I explained in 2021, no rule change is needed for the Senate majority leader to require senators to speak on the Senate floor to sustain a filibuster. The downside is that unlimited, indefinite talking prevents any other business from reaching the Senate floor. And Thune expressed that very concern last week, fretting that action on other bills would stall and name-checking pending legislation on housing, cryptocurrency, permitting, agriculture, highways and Russia sanctions. He said his promise to SAVE Act proponents was only to discuss the standing filibuster option with his Republican conference, not necessarily to use it.

Thune’s hesitation is riling SAVE Act advocates like Luna and Senator Mike Lee of Utah, who recently said on X that the talking filibuster is “almost certainly” necessary to pass the bill.

Has Senator Lee walked across the aisle and met Bernie Sanders? Cory Booker? Plenty of Senate Democrats would love nothing more than to filibuster a Republican voter suppression bill from February to November and call more attention to Trump’s attempts to destroy democracy.

More rational Republicans, like Thune, likely recognise that the best way for the party in power to mitigate the usual midterm election losses is not by trying to suppress the vote but by enacting legislation that voters want, which they can’t do if Democrats refuse to relinquish the floor.

But why — aside from respect for democracy — should Republicans refrain from voter suppression tactics? Because, as I detailed for the Washington Monthly four years ago, twenty-first-century voter suppression tactics have been repeatedly shown to flop.

An academic study analysing ten years of strict voter identification laws found that they had “no significant negative effect on registration or turnout, overall or for any subgroup defined by age, gender, race, or party affiliation.” And we have anecdotal examples of Democrats cannily exploiting attempted voter suppression by Republicans to galvanise base turnout.

Look at President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election or Senator Raphael Warnock’s 2022 re-election in Georgia, which came one year after the Republican-controlled state government enacted a flurry of restrictive voting policies, prompting Democratic outrage that was wisely channelled into get-out-the-vote efforts.

Whether the particulars of the SAVE Act would work any better for Republicans is moot because it’s never going to pass. But a SAVE Act stuck on the Senate floor, subject to ongoing filibuster, would be a gift to Democrats, helping them raise alarm about the erosion of democracy among left-leaning constituencies that are not always easy to motivate, especially in a midterm when turnout is almost always lower than in years with a presidential contest.

Having said that, we cannot be sanguine about what the Trump administration will do on its own regarding the midterm election.

Last March, the president issued an executive order imposing restrictive voting rules on states. The justice department has been trying to piece together a national voter database from unredacted state voter roll data, which the Brennan Center says is an “attempt to force states to remove voters from the rolls based on incomplete and likely inaccurate information.”

Last week, FBI agents, with director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard creepily looking over their shoulders, seized 2020 voting records from Fulton County, Georgia. Trump, based on what he told Bongino (“you’re going to see something in Georgia”), is planning to use the records to further his gaslighting claims that Joe Biden stole the election in Georgia when we have plenty of evidence that Trump was plotting the theft.

And considering how Trump has already abused his power with National Guard and ICE deployments designed to punish Democratic-run cities, we can’t discount the possibility that he will try to send armed agents to election sites with the intent of intimidating voters.

But, as with any bully, these real and potential acts of force and intimidation mask underlying weakness. A president simply doesn’t have the power to take over a constitutionally designed, decentralised, fifty-state-managed election system. And as with any bully, the way to respond is to have your eyes wide open, but also have no fear.

That’s what we’ve been seeing. Most states aren’t turning over their unredacted voter data. Trump’s Justice Department has sued twenty-four of them, and last month, federal judges dismissed the cases involving California and Oregon. Also, last month, attorney-general Pam Bondi tried to pressure Minnesota governor Tim Walz to turn over the data, suggesting that compliance would end ICE’s Operation Metro Surge, but Walz has not budged. In Georgia, the Fulton County government has sued to recover its voting records.

Trump won’t be able to send the National Guard to states where they are not wanted after the Supreme Court ruled in December that the federal government cannot legally use the military to enforce state laws. (Trump then pulled the National Guard out of Democratic states, tacitly acknowledging that, with all his bluster, even he can’t ignore the highest court.)

Ahead of the election, Trump could try more extreme methods that push constitutional bounds, such as invoking the Insurrection Act to justify a new round of armed deployments. But he flinched from doing so last month after floating the idea, seemingly recognising the likelihood of political blowback. Former Trump aide Steve Bannon threatened on his podcast, “We’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November.” But this is both stupid — ICE agents, who are incredibly unpopular, can’t intimidate citizens eligible to vote and would be walking advertisements for Democrats — and perhaps illegal, as ICE agents are empowered to enforce immigration laws, not patrol election sites.

Also percolating in the far-right fever swamps, as Salon and Democracy Docket have covered, is wishful speculation that Nicolas Maduro, the captured Venezuelan leader languishing in federal jail in New York City, will “confess” to having helped throw the 2020 election in exchange for lesser charges. Could the Trump justice department pressure Maduro to make such an obviously false admission? It sounds almost too fantastical to believe. But it’s the kind of beyond-the-pale scenario Democrats must consider as they try to game out what lengths Trump would go to in order to affect the 2026 midterms.

Still, keep in mind that such a development would serve Trump’s conspiracy theory narrative about the 2020 election but would have no direct impact on the ability of the fifty states to properly administer the upcoming elections.

Sure, Trump could use a false confession as a fig leaf to justify some extreme action. But we still have a constitution and we still have laws. As awful as the Supreme Court has been, it didn’t roll over for Trump when he tried to steal the 2020 election. We can retain hope that there are some lines the justices won’t let Trump cross. Already, lower court judges have prevented Trump’s executive order from being implemented.

Moreover, Democratic state and local officials aren’t letting their guard down. The Bulwark’s Laura Egan reported, “Democratic governors in states that Trump could target have been huddling with their teams to game out how to handle potential interference from the White House. ‘We have to plan to safeguard the ballots and ballot equipment against federal seizure. We have to plan for the potential spectre of armed, masked men roaming our streets and scaring people away from the polls,’ said Shenna Bellows, Maine’s secretary of state who is running in the Democratic primary for governor.”

Trump should pay heed. His executive order imposing national election rules was challenged in court and sidelined. His legislation imposing national election rules can’t clear the Senate and is turning Republicans against each other. His national voter database can’t get off the ground. The nationalise-elections well is dry.

And a deployment of armed agents would just dig the hole deeper. His militarisation of immigration enforcement has already backfired on Republicans, and any armed presence around election sites could easily do the same at the worst possible time. The number of energised and determined voters could easily outdo the number of intimidated voters.

Thune, by highlighting his legislative to-do list, is subtly reminding Trump there’s another way to survive the midterms: get stuff done. Serious action on building housing, generating domestic energy, and helping distressed farmers (who are hurting under Trump’s tariffs) could prompt a reassessment from swing voters who, right now, see Trump as narcissistically out of touch with their struggles.

After all, how did Biden and his Democrats enjoy a relatively successful 2022 midterm, with a one-seat gain in the Senate and better-than-average nine-seat loss in the House? They pivoted to legislative compromise, notching bipartisan victories on infrastructure investment, semiconductor manufacturing, gun safety, Electoral College ratification, and Ukraine aid. Biden also cut a budget reconciliation deal with conservative Democrat Joe Manchin on healthcare and energy.

Outside the legislative arena, Biden kicked off the autumn 2022 campaign with a stirring speech warning of “MAGA Republicans” who are “election deniers” that would “undermine democracy itself.” Come November, the swing state Republican candidates for governor and secretary of state who had promoted the fiction that Trump really won the 2020 election lost their races. Voters may care about their bank accounts first and foremost, but preserving democracy is still a high priority for them.

Trump is pursuing the exact opposite strategy from Biden’s 2022 strategy: a fixation on insisting the 2020 election was stolen from him and a lack of interest in legislation that would help economically anxious voters. Trump may be loath to take a page from his predecessor, but his own instincts didn’t serve Republicans well in the 2018 midterms, when they lost 40 House seats and the speakership, and nor did they serve him well in 2020 when he lost re-election and Republicans coughed up the Senate.

Trump’s political instincts have only served him well when out of power, not while in office. And to quote Jerry Seinfeld, “If every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right.” •

The post Will Trump steal the midterms? appeared first on Inside Story.

The report on the May–November 2024 conflict by the Commission Nationale Consultative des Droits de l’Homme, or CNCDH, released last week, found “a worrying weakening of fundamental human rights, affecting the Kanak population in particular.” It pointed to “persistent structural discrimination, significant social inequalities and a questioning of the self-determination process implemented by the government.”

The 2024 unrest was sparked by French president Emmanuel Macron’s late-2023 proposal to transform the electoral rolls for New Caledonia’s provincial assemblies and Congress. The changes, which would have added thousands of French voters to the territory’s electoral rolls, angered independence supporters, mainly indigenous Kanak, who organised months of peaceful rallies, vigils and meetings in opposition.

Former French high commissioner Louis Le Franc and other officials seem to have misjudged the level of anger about this unilateral change, decided without a consensus of leaders in Nouméa. In March 2024, Le Franc told visiting French parliamentarians that “the independence movement, just like the Loyalists, are no longer able to mobilise as they did before. Their mobilisation will not exceed a few hundred people on each side, but we will be able to manage.”

Just weeks later, on 13 April, an estimated 30,000 people marched through the capital, waving the flag of Kanaky, during a rally organised by the CCAT network and independence coalition Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste, or FLNKS. On the same day, an anti-independence Loyalist counter-rally drew 15,000-plus protestors, many of them waving the bleu-blanc-rouge French tricolour. The size of the two rallies was unprecedented in a country of just 268,000 people.

Trouble was clearly brewing. In late April 2024, I reported that “in coming months, further protests will convulse New Caledonia.” I was wrong — the crisis began in weeks, not months.

When Macron’s legislation reached the French National Assembly on 13 May, riots erupted across Nouméa and in nearby towns. Dodging teargas, flash-balls and police truncheons, protestors from the squatter settlements and public housing towers mobilised on the streets. Authorities responded with an overnight curfew, a state of emergency and, in a vain attempt to halt social media mobilisation, a shortlived ban on TikTok.

Le Franc urgently sought more police from Paris, but their rapid deployment was complicated by France’s massive security operation for the 2024 Olympics and Paralympics. In a 2025 court case, government lawyers acknowledged that “in the days leading up to 13 May, the high commission repeatedly warned the interior ministry. The warnings were ignored, as it was essential not to disrupt the organisation of the Olympic Games. There were only 500 to 800 police officers and gendarmes, a historically low number.”

As rioting expanded after 13 May, further deployments were hampered when protestors repeatedly blocked the fifty-five-kilometre road from central Nouméa to the international airport at Tontouta. With no safe route to the airport, hundreds of tourists were evacuated by Australian and NZ military aircraft using the shorter domestic airstrip at Magenta.

Supermarkets and shops were looted, and roadblocks and barricades sprang up in Nouméa and surrounding towns. Young protestors torched the Renault and Porsche dealership in Magenta, a striking symbol of the enormous economic inequalities in the French colony.

New Caledonia’s capital combines luxury apartments, tourist hotels and yacht harbours with peri-urban squatter settlements housing thousands of mainly Kanak and Wallisian islanders. As the CNCDH report explains, “these inequalities, which are significantly more pronounced than in mainland France, mainly affect the Kanak people, a significant proportion of whom live below the poverty line.” The result is very high unemployment among the Kanak population, especially young people and women. “Racial discrimination, deeply rooted in New Caledonia’s colonial history, exacerbates social inequalities,” said the report.

Social and cultural polarisation worsened in subsequent months. By year’s end, fifteen had died, hundreds had been injured and more than 2500 arrested. The economic damage was enormous: businesses were burnt out or shuttered, tourism, nickel smelting and other key industries foundered, and New Caledonia’s 2024 gross domestic product fell 13.5 per cent. Schools closed and the health sector suffered cutbacks to crucial medical services as French doctors, nurses and medical specialists fled the islands.

The initial failures of French security forces were highlighted last year, as the insurance company Allianz sued the French State over the destruction of businesses in the Kenu-In commercial complex between 15 and 17 May 2024. The shopping centre was looted and torched during nearby clashes between Kanak rioters and police.

During the subsequent case, the court was told of an internal report in which the gendarmerie commander in New Caledonia admitted a “mobile gendarmerie squadron and a GIGN unit were deployed, before being immediately withdrawn,” even though their mission was to protect Kenu-In. Having found the French State was “aware of the inadequacy of its security measures” in late May, the court ordered the government to pay €28 million (A$48 million) in compensation, a worrying legal precedent for Paris given hundreds of businesses were damaged and closed during the crisis.

Within weeks of the start of rioting, a total of 3000 gendarmes and police officers had been deployed, supported by CRS riot squads from the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité, officers of the SDAT Anti-Terrorist Sub-Directorate, and nearly 150 elite GIGN paramilitary soldiers. As part of the Gendarmerie Nationale, the GIGN describes itself as “a unit dedicated to counterterrorism, extreme crisis management, the fight against organised crime as well as the security and protection of the vital interests of the French State.”

On 15 May, a day when four people were killed by gunfire, the security forces suffered their first death. French gendarme Nicolas Molinari was shot near Saint Louis tribe, on the outskirts of the capital. (Three people have now been charged over his death.) Molinari was one of two gendarmes killed during the 2024 crisis; the other was accidentally shot dead by a fellow officer.

In response to Molinari’s death, elite GIGN forces mobilised against a small group of armed independence activists in the Kanak tribe, the site of ongoing armed clashes. French forces established roadblocks near Saint Louis, banning vehicle movement and restricting access to basic goods, gas bottles or jerrycans of petrol. All men, women and schoolchildren were searched as they entered or left the tribe, and any without ID were turned back.

As gendarmes sought to clear the road to the outlying town of Mont Dore, where the community was isolated for months, GIGN sharpshooters killed three Kanak at Saint Louis: Rock Victorin “Banane” Wamytan in July, and Samuel Moekia and Johan Kaidine on 19 September. Calling for an independent investigation into the deaths of Moekia and Kaidine, the FLNKS condemned “the barbaric and humiliating methods used by the police, who did not hesitate to carry out a summary execution of one of the young people in question.”

As the crisis spread, anti-independence politicians and many non-Kanak New Caledonians, stunned by the protesters’ anger and resistance, called for police to respond with a massive show of force. In July, the freighter Calao carried Centaure armoured cars, trucks and other vehicles from Toulon in France to support police operations, their unloading captured in a striking video by dockworkers.

By September, forty-one police and gendarmerie units had been deployed, with more than 6000 personnel on the ground. The gendarmes were provided with helicopters, logistic and technical support from French military forces based in New Caledonia.

Throughout these months, church and community leaders called for an end to violent protests by young Kanak, while also criticising the excessive use of force and intimidation by security forces. They were worried that police, angered by the deaths of two gendarmes, would lash out against Kanak youth with extra-judicial acts.

The French high commission and public prosecutor, meanwhile, were angered by criticism of police tactics by the media, UN rapporteurs and human rights organisations like Amnesty International. Many journalists — including this correspondent — were denounced by the French high commission for “fake news” after they reported on police violence against Kanak communities and the spillover effects on non-combatants.

Yet the CNCDH, after months of inquiry, bluntly concludes that “the responses from public authorities have been essentially ‘repressive,’ relying on administrative policing measures, massive intervention by law enforcement agencies, exceptional judicial measures and measures at the local level perceived as collective punishment.”

Other lawyers and human rights advocates have documented how security forces breached their own regulations as they tried to control the colonial situation far from France. An August 2024 statement by UN human rights rapporteurs raised concern over “the absence of dialogue, the excessive use of force, the ongoing deployment of military forces and the continued reports of human rights violations.” They criticised the “exclusively repressive and judicial approach” to the crisis that is “not only anti-democratic, but deeply worrying for the rule of law.”

In its regular review of French policy in May 2025, the UN Committee Against Torture expressed concern “about allegations of excessive use of force, including lethal force, by police officers and gendarmes as well as by the armed forces that were deployed to New Caledonia in May 2024.”

French authorities have dismissed the UN criticisms by highlighting the use of firearms by activists at Saint Louis, the stoning of riot police by youth on the barricades and hundreds of officer injuries. Gendarmerie general Nicolas Matthéos said that he has “never seen such a level of violence and adversity” in his thirty-year career.

Yet the UN concerns are echoed by the CNCDH, which declares “the clashes led to violent, often disproportionate repression by the police, particularly in the Southern Province and more specifically against the Kanak people.” It cites “numerous testimonies that have indicated severe physical violence, including against minors, as well as deliberate destruction of property, all of which are disproportionate practices. A militarised police intervention involving armoured vehicles and firing from helicopters at civilians attempting to flee has also been reported.”

Back home in France, the French police have a reputation for militarised policing, and a long tradition of using tear gas and flash-bang grenades during protests by the Gilets Jaunes (yellow vest) movement, farmers, unionists and Palestine supporters. Human rights groups have documented a range of injuries caused by these grenades, including people losing a hand or eye.

Yet authorities weakened restrictions on the use of such grenades in late June 2024, although the relaxation only applied to forces operating in New Caledonia. Existing regulations restricted use the GML2L tear gas and flash-bang grenade to a specific launcher, but interior minister Gérald Darmanin’s office quietly informed the heads of France’s National Police and Gendarmerie that the grenade could be thrown by hand, leading to their being tossed into houses and enclosed spaces.

Police also trialled new riot control equipment during the unrest, adding new technology and infrared cameras on the Centaure armoured cars. The newspaper Politis reports that French authorities purchased weaponry classified as “war materials” at the start of the conflict. These included new launchers that could rapidly fire twelve gas grenades over distances up to 200 metres.

The CNCDH report also highlights discrimination in the court system and “unacceptable conditions” in New Caledonia’s prison Camp Est, where hundreds of protestors were held on remand. French authorities acknowledge that, by year’s end, 2528 people had been taken into custody with more than 500 brought before a magistrate. Fifty-eight per cent of detentions related to property offences, and around one in ten of those held were minors.

The influx of hundreds of new prisoners on remand exacerbated the already unacceptable conditions in the Camp Est prison, in facilities long acknowledged as “deplorable” by French authorities.

“The events of 2024 highlight a longstanding and persistent situation,” says the CNCDH. “Although Kanak represent around 43 per cent of the New Caledonian population, they make up between 90–95 per cent of those imprisoned at Camp-Est… This disparity is all the more striking given that, at the same time, Loyalist armed militias — which have been widely publicised and implicated in acts of violence — have not, to date, been subject to any known legal proceedings.”

In June 2024, key Kanak leaders were flown to France in handcuffs on military aircraft, to be charged with serious crimes. They were held in solitary confinement for pre-trial detention, in prisons scattered across France. Over time, French investigating judges abandoned most of the serious charges, and the detained Kanak — including current FLNKS president Christian Tein — were eventually released from detention, later returning to New Caledonia.

The CNCDH report criticises the breach of human rights in these transfers and eventual release, noting “some transfers to mainland France allegedly violated the rights of the legal defence and took place in complete secrecy, even from relatives. The release of certain individuals detained on French mainland territory, 17,000 kilometres from their homes, without winter clothing or return tickets, only reinforced a feeling of humiliation that was detrimental to the perception of justice.”

Just over a year after the end of clashes, the French State and local leaders are again debating a new political statute for New Caledonia. But two key texts, the Bougival Accord negotiated in July 2025 and the supplementary Elysée-Oudinot Accord in January 2026, are opposed by the main independence coalition, FLNKS. As France again moves to translate these agreements into law without consensus among leaders in Nouméa, some New Caledonians fear more conflict later this year.

New Caledonia’s current gendarmerie commander General François Haouchine confirmed last month that fifteen squadrons of mobile gendarmes from France were still deployed in the islands, alongside 1200 local gendarmes and police. He also said that “the director-general of the National Gendarmerie keeps five mobile gendarmerie squadrons on permanent standby, ready to be deployed to New Caledonia in case of emergency or necessity.” •

The post “Violent, often disproportionate repression” in New Caledonia appeared first on Inside Story.

He also thinks big. His government is prioritising large infrastructure projects to increase Canadian economic autonomy, and the prime ministerial jet regularly wings its way overseas. In one seven-day period in January, he signed a trade deal in China, pitched investors in Qatar, and stopped at Davos to give a speech. And in that speech he captured headlines around the world by arguing the rules-based order on which international relations has been based since 1945 is fading and “comfortable assumptions” about prosperity and security are no longer valid.

The Trump administration has overturned rules and conventions around the world, but the effects feel particularly intimate in Canada. The proximate American border means the United States is a day-to-day reality for Canadians. Thousands of trucks carry tariff-free goods back and forth every day; just-in-time manufacturing supply chains straddle the border. At this frigid time of year, sun-seeking Canadian tourists flock to Florida and Arizona. While the border has gradually thickened since 9/11 — before which passports weren’t needed — crossing it for business or leisure remains a familiar routine for most Canadians.

This familiarity has been upended in two ways. One is Trump’s love of tariffs. His 2018 renegotiation of the US–Mexico–Canada free trade agreement, or USMCA, seemed arduous at the time; now Canada is desperate to retain that deal. As with all the administration’s trade policies, it is almost futile to list its ever-changing barrage of tariff announcements affecting Canada over the past year, nor to explain the logic behind most of them and how they fit with the USMCA.

The opening shot was Trump’s November 2024 announcement of 25 per cent tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico. Since then numerous tariff announcements have been made and variously postponed, withdrawn or extended, the only clear result being uncertainty among Canadian exporters and general chaos and confusion.

The second upset is even more vague. Although it didn’t come up in his first administration, Trump now regularly flirts with annexing Canada, referring to it as the fifty-first state and striking at the greatest perennial fear in Canadian hearts. The seriousness of this project is never clear — it is often pointed out that it is not in the interest of Trump’s Republican Party to add tens of millions of likely Democratic voters — but the abstract implication is obvious: a lack of respect for Canadian sovereignty, whether or not its territory is occupied.

Into this uproar stepped Mark Carney. His predecessor Justin Trudeau was already on the political ropes in 2024; after nine years in power, the last five in minority governments, his poll numbers were anaemic. His Liberals were losing safe seats in by-elections, and memoirs were emerging from former ministers with little good to say about the boss. The country had lost enthusiasm for a celebrity prime minister who seemed unaware the love affair was over and refused to move on.

Canadian prime ministers are very hard to overthrow internally, but the second coming of Trump finally did the trick, creating a crisis atmosphere and missteps by Trudeau that triggered the resignation of his long-loyal deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland. Recognising the ride was over, Trudeau announced last 6 January his intention to step down.

This created opportunity for Carney. The Canadian-born former Goldman Sachs employee with an Oxford economics doctorate — a man who has served as governor of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England — had made little secret of his political ambitions. But while a regular at Liberal Party gatherings in recent years, Carney hesitated to take the plunge, and seemed only interested in starting at the top. The party had previously turned to an expatriate novice as leader: Michael Ignatieff, the Canadian-born public intellectual who had spent almost all his adult life in Britain. Tagged by his opponents as “Just Visiting,” Ignatieff led the party to its worst-ever defeat in 2011.

While Carney had a more substantive record of actually running things and had returned to Ottawa in 2020 after completing his term at the Bank of England, his golden resume gave little sense of his actual political skills, and he sometimes looked like any other of the many business titans who are convinced they could easily run the country if they didn’t have to waste time with parties and elections. Only through a very unusual set of circumstances could one imagine Prime Minister Carney.

And so here we are.

Carney’s assuming the prime ministership as an entry-level position was assisted not only by Trump but also by his party’s perilous parliamentary standing. An imminent vote of non-confidence and ominous polls were suggesting a wipeout. Under these circumstances most Trudeau ministers declined to run for leader, leaving only recent ex-minister Freeland and two others. Carney blew this group away on 9 March with 86 per cent of the party’s mass-membership vote. Sworn in as a seatless prime minister, he soon called an election for 28 April.

The party slightly improved its seat count in that election to just short of a majority, a reversal from the blowout expected under Trudeau. While tasting political success — including winning a suburban Ottawa constituency for himself — Carney now had to turn to the real task: responding to the double-barrelled American threat against trade and Canadian sovereignty itself.

Two general philosophies have developed about how to deal with the Trump administration, both in Canada and internationally. The first is to wait out the storm, confident that bluster is often just talk, tensions will ease, deals are still plentiful, and all the fuss will one day pass. But the second is that everything has changed, that Canada and the rest of the world can no longer anchor their foreign, trade and defence policies to the whims of a few swing votes in Wisconsin and Ohio.

Carney is decisively in the second camp. “The old relationship we had with the United States — based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation — is over,” he said soon after taking office. In the April election Carney adopted the ice hockey term “Elbows Up,” indicating he was ready to fight. In May, he invited Charles III to make a hurried trip to Canada to read the throne speech, the first royal reading since 1977, and the most symbolic way possible to emphasise Canada is not the United States.

His government boosted defence spending in response to Trump’s pressures on NATO countries to spend more, but directed it in non-American directions, and the government is now entertaining submarine bids from Germany and Korea and taking a serious look at cancelling Canada’s current order for American F-35 jets in favour of Sweden’s Gripen.

Carney also turned his gaze internationally in other ways, seeking new friends. By coincidence Canada was scheduled to host the G7 summit last June; while the guest list has been expanded in previous years, Carney took the opportunity to invite Anthony Albanese to pop by, along with the leaders of Mexico, India, Brazil, South Africa, South Korea and Ukraine; with Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates declining with regret.

And while Trump’s 2024 tariff threat frightened Justin Trudeau enough to prompt a frantic impromptu flight to Mar-a-Lago, Carney did not rise to Trump’s bait in the same way, ignoring or downplaying presidential provocations and showing less interest in putting the relationship back together. In turn his early hustle and mettle appeared to impress Trump, who at least initially addressed him by his correct title rather than “Governor,” as he regularly termed Trudeau.

To move Canada away from its dependence on American trade, the Carney government announced a new focus on “major projects” — such as pipelines, mining developments, and container terminals to accelerate Canadian exports — fast-tracking approvals and reducing regulatory delays. But much of that red tape was linked to environmental assessments and concerns, and Carney had built his post-banking career primarily as an environmental capitalist, leading climate-related investments and task forces and writing a lengthy book, Value(s), that questioned the modern market economy.

Now those earlier views have been paused or thrown out, depending on one’s perspective. The Liberal Party of Canada, the last great centrist catch-all party, has long been noted for its opportunistic instincts, but the flip from Trudeau to Carney remains breathtaking.

On his first day in office Carney curbed the consumer carbon tax, a Trudeau centrepiece that the opposition Conservatives had targeted with great success. In November, he parsed his words in declining to say Canada still had an explicit feminist foreign policy — another top Trudeau jewel. The low priority on environmental concerns under the new regime drove Stephen Guilbeault, a Trudeau-era minister, to resign from cabinet in September, with other reports of grumbling in the caucus. But Carney insists he has not changed his values: “I’m the same me. I’m focused on the same issues.” According to him, it’s merely a case of implementing change pragmatically.

Still, redirecting a century of trade in response to American policies isn’t easy. The quest to diversify markets is a perennial chestnut in Canadian trade policy, seen in John Diefenbaker’s attempt in the 1960s to reverse back to prioritising Britain and the Commonwealth, Pierre Trudeau’s “Third Option” in the 1970s, and Jean Chretien’s 1990s “Team Canada” trade missions to China and elsewhere. None of these made significant dents when the world’s largest and most dynamic economy was right next door. Instead, the 1988 Canada–US Free Trade Agreement and later NAFTA locked Canada in closer with preferential access, and Canada fought hard to retain this with the 2018 USMCA.

Trade challenges affect the vast Canadian economy in different ways. The Trump tariffs and threat to abandon the USMCA particularly threaten the manufacturing province of Ontario, which houses all the country’s auto assembly plants and other goods producers most at risk from Trump’s America-first policies. Energy-rich Alberta, by contrast, exports significant oil to the United States; though this is now possibly at risk from renewed Venezuelan competition, the province, often considered the most American part of Canada, has fewer trade fears.

In September, Ontario premier Doug Ford, always a colourful figure, poured a bottle of Crown Royal rye whisky onto the ground at a press conference, angered by the company’s plans to move some production from Ontario to the United States, and in January announced Crown Royal would be removed from government liquor stores entirely. But this sparked protests from the premiers of Manitoba and Quebec, where Crown Royal jobs remain.

Ontario’s Ford is a generally unpredictable maverick whose behaviour contrasts with Carney’s cool approach; in October his government ran ads in the United States featuring a Ronald Reagan speech decrying tariffs. The ads so enraged Trump that he called off formal trade talks with Canada, which remain suspended.

Still, Carney seems willing to make tough choices and tradeoffs in his quest to redirect the Canadian economy away from the United States. The centrepiece of his January trip to China was an agreement to lift the current 100 per cent tariffs on a limited number of Chinese-made electric vehicles into Canada, a policy that had been in lockstep with the United States. (The change immediately led to grumbling from Ford, worried about his auto sector.) In return, the Chinese lifted their own retaliatory tariffs on commodities like western Canadian canola and lobster from the Atlantic coast. Saskatchewan premier Scott Moe sat happily beside Carney in Beijing.

Other challenges are more thorny. While Carney is busy circling the globe, his party’s lack of a parliamentary majority means the rest of his legislative agenda back home is modest and stalled, and his Liberals are neck-in-neck in the polls with the opposition Conservatives. And while the standing joke a year ago was that Donald Trump had managed to bring the country together more effectively than any Canadian politician, regional tensions beyond trade are alive and well. Alberta, which has never felt it gets sufficient respect, is moving toward a referendum on separating from Canada; in Quebec the Parti Québécois, which initiated sovereignty referendums in 1980 and 1995, is leading in the polls for this year’s provincial election.

Still, Carney’s grand mission is assisted by the lack of obvious alternatives. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, who was poised a year ago for a huge majority against Trudeau, has struggled to come up with a clear Trump policy. He did increase the Tory vote in the April election, but he lost his own seat and was preoccupied for much of the Canadian autumn by two defections from his caucus to the Liberals and a looming leadership review. Trump offers him little to work with — once calling him “not a MAGA guy” — and must straddle camps: one November poll found Conservative supporters divided exactly 50–50 in their approval of Trump. (Two per cent of Liberal supporters approved of Trump.)

Poilievre’s strategy is to remind voters that not so long ago they greatly disliked Carney’s party, and to change the conversation to the general cost of living pressures and lack of opportunity that existed before Trump came back on the scene. Just last week Poilievre easily won his party leadership review with 87 per cent support. But among voters as a whole, Carney’s approval rating far exceeds his.

Not long ago, Denmark was in a territorial dispute with Canada. The countries had long disagreed over ownership of Hans Island, a tiny Arctic outpost between Greenland and Canada’s Ellesmere Island. For several decades, contingents from Denmark and Canada made alternating visits to the island, with a tradition of leaving behind a bottle of Gammel Dansk liquor or Canadian Club rye respectively to signal ownership. The matter was finally resolved in 2022 by dividing the island roughly in half.

Now, in 2026, Trump’s very different approach to Greenland, devoid of good-natured humour and exchanges of alcohol, and the American intervention in Venezuela and proclamation of the “Donroe Doctrine” have moved Canada’s concerns back from tariff worries to sovereignty itself. In January Trump resumed using his memes of stars-and-stripes covering the Canadian map, and his accelerated disdain for NATO and allies — including disparaging the contributions of Canada, Denmark and others in Afghanistan — was a reminder that his disruptions went well beyond trade.

It was in this context that Carney made his Davos speech. Without mentioning the president by name, he delivered a graduate seminar on great power rivalry, emphasising “we are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition” and calling for solidarity among middle powers — another perennial Canadian theme. His most provocative passage evoked a Vaclav Havel essay about people turning a blind eye to communism, unable or unwilling to acknowledge the reality of what was really going on.

“The powerful have their power,” Carney said. “But we have something too — the capacity to stop pretending, to name reality, to build our strength at home and to act together. That is Canada’s path.” Trump predictably reacted negatively in his own Davos speech the next day and again began titling Carney as “Governor.” When US treasury secretary Scott Bessent claimed that Carney recanted some of his “unfortunate remarks” in a subsequent phone call with the president, Carney responded: “I meant what I said in Davos.”

Another Canadian prime minister was in the audience for Carney’s remarks: Justin Trudeau, accompanied by his partner of the past year, American pop star Katy Perry. Trudeau also gave a speech at Davos, though it attracted little notice. Instead, all eyes were on the serious man from Canada. •

The post Carney’s Canada appeared first on Inside Story.

Where is the political opposition to citizens being snatched off the street and deported, the costs of health insurance skyrocketing, universities and media companies being forced to pay ransoms to keep operating, the breakdown of public health services, the summary dismissal of senior female and Black military leaders? Where are the voices speaking out strongly and persuasively against Trump’s autocratic behaviour, his kakistocratic cabinet, his kleptocratic family and associates, and his appalling and expensive taste in architecture and gilded trimmings?

The polls highlight Trump’s dramatic loss of support. Not just generally but even among his base and even on such touchstone issues as immigration and the economy. A recent CNN poll has 68 per cent of respondents saying the country is going pretty badly or very badly. Voter disaffection has been clear in recent state elections (where Democrats took twenty-five state Senate and House seats from Republicans) and at special elections in Florida, Virginia, Arizona and Tennessee. Yet Congressional Democrats seem unable to capitalise on the failures of the administration or Trump’s increasingly erratic behaviour and harness the community concern expressed in the No Kings rallies.

Yes, there have been a few standout moments: senator Cory Booker’s marathon speech on the Senate floor; rallies led by senator Bernie Sanders and representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; representative Bennie Thompson accusing homeland security secretary Kristi Noem of abuses of power and demanding her immediate resignation; and Democrats holding town hall meetings in Republican-held districts.

But there has been no coherent, coordinated response. We rarely see House and Senate leaders take to the media to name the issues and how they would deal with them. Senate Democrats did take a stand on health insurance costs during the recent government shutdown; but then, amid fear they would be blamed for job losses and the hardships facing unpaid federal workers, enough of them folded to enable the Republican bill (which offered nothing on health insurance) to pass. After forty days, the Democrats were left with nothing.

While the margins are thin, Republicans’ control both chambers of Congress means they control which legislation comes to the floor and which issues are examined in committee. Coordinated, controlled and timely responses to announcements by Trump and Republicans are hampered further because the opposition has no designated leader — although that shouldn’t stop House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer from holding daily press conferences — and Trump eats up all the media airtime.

There is every reason to believe the Democrats can take back the House in the 2026 midterm elections: a November NPR/PBS News/Marist poll showed Democrats leading Republicans 55–41 per cent when people were asked who they would vote for if the election for Congress were held today. Taking the Senate will be more of a challenge, with the Democrats needing to flip four seats to take a fifty-one seat majority.

But the midterms are a year away and — as the past eleven months have shown — the Trump administration could do an enormous amount of damage in that time. Congressional Democrats can’t just sit passively, look optimistically at the polls and hope voters prefer them to the Republicans.

The most effective Democratic opposition so far has come from outside the Congress — from Democratic state governors, in particular Gavin Newsom (California), J.B. Pritzker (Illinois) and Josh Shapiro (Pennsylvania). These three are almost certainly looking to run as the Democratic nominee for president in 2028.

They will join what is predicted to be a sizeable lineup of Democrats. Senators Cory Booker and Chris Murphy, House members Joe Neguse and, possibly, Ocasio-Cortez are all likely to step forward for the nomination.

Given the appallingly low levels of public trust in Congress, candidates from elsewhere — with name recognition and demonstrable experience — will stand a better chance. To the list of governors above, add Gretchen Whitmer (Michigan), Wes Moore (Maryland), Andy Beshear (Kentucky) and Tim Walz (Minnesota). Of these, Newsom clearly fancies himself as a winner, but he needs more than the ability to hilariously troll Trump, and he is carrying personal and political baggage. There are some also-rans to add to the list of candidates — most notably Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg.

If past experience is any guide however, the likely final candidate is a name not yet mentioned.

Two key factors should guide the Democrats in selecting a presidential candidate.

The first is that Americans, especially younger voters and people of colour, appear to be looking for a different type of politician and a different style of campaigning. This is most obviously demonstrated in the recent upstart victory of Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral race.

The win was a surprise not so much because he was relatively young, a Muslim and a Democratic socialist proficient on social media, but rather because he ran a campaign based on listening and then responding to what he heard about voters’ needs.

Mamdani has described the need to change “a political impulse of lecturing” to a commitment to “listening.” When he conducted an in-person survey, asking life-long Democrats why they had voted for Trump or failed to vote at all, what he learned is that “many did so because they remembered having more money in their pocket four years ago,” and that they craved from Democrats “a relentless focus on an economic agenda.”

That is how he ran his mayoral bid. He spent the entire campaign mainly talking about affordability. Instead of the political message, so often heard in difficult times, about undeserving welfare dependents and working-class people missing out to recent immigrants, he talked about working together to provide everyone with a better life.

This focus on affordability also helped Democrats Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger win their governors’ races in New Jersey and Virginia respectively.

To win in 2028, Democrats will need to woo back a lot of working-class voters, including some of those blue-collar workers who voted for Trump. Recognising the very real financial issues confronting many American families, and offering realistic solutions, will win them over in ways that talking about civil rights will not.

Meanwhile the presidential candidate who vowed to lower prices, Donald Trump — even as he spruiks the state of the US economy (which is hardly booming) — is calling affordability concerns a “hoax” perpetrated by Democrats. As pollster Frank Luntz says, he runs a grave risk of appearing out of touch when Americans not only feel like they’re paying more but actually are.

The second factor Democrats must consider in choosing a presidential candidate is: who will they need to beat?

Given the craven state of the Republican party, the choice is Trump’s to make. The frontrunner might appear to be vice-president J.D. Vance, but Trump has already invoked secretary of state Marco Rubio’s name as well. The man with the most appeal beyond hardcore MAGA voters might be senator Tim Scott from South Carolina, although he was forced to withdraw from the 2023 Republican presidential primary due to lack of support.

The two most politically ambitious members of the Trump administration, the ones most likely to throw their hats in the ring, are health and human services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.

Of course the elephant in the room is whether Trump will attempt to run a third time. Constitutionally it’s impossible, but that might not stop him trying something nefarious. It’s clearly on his mind in more ways than his Trump 2028 baseball cap. “There are methods which you could do it,” he said in an interview with NBC News in March. More recently, in October, he said cryptically: “Based on what I read, I guess I’m not allowed to run. So we’ll see what happens.”

If a member of the Trump family were elected president, Trump senior could retain his power and influence. Both his older sons Donald Jr. and Eric have indicated they might “one day” run for president. Trump himself has suggested that a dynasty “could” be established, and he certainly regards his name as a political brand.

The 2028 election is still three years away, although campaigning will start in earnest as soon as the midterms are over. At this stage there are just two certainties: it will be about how voters perceive the state of the economy, and it will reflect voter disgust with the current political establishment. If the Democrats gain control of at least one chamber of the Congress in the midterms and begin to act more aggressively against unpopular and undemocratic Trump initiatives, the political dynamics could change dramatically, especially as — we hope! — Trump himself will not be on the ballot. •

The post Where are all the Democrats? appeared first on Inside Story.

The first tier is hold on hard, so as to cope with a bumpy ride while clinging to as much as possible in the US relationship. The second is to hedge and hide from all the horrors being hurled around by Donald Trump. And third is help! Help yourself while seeking support from others facing the same horror.

Hold, hedge and help are responses to a US president operating on a strange mix of instinct, grievance and ego.

Foreign Affairs magazine asks: “How Much Abuse Can America’s Allies Take?” A Washington Post op-ed headline declares: “America Has Become a Rogue Nation. US Allies Are Looking Elsewhere.” While the Post has bowed to Trump (to protect the business interests of its owner Jeff Bezos) the “rogue” headline won’t bring White House retribution — it’ll be taken as praise.

The Indo-Pacific is scrambling to adjust to a great and powerful ally spewing a cornucopia of self-harm, doing serious damage to itself and its “friends.”

After seeing Trump kicking at Ukraine in favour of Russia, Taiwan thinks the unthinkable: how to resist China without America. Japan is explicit about its military support for Taiwan, and suffers Chinese diplomatic retribution without any White House backing. South Korea and Japan seek to overcome the scars of their history, exchanging quiet doubts on what their great ally will deliver. India, which had been drawing closer to the US for a decade, is reshaping its foreign policy after Trump bullying.

The opening move in handling Trump is to hold on hard: lavish gifts and praise on the distractible king. Try not to provoke. Expect offbeat monologues and verbal zaps rather than reasoned debate. On this metric, Anthony Albanese’s October visit to Washington worked well, with only a passing zap at Australia’s ambassador.

Traditional alliance responses — such as hosting more US military personnel and facilities in Australia — get little credit from Trump. Rather than seeing an ally acting in partnership, the transactional president rails against freeloaders extracting military benefits from America.

A better hold tactic is simply to hand over cash. Seek the best deal on American tariffs but don’t scream too loud. Australia’s pledge to pump US$3 billion into America’s shipbuilding industry as part of the AUKUS submarine deal fits the Trump pay-to-play version of the alliance.

“America First” is the guiding vision of Trump’s National Security Strategy, released on 4 December. Under the headline “Burden-Sharing and Burden-Shifting,” it declares: “The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over.” Allies and partners “must assume primary responsibility for their regions and contribute far more to our collective defence.” Expect much shifting and not much sharing.

At what point does America First become America Only? An arbitrary and unpredictable leader means the question has no real answer. Trump shreds Henry Kissinger’s dictum that “the essence of foreign policy is precisely the ability to accumulate nuances in pursuit of long-range goals.”

Understanding that the US may no longer be reliable drives the pivot to hedge and hide. Traditional diplomatic hedging is about keeping options open to minimise risk. The Trump risks leave no option but to hedge. And the major winner of the moment is the other big player — China. Everyone turns towards China. A rogue US makes it hard to know where the balance point lies between the two superpowers; that uncertainty serves China, unsettles the Indo-Pacific, and hurts America.

A symbolic expression of hedging comes from America’s long-time ally Thailand, whose king visited Beijing last month — the first Thai monarch to go to China since the two countries established diplomatic ties fifty years ago. The Middle Kingdom always appreciates tribute, especially conveyed by a royal.

Hedging will be more than a temporary tactic. Nations must shift to adjust to big structural changes. Trump’s long-term damage to the multilateral system may be as influential as his remaking of the Republican Party and polarisation of American politics. The destruction of USAID will cause a dramatic restructuring of the international aid system. And the distrust of the United Nations that Trump has driven even deeper into American thinking may be as consequential as the loathing of the European Union Margaret Thatcher bestowed on British politics.

Hedging is conducted softly. It is Trump who forces the hide. Nothing must be done to attract the president’s angry attention, because that is what causes tantrums, threats and tariffs.

The Hide imperative is to avoid a role in the Trump soap opera. The “soap” analysis is offered by Australian economist, Justin Wolfers, who is professor of public policy and economics at Michigan University. In a recent interview, Wolfers diagnosed Trump in terms any Australian TV viewer could follow.

You and I could try and talk about this like it were economics or like it were international relations, but it’s not. It’s a soap opera. It’s Sons and Daughters. It’s Home and Away. It’s Neighbours. And it’s going to be a soap opera that goes on and on for the next three-and-a half years. And just like sometimes Madge would get a little cranky in Neighbours, we are seeing the same thing happen here. Not a lot of rhyme or reason.

What we see, though, is the spotlight is relentlessly around the president. The thing he claims to want is “deals, deals, deals.” Look, you can’t do a deal with a bloke who halfway through the deal all of a sudden decides he’ll throw new tariffs on steel or aluminium, or that he doesn’t like something one of the [Canadian] provinces has done. Or he doesn’t understand the history of his own party and so will tax Americans as a result.

It just means the single best strategy is, in fact, the one that Australia has been following: stay out of the way. For all the people who are saying you’ve got to get more meetings with the president, the single best thing to do is make sure he forgets the name of our country.

The final tier: help! The need to help yourself is driving big increases in defence spending across the Indo-Pacific. Trump demands more military spending under that heading of “Burden-Sharing and Burden-Shifting.” The sharing and shifting language feeds doubt about what Trump will do, or demand, or fail to deliver. Uncertainty drives Asia’s new arms race. An unreliable president means nations must rely on themselves, and never look for help from Washington.

This all means that the quasi-alliance Australia has built with Japan this century enters new territory. When the Australia–Japan–US strategic dialogue was launched in 2002, its aim was to add a third leg to America’s alliances with Australia and Japan. Now Tokyo and Canberra want to help each other manage Washington and act together when Trump goes missing.

Australia and Japan signed a joint declaration on security cooperation in 2022 with the twin aims of serving their alliances with the US and the “peace and stability of the Indo-Pacific.” Canberra’s partnership with Tokyo has reached an extraordinary moment: Australia puts as much “strategic trust” in Japan as it does in the US.

At ministerial talks in Tokyo in September, deputy PM and defence minister Richard Marles declared: “There is no country with whom we have a greater strategic alignment than Japan. We’re both democracies. We both support a global rules-based order. We are both allies of the United States.”

Foreign minister Penny Wong told Japan’s foreign and defence ministers: “Our relationship has only grown stronger. We do face very difficult, challenging strategic circumstances, and as we face those circumstances, what we know is our strategic alignment and our strategic trust have never been stronger or deeper.”

The regional quest for help! is also the unspoken element in Indonesia and Australia agreeing on the terms of a new defence pact, a Treaty on Common Security, to be signed next month. Indonesia’s non-alignment means this can’t be labelled an alliance, but the two neighbours will consult on “adverse challenges to either party or to their common security interests” and consider joint actions.

Anthony Albanese calls the treaty a watershed moment that “signals a new era in the Australia-Indonesia relationship.” President Prabowo Subianto hailed “an important treaty between Australia and Indonesia, committing ourselves to close cooperation in the defence and security fields.” Prabowo said the “determination to enhance our friendship” to act as partners and neighbours would “enhance and guarantee security of both our countries.”

China and America were the twin ghosts present at the creation of the Australia–Indonesia pact; the needs of neighbourliness given urgency by Asia’s new reigning power and the other power gone rogue.

An unstable era also prompts Australia to offer fresh guarantees to the South Pacific: an alliance with Papua New Guinea, new security agreements with Nauru and Tuvalu, and similar bilateral treaties being negotiated with Fiji, Tonga and Vanuatu.

The hold, hedge and help framework is woven through the speech Penny Wong gave last month reviewing the three years of the Albanese government. Trump wasn’t mentioned by name, and Wong made only one mention of “the President.” She referred back to her assurance when Trump was elected: “Australians should be confident in our ability to navigate changes that were foreshadowed by the new administration.” In dealing with that administration, the Labor government had refused “to sprint towards a deal at any cost,” ensuring that it didn’t “bargain away what matters to Australians.”

This is classic hedge delivered with a firm hold.

Drawing on history more than the Trump experience, Wong praised American regional leadership as “indispensable” and declared, “The United States is our closest ally, and our principal economic and strategic partner. The Indo-Pacific would not have enjoyed long periods of stability and prosperity without the United States and its security guarantee to the region, as well as its leading role as an investor.”

Those words could have been lifted from any Australian foreign minister’s speech over the past eighty years. But the rest of the speech was a reflection on how “longstanding institutions and rules are undermined and broken.” Wong’s opening words were about “resilience becoming an even more critical priority, as Australia builds our future in an ever less stable world.”

“The Indo-Pacific is where the world’s future is most being shaped,” Wong observed, but “the change in the regional landscape is permanent. The disruption — the contest — is permanent. China will continue trying to reshape the region according to its own interests.”

In the help part of the speech, Wong said, “our defence, security and trade relationships with Japan, the Republic of Korea and India have reached unprecedented levels. Australia cannot afford to stand still while tectonic plates are shifting around us — because in these circumstances, that would mean going backwards.”

Permanent disruptions. Tectonic shifts. Broken rules. Uncertain world. Hold hard, hedge and hide, and help! •

The post Hold on hard; hedge and hide; help! appeared first on Inside Story.

That is one take. Many more are available, a rant the usual form. The fuller version below elicits the malaise via four, connected stimulants: political paralysis, economic stagnation, corrosive scandal, social fissure. But the funk of 2025 has a precise origin, namely the Labour Party’s big electoral win on 4 July 2024 and the near-instant collapse of the hope, always muted, invested in this outcome. Before returning to this stimulant, a cursory digest of the three others.

Whirling to somewhere

Many UK economic problems — such as low growth, productivity, investment, employment levels, and skills training, plus high debt, taxes, inflation, energy costs, and welfare spending —now look endemic. Short-term horizons, policy switchbacks, bloated schemes, poor oversight, even unreliable statistics, can compound them. A blame-wedded polity and media surround them.

Somehow, for all these, the show stays on the road. There are even bright spots. Today’s “something will turn up,” as per North Sea oil in the 1980s and financial services in the 2000s, is a productivity and growth surge from AI diffusion. The sheer overlap of difficulties today, however, may be unprecedented. (The qualifier “outside wartime” must be used, if at all, warily: Russia-organised sabotage, and its naval menace to seabed cables, are a constant vexation.)

Britain is not, as things stand, a going concern. With a long static economy, trade dependent, tested by the fierce new geoeconomics, exposed to global bond markets prowling both for margins and reassurance, its highest financial hazard is (far from static) debt. That is created by long-term overspending, which requires more borrowing and higher interest-rate payments. Public sector net debt in 2025 will be equivalent to around 94.5 per cent of GDP, and servicing it cost around £111 billion (A$224 billion) — close to 8.4 per cent of total government spending, and far above outlays on education or defence. Borrowing in the seven months to October 2025 was £122 billion (A$246 billion), the third-highest ever for the same period (one other was during the pandemic).

Yet orthodox routes of containing the debt have gone astray or reached their political limits. Persistent near-zero growth, a multiplier of insecurity and social drag, continues. Britain’s economy grew by 1.1 per cent in the year from July 2024, then 0.1 per cent in 2025’s third quarter. Labour’s oft-cited “number-one mission” has expired. Productivity growth is weak, and productivity in the vast public sector, a key indicator of economic health, has fallen below 1997’s (adjusted) level. Energy inflation is an extreme concern for business and millions of worried citizens, the latter also facing steep food prices. Unemployment is above 5 per cent, a four-year high, as employers cut recruitment after a steep hike in their national-insurance costs.

The squeeze on citizens has got tighter. Two tax rises amounting to £116 billion (A$234 billion) will push the proportion to 38 per cent of the whole UK economy, a peak last reached in the early 1980s. Just one of the copious twists in a serpentine tax system, which makes the Schleswig-Holstein problem look a doddle, is that many families are deterred from earning more by the prospect of an extra tax hit or loss of childcare or other benefits.

“This tax trap is killing aspiration,” writes the Times’s Alice Thomson. “Now nearly 50 per cent of the young feel that working hard and playing by the rules no longer determines success in the UK. They believe if you try too hard, you’ll be penalised. A third are considering emigrating.” Graduates paying off their debt struggle on average salaries that will never earn a property, look at minimum-wage pals now earning 66 per cent of theirs, and ponder. The funk, in some variant, is everywhere.

Again, wealth creation via growth, along with well-crafted investment, “should” be a solvent for the above. The Conservatives mislaid the recipe. Labour’s statist government, lacking pro-business nous or instincts, barely shows interest, declarative pledges apart. Disdain for its outgroups (such as small businesses, farmers, public schools, the super-rich) — snobbery dressed up in “workerist” language is the norm — creates its own hostile environment.

(Britain’s class carousel makes Labour now the posh party, with a clear survey lead among the privately educated. The top-earning 1 per cent, some now (re)-emigrating, may be hard to like, but contribute 30 per cent of income tax proceeds. Call it a skewed system, but the UK also pays its ever-rising bills via such creditors, domestic and overseas.)

There is no plan either for welfare dependency, what journalist Juliet Samuel calls “the disastrously wasteful and demoralising phenomenon of a welfare system paying more and more people not to work.” The “universal credit” benefit, launched under the Conservatives, went to half a million individuals in 2018; today, more than five million receive it, with no obligation to work. A million young adults are not working, studying, or training. Every working day, 5000 people are being registered for long-term sickness benefits, the rate having doubled under Labour.

Almost ten million working-age people, that’s a fifth of the working-age population, are (finds a new review) now classified as disabled. A single category of the latter — two million in 2019, the outlay £11 billion (A$22 billion) — is projected to reach four million in 2030, the costs tripling to £34 billion (A$68.6 billion). All the above capable of working need support, skills, the right incentives; which in turn would require a larger change in public policy and even public morality. Neither of these is in sight.

It’s not all the fault of authorities, Conservative or Labour. Longer-term factors are also involved. Brexit may get in the neck, but the big clangers preceded it, which is why it happened. The European Union is no model, if it ever was. France’s debt-to-GDP ratio is higher and its problems at least as big, which consoles some. Yet the UK’s accumulated flaws make for acute vulnerability to external security foes (often now also internal), and ultra-dependence on “the kindness of strangers,” namely the bond markets. Among advanced economies, the UK’s bond-yield — the interest rate needed to make government bonds attractive — ranks very high: “an extremely uncomfortable position,” says the Financial Times sage Martin Wolf. The daily reel of governments and bond vigilantes is heady. But when, mid-whirl, the music stops?

On yer bike! Oh, it’s stolen

Britain’s penchant for large-scale scandal also incurs huge costs. Legal fees, restitution payments, interminable inquiries, severance packages, new legislation to preclude a repeat: all because, in the first place, the system didn’t work as it should. Linking many is that these costs are inflicted by often ostensibly enlightened institutions taking extreme lengths to protect themselves against their external, and in the end wholly justified, critics. Not exactly new, this feature encapsulates the UK’s recent decades.

The country’s most “revered” bodies yield some of the most damaging scandals. Go figure. (My guess: sentimentality plus unaccountability breeds entitlement.) The BBC has on its ledger Jimmy Savile, Huw Edwards, Martin Bashir’s Princess Diana interview, paedophilia smears against a peer and pop star, and many more; the NHS has organ retention, contaminated blood, a GP mass-murderer, a nurse baby-murderer, and countless others. Hannah Barnes’s New Statesman investigation (with Channel 4 News) into maternity care at Oxford University NHS Hospitals Foundation is one more catalogue of, it appears, rooted negligence where babies die and mothers are left to grieve for a lifetime. It also reveals a superior, cold-hearted executive style that chills the bone.

What’s new? In one sense, not much. A grim modern litany extends from Aberfan and Ronan Point in the 1960s to Grenfell Tower and Horizon/Post Office accounting in the 2010s. For bestiality, corruption, and longevity, grooming gangs from the early 2000s stands out. (A far too anodyne term for rape-and-sexual-torture gangs, or the professional term “group-based child sexual exploitation”.) The litany’s more recent cases echo the older while better concealing their own roots: a pick from secrecy, corporate malfeasance, tech trickery, indifference, cruelty and a particular kind of official disdain for those on the outside. So police and social workers (to name only those) could choose to ignore the in-plain-sight, years-long evidence of thousands of defenceless under-age girls being subject to grotesque, organised violation in English towns. Such fiascos are measured in enormous human pain, annihilation of trust, and generational damage.

The most extortionate scandals arise from joint state-business projects. A high-speed rail (HS2) plan to connect London and the north-west — from stunt by Labour’s Gordon Brown in 2009 to endless cash-drain under the Tories, since much reduced in ambition — will have cost above £100 billion (A$202 billion) by 2036. (Tip: in Britain, it’s safe each time to toss in another decade or two, with matching billions.)

A nuclear-power station at Hinkley Point C in southwest England, under joint UK-French auspices, was announced in 2008 by the then prime minister and Nicolas Sarkozy. It became part of David Cameron–George Osborne’s early 2010s fantasy of a “golden decade” partnership with China. (CGN, a Chinese company, owns a 24.4 per cent stake, down from 33.5 per cent.) Construction, begun in 2017, has been at a sloth’s pace: setbacks, delays and expenses at a cheetah’s. The cost estimate in 2015 was £18 billion (A$37.8 billion) until 2025 completion; it is now £48 billion (A$96.8 billion) by 2030–31 (for the initial phase, i.e. the first of two reactors.) Even to reach this point has entailed a host of public consultations, judicial reviews, and environmental studies — one of which is leading £700 million (A$1412 million) to be spent on protecting extremely low numbers of not-at-all endangered fish and seabirds. (That inaugural PM was… Gordon Brown. For its melancholy part, Britain “never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.”)

The state’s colossal prodigality and tendency to vice, in the context of economic stagnation, become a tool of social fissure. Its wilful transfer of border security in coastal England’s southeast to transnational criminal gangs ravages social trust, jeopardises civic safety and kindles extremism on each flank. (Please remember: the far right and the far left are always allies.) Unlawful migration in small boats, from 2018–24, numbers perhaps 130,000. Incomers are largely young men, 70 per cent said to be from Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Albania, Syria and Eritrea; more recently, Sudan and Bangladesh have joined the list. (Amid constant, contested input from media, NGOs, lawyers and partisan groups, much about this business is unknown, reliable information is scarce, and little can be taken for granted.)

Boat numbers have risen since Labour arrived, contrary to Starmer’s many fulminating promises: 43,000 from mid 2024–25, an annual increase of 38 per cent. Perhaps 15,000 came via lorries or other means. Almost all, it seems, had travelled through several EU countries; some, according to verified documents, even lived for years in Germany or Sweden. Asylum claims as a whole that year amounted to 111,000, the highest figure since 2001. More than 400,000 people have claimed asylum since 2021.

Asylumees (if the term is allowed) are initially housed in poorer areas whose local people are already hard-pressed. A good number go straight to work, often prearranged, in the underground economy, as for instance delivery bikers; others join or are forced into gangs, or enslaved. Their periodic crimes, especially sexual, are avidly reported in the right-wing media and underplayed or finessed in the left’s. An informal social contract has been torn up. As a recipe for social unrest and division, unlawful migration is hard to beat. Shabana Mahmood, Labour’s new home secretary — a flinty spark on Labour’s notional right, and feasible leadership contender — has taken on the job with sure intentions that make back-benchers growl.

Those locals’ towns, and cities, across Britain share an immediate consequence of stagnation: their main streets’ decay as familiar small businesses close and fake shops (vape or candy stores, or “Turkish barbers”) arrive. Some are exposed — if police can be bothered to investigate — as fronts for laundering drug money, a sign of the widening reach of (mainly London’s) patchwork of criminal gangs. In London itself, phone-snatching is the street crime du jour, with high-end mugging (luxury watches or jewellery) and upmarket bike-theft also a trend. Many retailers, quality and corner-shop, have given up defying shoplifters: too dicey, and the police (re burglaries too) routinely do nothing.

Terrorist attacks are rare thanks only to the security services’ intelligence and craft: most plots go unreported. MPs were murdered in 2016 and 2019 by far-right extremists (neo-Nazi, then Islamist). Acute danger —related to Russia-led sabotage, Iranian proxies, and lone-wolf attacks, anti-Muslim zealots targeting mosques, Jews intimidated everywhere, all synagogues’ need for tight security, Hong Kong exiles harassed by Beijing’s thugs — form the outer layer of a stressed civic realm. England’s vintage tolerance and trust, that realm’s supreme guarantee, are in question. People are on their own, with no sense the government is on their side. Mahmood may just have the mettle to redress that, in the unlikely event she’s allowed.

In military terms, the British army’s 74,000 full-timers, half of all armed-services personnel, represent a 50 per cent decrease from two decades ago. It struggles for recruits, notably from the UK’s ethnic minorities. Half of young adults consider Britain a racist country and 41 per cent would never fight for it; 11 per cent would, so that’s a start. Lucky the international situation is so calm! (And that for space — and mental health — reasons, this piece omits reference to UK foreign policy.)

Economic stagnation, public scandal and social fissure compose terrible failures of state. Both main parties are culpable. (Labour’s local government record in big cities such as Birmingham is but one case.) If the above examples count as egregious, they are far from alone.

“A stench of death”

Labour’s sweeping victory in mid-2024 was also an anti-climax. The electorate’s savvy use of the first-past-the-post system handed Labour a majority of 172 in the 650-seat House of Commons on 33.7 per cent of the vote. A telling 41.3 per cent of voters abstained. To mass relief, the Conservatives were out — after fourteen years, five prime ministers and umpteen failures. Yet expectations were low. Sir Keir Starmer, a career lawyer of stock views and a prim manner, was not popular (minus 18 approval in YouGov’s tracker on election eve), while Labour’s bland manifesto had offered detail-light “change.”

There was no honeymoon. The public mood quickly turned sour amid lavish wage deals, abortive welfare cuts, price increases, small-business fetters, miniscule growth rates (at best), and Rachel Reeves’s £40 billion (A$84 billion) tax rises in her first budget as chancellor. Starmer and Reeves’s monotonous blame-hunting was no help in lifting it. Number 10 Downing Street’s backroom tiffs and leaking feuds soon buzzed into life. Labour’s wealthy grandees awarding cabinet members high-end trips, designer clothes, sports tickets and concert freebies met with real anger.

More obloquy came with resignations, often involving property: of an anti-corruption minister, niece of Bangladesh’s ousted PM; a homelessness minister who had evicted her own tenants then raised the rent; Angela Rayner, the combative deputy PM, for non-payment of £40,000 (A84,000) owed in tax over a house purchase. That Starmer and Rayner had been zealous prosecutors of every Tory misdeed invited the most bittersweet of taunts: hypocrisy.

Starmer’s approval rating fell to minus 51 in November 2025, the lowest for a PM since 1977. Labour, having lost support to Greens on the left, LibDems in the centre, and Reform on the right, dropped below 20 per cent. No one was surprised. Again, it was not that hope had been high. Rather, engaged voters had sought hope; a cathartic thrashing for the Conservatives; and change tout court; any of which had to be, it was assumed, for the better. For its part Labour, indulging each wish, wanted solely to glide into office. When it did, and people saw that instead of a plan Starmer had only fusty banalities to offer, they tuned out for good.

Reeves, the PM’s accessory, faded alongside. (In a November pre-budget poll, a record 71 per cent were dissatisfied with her record.) Before the election her grip of the economics brief, reinforced by Starmer’s own lack, had raised her almost to co-equal status. The ambitious Rayner’s exit did the chancellor no harm. But Reeves’s own capital was depleting: at first from scrutiny of her CV, her book on women economists, and even her chess expertise, and later with news that she had leased her south London property without the required licence. In between she had appeared utterly distraught in a packed Commons as Starmer declaimed — including yet more footblah — without glance or gesture toward her. A confounding scene.

Then, Reeves’s plans for her second budget on 26 November turned into an unwitting daily farce, with the bond markets playing the jittery straight man. An antic double reversal over an income-tax rise — first you see it, then you don’t — riled colleagues to leak-venting fury. Starmer himself got in on the act by provoking a leadership wobble via leaks against up-and-coming rival Wes Streeting.

MPs despaired. The New Statesman’s political editor Ailbhe Rea reported cabinet members’ “contempt” for their PM. And the Economist’s Bagehot columnist let rip: “[A] viper’s Downing Street, a fed-up cabinet, feral and panicking MPs, polls pointing to oblivion… [Starmer] has no personal charisma to charm his way through… [and] neither friends nor followers in the party… [T]he top of government is a circus… [I]n sixteen months] Sir Keir’s government has managed to accumulate a stench of death.”

In the event, the chancellor’s welfare splurge (coming soon) and scattershot hike in taxes (years away) delighted Labour MPs and calmed bond markets. (By many accounts, voters were unmoved or derisive.) Job done, for a day at most. By the weekend, Reeves was spending a TV round denying a serious charge of overplaying the gloom of pre-budget forecasts to enhance the meagre offering to come. Starmer, riding to her rescue on December’s dawn, is in on the paper-trail that now overshadows them both.

It’s all in vain. Months before the comically grim pre-budget spectacle, prime minister and chancellor had lost voters’ trust. It will never be regained. So while posterity will debate the sequencing to come, the politics of this moment are long clear: Starmer and Reeves are already finished. True, the mechanics of their departure, requiring a Labour revolt — more likely a behind-the-scenes cabinet one — and member-led election, look knotty. Labour scribes stress the party’s discomfort with coups, unlike the ruthless Tories. And there is no recourse to patriotism: Starmer’s borrowed “country first, party second” slogan is a vague memory, if that. Grilled by Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch in parliament on 19 November, he faced his own MPs while bellowing: “This will be a Labour budget with Labour values.” QED.

What makes Labour’s ordeal tougher to process or resolve is its self-portrayal as the “adults” who would turn Tory chaos into stability, disrepute into propriety. (The favourite of Starmer’s patronising jibes at Badenoch, whose budget reply to Reeves was both fiery and witty, is “unserious.”) Trevor Phillips, a sound, Labour-friendly broadcaster, is persuaded there was no plan: “They simply convinced themselves that they would succeed because they were better people — harder-working, more virtuous, more organised, more moral — than their predecessors.”

The upshot is another protracted Westminster melodrama. And, yes, the intra-term ejection of dire leaders (such as three of those five Tory PMs) can be regarded as essential: a fusion of constitutional duty and popular justice. Claims even follow that “the system is working.” The funk intuits the opposite: in these all-consuming spasms, which suck yet more energy and attention from Britain’s many intractable problems, it sees less drama than desolating waste.

A medley of muddle

Labour’s serious trouble as the governing party also maintains Britain’s tenor since the Brexit referendum of 2016 and its long aftermath. Two upheavals supervened: Covid-19 and (Britain’s version of) Black Lives Matter. The concatenation forced an already dizzy governing order towards agitation in ways that fed into politics. Society’s pivotal gulf began to erode a century-old party model; not just coalitions, but those of interchangeable causes, began to emerge. Not least, the system’s insiders became more detached and status-aware. A mix of such elements, contingency very much included, helped make things happen as they did. Here (again) is one take.

Years-long bitter wrangling, political and constitutional, followed voters’ choice (by 52–48 per cent) to leave the European Union. Sects filled a leadership vacuum, judges a political one, motormouth partisans the airwaves, flags and loudhailers the streets, social media the screens. It took an unimagined synchronism — the Conservatives’ decisive electoral win in December 2019, breaking the Brexit logjam, and the Covid-19 pandemic, choking public life — to release the main conflict, but then only into a tumbling cascade of fresh rancour. A natural end, far less resolution, never came. By the time Boris Johnson’s misrule became scandal in 2022, public contempt for him, but also widespread disgust with politics as a whole, had solidified.

In respect of these outcomes, there is — thus far — a straight line from Boris Johnson to Sir Keir Starmer. Continuous too is today’s schism between principal tribes: each capacious yet defined, with traits both felt and ascribed, ever replenished by fresh incidents, issues or disputes via rupturing social media. Almost a decade on, “Remain vs Leave” is now just one item in “Britain versus Itself.” As if the jaunty satire of the Pythons’ “Looking for an argument…?” sketch, more than fifty years old, was rather provident social commentary.

Equally, the last decade’s turbulent stability isn’t solely the work of venal politicians. The centralist fragmentation of the UK state, begun during Tony Blair’s decade (1997–2007), has propagated. One strand is the creation or promotion plus dense funding of a host of institutions: from environmental, legal, higher education, scientific and sporting bodies to cultural organisations, charities, NGOs, religious foundations and voluntary groups.

Most of the latter, in the century’s opening decade, would have been regarded as belonging to “civil society,” or parts of an autonomous “third sector” alongside state and business. Since then, just as current social, generational and political trends now run through their bloodstream, so patronage does their moneystream. In turn, the UK state’s diversified reach has accommodated them as a quasi-public sector, effective cohabitants of a broader official order. And as the state has mutated in additional ways — to become more digitalised, corporate, legalistic, segmented, regulatory, opaque, and intertwined with techno-business — this sector has kept pace alongside.

The 2016 referendum, and foremost the pro-EU “Remain” campaign, hinted at emerging political effects. In elections, parties appeal to voters with shades of opinion; healthy parties are already a loose coalition. In a referendum, where coalition-building focuses on a binary choice, voters’ uniformity — not their variety — is esteemed. The coalition must bind, though this can have psychic and public side-effects. The former risks groupthink, as temptation and reality; the latter an ethos of superior wisdom, effusive agreement, complacent debate, companionable outrage.

Such was the Remain camp. Even with the entire establishment on its side, it fell short. Its constituency, from the governing class to those junior institutional branches and beyond, had embodied the outlook of the expanding state. Its top layer was highly educated, London-centric, liberal-left-to-centre-right, would-be cosmopolitan, its credo visceral anti-Brexit certitude, allied to beneficent (even patronising) attachment to a particular idea of Europe and of multiculturalism, professed faith in the British state’s behemoths, the BBC and NHS. Virulent antipathy to contrary views on these topics, especially those couched in patriotic terms, was a given. (Although a surrogate patriotism was and is often discernible.)

Remain’s cohort adapted to defeat by spurning losers’ consent. Rearguard action came via parliament, courts and streets, where (as signalled above) enormous crowds from many a British nook marched through London, flags aloft — EU flags, of course. A second referendum was mooted before the first had been enacted. The supreme court (a Blair invention, one more of those institutions) got involved. Remain’s smug shock-jocks, fired-up newspapers and why-oh-why columnists, a monomaniacal BBC (“Institutional bias? Who me?”): all succoured the stop-Brexit cause. Tories and Labour, split every way in any case, looked irrelevant. Something was going on, deeper than old, dull, party politics.

Covid-19’s irruption in early 2020 added to the brew. State spending jumped above 50 per cent of the economy. The pandemic’s eerie half-world handed authority an instant semi-free pass to suspend liberty. A kind of soft authoritarianism took hold: society’s insider–outsider gap more overt, the inducements of a mainstay greater. For the longer haul, a professedly commanding state — unequipped for the task, and ill-led — needed majority consent and allies’ support in securing it. The inchoate array of quasi-public institutions functioned as accessory in a putative national endeavour, inter alia helping keep dissent to the margins.

Five months later, Black Lives Matter protests crossed the Atlantic. A ban on public gatherings was in this instance lifted. London’s might have been the largest, but Bristol’s in southwest England was the most spectacular, as a statue of Edward Colston — seventeenth-century philanthropist, Tory, churchman, local dignitary, and (now most relevant) investor in the slave trade — was toppled into the city’s harbour at the occasion’s climax. A sudden national atmosphere of extreme fervour, kindled as much as amplified by broadcasting and social media, took hold. It acted as release both from Covid-19’s restrictions and into a new phase (even era) of identitarian preferment.

Defining the moment, a spate of institutions from London outwards — grand and modest, public and quasi-public alike — converged in a frenzy of abrogative entrenchment. The process would span nomenclature, auto-histories, board memberships, mission statements, PR messages, gallery exhibits, publishing rosters, broadcasting schedules, museum captions, campus life, library stock, the whole shebang. The delirium was propulsive: ever more partisan in its agendas, coercive in imposing them, censorious in policing them, intolerant of difference, stranger to doubt. The coup de grace: as imprimatur to the BLM upsurge, the delirium remade the moment as a power-play in anti-system dress. In short, a top-down cultural revolution. British-style, of course.

It was evident, not least from the concurrent instantaneity of events, that base-level psychic shifts were again in motion. Devotion to an exclusive version of reality, absolute self-assurance, a sense of undimmed rectitude: all familiar from the Remain movement. And naturally so, for the same institutional and sensory tide was then still also coursing through pro-EU veins. At each juncture, the impulse to self-preservation belied claims to high-minded reform and progress. And in any case, soi-disant disrupters and rebels had long stocked the ranks of comfortable society: it was uncool to be anything else. Now they were even better fortified against the lower orders.

Get in! But who…? How…? And what next?

Thus had a trio of major crises from 2016 been tinder for a vehement social divide. Brexit had released its fever, Covid-19 herded it, BLM actuated it. In successive campaigns, institutions and movements connected to the status quo drew toward the state’s ambience. Britain’s long shapeshifting class divides had played another card: insiders versus outsiders. In the process the insiders had accreted a hitherto unavailable degree of self-consciousness. And from at latest 2022, when the inane Liz Truss took forty-five days to seal her (Tory) party’s reputational ruin, their primary choice at the next election was clear: Labour.

Why Labour? Towards 2024, it was palpable: to get the Tories out. Labour’s by then fourteen years in opposition were an interminable lesson in the pitfalls of boldness. Now that victory looked assured, why take risks? Moreover, Starmer himself was the very incarnation of safety-first. So, as a cipher of his artful chief adviser Morgan McSweeney — the gist of Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund’s riveting book, Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer — the party crept to office with minimal policy baggage and (as above) no plan. Today, its leader’s motto might be: “If you seek my (own) ruin, look around.”

Since 2024, then, voting choices for the “lanyard class” (Blue Labour guide Maurice Glasman’s coinage) are more complicated. The answer now to the “why?” question is, in part, because insiders have to vote for someone. Zack Polanski’s new Green left-populism is a gamble, Ed Davey’s LibDem outfit is at best a coalition back-up, the Conservatives’ penance has long to run, Nigel Farage’s Reform Party is of the distasteful right. So, Labour it is; but Starmer?

Okay. Get in a PM who can do the job. Problem solved? Not yet! Labour’s parliamentary party leans left, its members more so. Its MPs could well choose a leader of the same mien (pro-trade union, welfare, high taxes and spending, a good dose of class war thrown in), just as the economy craves a different recipe. The bond markets wouldn’t like that one bit. Back to the drawing-board?

A wider problem is Britain’s cross-party deficit of leadership, now lasting a decade. Is David Cameron, who resigned on the morning of the Brexit vote, a pillar of statesmanship then? By what came after, a reluctant yes. Brexit, Covid-19 and BLM all unfolded while the UK was nominally governed by the Conservatives. That party, for all its wrongs, was never quite in charge; no one was. During the period, Labour was led by Jeremy Corbyn, and thus nugatory. (The party’s four leaders since 2007 — Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband, Corbyn and Starmer — have been duds.) The full extent of the debilitation will be grasped only when, or indeed if, the pattern ends.

But social changes and political trends also influence leadership and its prospects. Labour’s middle-class entryism is one: while 80 per cent of the party’s vote was working-class in the mid-1980s, and 50 per cent in 1997, from 2010 a majority were middle-class. Higher-earning people agree: 36 per cent in the ABC1 category voted Labour in 2024, and 40 per cent of those earning £70,000 (A$141,000), against 25 per cent and 22 per cent Conservative.

The figures back up the long familiar reality of a party turning more upmarket in its personnel and priorities, which also means more North London-centric, as with four of its last five leaders. Indeed, five of its last nine (Michael Foot the other) make the cut, two more being Welsh and two Scottish; the last Englishman — no women here, though the Tories have elevated four — was Harold Wilson in the 1960s–70s. In such details lie the contours of a profound mutual disaffection.

Everyone in Westminster’s parochial, compelling political arena is now imagining the circumstances of Starmer and Reeves’s eventual downfall and what may come next. How will the sequence affect the country’s grasp of its predicament? The FT’s Janan Ganesh knows. In a September piece, Ganesh — the Lionel Messi of columnists — sees anger at the government’s “predictable flop” (which he did, in fact, predict) as futile, since Labour was “merely acting according to its nature.” In its ebb lies one consolation:

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For voters to accept painful reforms, the status quo has to be tested to failure. That means both of the main political parties must disappoint in government. As long as Britain was stagnant under the Tories, voters could tell themselves that a management switch would get things moving again. If Labour fails too, that hope becomes harder to sustain. It might dawn on people that no one party is the issue so much as an unfit state, which can’t be fixed without creating losers. The triple-locked pensions, the benefits system riddled with perverse incentives, a health service that is forever having to be “saved”: when the slightest reform of these things is tabled, protests fill Whitehall. Perhaps, four years down the line, such resistance will start to look like the problem…

In other words, the failure of this government might be — if the left will lend its language to me for a moment — historically necessary.

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Ganesh sees “this theme of useful failure” as illustrating people’s readiness to “interpret the problems of the day with reference to whoever is in charge.” When the left presides, a malaise is pinned on a stifling public sector; the right, and it’s unchecked individualism. This can account for politics lagging thought: free-market ideas broke through in the US and the UK only in the 1980s, when under left-of-centre incumbents, “voters could define the sickness of the age as big government. If there is a failed Labour administration circa 2028, expect the same clarity.”

Starmer might then play the role of “the end-of-an-era figure, who gives the existing way of doing things one more diligent and sincere heave, just to remove all doubt that a new approach is needed.” But “[who] is Thatcher in this dialectic?” Not Farage, nor yet a Tory, nor the (probably leftward) next Labour leader. Instead:

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My sense is that politicians will take their cue from voters, rather than the other way around. The problem is not that governments lack the desire to reform… There just hasn’t been the public stomach for it. If and when that changes, a political entrepreneur won’t fail to capitalise. Who had Clement Attlee down as a transformational figure before 1945? The precondition for serious reform is a mood of total national exasperation, not just frustration. Labour seems all too willing to oblige.

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Ganesh’s longer view and emphasis on voters’ initiative are respite from two inert fads, each an inversion of its target: scorning “nostalgia” (a licence for presentism) and scolding the “corrosive narrative of decline that now seems to dominate our national life” (a permit for boosterism.) En passant too, his argument bypasses the catastrophism and elite-centricity that impel many a funk-driven rant. That said, my opening para stands.

A Labour government born in one vacuous promise is in more peril than it knows. Its unwinding (pace Ganesh, a steady Brexit critic) may yet precede a landmark UK anniversary: the decision of 23 June 2016. How will the British people, maybe even by then, come to think about a decade of misgovernance and turmoil? And how will they seek to move beyond? •

The post Britain versus itself appeared first on Inside Story.

Few of those attending COP30 judged it a success. Yes, securing a final agreement means the multilateral UN system has been maintained. Developing countries will see a tripling of financial assistance to help adapt to climate change. There is a new (though incoherent) global goal on adaptation, a new “just transition” mechanism and — despite the best efforts of Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the Vatican — a gender action plan.

But COP30’s main task lay elsewhere. It needed to acknowledge that the world is significantly off track to achieving the Paris agreement goal of keeping global warming to 1.5–2C above preindustrial levels — and do something in response.

In this, it failed. A majority of countries wanted the COP to agree on new analytical and discussion processes (so-called “roadmaps”) to help countries transition away from fossil fuels and end deforestation. But this was blocked by a coalition of the Gulf states, Russia, China and India.

Expressing the anger felt by many delegates from both developed and developing countries, Juan Carlos Monterrey, Panama’s special representative for climate change, addressed his closing remarks to the world’s young people. “The negotiators that your governments sent to COP30 are not defending your future. They are defending the very industries that created this crisis: the fossil fuel industry and the forces driving global deforestation… A ‘forest COP’ with no commitment on forests is a very bad joke. A climate decision that cannot even say ‘fossil fuels’ is not neutrality. It is complicity.”

This is not just about a single conference. The outcome of COP30 leaves the UN climate regime with a double problem.

On the one hand, future COPs already had little to negotiate about. Since the Paris agreement was signed in 2015, successive COPs have completed the Paris Rulebook on how to implement it, and they have now concluded the tasks Paris bequeathed. A New Collective Quantified Goal defines how much money needs to flow from the rich world to support developing countries tackle climate change up to 2035; a Loss and Damage Fund will assist them recover from climate disasters; and now there is a Global Goal on Adaptation.

Given how hard Australia and Turkey fought to to be responsible for COP31 — in the end Australia was put in charge of the negotiations, while Turkey will host the event in the Mediterranean resort of Antalya — the actual agenda next year will be ironically thin. Not until COP33 in 2028 will anything really important be up for negotiation: that will be the next five-yearly “Global Stocktake,” when the Paris agreement requires the world to assess progress against its global goals and define new ones.

But that prospect merely highlights the second problem. On the issue that matters most — whether or not emissions can be slowed to a trajectory sufficient to limit warming to 2C before returning to 1.5C — the world is now irrevocably split.

What happened at COP30 was not surprising. Two years ago, when the last Global Stocktake concluded in an agreement that the world should be “transitioning away from fossil fuels… so as to achieve net zero by 2050,” Saudi Arabia and Russia were furious. The phrase threatened their economic and political interests, they believed, and should not be repeated.

Having stopped both the G20 and COP29 from using it last year, they were implacable in Belém. Marshalling the other Gulf States and the rest of the Arab Group alongside their allies in the BRICS alliance, China and India — and by pressuring a number of poorer African and Asian nations — they were able to build a bloc easily large enough to prevent the consensus, or even compromise, required by the UN system.

At their back sat Donald Trump. The United States did not attend in Belém, but the president’s extremely friendly meeting in Washington with the Saudi leader Mohammed Bin Salman during the second week of the COP will surely have aligned their climate strategies. The extraordinary bullying by the US of delegates to the International Maritime Organisation meeting in October, which stopped the IMO adopting an emissions reduction plan for global shipping, had already revealed the Trump administration’s ruthless determination to sustain the market for fossil fuels.

In this sense COP30 witnessed the emergence of what we can call an Axis of Obstruction: a small but powerful set of oil and gas producers and their major customers determined to resist further global emissions reduction commitments. Russia, the US, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Iran are the key producers: India and China their customers.

On the face of it, China’s position is puzzling. As the world’s largest producer of wind and solar equipment, electric vehicles and critical minerals, it has a huge economic interest in the rest of the world’s decarbonisation. But it is also Russia’s major backer in the Ukraine war, and it sees its strategic interests best served by the Trump-inspired division of the Western alliance. In Belém many observers felt that, had there been a consensus for the fossil fuel roadmap, China would have gone along with it. But the priority was its wider geopolitical goals.

Having won this significant victory in Brazil, it is very difficult to see the Axis of Obstruction — or at least, its core oil and gas producing members — compromising at future COPs. Which means that, however often the Europeans, Latin Americans and small island states demand an explicit commitment to transitioning away from fossil fuels, they will not get it. The Belém stalemate will continue.

The question is, does this matter? There’s a strong case for saying it doesn’t.

The Paris agreement creates a very clear division of labour. The UN system sets the global goals and rules of climate action, by consensus. But it is up to individual countries to decide what they will do to meet them. The actual mechanisms of emissions reduction and adaptation are national climate plans and policies, and subsequent business investment in solutions.

In other words, climate policy and investment — the implementation of the Paris agreement — doesn’t need a global consensus. If the majority of countries want to develop roadmaps away from fossil fuels and deforestation, they can do so. Such roadmaps will not have the legitimacy of the UN regime, but as guides to national and business implementation they won’t need it.

That is why Brazil’s announcement at the end of COP30 that it would assemble a “coalition of the willing” to develop a roadmap process for the fossil fuel transition — and a parallel one for deforestation — is so significant. For if the world is to transition away from fossil fuels, it is not the producers who will lead the charge. It is all those countries that consume fossil fuels and must find ways of consuming less. Fossil fuel supply will decline when demand falls.

This is not a straightforward prospect. As the International Energy Agency’s latest World Energy Outlook reveals, neither the economics nor politics of reducing fossil fuel demand to net zero by around 2050 will be easy. Net-zero electricity is within reach: the declining costs of wind, solar and batteries, supplemented by hydro, geothermal and nuclear make this entirely feasible. The same is true of electric vehicles. But it is not true, yet, in heating and cooling, aviation, shipping or heavy industry. And the fears of workers, communities and nations dependent on fossil fuel production are entirely understandable: a “just transition” for them needs to provide replacement jobs and foreign exchange, not just words.

So the idea of a “roadmap” process, involving technical and economic analysis accompanied by real-world political discussion, is a good one, and it doesn’t need unanimity to happen. Countries cannot go it alone on such a project — innovation needs the incentive of global markets — but if a sufficient “coalition of the willing” wishes to push ahead, the axis of obstruction won’t be able to stop them. Colombia has already offered to host an initial conference for the fossil fuel roadmap in April next year.

Indeed, those lamenting the results of COP30 face an uncomfortable truth. If the fossil fuel producers had been forced to accept the language of “transitioning away from fossil fuels,” they would still not have cut fossil fuel production. Nothing in the words agreed at the UN about global goals can force individual countries to do anything. That is the Paris agreement.

This is not to say the UN regime is redundant. The global goals matter. The five-year cycle of setting and reviewing national climate plans ensures a constant ratchet of global progress. Countries must be transparent about what they are doing. And the responsibility of developed countries to provide financial assistance to developing ones is crucial both in reality and symbolically. But decision-making COPs really aren’t needed in years that don’t end in 0 and 5 (to set plans) and 3 and 8 (to take stock).

Some reformers have suggested the other COPs be abolished, or at least made more low-key affairs in the UN climate headquarters of Bonn. With the locations of COP32 (Ethiopia) and COP33 (India) already decided, that isn’t going to happen.

But the focus of COPs could shift from rulemaking to implementation. Brazil tried to encourage this at COP30: alongside the formal talks it convened more than 350 side events and accompanying announcements on the implementation of climate plans. Organised under the auspices of the ten-year-old “Climate Action Agenda,” the program brought together 482 separate initiatives in the fields of energy, industry and transport; forests, oceans and biodiversity; agriculture and food systems; resilient cities, infrastructure and water; human and social development; and finance, technology and capacity-building.

These initiatives have almost all been organised by coalitions involving some combination of the private sector, national governments, states and cities, international organisations and civil society groups. Nearly 200 formally reported their results through a UNFCCC portal this year, and more than 100 submitted their future plans to accelerate solutions.

But in Belém, as at previous COPs, the “action agenda” felt as if it happened off stage. The main show remained the negotiations. It is this dynamic that needs to change if the Paris agreement process is to shift from rulemaking to implementation. As the negotiating agenda diminishes, the question is whether the Australian–Turkish COP31 can give equal billing to the action agenda.

Could COP31 organise, not just individual side events, but a parallel conference to discuss the possibilities and pitfalls of climate action in the real world? This would offer more — and more interesting — stories for the media to cover. If such a conference were to report into the official COP, with a formal session at which ministers could respond, this could even unify the two sides of the overall event.

The negotiators are likely to resist such a shift. Implementation is not what they do, or in many cases what they know about. And they have already, at COP30, resisted one attempt to bring implementation into the talks.

The fossil fuel and deforestation roadmaps discussed in Belém were not the first suggestions of their kind. COP29 agreed that a roadmap should be produced to show how the world could get US$1.3 trillion of climate finance flowing to developing countries by 2035. That figure had been agreed as the world’s aspirational goal but no one knew how to achieve it. So the COP asked its current and next presidencies, Azerbaijan and Brazil, to produce a “Baku to Belém Roadmap to $1.3 trillion” in time for COP30.

That roadmap was published just before the conference opened. It identifies, over the course of ninety analytic pages, all the different sources of public and private finance that might be mobilised to get to the US$1.3 trillion goal, and sets out a number of short-term actions that could be taken by groups of countries and international institutions to scale up the relevant flows. But it was not discussed at COP30, and was merely “noted” in the final text.

It was the developing country negotiators who primarily objected to the document. As it had not been negotiated, they complained, it had no status under the COP. The process by which it had been written had not been transparent. It discussed sources of finance, policies and institutions that lay outside the competence of the UNFCCC.

Yes, said the Azerbaijani and Brazilian officials, it did. This is because most of the money making up the $1.3 trillion — if such a figure can ever be reached — belongs to private sector firms and public institutions that aren’t members of the UN. If the UNFCCC wants the money to flow, it will have to engage with them, and this is what the Baku to Belém Roadmap proposed.

This is where climate action in the real world — the world beyond the talks — will actually happen. But it is not yet where national climate negotiators are comfortable.

This then is the international climate policy vista revealed in Brazil. Until the next Global Stocktake in 2028 — and probably even then — the UN system won’t make progress on the goal of “transitioning away from fossil fuels.” The Axis of Obstruction countries will do their best to block faster decarbonisation efforts, both within the UN and beyond it. Meanwhile coalitions of willing countries, subnational governments, international institutions, businesses, investors and civil society will continue to accelerate the processes of climate action and implementation.

For Australia’s presidency next year the question will be whether these coalitions and actors can be given equal status with the negotiations, and even perhaps be recognised and legitimised by them. If they can, a new climate regime may come into view just at the point it is required. •

The post Regime change appeared first on Inside Story.

Accordingly, many NGOs — and the UN itself — have been hailing the result of COP30, just concluded in Belém, Brazil, as vindication that the multilateral UN process still works. The conference didn’t break down. There was an agreement.

Yes, there was. But in truth it’s hard not to see COP30 as a failure. The 2015 Paris Agreement sets out a very clear goal, accepted by all 198 parties to the UN Climate Change Convention: to limit global warming to well under 2C relative to preindustrial levels, and if possible to no more than 1.5C. But the world is not on track to meet these goals, and COP30 has done nothing about it.

In fact the conference has revealed something more serious than this. There is now a powerful and organised resistance in the international community to deeper action on climate change. It is not about the science: outside the United States, this is not in dispute. It is about what the science means for the world’s consumption of fossil fuels. COP30 saw a determined effort on the part of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and their Arab Group allies, accompanied by Russia, India and China, to block agreement on any mention of fossil fuels or the need to shift away from them.

A large majority of countries came to Belém determined that the international community should acknowledge the Paris temperature goals are in grave danger. The Agreement requires countries to publish new climate plans every five years, and this was one of those years. With almost all large economies having done so, though, a large “emissions gap” remains between expected emissions and the levels required to limit warming to 1.5 or 2C. The UN judges that the world is heading for 2.3–2.5C of warming this century. These are levels that will cause ecological and economic devastation everywhere, and extinction for low-lying island nations in the Pacific.

That the world faces more than 2C of warming isn’t proof the UN regime has failed. Before the Copenhagen COP of 2009, the projection was around 6C of warming. Before Paris in 2015, it was around 4C. So huge progress has been made: emissions growth has been drastically slowed as a result of the global rollout of renewable energy over the last fifteen years following UN agreements on national targets and plans. But the majority of countries wanted the COP to acknowledge that it was not enough, and to commit the international community to doing more.

A specific proposal came to embody this idea. In his speech opening the conference, Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva called for the COP to agree to a “roadmap on transitioning away from fossil fuels” and a comparable roadmap to halt deforestation. He was stating the scientific fact that the world must wean itself off oil, gas and coal over the next three decades if it is to meet the UN climate goals.

But Lula was also acknowledging that we don’t know how to do this yet. Many renewable technologies are still too expensive, and for fossil fuel–producing countries and regions the economic and social consequences of declining production are likely to be harsh. The same is true for countries with rainforests being cut down to provide land for growing food. Both oil and gas and agriculture are major sources of jobs and exports for countries — like Brazil — still trying to end absolute poverty and hunger.

So the proposal for a roadmap based on technical expertise, economic analysis and discussion among consumer and producer countries was attractive. By the middle weekend of the COP more than eighty countries were pushing for it to be included in the final text.

The phrase “transitioning away from fossil fuels” is totemic. Two years ago, in Dubai, COP28 concluded dramatically with this phrase agreed as the new global goal. The UN’s press release hailed it as “the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era.” But since then Saudi Arabia and Russia have ensured the phrase has never again been used in any international forum, and they refused to allow it at COP30.

Whatever compromise language the Europeans and Latin Americans tried — “a fossil fuel roadmap which did not mention either fossil fuels or a roadmap,” as one analyst put it — was greeted with the same absolute rejection. Applying pressure to a number of poorer African and Asian countries, the Saudis and Russia gathered a large enough opposition to ensure the proposal could not achieve consensus.

So there is no mention of either roadmaps or fossil fuels in COP30’s final text. The Brazilians have announced they will convene a coalition of countries to develop roadmap processes over the next year; but a voluntary initiative carries no weight in the UN process.

The final agreement does acknowledge the emissions gap, though not with any sense of alarm. And it launches two new initiatives, a Global Implementation Accelerator and a Belém Mission to 1.5, to speed up the execution of existing plans and encourage new ones. But even the most Panglossian of observers knows that these are just UN-speak for more consolatory talking shops.

The other key demand of developing countries was more money for climate adaptation. As extreme weather events increasingly batter vulnerable countries, they need more resources to help them cope. Specifically they wanted current levels of adaptation finance to be tripled by 2030. They didn’t get this, but the text does recognise the need for a tripling by 2035, and most developed countries acknowledged afterwards that they are now effectively committed to it.

Elsewhere COP30 agreed a new “global goal on adaptation,” but it has been widely rejected as incoherent after the Saudis inserted material contradicting the experts who had worked on it for two years. Ater the gavel had come down on the final plenary session on Saturday afternoon, several countries said they could not accept it. Others attacked the failure of the COP to recognise the urgency of the emissions gap and the need to transition away from fossil fuels. At one point the Brazilian chair was forced to adjourn the meeting to address their concerns in private.

In truth, there is a much deeper story than one climate conference. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Russia now collaborate closely in the “OPEC+” group of major oil producers. Their goal is to maintain oil price stability as a means to greater economic certainty; just this month they decided to pause planned increases in oil production for next year. They see action on climate change as a long-term threat to their core economic interests: if projected global demand falls, both output and price will fall too.

For their part, China and India have become Russia’s largest oil and gas purchasers since its invasion of Ukraine, with preferential price terms, both on the officially recorded market and in the “dark” trading of unregistered Russian tankers. India has recently reduced its imports in response to US sanctions, but it was little surprise to find all three countries united in Belém.

Indeed, it’s arguable that the COP was not the most important climate summit of the last few days. Even in a week that culminated in the G20 Leaders’ Summit in Johannesburg — another critical gathering of global governance boycotted by the US — the key meeting was surely Tuesday’s remarkably friendly White House encounter between Donald Trump and the Saudi prime minister Mohammed bin Salman. Alongside new US arms sales and Saudi investment in the American economy, the COP must surely have been discussed. As Saudi Arabia maintained its hard line in Belém, the two men will have found common cause.

Here we can see emerging the new contours of international climate relations. Inside the UN process Saudi Arabia and Russia collude with allies to block progress on transitioning away from fossil fuels. Outside it, the US under President Trump does all it can to obstruct and undermine the multilateral process and to bolster the expansion of fossil fuel production. Most of the rest of the world can only watch on, united in desiring a different future, but increasingly forced to seek progress in “coalitions of the willing” outside the formal UN process.

Next year’s COP will be presided over by Australia — though in a messy compromise between the two countries contending for the honour it will actually be held in Turkey. The schism in global climate politics revealed in Brazil this week will surely make Australia’s negotiating task even more difficult. But that may no longer be the point. If COP31 can prioritise implementation and investment over the search for further textual agreement it may make greater progress; and in doing so help the world navigate the new geopolitical terrain. •

The post Not so good COP appeared first on Inside Story.

Being serious about power and interests should be the simple first step of any nation, especially a superpower. A serious nation carefully calculates its power, weighs interests, judges its international course, and builds a sturdy policy to promote its wealth and future. The consistent purpose is to persuade partners and outwork potential foes. As the superpower, America has expressed its identity in the norms and principles it has built into the international system.

Donald Trump torches it all. Rather than a consistent course, he offers shock and showmanship. Great television makes for strange government. Trump crashes policy and distorts American power. His zig-zags aren’t merely a tactic, they amount to the whole strategy. Don’t bother to plot a course to a destination; it’s more fun just zooming all over the map.

Trump has revolutionised the Republican Party, transforming it into a raging cult. It hacks at the machinery of government, sacking public servants, dismantling departments and closing agencies. The chant is to smash the “deep state” but the result is a weakened and bemused government.

America’s trade policy is remade, even as US economic influence in Asia declines. The protectionist consensus is at its strongest in American politics since the Great Depression, nine decades ago. The US has given up on free trade. Washington hasn’t had anything constructive to offer the Asia-Pacific on trading relations since Trump withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership the day he became president in 2017.

Globalisation isn’t dead, but it’s fracturing. Trump distrusts the system America created. Globalisation-minus-the-US is no oxymoron; the moron tendency triumphs. US strategy and alliances are roiled by a president who can’t think long-term and believes only suckers make permanent promises to allies and friends.

Trump in hyperdrive pushes the trend towards a post-American world.

Having spent a couple of months around Washington, I depart with a repeat line from a previous dispatch: Trumpworld is even stranger close up. This elegant city has an edgy feel. It’s still a jolt to see uniformed troops patrolling the streets. The National Guard was ordered to deploy in August when Trump — in the White House’s words — “declared a crime emergency in the nation’s capital and vowed to make streets there safe again.”

At least the armoured vehicles are no longer guarding the forecourt of Union Station. The young troops are cheerful enough but growing bored with acting out the role of an army of occupation. The coup theatrics are all about politics, not policing. The Republican president sends the National Guard only to cities controlled by Democrats.

Fall is always glorious here, and the leaves are vivid. Autumn heading to winter is a description of how Washington feels: much is changing and the politics, like the weather, is turning frigid.

Not many people in Washington have cause to recall prime minister Anthony Albanese’s visit to the White House last month. That day will live in local memory as the moment Trump sent in the machines to demolish the East Wing of the White House. His attacks on the building that symbolises the presidency goes beyond metaphor to become a motif for a wrecking-ball president.

The kicking the president is inflicting on the federal government has many human faces. The public servants being assailed by the administration are people living in Washington and the commuter suburbs of Maryland and Virginia. Many good people are suffering. What Trump is doing to America’s government will take a long time to repair. And in suburbs around here, there’s an ironic taste to the slogan, “Make America Great Again.”

More than the expression of a giant ego, MAGA is a declaration of Trump’s right to dominate. This is the personality he has been selling America from the start. An example of all that has followed was a speech in early 2016, nine months before he was first elected president, when Trump proclaimed: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible.” Incredible it was, and incredible it is.

Under the old rules of American politics, the tsunami of Trump untruths should have washed him away. By the final year of his first presidency, the Washington Post factcheck said Trump had reached a grand total of 20,000 false or misleading claims.

The fibs cascade anew in the second presidency. Surveying this administration’s first nine months, the New York Times’s David Sanger concluded “the only thing predictable about Mr Trump’s handling of global affairs is that it will be an unpredictable mix of instinct, grievance and ego. And there is little evidence that his tantrums, swerves and reversals are strategic and thought-out, as his supporters sometimes insist, rather than the products of impulsivity, mood and circumstance.”

The falsehoods and fantasies are merely the president describing the great world being created by his greatness. Trump isn’t interested in policy or theory. He does “alternative facts,” a phrase that epitomises the golden sands (always glitzy gold) on which the very stable genius stands.

Trump’s game theory is from Dungeons and Dragons. He’s playing as a “chaotic neutral,” an individualist who cares little for rules or precedence and thrives in spontaneity.

The president isn’t a person; he’s a TV character. That insight is from American television critic James Poniewozik. TV was born at the same time as Trump, Poniewozik writes, and TV is his soulmate. Trump thinks like a TV camera: “If you want to understand what President Trump will do in any situation, then, it’s more helpful to ask: What would TV do? What does TV want? It wants conflict. It wants excitement. If there is something that can blow up, it should blow up. It wants a fight. It wants more. It is always eating and never full.”

A working title for this bizarre political soap opera would be The Ego has Landed. The latest Ego episode is the proposal for a two-headed coin. The US Treasury proposes to celebrate America’s 250th birthday next year with a one-dollar coin depicting Trump on both sides. On one side his face is in profile, on the other he is standing in front of the US flag, with first raised, beneath a three word slogan: “Fight. Fight. Fight.” Heads, Trump wins. Tails, Trump wins. He would be the first sitting president on a coin in 100 years.

The Trump soap opera challenges the comedians. How to mock something when the truth is so much stranger/funnier/outrageous than any parody? The singing satirist Tom Lehrer observed long ago that political satire was rendered obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. No spoof or caricature comes close to what Trump serves up daily. And, yes, he is campaigning to get the Nobel.

Plenty of giant egos have occupied the Oval Office. Why does this president pose such a threat to America’s power and its institutions?

One difference is that no previous president has had such a focus on generating cash for himself. Trump is running a for-profit presidency. The New Yorker estimates that since he returned to power in January this year the Trump family business has made $3.4 billion, including $2.3 billion from cryptocurrency.

The for-profit president works to help his fellow millionaires. Along with the $4 trillion in tax cuts signed into law in July, the administration is quietly killing regulations so it can give hundreds of billions of dollars to companies and investors. New notices from the Treasury and tax service, business reporter Jesse Drucker writes, “are giving breaks to giant private equity firms, crypto companies, foreign real estate investors and a variety of multinational corporations.” The changes gut a 2022 law introduced by the previous Biden administration aimed at corporations making more than $1 billion a year in profits.

On foreign affairs, describing Trump as isolationist doesn’t quite capture his mindset. A more accurate descriptor is “unilateralist.”

“Isolationism” is a policy label and Trump doesn’t do policy so much as ride the vibe and his latest impulse. Rather than isolated, the unilateralist president imagines America alone and on top. The rest of the world should look up and pay homage — and pay. From the dominant position, the US issues unilateral demands.

The unilateralist reaches for what he wants with force, threat, demand and bluff. If that doesn’t achieve complete victory, he’ll do a deal. The deals are all zero-sum and the sum must favour the United States. Trump still operates like a real-estate developer aiming to win the best property, then extract maximum rent.

No cognitive dissonance for Trump; he seldom has to balance competing ideas because his guide is instinct, not intellect. A Great America is made Great Again by its Great Leader. Untethered from responsibility other than to itself, America can pursue the single goal that has always been at the centre of Trump’s life: get even richer.

As critics observe, Trump seeks to rule, not govern. Everything should be in thrall to the whim of the Leader. In Trumpworld, the president has absolute authority, and can be as authoritarian as the mood dictates. The performances will be outrageous, because grand theatre is fun. As one element of his greatness, the Leader is ever unpredictable. Reward your friends. Punish your enemies. Keep score. Win.

In his second presidency, Trump has created an administration in his own image: a team deeply serious about serving the Leader, but unworried about the serious business of government. No adults in the room this time. The kids are running the show.

In “A Confederacy of Toddlers,” the Atlantic’s Tom Nichols observes: “The United States is now a nation run by public servants who behave no better than internet trolls, deflecting criticism with crassness and obscenity… the larger danger under all of this nastiness is that President Donald Trump and his courtiers are using crass deflection and gleeful immaturity as means of numbing society and wearing down its resistance to all kinds of depredations, including corruption and violence.”

Trump wants to destroy much of the government system, to do away with checks and balances that limit his power. The “No Kings” protests across America are a shrewd indictment of the president’s character and his desire to rule by fiat.

Among Trump’s followers are those who see the president as the perfect instrument to “burn down Washington,” the original subtitle of a book by the head of the Heritage Foundation about how to institutionalise Trumpism by torching institutions. The foundation created Project 2025 to write the conservative agenda for Trump’s administration “to take down the deep state and return the government to the people.”

The United States approaches a constitutional crunch. The crisis hasn’t arrived, but the storm builds. The question is stark: how much will the US bow to presidential diktat and directive?

The US has long had elements of an imperial presidency; Trump aims to get the full Imperial. He wants a completely free hand. When the president declares an “emergency,” Trump argues, he should be able to respond as he pleases. Here is a classic play from the autocrat handbook: in a crisis, the strongman should not be delayed by parliament or hampered by law.

“Emergency” powers were invoked by Trump to bypass congress and impose tariffs on nearly every US trading partner. The Supreme Court must rule on whether the tariffs are legal and the extent of Trump’s emergency powers. Can Trump declare anything a crisis then do whatever he wants? The court’s decision will have huge implications for America’s economy. And politics. And for Trump’s authoritarian personality.

The Trump persona is brazen, with a clear element of cruelty. A key attack word in the president’s vocabulary is “nasty.” Trump can deliver nasty-with-feeling. “I hate my opponents. And I don’t want the best for them,” he says.

During Trump’s first term, in “The Cruelty is the Point,” Adam Serwer argued that the president rejoiced in inflicting cruelty: “Trump’s only true skill is the con; his only fundamental belief is that the United States is the birthright of straight, white, Christian men, and his only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty. It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear.”

Trump’s disdain for those who are liberal, “woke” or weak is more than an expression of hate for his opponents. He seeks to dismiss all opposition as useless or illegitimate. Nothing must impede the right to rule.

Harsh style serves an autocratic purpose for a president who always expects to win. The point is not to create or drive policy, but to express the Trump personality, to Make Trump Even Greater.

The Trump soap opera shreds policy and principle and power. An unserious America is being run by ego, not intellect. •

The post Instinct, grievance and ego appeared first on Inside Story.

Sadly, they would be wrong. About 400 kilometres west of here the Amazon completes its nearly 7000 kilometre journey from the high Andes across northern South America by splitting into multiple smaller rivers. Belém sits close to the end of the southernmost of these, the Pará, where it meets the even smaller Rio Guamá coming in the other direction.

Never mind, the Amazon rainforest is very close, and the intrepid can take a five-day cruise upriver to the larger city of Manaus, capital of the state of Amazonas, which really is in the heart of the rainforest.

Belém, capital of Pará, was not everyone’s choice to host COP30. Not merely because it is far away (three and a half hours by plane) from Brazil’s main population centres (and airports) Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, but because, though around two and half million people live in its wider metropolitan area, it doesn’t have nearly enough hotel rooms to accommodate the 50,000+ people who nowadays attend COPs. Country delegations and business representatives have complained they could find nowhere to stay, or that prices have been hiked to unaffordable levels. In the end the authorities managed to hire some cruise ships for the official delegations and enterprising entrepreneurs converted old shipping containers into windowless pods for the NGOs. Anyone with a half-decent apartment has rented it out and left town.

The Brazilian government claims it chose Belém to draw attention to the climatic threat to the whole world posed by the Amazon’s continued (though now slowing) deforestation. Locals will tell you that the governor of Pará, Helder Barbalho, is an important Workers’ Party player and a possible successor to Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and the COP venue the result of a private political deal.

Whatever the truth (and both could be true), Belém is an appropriate host city. It is not a bad thing for the numbers at COPs to be limited — two years ago Dubai’s COP28 attracted over 100,000 attendees — and many would say that if the hotel price mechanism is the way to do it, so be it.

Belém is typical of many cities in the developing world. At its centre stands its colonial legacy: an old town of charming seventeenth-century Portuguese buildings and two beautiful churches, the Basilica of Our Lady of Nazareth of Exile and Our Lady of Grace Cathedral. It has a traditional Catholic culture, which every October is celebrated in the five-hour procession of the “Círio of Nazaré” (otherwise known as the “Christmas of the Amazon”) in which thousands of local people follow a statue of the Virgin Mary being carried through the streets. But its population is multiracial: mainly descendants of the Portuguese, enslaved Africans and indigenous forest peoples, and their many mixed offspring.

Belém (Portugese for Bethlehem) became rich as the centre of the sugar trade, a product of Brazil’s vast slave plantations. Later it shifted to the export of rubber, and now of aluminium, iron ore and timber. As its airport posters indicate, it is trying to diversify into tourism, while at the same time coping with an urban expansion that puts pressure on its transport systems, air quality and poverty levels. It is in growing cities like this all over the world that we will discover whether net zero goals are indeed compatible with equitable economic development, and whether human societies can genuinely adapt to the climate change that is now inevitable.

Before COP30 formally begins on Monday, President Lula invited the world’s leaders to a summit this week to recommit to action on climate change. Acutely aware that Donald Trump is leading the counter-movement, both to expand the production and use of fossil fuels and to undermine the multilateral UN process, Lula and the UN secretary-general Antonio Guterrres wanted to get the rest of the world to stand up against him. They didn’t quite succeed.

In all, 144 countries sent ministers to the summit, a very impressive total. (The UN climate convention has 198 members.) But only around thirty were heads of government, and perhaps another thirty deputy heads. Donald Trump stayed away, of course, but so did the leaders of China, India and Indonesia, all countries with large and still rising emissions.

Perhaps surprisingly, since Australia is bidding to host next year’s COP31, so did Anthony Albanese. Luckily for him, President Erdogan of Turkey, Australia’s rival for the privilege, was also a no-show. “Perhaps they cut a deal,” said one wag. British prime minister Sir Keir Starmer came, left after one day, and failed to bring any media with him. Facing criticism at home that Labour’s climate policies are worsening the cost-of-living crisis (and that Starmer himself spends too much time overseas), one commentator observed acidly that “they obviously didn’t want the British public to know he’d been here.”

The summit itself was a slightly underwhelming event. President Lula’s main national objective was to get other countries to support his “Tropical Forest Forever Facility,” or TFFF, a bold plan to create a US$125 billion endowment fund to support countries (such as Brazil) committing to halt deforestation. The aim is to get governments, the private sector and philanthropies to invest in the fund, which in turn will invest in high-growth stocks around the world. The profits will be shared between the fund’s investors and countries that can show they are halting deforestation.

Having put US$1bn of Brazil’s own money into the fund, Lula will have been delighted he secured support from several other donors. The TFFF was endorsed by fifty-three countries, including all the major rainforest ones, and initial contributions now total US$5.5 billion of the core $25 billion goal, including $3 billion from Norway, $1 billion from Indonesia, $500 million from France, an as-yet-unspecified commitment from Germany and smaller sums from Portugal, the Netherlands and others.

Other sessions of the summit discussed how to combine poverty and hunger reduction with environmental sustainability — this is Lula’s overriding obsession — along with the clean energy transition and overall global emissions reduction. But Brazil did not seek agreement on a summit communique and didn’t issue one at the end.

Much to other countries’ surprise, and in some cases dismay, Brazil merely published a series of statements on the issues discussed, some signed by groups of participating countries, others just by Brazil. Apart from the TFFF, the statements included a “Belém Declaration on Fighting Environmental Racism,” a “Call to Action on Integrated Fire Management and Wildfire Resilience” and a “Belém Declaration on Hunger, Poverty and Human-Centered Climate Action.” President Lula did issue a general “Call of Belém for the Climate” asking other countries to step up their efforts, but it was in his name only.

So Lula and Guterres failed to secure a clear public statement from those 144 countries that — unlike Trump — they still believe in climate science, still believe in multilateral cooperation, and still specifically believe in the Paris agreement and its temperature goals.

It isn’t clear why they didn’t seek such an agreed statement: whether they thought it was too logistically difficult to negotiate, that not everyone would sign, or simply that it wasn’t necessary. But several experienced diplomats and politicians here believe it was a missed opportunity to give the global media a very clear story: that the vast majority of the world remains committed to climate action, and that Trump is isolated. It is notable how little coverage the summit’s conclusions have had in the world’s main media outlets.

That story will now have to be provided by the COP itself. This year it has three main agenda items, two of which are not actually on the agenda at all.

First, it must deal with the global “emissions gap.” This is the difference between two emissions numbers. The first is the level of global emissions in 2035 that climate scientists say will be necessary to put the world on a path to the overall warming limits agreed in Paris: well below 2ºC compared with pre-industrial times, and ideally no more than 1.5ºC. The second is the sum total of emissions that countries project for 2035 in their new national climate plans, the so-called “Nationally Determined Contributions,” or NDCs. There is a large gap between them.

COP30 is one of the five-yearly moments when — as stipulated by the Paris agreement — all countries must submit a new NDC, stronger than the last. But not all countries have done so. By the end of October, the UN climate secretariat was forced to admit that fewer than a third, only sixty-four, had submitted new NDCs, and this was not enough to make credible projections of global emissions in the target year of 2035.

The UN Environment Programme was less shy. Its annual Emissions Gap Report projected that countries’ new plans, if fully implemented, will put the world on a projected path to 2.3–2.5°C of warming. This compares to 2.6–2.8°C based on previously announced policies: a small improvement, but not much, and inevitably reduced by the US’s current stance and policy reversals.

Does this keep alive the Paris goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C? To get onto a 1.5°C pathway, says UNEP, would require a further 55 per cent reduction in annual global emissions by 2035 compared with 2019 levels (35 per cent for a 2°C pathway). As it notes, the size of such cuts, the short time available to deliver them, and the challenging political climate, make 1.5°C almost certain to be exceeded within the next decade. But UNEP also points out that this doesn’t mean the goal should be abandoned. Global average temperatures were always likely to overshoot 1.5°C of warming, and would then need to be returned to that level by 2100 by serious (and as yet highly uncertain) investment in removing carbon from the atmosphere. This prospect, it says carefully, remains “within the realms of possibility — although doing so will be extremely challenging.”

You might have thought that the emissions gap would be the key item on the COP30 agenda — and most countries in the world would agree with you. But a powerful bloc, including China, India and Saudi Arabia, is insisting that there is no provision in the Paris agreement for a collective discussion of NDCs. They are called “Nationally Determined” for a reason. They argue (almost certainly correctly) that the system of “global goals but nationally chosen targets” was precisely the compromise that made the Paris agreement possible.

Most other countries think this is ridiculous. If a global climate conference can’t discuss the emissions gap, what is its point? So we can expect this argument to take up a lot of the opening day on Monday, when the conference agenda must be agreed before the proceedings proper get started. As the COP presidency, Brazil must remain studiedly neutral between country positions. But it will surely try to steer this issue towards the climate ministers when they arrive for the second week (the first is just officials). And they will probably succeed, since almost all the ministers will want to discuss the emissions gap and what can be done about it.

Some ideas exist already. President Lula has himself proposed that the UN should produce a “roadmap for the transition away from fossil fuels.” This is a bit of a gauntlet thrown down to Saudi Arabia and Russia, who since 2023 have blocked all international forums from using this phrase, even though it was agreed at COP28 and is officially the world’s aim. “This issue is going to make the COP quite spicy,” grinned one delegate.

Also not on the official agenda is a second report, the “Baku to Belém Roadmap to $1.3 trillion.” This is the document mandated by last year’s COP29 in Baku to get itself out of a tricky negotiating hole. The Paris agreement said the world had to agree a “New Collective Quantified Goal,” or NCQG, for climate finance: that is, the sums of money that should be provided to developing countries to help them reduce emissions and adapt to climate impacts. Last year, at COP29, the developed countries, who have the leading responsibility, said they would provide at least $300 billion annually by 2035 from public resources (including some mobilised from the private sector). But this was far less than the developing countries wanted, and that expert analysis suggested they needed. So the COP also agreed an aspirational goal of some $1.3 trillion a year in total financial flows to developing countries by 2035, without assigning anyone the responsibility to make sure it happened. Instead they asked the two COP presidencies Azerbaijan and Brazil, to produce a “Roadmap” showing how the $1.3 trillion could be raised, and to report it to COP30.

The Roadmap was published on Wednesday. It is a comprehensive examination of all the different sources of public and private money that could conceivably flow to developing countries over the next decade (a total sum, it notes, many times larger than $1.3 trillion) and the different fields in which it would need to be invested. It makes a strong case that emerging and developing countries will get stronger growth through a low-carbon and climate-resilient economic development path than by continuing to rely on fossil fuels. It sets out nearly fifty measures which, were they taken by governments and financial institutions (both public and private), would start to get serious monies flowing.

But this report, too, is not due to be discussed by the COP. Because it was inserted into the final agreed text in Baku by ministers very late in the negotiations, it was neither fully understood nor accepted by the official negotiators. As it has been produced in a highly unorthodox way by two COP presidencies, rather than negotiated by all 198 UN parties (though Brazil and Azerbaijan extensively consulted countries and others), some are saying that the most that can happen at COP will be for the report to be “noted.”

Again, though, this view seems unlikely to prevail. Ministers from developing countries are desperate to ensure that there is more money available for climate-positive development over the coming decade. They will want to discuss the Roadmap and how the measures in it can be implemented. Expect this, too, to happen in the second week.

The third key issue for the COP is on the agenda. That’s an agreement on the “Global Goal on Adaptation,” another requirement the Paris agreement put on the future negotiating table. With their uncanny ability to justify their own existence, country negotiators have been talking about what such a goal might look like for eight years, yet have still not reached a conclusion. But there is quiet confidence in Belém that Brazil will apply some gentle (or maybe not so gentle) pressure to get at least one unequivocal win out of its conference.

There’s also talk of another triumph the Brazilians might pull off: ending the conference on time, at 6pm on Friday 21 November. COPs never finish at the timetabled hour: even though they have two weeks to come to agreement, the negotiators always leave at least one issue to the very end, and then beyond. Recent COPs have continued well into the Saturday and even Sunday before dramatic last-minute resolutions. With much less on the negotiating table this year, observers are wondering whether Brazil can do the unthinkable. Not getting the world to act faster on climate change, but to stop talking about it at the scheduled time. •

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Historically, the tests were meant to do two things: ensure readiness for a third world war and signal toughness. These elements were brought together in the idea of deterrence. Tests demonstrated a capacity and willingness to prevent Armageddon by means of a balance of terror.

As a result, more than 2000 nuclear explosives were detonated, about half by the US and most of the rest by the Soviet Union, France, Britain and China. The biggest test, by the Soviet Union in 1961, was roughly fifty megatons, approximately 3000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.

The end of the cold war went a long way towards stopping the folly, notwithstanding a few reckless tests by India, Pakistan and North Korea. By the end of the 1990s it was widely accepted that testing was environmentally risky and so dangerous for international security that it should be prohibited. At least for established players, testing also seemed unnecessary given the calmer global setting, the amount of overkill in the system, the masses of test data already collected, and advances in computer modelling.

So it wasn’t surprising that the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty soon gathered more than 100 signatory countries. But it never came into legal effect.

For that, there was plenty of blame to go around, especially in Delhi, Islamabad and Pyongyang. Washington, initially supportive of the treaty, also ended up being a spoiler. In 2008, for example, it was the only member of the UN to vote against the treaty’s entry into force (168 voted in favour, and three abstained). Times had changed, with George W. Bush’s Republican administration opposing constraints on US freedom of manoeuvre by global institutions.

Since then, despite keeping its nuclear powder dry, Washington has kept its distance from the test ban treaty. Even Democratic administrations have held back, constrained by a sceptical congress and stringent conditions for treaty ratification that give a minority of senators considerable blocking power.

Today, the most dangerous drivers of nuclear strategy are persistent regional rivalries. The main concerns are: (a) Russia’s ambitions in Eastern Europe; (b) China’s territorial claims on Taiwan, the South China Sea and some Japanese islands; (c) the Korean peninsula; and (d) the India–Pakistan feud. Overlaying this is US–Russian–Chinese great power rivalry.

And, of course, we must now include the Trump factor. While liking to present as a master of political chess, Trump doesn’t have a traditional approach to statecraft or a Kissinger-type handle on world and military affairs. He often seems moved more by whim and ego. So, what are we to make of his announcement? Here are three possible explanations.

First, we must consider Trump’s tendency to bloviate. Maybe last week’s statement was essentially theatrical, empty of substance.

This overlaps with a second possible explanation. Perhaps Trump didn’t fully understand what he was saying. Some well-informed critics have been scathing about his imprecision. Hans Kristensen from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists says, “It’s hard to know what he means. As usual, he’s unclear, all over the map, and wrong.” Trump’s attempts to clarify the situation have been confusing. Even his officials seem unsure, with nuclear weapons expert Jeffrey Lewis claiming, “they are just making this up as they go along.”

Scrambling to catch up a few days later, energy secretary Chris Wright suggested Trump meant conducting a round of non-nuclear explosions, presumably to test the viability of nuclear weapons. Maybe the line between what the US weapons establishment calls “subcritical experiments” (for instance, assessing the impact of high explosives on nuclear material) and what is commonly understood as a nuclear test might have been lost on Trump in his social media moment.

There’s also a good chance Trump meant testing “delivery systems” — the bombers, submarines, and missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads — rather than testing the warheads themselves. This would fit his idea of matching Russian and Chinese modernisation programs. But the US already tests these delivery vehicles as a matter of routine. In September, for example, the US Navy test-fired four nuclear-capable (but unarmed) Trident missiles as part of a longstanding program.

A third possible explanation is that Trump is not as muddled as critics believe and is indeed set on resuming nuclear test explosions. Why would he do that? Arguments in favour of tests include enhancing warhead safety, confirming stockpile reliability and facilitating the on-going generational modernisation of America’s nuclear deterrent by better fine-tuning new warheads. Critics suggest testing would also fit well with Project 2025, the hardline conservative blueprint that calls (among many other things) for a much-expanded nuclear weapons program.

It’s difficult to assess Trump’s policies without reference to his personality. Historically, nuclear tests often had a dramatic element to them, and Trump is nothing if not performative. This is not a trivial matter. Former Trump cabinet picks including defense secretaries Jim Mattis and Mark Esper, secretary of state Rex Tillerson, chief of staff John F. Kelly and national security adviser John Bolton have presented an unflattering picture of an immature and impulsive POTUS. Some of Trump’s public statements and numerous social media posts appear to confirm the judgement.

Understanding the man and his policies requires a psychologist as much as it does a strategic analyst. Here is a world leader who has worried about perceptions of his hand size and has boasted about the bigness of his nuclear button. Adding to the psychodrama is the tagging of Trump with the TACO meme (“Trump always chickens out”). Although it originated with his erratic tariff policy, the meme perhaps plays on his mind in other areas. Countering the TACO jibe might help explain the US attack on Iran, for instance. God forbid if it also edges Trump towards a nuclear test.

The whole testing business might simply fizzle out, of course — and there are good reasons for it to do so. Most experts believe the political and strategic costs of new American tests would outweigh the marginal technical gains. (Indeed, China might benefit significantly more from a collapse of the de facto ban because it possesses less historical test data and is expanding its arsenal more than any other country.)

Another reason for Washington to back off is that a new round of tests would worsen global and regional arms-racing. Moscow has already signalled a readiness to counter-test — to take “appropriate retaliatory steps,” in Vladimir Putin’s words this week — and the knock-on effects could easily spread to China, then India, then Pakistan.

US testing could also increase pressure on the nuclear weapons non-proliferation regime. Turbulent American leadership and Trump’s ambivalence, sometimes even hostility, towards allies provides a worrying context. If current concerns about the robustness of alliances are compounded by US nuclear test explosions reciprocated by Russia and China, it could spur vulnerable countries to acquire independent deterrents. The most often mentioned candidates here are Taiwan, Japan and South Korea, but perhaps others, such as Poland, might join the list.

It’s also easy to imagine tests intensifying global anti-Trump antagonism and perhaps anti-Americanism. The prospect must give the US state department nightmares. Old-timers will recall when NATO nuclear modernisation in the early 1980s boosted the anti-Reagan peace movement and threatened the political foundations of the Western alliance.

Trump’s loose wording, frequently cavalier attitude and tendency to bluster make it tempting to discount his declarations as background noise. With his pronouncements giving plenty of wriggle-room, only time will tell if his reflections on nuclear tests amount to anything.

The question now is whether anyone in Trump’s circle has the authority to impress on him that a resumption of nuclear explosive tests would likely spark a train of unintended consequences contrary to US national interests and global order. •

The post Testing times appeared first on Inside Story.

Trump’s tour took in the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Busan, where South Korea’s president Lee Jae Myung reaffirmed a promise to invest US$350 billion in the United States over the next decade, including in American shipyards, and capped it with a gift of a gold crown, a simulacrum of one worn by an eighth-century Korean monarch.

On his way to Busan, Trump stopped off in Tokyo, where new Japanese prime minister Sanae Takaichi stood by her predecessor’s pledge of US$550 billion investment and added a favourite golf club of her political mentor, the late Shinzo Abe, and a promise of cherry trees and fireworks for next year’s 250th anniversary of US independence. After announcing a planned lift in Japan’s defence spending to 2 per cent of GDP, she even jived with him to “YMCA” aboard a US Navy aircraft carrier.

At the ASEAN summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s Anwar Ibrahim let the American president take the credit for the halt in border clashes between Cambodia and Thailand  that Anwar himself had largely worked out. So, too, came promises to buy American liquified natural gas, missiles and civilian airliners.

Along with their friendly encounters with Trump, these leaders were rewarded with tariff cuts here and there. Anthony Albanese, meanwhile, capped his Washington visit of a week earlier with a seat next to Trump at a dinner put on by South Korea’s Lee.

Yet there was one meeting where the power dynamics were reversed. There, it started to look like Trump might do what the Australian strategist Hugh White and others have long predicted: give up efforts to maintain paramountcy in the Western Pacific and instead share power with China.

At a ninety-minute meeting with China’s Xi Jinping in Busan it was Trump who appeared the supplicant, heaping praise on the Chinese leader. Xi is “distinguished and respected,” the American president declared; indeed, he is a “great leader of a great country.”

Across the table, Xi showed what US scholar Orville Schell calls the “Mona Lisa–like hint of a smile permanently etched on his face” and duly accepted Trump’s respect. “Given our different national conditions, we do not always see eye to eye with each other, and it is normal for two leading economies of the world to have friction now and then,” said Xi. But the two leaders should “stay the right course and ensure the steady sailing forward of the giant ship of China–US relations… China and the United States should be partners and friends. This is what history has taught us and what reality demands.”

The main tangible outcome of the meeting for Trump was China’s agreement to halt for a year the restrictive conditions it had placed on shipments of seventeen rare-earth elements, including specialised magnets, vital for many kinds of electric vehicles, military aircraft and missiles, mobile phones and medical diagnostic machines. China has near-total control of world trade in these refined materials, and Xi’s use of this high-tech stranglehold has virtually halted Trump’s trade and investment war against China. Shipments of US soybeans, food for China’s pigs, would also resume.

Trump left the APEC meeting early, allowing the enigmatic Xi to project himself and China as a more predictable partner, economically at least. Many diplomatic analysts gave Xi a net win over Trump in courting the Asians.

Asian leaders had come to the summit dreading public humiliations at the hands of an unstable Trump. They were spared that. But after leaving the region, Trump delivered a message that has caused consternation among “China hawks” in American and allied strategic circles, most probably including those in Canberra.

In a social media post, Trump called his “G2 meeting with President Xi of China” a great step for both countries. “This meeting will lead to everlasting peace and success. God bless both China and the USA!” His defence secretary Pete Hegseth also referred to the “G2” in an X post after speaking with Chinese defense minister Dong Jun. Hegseth vowed to “deconflict and de-escalate any problems that arise” between the two militaries.

Hong Kong academic Wang Xiangwei, a former editor of the South China Morning Post, was among those struck by the terminology. “It is this collaborative tease that elevates Busan beyond a photo-op,” he wrote, “hinting at the resurrection of the G2 concept — a bipolar stewardship of global affairs by the world’s two economic titans.”

A G2, or Group of Two, was first postulated by the American economist Fred Bergsten in 2005. He argued that the two major economies — China was already set on a high-growth path — needed to keep talking to work out a modus vivendi.

Some observers have interpreted Bergsten’s argument as a call for China and America to jointly rule the world, with the US dropping the goal of pre-eminence in Asia. “It has come to imply a power equilibrium between the two nations — something that Beijing has long coveted as it ascended from regional powerhouse to pivotal global player,” Didi Tang, a China specialist with the Associated Press, wrote this week. As the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Neil Thomas told her: “The G2 concept implies that China and the United States are peers on the global stage and their positions should be given equal weight.”

Trump’s use of “G2” has stirred unease in Washington and across Asia, wrote Ken Moriyasu this week in Japan’s Nikkei Asia. “Critics from previous administrations argue that the phrase signals a bilateral power arrangement that could alienate America’s allies, especially in China’s neighbourhood.” Mira Rapp-Hooper, Asia adviser to former president Joe Biden, agrees: “It is a term that plays very poorly in countries like Japan, Australia and India,” she told AP’s Tang. “They hear the United States deferring to Chinese preferences in Asia, potentially at a cost to their interest.”

Kurt Campbell, who orchestrated the US “pivot” to Asia under Barack Obama — and, some say, the AUKUS deal under Biden — said there were “real anxieties in Asia about the way the actual G2 was manifested.” It was not just the notion that the countries were making decisions that would affect the region, Campbell told the AP’s Tang. “It was how China used the concept or the idea of it to make other surrounding nations feel insecure.” It was a concept, he said, that “has been powerfully delegitimised.”

Even so, Trump has plucked it from somewhere. His remark came “amid the absence of strategy documents from the Trump administration,” as Nikkei’s Moriyasu noted, “be it on a China strategy, Indo-Pacific strategy or a National Defence Strategy. Trump’s words hint at a new vision of cooperation rather than confrontation with China.”

“Somewhat triumphally,” as Tang noted, Chinese commentary quickly picked up on Trump’s use of the term. “Trump’s G2, to some extent, is that the US has accepted the reality that it no longer has the unipolar position but wants to build a bipolar world with China,” said Housha Yueguang, a popular nationalist blog. “It means Europe is no longer important, let alone Japan or India.”

More circumspectly, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said the two countries “can jointly shoulder our responsibilities as major countries” and “work for an equal and orderly multipolar world.” Zhao Minghao, a Chinese academic specialist on China–US relations, said it “does not mean China and the US co-ruling the world” and nor did it mean that cooperation will replace competition in bilateral relations.

Trump’s remarks suggest he is less interested in dominating the security environment in East Asia than in maintaining ascendancy in high technology and manufacturing. His secretary of state Marco Rubio and defense policy director Elbridge Colby are among those pursuing the longstanding effort to bottle up Chinese military power and contest its diplomatic influence. But other members of his administration are “restrainers” who think the United States should limit its efforts in Asia and Europe and concentrate on the American hemisphere.

The president’s recent show of force towards Venezuela suggests the latter camp has greater sway, and other recent Trump actions have damaged Washington’s attempts to rally a wider array of Asian powers as counterweight to China.

His imposition of 49 per cent tariffs on imports from India — punishment for buying Russian oil — and his susceptibility to Pakistani overtures, has put India’s Narendra Modi in a huff. Modi attended the meeting of the China-sponsored Shanghai Cooperation Agreement, his first China visit in seven years, but stayed away from the ASEAN meeting in Kuala Lumpur. He has apparently refused to take phone calls from Trump.

Vietnam was also hurt by Trump’s high tariffs on its exports, now 20 per cent, as punishment for its role as a finishing-off and rebadging centre for some Chinese exports. It has backed away from buying US military transport aircraft and entered a US$8 billion deal with Russia for advanced fighters and air-defence systems.

For Hong Kong–based commentator Wang, the situation has evolved since Bergsten first mooted the G2 and Washington saw China emerging as a “responsible stakeholder” in the existing world order. Chinese leaders saw that role as a trap, drawing China into burdensome global duties, distracting it from domestic development, and alienating it from the developing world. With later efforts to “contain” China having demonstratively failed, says Wang, a G2 would be one of “co-equals, not patron and junior partner.”

These are early days, Wang cautions, given Trump’s “mercurial” character. “The same feed that praises a G2 today can excoriate China tomorrow,” he wrote. “That volatility partly explains Beijing’s cautious tone. Structural problems also lurk beneath the surface of the relationship: a ballooning US trade deficit with China; enduring US restrictions on high-end chips and tools; data security and platform governance; and, above all, Taiwan.”

Among the likely irritants are the “poison pills” Trump inserted into trade deals with Cambodia, Malaysia and maybe others to prevent them joining supply chains that ultimately benefit China. The clauses “threaten to end the agreements if either country signs a rival pact that jeopardises ‘essential US interests’ or ‘poses a material threat’ to US security, reported the Financial Times.

In a first for a US–China leadership meeting, the two leaders didn’t discuss Taiwan in Busan. “It may be tactical,” Wang ventured, “a decision to avoid blowing up a fragile restart, or it may signal that both sides prefer to manage that issue through quieter channels.”

Next year may see the G2 idea fleshed out. Trump plans a visit to Beijing in April, with Xi making a return visit to Washington later next year. “In the end, even a successful G2 will not be warm all the time,” Wang said. “It will be a volatile tango, marked by recurring bouts of friction and periodic resets. But if Washington and Beijing can institutionalise enough cooperation to stabilise the floor while competing responsibly above it, that alone would be good news — particularly for Asia, where the costs of miscalculation would be immediate and severe.”

While such a shift may not go down that well in the halls of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the US Studies Centre at Sydney University and defence agencies, it may not be unwelcome for Albanese. He has just replaced Office of National Intelligence director-general Andrew Shearer — a China hawk appointed by Scott Morrison — with senior career diplomat Kathy Klugman, who is likely to pursue a softer approach to China at the top intelligence coordination and assessment body.

For his part, Hugh White sees his long-predicted power-sharing arrangement coming into being. “Back in the 2010s, when the G2 idea  first appeared, there was still an overwhelming assumption in Washington that America’s position of global leadership remained unchallengeable,” White tells me. “Support for the G2 idea was therefore based on the expectation that China was going to be the world’s second-most important and powerful country, but not an equal of the US.”

With everyone else having left the room, says White, Washington imagined America telling China what to do — “not a model that ever appealed to the Chinese, of course.”  Trump’s Washington might be realistic: “Behind the MAGA bombast about American greatness and Trumpian power and prowess lies an uneasy recognition that China these days really is an equal, and must be dealt with as such.” •

The post And then there were two appeared first on Inside Story.

The IMO is the United Nations agency responsible for the safety and security of shipping and the prevention of the marine and atmospheric pollution it causes. For more than a decade it has been working, somewhat sedately, on a policy to cut the maritime sector’s greenhouse gas emissions. (Shipping contributes just over 2 per cent of global carbon emissions, rising year on year.)

In the past twelve months the IMO had finally reached agreement on two linked measures: a global fuel standard requiring ships gradually to use less-polluting fuels; and a pricing mechanism for the remaining emissions to provide a further incentive to reduce them. The revenues would go to help green the shipping companies, and assist developing countries. The measures had won the support of the global maritime industry, as well as almost all of the IMO’s 176 nation state members.

But not all. At a special environment committee meeting called to ratify the proposal this month, the United States, Russia and Saudi Arabia opposed the measures and called for the vote on them to be postponed. From the White House Donald Trump made clear his views: “The United States will NOT stand for this Global Green New Scam Tax on Shipping…” he declared on Truth Social. “We will not tolerate increased prices on American Consumers OR the creation of a Green New Scam Bureaucracy to spend YOUR money on their Green dreams.”

But it was inside the IMO’s headquarters that Trump really made his presence felt. As delegates considered the motion to delay the decision, US negotiators openly threatened them. A vote against the United States would lead to tariffs being imposed on their countries, they warned, and the individuals themselves would be denied visas to enter the country.

The Trump administration’s bullying tactics were widely decried; but they proved effective. Before the meeting everyone assumed the carbon reduction measures would pass with a large majority. But the meeting ended, as the United States wanted, with the vote put off for a year. It was clear that many countries had changed their positions in the face of the American threats. Industry leaders put a brave face on it, insisting that they would bring the measures back to pass in 2026. But others warned that Washington would only redouble its threats to ensure the policy is killed off.

The dramatic scenes at the IMO opened a new front in the technological struggle that has defined global climate politics for the last two decades: that between fossil fuels and clean energy.

Over the past ten years, clean energy — wind, solar, hydropower and geothermal sources, together with electric vehicles, electric heating and cooling, battery storage and energy efficiency — had finally gained the ascendancy. As a result of huge cost reductions, renewables are now expected to meet over 90 per cent of the growth in global electricity demand over the next five years. Last year Britain became the first major economy to phase out coal-powered generation altogether (a fitting milestone, as it was also the first country to introduce it, in 1882). Globally, perhaps more remarkably, this year or next will see renewables surpassing coal as the world’s primary source of electricity.

Electric car sales in 2024 exceeded seventeen million globally, making up over a fifth of all cars sold. The market has seen extraordinary growth; 3.5 million more electric cars were sold in 2024 than 2023, a number larger than all the electric cars sold in 2020. In China, electric cars accounted for almost half of all car sales last year.

Meanwhile the global battery market is advancing rapidly as demand rises sharply and prices continue to decline. In 2024, the average price of a car battery pack fell below US$100 per kilowatt-hour, the key threshold to compete on cost with petrol-driven rivals.

Politically, too, the tide seemed to be running out on fossil fuels. In 2021, COP26 in Glasgow agreed that coal-fired power should be “phased down,” and twenty-four countries and a number of leading car manufacturers announced they would end the sale of petrol-driven vehicles by 2040. Two years later, in Dubai, COP28 agreed that the world needed to be “transitioning away from fossil fuels” altogether. The official UN press release declared that this represented “the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era.”

The processes by which clean energy has begun to out-compete fossil fuels have provided a classic example of the technological innovation and “creative destruction” analysed by this year’s winners of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Jan Mokyr, Philip Aghion and Peter Howitt were jointly awarded the prize this month in recognition of their historical and theoretical work explaining how, through innovation, capitalist economies change their industrial structure and thereby develop.

Up to now the role of governments in this process has been largely to encourage and support the insurgent technologies. Wind and solar power began their modern ascent in the 1990s, when Germany first introduced a “feed-in tariff” to subsidise them. The EU followed, and then other countries (including many American states), with mandates requiring electricity producers to use a minimum proportion of renewables.

Companies responded by innovating, improving the new technologies’ performance and lowering their costs. This allowed policymakers to raise the targets. When China started manufacturing and exporting renewables at scale in the 2010s, costs fell even more dramatically. In an effective virtuous circle, the targets were raised again. Today solar and wind power are cheaper than coal almost everywhere in the world; policy is no longer needed.

In vehicles, rising fuel-efficiency standards imposed by governments to control air pollution (and then carbon emissions) first just improved the performance of petrol-driven cars. But around twenty years ago technological innovation brought electric vehicles, or EVs, into the mix. As the standards have been raised and EV costs have fallen, creative destruction has taken its course. On a lifetime cost basis, EVs are expected to become cheaper than internal combustion engine vehicles by 2030.

When Donald Trump was elected president — claiming climate change was a “scam,” pulling the United States out of the Paris Agreement and promising to “drill, baby, drill” in his quest to boost the American oil industry — many observers doubted whether US policy would in reality change that much. The green technology subsidies of Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act were bringing too many new jobs to Republican districts; wind- and solar-powered electricity was so much cheaper than coal; the global oil price was not high enough to incentivise new drilling in the Arctic or national parks. For Trump to bring climate change into the culture wars was one thing, such observers supposed (your own correspondent included); actively damaging the American economy was surely another.

But we underestimated him. For Trump, climate change is a war on two fronts: against liberals and their values; and against China. He has proved himself amply able to sacrifice American businesses and employment in pursuit of his twin aims.

Trump has added a new dynamic to the creative destruction process. He is using the power of the American state, not to support the new technologies, but to promote the old. On his first day in office, he signed an executive order to eliminate EV mandates, and in his landmark “Big Beautiful Bill Act” ended the tax credits that had done much to stimulate EV production and sales. The Environmental Protection Agency proposes to rescind its key 2009 finding that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health. If it does so, vehicle makers will no longer be required to measure, control or report their greenhouse gas emissions at all.

Last month, meanwhile, the US government said it would open thirteen million acres of federal lands for coal mining and provide $625 million to recommission and modernise coal-fired power plants. It has frozen permits for offshore wind projects, ended clean energy tax credits and blocked wind and solar developments on federal lands. This month the administration cancelled $7.6 billion in grants that supported hundreds of clean energy projects in sixteen states (all of them run by the Democrats). Although the Inflation Reduction Act has not been formally repealed, most of its green technology provisions have been terminated.

Energy demand in America is now soaring as the exponential growth of AI data centres sucks in ever more electricity to power them. Just a few years ago Google, Microsoft and Meta all committed to achieve net zero power consumption by 2030, and Amazon by 2040. But these targets are now under threat. US coal consumption, long thought to be in terminal decline, is now set to rise by 7 per cent next year. As one environmental analyst put it, “it’s a steampunk dystopia — bloated, coal-fired data centres in an ever-warmer world.”

Trump is not limiting his fossil fuel drive to the US. He is also using trade and defence deals to pressure countries in Europe and Asia to buy more American gas under decades-long contracts. In its bid to reduce the tariffs Trump imposed, the European Union has committed to import up to A$1.15 trillion of US energy — mostly liquefied natural gas, or LNG — by 2028, more than four times its current imports. Similarly, Indonesia has signed up for A$24 billion in US energy imports. Japan is negotiating a similar deal. Australia is next in line.

Why is Trump doing this? His ideological antipathy to environmentalism and environmentalists is clear. But economically, his target is China. Over the past decade, China has become the global superpower in the manufacture of green technologies. It now controls more than 70 per cent of global solar, wind and battery manufacturing. Chinese-made electric vehicles are now much cheaper — and higher-quality — than Western brands: BYD this year overtook Tesla as the world’s largest electric and hybrid vehicle manufacturer.

As global demand for renewable energy and EVs rises, the Chinese economy grows stronger. By launching an assault on clean energy both domestically and overseas, Trump is trying to limit China’s global dominance.

He is already having some success. Major car manufacturers in Europe, including Audi, Volvo and Porsche, have announced they are slowing their shift to EVs or even abandoning them altogether. Most major US banks (including JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs) have weakened or got rid of their green investment policies, and internationally the 150-stong Global Net Zero Banking Alliance has shut down.

Lobbied on all sides by worried manufacturing industries facing higher energy costs and Chinese competition, the EU is engaged in a painful process of weakening its carbon targets and regulations. Inspired by Trump, and exploiting concerns about inflation and the cost of living, right-wing parties have targeted European countries’ net zero goals and policies. Public support for climate action in Europe remains high, but governments are increasingly nervous. Having already delayed its EV targets, the British government is considering pushing back its flagship pledge to achieve net zero power by 2030.

In the long term, few analysts believe the global transition to clean energy can be derailed. Climate impacts are so severe and evident, and the costs of clean energy falling so rapidly, that both politics and economics will demand an end to fossil fuel use. But how far away the long term is remains unclear. It’s long been understood that the oil, gas and coal industries would work hard to resist the transition, and governments throughout the world have become familiar with their lobbying and public communication tactics. But as clean energy firms have expanded, a counter-lobby has grown up to challenge the claim that fossil fuels are needed to provide jobs and energy security. This technological and political struggle always looked like being the key conflict of global climate policy. But in President Trump one side has acquired a new weapon. •

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Mokyr was nobody’s most likely candidate for the economics Nobel, but almost no one begrudges him the award either. He is one of economic history’s pre-eminent figures and one of its most popular, a joy to read. And he has devoted his career to answering one of economics’ central puzzles: how do we promote productivity and economic growth? How do we build the incomes of entire populations and whole generations?

Mokyr’s answer to the prosperity puzzle is that the flow of new ideas must keep adding to our stock of useful knowledge. Importantly, prosperity will only take off if it can build on itself in a sort of virtuous spiral. And you need to generate not one but two different forms of knowledge:

• propositional knowledge, such as empirical studies, which tells people how things are; and

• prescriptive knowledge, such as written instructions, which tells people how to get things done.

Finally, for all that knowledge accumulation to happen, you need a particular form of culture — one that is open to spreading knowledge broadly, to the possibility that knowledge will change, and to the idea that people will apply this knowledge.

If you want to read some of Mokyr’s work, you can try his Nobel citation and longer background paper and then this paper on the Industrial Revolution (or read Kevin Bryan’s excellent summary of the latter). Mokyr’s big four books are The Lever of Riches (his most popular), The Gifts of Athena, The Enlightened Economy and A Culture of Growth. They’re all great, and all impressively readable for the non-economist. That last one, spelling out Mokyr’s broad cultural story, may be the most significant.

In an economy worried about its capacity to innovate and grow, Mokyr tells the biggest story of all, a story informed by the full sweep of human history. You might think we should have seen his Nobel coming.

The quest for growth

Economists really, really want to understand economic growth. The economist Robert Lucas (Nobel 1995) once memorably quipped that, as an economist, once you start thinking about growth you can’t think of anything else. A great many economists agree; Mokyr used repeated that Lucas quote in an interview within hours of his Nobel win.

It’s the quest Adam Smith embarked on in the 1770s with his The Wealth of Nations and David Ricardo continued after Smith’s death: finding the laws that determine an economy’s expansion.

A simple thought experiments explain why so many economics pursue it: growth matters to people’s lives in a way that most people don’t realise. Just over 250 years ago, the world’s most powerful person was the French king Louis XV. All his riches could not save him from smallpox, a disease that not even the poorest person in an advanced economy will die from today. And this is just one of hundreds of examples of growth’s benefits.

Not surprisingly, Smith and Ricardo lacked a detailed understanding of how their economies had entered a new growth path, so they compared the different economies of their own era. But since the 1950s economists have increasingly compared economies across time as well.

The dominance of models

For some time after the growth puzzle came back into focus in the 1950s, the economics profession seemed to focus on mathematical models. In particular, the profession made many mathematical extensions to the original “exogenous growth” model devised in large part by Robert Solow (Nobel 1987). Solow’s doctoral students alone included four future Nobel winners. Mathematical breakthroughs also helped win Nobels for the aforementioned Robert Lucas, and for people like Paul Romer (Nobel 2018). Such people integrated factors like human capital, technological innovation and imperfect markets into the dominant mathematical growth models.

If you have come across someone angrily declaring that economists want to reduce all of people’s behaviour to mere mathematical modelling, then this sort of economics is probably what they have in mind. You might suggest to such people that this approach peaked thirty years ago (perhaps marked by Lucas’s 1995 Nobel). Just don’t expect they’ll thank you for the tip.

(You might also tell your angry anti-modelling interlocutor that economic models are almost by definition pretty useful in economics, in the same way that maps are useful in geography and architectural drawings are useful to builders. They probably won’t thank you for that, either.)

Empiricism resurgent

If the back end of the 1900s was the era of mathematical models in economics, the 2000s so far have been the scene of the “credibility revolution.”

You can still win a Nobel partly for work on models, as Romer did in 2018. Indeed, while Mokyr won half of this year’s Nobel, the other half went to Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt who, like Romer, extended the modelling of innovation. But the interest in mathematical models has gone off the boil.

The focus of the 2000s has mostly been on practical empirical methods. You still use maths, but now it’s in conceptual tools like difference-in-differences, instrumental variables and randomised controlled trials. You would have been most likely to win your Nobel for showing why people ended up with lousy used cars (Akerlof, Nobel 2001) or how to think about the prices of assets like your house (Fama, Hansen and Shiller, Nobel 2013) or the regulation of companies like Google (Tirole, Nobel 2014) or whether minimum wages make sense (Card and Krueger, Nobel 2021). In this work, economists want to make a casual claim: this led to that.

The field being economics and the year being 2025, there’s now even a paper that makes this point using a dataset of 44,000 economics papers. The authors argue that “the average proportion of causal claims in papers rose significantly from approximately 5 per cent in 1990 to around 28 per cent in 2020.”

The move to history

In his first public remarks on winning the Nobel, Joel Mokyr explained that he never expected to win a Noble Prize because of, well, history: no economic historian had won an economics Nobel except Robert Fogel and Douglass North back in 1993.

Mokyr is usually insightful. And there has very likely been too little economic history taught in schools and universities. But his historical analysis of the Nobel seems to me quite wrong.

Yes, the 2000s had been increasingly about practical empirical methods. But in the 2020s, the Nobels have markedly favoured economic history:

• In 2022 Ben Bernanke got a Nobel for analysis the Great Depression of the 1930s — and also, as US Fed chair, for applying that analysis to the 2008 recession.

• In 2023 Claudia Goldin won for spending decades building up and rigorously analysing decades of data on women’s labour. Goldin sees herself — rightly, I think — as an economic version of Sherlock Holmes. But she is also adamant that her work is economic history. “I am first and foremost an economic historian,” she told me in 2022, with Sherlockian matter-of-factness.

• In 2024 Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson won for an explanation of historical growth that argued prosperity springs from good institutions. This involved looking at a lot of institutional history. Indeed, on this point Mokyr has been in the very best sort of multi-decade dialogue with his 2024 predecessors, characterised by disagreement, provocation, consultation and mutual respect. Take a look at the Mokyr’s presence in the authors’ comments and footnotes to Acemoglu and Johnson’s “Machinery and Labor in the Early Industrial Revolution, and in the Age of AI,” from way back in the April 2024 world where none of these people yet owned a Nobel.

A sensible reaction

As far as I can see, the Nobel committee is working hard to encourage a broadening of economics. It has done this before: in 2002 it gave a Nobel to Daniel Kahneman, who didn’t even consider himself an economist though his psychological research helped found a field called behavioural economics. But now it seems to have embraced economic history hard. First it awarded Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson, even though their ideas are more popular than proven. Now it has awarded Mokyr, whose ideas seem even less testable.

You might question the choice on this ground. A more useful way to see it might be that economics is trying out different approaches, and that this seems a good thing. •

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Sunday talk show anchors this week pressed Democrats on “How much credit does President Trump deserve for this deal,” if the cease fire was “a clear win” for Trump, and if “this peace deal came together now because President Trump was more effective at pressuring Prime Minister Netanyahu than former President Biden.”

We will learn nothing from a cramped debate designed to flatter one man’s ego and buoy his hollow, self-indulgent quest for a Nobel Peace Prize. And we will steer attention away from the far more tragic yet instructive strategic failures on all sides that produced so much needless death and suffering and have likely set back the cause of peace for decades.

That Trump gets some credit for the ceasefire agreement is not even something in dispute. All reporting indicates he successfully leaned on a reluctant Netanyahu to accept Hamas’s offer to release the twenty remaining living Israeli hostages in exchange for Israel’s release of far more Palestinian prisoners, without any broader peace agreement in place or commitment by Hamas to disarm.

But the value of that credit is limited. Finalising such a deal after two years of ruthless war that left Gaza in rubble and Hamas with depleted negotiating leverage is not exactly a diplomatic feat on the order of the Camp David accords. No trust has been built between Israelis and Palestinians; no vision of permanent peaceful coexistence has been offered, let alone given lip-service. The longstanding presumption that Israel still sought a two-state solution has been extinguished by the statements of those now in power. At the micro-level, freedom for individuals in captivity is worthy of celebration. At the macro-level, what is there to cheer?

According to Gaza health ministry statistics, Hamas’s decision to attack Israel two years ago led to nearly 70,000 deaths of its own people, about 3 per cent of the Gazan population. Among the dead were six members of Hamas’s own leadership. Much of the territory has been reduced to rubble and, according to the United Nations, about 90 per cent of the population has been displaced, often multiple times. The most optimistic estimate from the UN for how long reconstruction will take is sixteen years, and the most pessimistic eighty years. From the Palestinian perspective, the 7 October attack was an unmitigated disaster.

But this is no zero-sum game that requires christening Israel as the winner by default. The 7 October attack that killed nearly 1200 Israelis was a massive military, intelligence, and security failure on the part of a complacent Israeli government uninterested in the peace process yet unwilling to believe their own peace could be so easily shattered. Clear signs of a pending assault were known yet repeatedly downplayed and dismissed.

The brutally overwhelming military response from Israel decimated Hamas and rolled back its allies Iran and Hezbollah, but at enormous cost to civilian human life and Israel’s global reputation and support for its right to exist, and to unity within the Jewish diaspora. The notion that Hamas or other Palestinian groups will now be kept at bay by Israel’s military might flies in the face of the decades-long history of Middle East strife, in which military victories are eventually reciprocated by asymmetric terrorist attacks.

The seeds for irrevocable mistrust and ongoing conflict have been deeply planted. Without even a trace of hope in the near future for a two-state solution, we should expect them to grow for more decades. There were no strategic choices by Israel or Hamas that anyone in the future should ever want to replicate.

And Trump? Yes he secured this ceasefire agreement… seven months after he failed to maintain the ceasefire agreement struck by Biden in January. But Trump is never interested in protecting the “wins” of others. He loves to do just enough to organise his own ribbon-cutting ceremonies. Now he can assert that his agreement portends the “historic dawn of a new Middle East” even though there is no reason to believe that’s true — unless you think that Israel can and should persevere indefinitely by militarily subjugating Palestinian territories, without much global support, and that somehow amounts to a new dawn.

There is nothing in Trump’s record to show he has any understanding of the complex, multifaceted policy approaches required to strike not just a temporary agreement with a handshake but a lasting peace fortified by hard-earned mutual trust, political compromise and economic co-dependence. There is nothing in Trump’s record to suggest he cares about what may happen to any temporary agreement beyond his time in office, or even beyond the initial photo-op.

The question “is Trump more effective at pressuring Netanyahu than Biden” is extraordinarily narrow. Even if the answer is yes, does that mean Trump has superpower diplomatic skills that will be deployed to do the necessary follow-through work? Of course not. We all know Trump wants to do just enough — or be perceived as doing just enough — to get his medal, and that’s it.

We who live on Earth are stuck with Trump for another three years and three months. I understand the incentive for other world leaders to genuflect in hopes of surviving. But the rest of us need not fall over ourselves to narrow our fields of vision and place Trump at the centre of every story. The lesson to learn from the 7 October attacks and the subsequent Israel–Hamas hostilities is not how a vainglorious blowhard can channel his thirst for validation into tenuous ceasefire agreements. It’s how the dark thrill of self-righteous violence in the short run can easily lead to devastating consequences in the long run. •

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Trump has since ramped up his pledge to reduce what Americans pay for prescription drugs, in recent months making bold, mathematically impossible undertakings to cut drug prices by as much as 1500 per cent. But there is little evidence that Trump can achieve his stated aim and serious concern that his plans would create shortages, increase prices and disrupt research and development, drug approvals and manufacturing.

Americans have always paid more for brand-name prescription drugs than consumers in most other countries. A 2024 report by the RAND Corporation found that brand-name drugs cost at least four times more in the US than they do in comparison countries. (By contrast, unbranded generics, 90 per cent of US prescriptions, averaged 67 per cent of prices in comparison countries.) This largely reflects a complex and fragmented reimbursement system, the lack of national price control mechanisms and the industry’s zealously guarded patent protections.

Government-funded programs have failed to capitalise on their large-scale bargaining power. The Veterans’ Administration is unique in negotiating prices directly with manufacturers, and the Medicaid Drug Rebate Program requires drug manufacturers to negotiate prices with the states. But Medicare has been prohibited until very recently from negotiating the price of medications for seniors.

In the private sector, health insurers typically rely on intermediaries known as pharmacy benefit managers to negotiate costs, and hospitals and physicians’ offices charge insurers or patients whatever price they can negotiate. The lack transparency provides countless opportunities for mark-ups. Many Americans look for cheaper medicines from online pharmacies or import them from Canada, Mexico and elsewhere.

Trump’s threats and promises come in an environment in which many Americans struggle to access affordable medicines and healthcare and the immense lobbying power of the pharmaceutical industry. That power, and Trump’s inability to focus on any issue for a concerted period, is a major reason why his pharmaceutical price initiatives are so disjointed and contradictory.

The process started in February during a White House gathering of governors and new cabinet members at which Trump declared “Americans are being screwed” on drug costs. But then, in April, he issued an executive order directing the Department of Health and Human Services to work with Congress to modify the only recent attempt to reduce Medicare spending on prescription drugs. Pharmaceutical industry lobbying had already paid off handsomely.

Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act enabled Medicare to negotiate prices for the most commonly used and expensive drugs the program covers. The first set of negotiated prices for just ten drugs — estimated to deliver annual savings of US$1.5 billion in out-of-pocket costs for Medicare beneficiaries and US$6 billion for the Medicare program — are not due to go into effect until 2026. Negotiated prices for another fifteen drugs, including blockbuster diabetes drugs like Ozempic, are due to be implemented in 2027.

The Republican Congress delivered on the industry’s demands in the One Big Beautiful Bill, which further limited which drugs can be included in Medicare’s negotiation program. The health policy centre KFF estimates that this change alone will increase Medicare spending by at least US$5 billion. It’s unclear whether the Trump administration will ever implement the previously agreed savings in 2026.

The April executive order also required disclosure of the direct and indirect compensation received by pharmacy benefit managers and a report on anti-competitive behaviour by prescription drug manufacturers. The required transparency regulations are yet to appear and several “listening sessions” on anti-competitive behaviours have yet to yield recommendations for reform.

There’s confusion and an irony in the fact that the April executive order attempted to make it easier for states to import prescription medicines, given that it came just one day after the Trump administration announced a national security report into the pharmaceutical industry as a precursor to the tariffs that were to come just a few months later.

An executive order issued in May aimed to tackle the disparities in drug prices between the United States and other high-income countries using voluntary “most-favoured-nation,” or MFN, pricing, under which prices in the United States could be lowered to match the lowest price in other similar markets. Non-compliance could trigger compulsion. “Big Pharma will either abide by this principle voluntarily,” Trump declared as he signed the order, “or we will use the power of the federal government to ensure that we are paying the same price as other countries to accelerate these price restrictions and reductions.”

Yet he also alleged European governments are the real enemy. Referring to what he described as “price gouging and profiteering,” he claimed it was “really the countries that forced Big Pharma to do things that, frankly, I’m not sure they really felt comfortable doing, but they’ve gotten away with it, these countries. The European Union has been brutal, brutal, and the drug companies actually told me stories — it was just brutal, how they forced them.”

The May executive order also requires a review of other countries’ policies and practices to pinpoint those that work against American interests — a review that will surely consider how Australia approves drugs for PBS listing — as well as efforts to facilitate direct-to-consumer purchasing programs at MFN prices.

This latter proposal reiterates a first-term attempt by Trump to benchmark prices for drugs administered in doctors’ offices to the lowest price in OECD countries — a move that encountered legal and political obstacles. The latest decision will face the same challenges, but for the moment it seems the administration is focused on what can be achieved through bargaining with individual pharmaceutical companies.

Discussions so far between the Department of Health and Human Services and the pharmaceutical industry have not yielded meaningful results. Big Pharma will fight hard to keep their largest and most profitable market. Their most potent argument is that cutting prices in the United States would stifle innovation by reducing funds for research and development. PhRMA used the same argument in a letter early this year to the US Trade Representative, saying that the Australia’s PBS pricing policies “undervalued American innovation.”

In a shift in focus, however, the pharmaceutical industry took the view that Trump’s tariff policies could be used decrease the gap between prices in the United States and Europe (and Australia) by forcing governments in these countries to stop bargaining down prices. “European governments are not signing up to pay more for drugs. We need trade tools to rebalance that equation,” said the CEO of one large international pharmaceutical company.

Such an approach would protect only the profits of the pharmaceutical industry, of course, and would do nothing to reduce prices for governments or patients. In fact, there is near-universal agreement that prices would actually increase in the United States and shortages of some medicines would be exacerbated.

Undeterred, Trump announced that a 100 per cent tariff will be levied on any branded or patented pharmaceutical product from 1 October “unless a Company IS BUILDING their Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Plant in America.” Given that he previously suggested tariffs would be phased more slowly, giving companies time to build factories and relocate production, this announcement came as a shock to companies outside the US.

The tariff edict was not the subject of an executive order and came with little detail. Trump’s threats had already spurred international pharmaceutical companies to announce billions of dollars of investments in their US operations. Trump had agreed in July to the framework of a deal with the European Union — where nearly all of the biggest companies have a significant manufacturing presence — that would levy only a 15 per cent tariff on drug imports, with some exceptions for certain generic drugs. A framework agreement with Japan, meanwhile, applied a baseline 15 per cent tariff to nearly all Japanese imports, with an exemption for generic drugs.

Whether these deals hold or have been abandoned isn’t clear. Carve-outs for European and Japanese exports and companies engaged in US manufacturing could shield most branded drugs from the 100 per cent levy. But it’s feared the tariffs will have the greatest impact on drugs for rare diseases and speciality pharmaceuticals from smaller manufacturers without an American presence.

Australian company CSL is hoping that its US-based facilities and large workforce will protect its exports of vaccines, anti-venoms and blood product to the United States. Blood products made up 87 per cent of the A$2.1 billion in medicinal and pharmaceutical products exported to the United States in 2024. Made from blood plasma collected in the United States and fractionated in Melbourne, these products are used in a range of medical and surgical treatments, including responses to a number of life-threatening diseases. Any increase in prices would have serious health and financial consequences for many Americans.

For the moment these concerns are in abeyance because the implementation of these tariffs has been paused while individual negotiations continue. Just this month Trump has revealed deals with Pfizer and Astra Zeneca. These companies will participate in a new direct purchasing platform named TrumpRx.gov that will let American patients buy a “large majority” of their products at a discount. In return, Pfizer and Astra Zeneca will receive a three-year reprieve from certain tariffs. Trump called this “bringing MFN pricing to American patients” but it is a long way from that.

There are concerns that TrumpRx is yet another move by the Trump family to cash in on the presidency and that the brand name will discourage some Americans from using it. There are also doubts about its ability to compete with the other, similar online pharmacy services that have proliferated in the United States, and about the actual the discounts to be offered. It’s seen as a win for the companies, with very modest gains for consumers. More companies are expected to join.

The White House is now saying it may not need to impose tariffs. Asked earlier this month when pharmaceutical tariffs would go into effect, commerce secretary Howard Lutnick said the administration is “going to let [the talks] play out and finish these negotiations, because they are the most important thing to the American people.”

In all this activity, two key areas have been ignored. First, generic drugs, which account for more than 90 per cent of prescriptions and 10 per cent of costs, are mostly imported from places like China (currently subject to a 30 per cent tariff) and India (a 50 per cent tariff). The tariff on imported Indian generics is estimated to increase US healthcare spending by roughly US$7 billion.

Second, in the push to increase onshore manufacturing, little attention is paid to why drug manufacturers move operations overseas in the first place. The pharmaceutical industry is a global web, with ingredients and finished drugs manufactured in a multitude of locations based in costs and expertise. Much of the US expertise in science and medicine is meanwhile being actively undermined by Trump policies on research funding. These issues, neither of them readily addressed under Trump’s current policies, explain why America imported nearly US$233 billion in pharmaceutical and medicinal products in 2024.

As prime minister Anthony Albanese heads to Washington for much-vaunted talks this week, there is considerable speculation about topics for discussion. Will Australia quietly accept 10 per cent tariffs as a best-case scenario, or will Albanese push for fairness based on Australia’s trade deficit (Australia contributes less than 1 per cent to the US trade deficit in pharmaceuticals) and existing trade agreements? Whether the PBS is still on the table will depend on who has had Trump’s ear last — including the well-funded lobbyists from Big Pharma.

The Saturday Paper’s Jason Koutsoukis recently pointed out that Australia is one of the two or three countries most likely to set the MFN prices in the United States; it topped a Trump administration list of eighteen countries in a “MFN  basket” for reference pricing. Koutsoukis reports that health minister Mark Butler is engaged in talks designed to protect the PBS. Let’s hope Butler recognises that the Australian pharmaceutical companies whose US-based parent companies see the PBS as a free-rider undermining their profits are not the Albanese government’s allies in this fight. •

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There is much in the Trump plan that is implausible, contrived and, as with many Robinson cartoons, more than just a bit absurd. We might applaud the American president for bringing a pause to the slaughter in Gaza and for the return of Israeli hostages. Quite possibly, no one else could have done that right now. Remember, though, it was the second Trump administration which continued to underwrite that slaughter, providing massive amounts of lethal materiel to Israel.

We should certainly applaud the Nobel Peace Prize Committee for not giving this year’s award to the Trump. At a stretch he might be a more credible contender in 2026, though that should depend on what happens with his twenty-point plan.

And the plan is just the problem. At best, it offers a respite in Gaza. It is not a blueprint for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. For two million–plus Gazans it might move the dial of daily hardship from starvation to subsistence. But it overflows with empty assertions, with the term “will be” worked to the point of exhaustion.

Are we meant to be comforted that a “Board of Peace,” under the direction of Trump and Tony Blair, will oversee the creation of “New Gaza”? Trump’s erratic behaviour and Blair’s dubious record as a Middle East peace envoy aside, this still amounts to an “unmistakable colonial framework,” in the words prominent Middle East experts Jeffrey Sachs and Sybil Fares. And there is not a single reference in the plan to the Israeli-occupied West Bank, home to three million Palestinians who are subject to constant harassment from 450,000 Israeli settlers, long aided and abetted by the Netanyahu government. (Another 230,000 Israeli settlers live in East Jerusalem.)

As for “New Gaza,” Trump’s new plan at least populates that devastated territory with Palestinians. Point 12 states: “No one will be forced to leave Gaza.” Those who wish to go will be free to do so and to return. Contrast this with Trump’s remarks in February 2025 that the United States would take “a long-term ownership position” in the territory, expelling Gazans to “a fresh piece of land” in either Jordan or Egypt and creating a “Riviera of the Middle East… something that could be so magnificent.”

Point 19 of the Trump plan deals with Palestinian statehood as follows: “While Gaza redevelopment advances and when the Palestinian Authority reform program is faithfully carried out, the conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood, which we recognise as the aspiration of the Palestinian people.” As ever, statehood is held out as a reward for Palestinian good behaviour. Bad behaviour by others that affects prospects for Palestinian statehood is somehow irrelevant.

And who will judge if and when Palestinians have met their obligations: Donald Trump, with a record of capricious behaviour second to none; Tony Blair, whose lies about the invasion of Iraq in 2003 are a matter of record; and possibly Benjamin Netanyahu, whose life’s mission has been to deny to Palestinians what Israelis regard as a birthright — a state of their own?

The plan’s first point deserves a motherhood award for aspiration: “Gaza will be a deradicalised terror-free zone that does not pose a threat to its neighbours.” How this might happen can be gleaned from point 6, which gives amnesty to Hamas members who commit to peaceful coexistence, and point 13, which excludes Hamas from any role in the governance of Gaza.

The critical question is who will make it happen? The answer, in point 15, is a temporary International Stabilisation Force, or ISF, which will “immediately deploy in Gaza” to train and support vetted Palestinian police in consultation with Jordan and Egypt. The ABC’s Middle East correspondent, Eric Tlozek, has commented that this will be one of the most crucial and difficult parts of the plan, with the makeup, legal status and rules of engagement yet to be defined. He quoted Andreas Krieg from the School of Security at King’s College, London, as saying that without a UN Security Council mandate the legitimacy of such a deployment would be contested and that Arab/Muslim contributors would be wary of being seen as subcontractors for Israel. A potential further complication, of course, is Trump’s poisonous relationship with the UN.

One worthy element of the plan (Point 18) deals with changing “mindsets and narratives,” long recognised as major obstacles to peace-making in the region. Dehumanisation of the other through racist and incendiary rhetoric infects Israelis and Palestinians alike. In his fine book, The Hundred Years War on Palestine, the prominent Palestinian-American scholar Rashid Khalidi wrote of the thorny issue of weaning Israelis from their attachment to inequality and “a reflexive dogma of aggressive nationalism whose tenacious hold will be hard to break.” Palestinians too, he wrote, needed weaning from a pernicious delusion — rooted in the colonial nature of their encounter with Zionism and in its denial of Palestinian peoplehood — that Jewish Israelis are not “real” people.

Israel has pulverised Gaza, killing some 70,000 Palestinians (the majority of them women and children) and Hamas’s top military leadership in the territory. The greater the pulverisation, the greater the formal support for a Palestinian state from countries who previously might have lacked the courage to make the call. By mid-October 2025, when Trump declared the “end” of the Gaza war, 80 per cent of UN members had formally recognised a Palestinian state, the newcomers including Belgium, Canada, France, Portugal, and Britain as well as Australia.

Ami Ayalon, a former leader of the Israeli Labor Party and one-time head of the Israeli internal security agency, Shin Bet, commented recently that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict would not end until “we achieve a political agreement that ends Israel’s occupation and creates two states side by side.” Many now rightly question the viability of a two-state solution but struggle to come up with better idea.

Writing in Foreign Affairs magazine in early 2024 the late Martin Indyk, twice American ambassador to Israel, argued that 7 October had resurrected the “allegedly dead two-state solution.” The explanation, he said, was simple, a lack of possible alternatives: the Hamas solution was the destruction of Israel; the Israeli ultra-right solution was annexation of the West Bank, dismantling of the Palestinian Authority and deportation of Palestinians to other countries; the “conflict management” approach long pursued by Benjamin Netanyahu was aimed at maintaining the status quo indefinitely and the world had “seen how that worked out.” Added to this list was the idea of a binational state, in which Jews would become a minority, thus ending Israel’s status as a Jewish state. None of those alternatives, Indyk wrote, would resolve the conflict — at least not without causing even greater calamities. If the conflict was to be resolved peacefully, “the two-state solution was the only idea left standing.”

Now that Australia has formally recognised a Palestinian state, what will it do to help create it and build the structures of statehood? Are there lessons from Australia’s leading role in the 1990s peace-making in Cambodia — including communications and election management — that might apply to Palestine? Are there NGOs that can marshal important expertise that could help the Palestinians?

In the mid-1990s prominent Australian lawyers, working under the auspices of the Australian International Legal Resources NGO, helped draft guidelines for the operation of the Palestinian legislative council and also helped create a forensic laboratory. Could Australia engage more closely on Palestine with regional countries — including Indonesia, which is already involved in Middle East peace-keeping? Its president, Prabowo Subianto, recently offered another 20,000 troops for UN peace-keeping operations, including in Gaza.

The only certainty in the days ahead is more talk. Much of it will be empty, and posturing won’t bring peace. Perhaps Australia, with its current bid for a non-permanent UN Security Council seat in mind, can at least work to focus the debate on action? •

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But British politics is in turmoil. No fewer than eight political parties — one of which has not even been formed yet — are vying for power across England, Scotland and Wales. (Northern Ireland has its own political system.) Political journalists have had to criss-cross the country to report on formerly marginal party conferences and their surprisingly large numbers of new supporters.

Dominating the headlines is Reform UK, the latest vehicle for Brexiteer-in-chief Nigel Farage, former leader of the Brexit Party and, before that, the UK Independence Party. Reform has been top of UK-wide opinion polls for six months now, leading Labour by ten to fifteen percentage points (27–35 per cent to 20–22 per cent). This is unprecedented: no third party has topped the polls outside a general election since the Social Democrat Party of pro-European Labour rebels in 1982, and never a party of the far right. But Farage has an extraordinary ability to command the media — both the right-wing newspapers (the Mail, Telegraph, Sun and Express) that still set the political agenda for the BBC, and social media, of which he has become a deft exponent.

From being a single-minded critic of the European Union, Farage has evolved into a sub-Trumpian far-right politician of the type familiar in the rest of Europe. He rails against net zero and climate policies, attacks diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and refuses — echoing Trump — to say whether paracetamol is safe for pregnant women.

But Farage’s main focus now is immigration: he has said Reform would deport 600,000 alleged illegal immigrants and end the right of legal migrants to settle in Britain with their families. Excluding EU nationals (for whom such rights are guaranteed under the Brexit arrangements), these UK residents number around 400,000: typically doctors, nurses, care workers, hospitality staff and others who came in response to labour market shortages and have made the country their home.

In the past, Farage has been careful to cultivate a certain traditional British decency; but his new stance leaves little unspoken. He is tapping into a widespread and growing public anxiety about immigration, fomented by the regular arrivals of small boats on England’s southern coast carrying asylum seekers across the English Channel from France.

Originating mainly from Afghanistan, Iraq, Eritrea and other conflict-ridden countries, these would-be migrants — largely young men — have been housed in hotels in towns across the country while their asylum claims are processed, which often takes a year or more. This has caused resentment and hostility among local populations, leading both this summer and last to demonstrations and in some cases violence. The issue has been whipped up on social media by nativist and racist influencers spreading disinformation and conspiracy theories.

All this came to a head last month at a rally of more than 100,000 far-right activists and supporters in London under the slogan “Unite the Kingdom.” Nationalist speakers from across Europe were joined in Trafalgar Square by Elon Musk, beamed in from the US to warn that “violence is coming… you either fight back or you die.” It was quite a shock to liberal and multicultural Britain to discover that so many people could be organised in such a blatantly provocative manner, deliberately (and successfully) stoking fear among the non-white population.

Farage kept his distance; but there is no doubt that he has been emboldened by Reform’s dominant position in the polls. Winning 14 per cent of the vote in last year’s general election — though only five seats in parliament, courtesy of the UK’s first-past-the-post voting system — the party’s polling support has since grown sufficiently for it to be favourite to form the next government. Given its extremely thin cadre of competent politicians — two of its five MPs have already left or been thrown out, though they have been replaced by two Tory defectors — this is a prospect many sober observers regard as alarming.

For the Tories it could be fatal. Their new leader Kemi Badenoch, elected by the membership last year, has decided that she needs to fight Reform on its own ground. At this week’s party conference she announced a plan to deport 150,000 illegal immigrants a year using a new police force modelled on Trump’s heavily criticised Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. A Tory government, she declared, would leave the European Convention on Human Rights (which would mean the UK joining Russia and Belarus as the only non-signatories) and repeal the Climate Change Act, bedrock of the UK’s cross-party climate policymaking for nearly twenty years.

The Conservatives continue to slide in the polls, however. From their wipe-out 24 per cent vote in the 2024 general election, they are now at a disastrous 20 per cent or less. The public shows no willingness to forgive their chaotic rule from 2017 to 2024, which gave the country five prime ministers and a botched Brexit. Some of their voters have turned to Reform; some to the centrist Liberal Democrats. Badenoch is widely seen as a failure who will be deposed soon.

But if Reform has effectively replaced the Tories as the main opposition party, Labour is feeling equally threatened. Many of Reform’s new supporters have come from across the aisle, threatening formerly safe working-class Labour seats in the Midlands and North of England. In these “red wall” constituencies, where manufacturing and mining industries once provided jobs for life but boarded up shopfronts now stand testament to longstanding decline, Reform draws on widespread disillusionment and anger.

While London and the southeast of England have benefited from globalisation and economic growth in the past thirty years, these places have felt abandoned. And the politicians responsible, Labour included, all look alike: metropolitan elites who no longer understand or represent them. In the most recent large-scale opinion poll calculating the likely results of a general election held today, 276 Labour seats were projected to fall to Reform.

To the dismay of many in his own party, Labour prime minister Sir Keir Starmer has met the challenge of Reform by agreeing with them. In a major speech in May, the prime minister said immigration in the last decade had done “incalculable damage” to the country, and warned Britain was at risk of becoming “an island of strangers,” a remark he later said he regretted. (It was widely noted to be an echo, whether accidental or deliberate, of the language used by a notorious former Tory minister, Enoch Powell, who was expelled from the Conservative Party in 1968 for his racist anti-immigrant rhetoric.)

At its party conference last week Starmer finally found the words to attack Reform, declaring that the country faced an “era-defining” choice between Labour and the populist right; between “decency or division, renewal or decline.” Yet at the same time Labour also took aim at the settled immigrant population, announcing that migrants will now have to live in the country for at least ten years (up from five) before they can apply to stay, and then only if they have never claimed welfare benefits and have done voluntary work in the community. For Starmer’s conference speech, peppered with appeals to patriotism, party members in the audience were issued with little Union Jacks and English, Scottish and Welsh flags to wave at appropriate moments.

But Starmer’s attempt to “out-Reform Reform” seems to be proving no more successful than the Tories’. His problem is that, for every voter toying with Reform who might be attracted back to Labour by the government’s tough language on immigration, more are leaving in the other direction. Labour is losing support both to the Liberal Democrats — who won a record seventy-two seats at the 2024 general election and are now neck and neck with the Tories in the polls — and a newly resurgent Green Party.

The latter had a particularly strong conference season, electing a charismatic new leader, Zack Polanski, on an “eco-populist” platform of unashamed support for migration, nationalisation of major utilities, a wealth tax and stronger environmental policy. Polanski is positioning the Greens firmly on the left of the political spectrum and appealing to disaffected Labour members to join them. Already up to 12 per cent in national polls, they could well supplant Labour in a number of cities where young socially liberal graduates struggle to find decently paid jobs and affordable rents, and disillusionment with current politics is rife.

But there is another challenger for their votes. Former left-wing Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, now expelled from the party, is in the process of setting up a new one. Provisionally called Your Party, it brings together other former Labour MPs and the independents who won seats in the election on pro-Palestinian platforms. Corbyn declared that 750,000 people had signed up for membership in its first month, but just a few weeks later the party had already had its first split, its founding MPs falling out over both policy and leadership issues.

The new party has still not held its promised first member conference, but Corbyn’s name recognition means that it cannot be ruled out as a serious threat to Labour’s urban support. In a recent poll, one in five Britons said that they would consider voting for the new party, including one in three young people.

All this has left the Labour Party in a serious funk. No newly elected government has ever seen its poll ratings fall as far and fast as this one, and few prime ministers have been as personally unpopular as Keir Starmer. (His net approval rating is now minus 44 per cent.) On the doorstep, Labour activists report a startling dislike, frequently contempt, for the prime minister. At Labour’s party conference the fractious mood spilled over into outright rebellion.

The popular Labour mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, a cabinet minister under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, roamed the fringe meetings and gave newspaper interviews criticising Starmer’s leadership and making clear that, given a chance, he would like the top job. In an upcoming party election for deputy leader, Labour members are almost certain to choose a close supporter of Burnham’s over Starmer’s candidate, an ominous warning to the prime minister.

Starmer can take comfort from the fact that Burnham, who is not a MP, can’t currently stand for the leadership (and Starmer supporters pack the party’s National Executive Committee, which chooses parliamentary candidates, so he can easily be blocked from running). But discontent with Starmer within his own party is now out in the open, and an alternative leader awaits.

These rumblings will almost certainly come to a head after next May’s elections for the devolved parliaments in Wales and Scotland, and in many English local councils. If the polls remain largely unchanged — and the government still has to get through what will almost certainly be an extremely unpopular and manifesto-breaking budget in November, when a large fiscal hole will have to be plugged by raising taxes — the party is heading for an almighty defeat.

The bloodiest carnage looks as if it will be in Wales, where Labour has led the devolved government since it was founded in 1998. Traditionally its main challenger has been the small but vigorous Welsh Nationalist party, Plaid Cymru. No longer: current polls have Reform and Plaid neck and neck on around 30 per cent, with Labour far behind on 14 per cent. The elections could give Nigel Farage his first serious taste of government, and a sickening humiliation for Labour.

In the Scottish parliament, where the Scottish Nationalist SNP has been the governing party since 2007, Labour won a majority of Westminster seats in the 2024 general election. But here too its popularity has since plummeted. From a 35 per cent vote share at the election, Labour now polls at around 23 per cent. The SNP remains on around 31 per cent, and is projected to be the largest party in the new parliament. Reform has more than doubled its vote share from 7 per cent to 16 per cent.

And in the English local elections, also next May, Reform could top the poll, taking further seats and councils from both Labour and the Tories.

What happens then? Constitutionally, nothing: Keir Starmer still has a huge majority of 148 seats in parliament, and he doesn’t have to call a general election till August 2029. He has plenty of time to get the economy moving, see inflation come down and improve public services, a combination that in normal times would be enough to ensure victory for a first-term government. His problem is that these do not feel like normal times. •

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The Murdoch family trust was created in 1999 during Rupert’s divorce from his second wife, Anna, and not long before he married his third, Wendi Deng. It sought to prevent Rupert’s four children from losing their inheritances to any other children he might father. Rupert controlled four of eight shares, and each of his four oldest children were given one each.

But the problem preoccupying the patriarch and his older son, Lachlan, in recent years has not been the threat from new arrivals but a conflict with the other three beneficiaries of the trust. After Rupert dies, they feared, James, Elisabeth and Prudence could well join together to out-vote Lachlan and dilute or change the editorial direction of the company’s media.

In December 2023 Rupert and Lachlan sought to change the “irrevocable” trust to ensure Lachlan’s ongoing control. The court, however, gave a clear victory to Lachlan’s siblings. The struggles continued: “For the Murdoch family,” the New York Times reported last month, “the last nine months have been filled with a flurry of warring sealed briefs, secret buyout negotiations and ever-mounting legal fees — some fifty lawyers are listed on the case docket — as they fought one final battle.”

That battle ended with a settlement bringing all outstanding litigation to an end. The three siblings, referred to in the trial as “the objecting children,” now became “the departing beneficiaries.” They will each receive $US1.1 billion, around 80 per cent of the current share value, and must resign from the trust. According to the Fox Corporation announcement, “They will be subject to a long-term standstill agreement [reported to be twelve years] preventing them, and their affiliates, from acquiring shares of Fox and News Corporation and taking certain other actions with respect to the companies.”

Those “certain other actions” have not been revealed but probably include a bar on investing in News Corp’s competitors and perhaps a pledge not to disparage the company’s activities, which would inhibit any public criticism of Fox News, for example.

James, Elisabeth and Prudence walk away not only with huge fortunes but also having escaped what would have been an all-but-impossible managerial challenge. How, for instance, would you turn Fox News into a more honest and professional news organisation? Any attempt would probably see an exodus of its audience to one of the other right-wing broadcasters, with a negative impact on the bottom line.

For Rupert the issue was also one of legacy:  “Fox and our papers are the only faintly conservative voices against the monolithic liberal media,” he wrote in 2022. “I believe maintaining this is vital to the future of the English-speaking world.”

Securing control of the empire cost Lachlan and Rupert much more than it might have because their hamfisted strategy sharpened the lines of conflict in the family and locked in the other three siblings more solidly against Lachlan. After the verdict, their bargaining position also became much stronger.

Initially, the highest price Lachlan was prepared to pay for their exit was 60 per cent of the value of their shares, which they refused. Now he has paid around 80 pe cent of a much higher share price.

Will that extra expense have larger consequences? Raising $US3.3 billion — by selling shares and by taking out a loan — is a big task even for the Murdochs.

The empire has long been notorious for its dual-voting structure, which has given the family more than 40 per cent of the vote with fewer than 20 per cent of the total shares. The share sell-off potentially makes their control more vulnerable. At the moment they own 41 per cent of News Corp voting shares and 43 per cent of Fox voting shares. With the sale, the proportions will fall to 33 per cent and 36 per cent respectively.

That reduction isn’t likely to matter in the short-term. Shareholders are presumably happy with Lachlan’s leadership, and the value of both companies has been rising. Fox shares, selling at about $30 share in 2014, now change hands for $56.81; News Corp’s, around $17 in 2014, are now $33.97.

But if things go sour for any reason in the coming years, Lachlan could be vulnerable. The founder and builder of an empire enjoys a status and reputation that isn’t simply inherited by his successor. Nor does Lachlan show any sign of encouraging a more informed and vigorous board: when Jack Nassar, former chair of BHP and global chief executive of Ford, stepped down recently, he was replaced by Tony Abbott, who has never sat on a public board and has very limited commercial experience.

There have already been moments when Rupert has not always got his own way. In 2023 shareholders decisively blocked his attempt to re-merge the two wings of his media empire, which had been split following the phone-hacking scandal in Britain.

In the closest vote on the future of the dual-voting structure, in 2017, 90 per cent of non-Murdoch family shareholders voted to overturn the system (diluted to 49.5 per cent by the dual-voting system). With the trust’s recently reduced voting share, the non-Murdoch vote would have made up a majority. Although any such victory would be non-binding, it would have been an acute embarrassment, and would probably have eventually forced change.

But the real powder keg, according to Sydney Morning Herald business writer Colin Kruger, is the $US1 billion J.P. Morgan loan that will help cover the payout to the three siblings. The loan is secured against the Murdoch trust’s share in each of the empire’s businesses, so if things go badly wrong at any point family control will be over. Even now, such a large debt may inhibit the company from pursuing opportunities that require cash up front.

As it happened, such an opportunity beckoned even before the ink was dry on the family trust settlement. President Donald Trump offered Fox a place in a consortium he was organising to buy the US assets of TikTok, the world’s fastest-growing social medium. The short-form video channel carries a huge array of material — sports, entertainment, news and opinion — pitched at younger users and claims more than a billion worldwide visitors each month.

TikTok is owned by a Chinese company, ByteDance, in which the Chinese government has a “golden share” that gives it a veto over business decisions and the right to seek information from it. Many Western democracies see this link as a potential threat to national security.

The Biden administration argued that the channel, with 170 million US users, could be used by China to boost propaganda and undermine free expression. After securing considerable bipartisan support, Biden signed a law requiring ByteDance to sell its US assets to an American owner or have it banned in the United States.

Although Trump tried but failed to ban TikTok during his first term, but then reversed his stance and repeatedly pledged to save TikTok. The reason is not hard to find: he had become “a big star” on the app, and TikTok users who get their news from the site were one of the groups that swung most his way in last year’s election.

Where Biden worried about national security, Trump saw an opportunity for patronage. One of the four executive orders he signed on the first day of his presidency was a direction not to enforce Biden’s TikTok law. The following month he created a US sovereign wealth fund whose first investment would be in TikTok.

Two invited guests — Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle, one of America’s richest men and a strong Trump supporter, and Rupert Murdoch — watched him sign the order. They are among the half dozen American figures named as part of the group Trump is assembling. The US-owned TikTok will have a seven-person board, comprising national and cybersecurity experts. Six will be American; ByteDance will choose the seventh.

This is crony capitalism at its most blatant. Trump will essentially choose who the American participants will be. “Larry Ellison is one of them. He’s involved. This great guy, Michael Dell” — chief executive of Dell Technologies — “is involved. I hate to tell you this, but a man named Lachlan is involved. Do you know who Lachlan is?” Trump told Fox News. “And Rupert is probably going to be in the group.” They’re “American patriots,” he said. “They love this country. I think they’re going to do a really good job.” He also joked that he would like it to see lots of MAGA content on TikTok.

In return, participants in the new TikTok will have what amounts to a government-guaranteed cash cow. But the ticket to be a passenger on this lucrative gravy train is likely to be expensive. Trump has made clear “that he wants investors in the TikTok divestiture to pay the US government a ‘tremendous fee-plus’ for arranging it,” reported the New Yorker’s John Cassidy. Vice-president J.D. Vance has said the US company will be valued at around $14 billion (possibly “lowballing” TikTok’s value as a favour to friendly investors like Ellison and Murdoch). Others have estimated $30–$40 billion.

Putting considerations of corruption to one side, this is clearly a great investment opportunity. Can the Murdoch empire, with its newly acquired debt, afford to buy in? And will the commitments Lachlan incurred to free himself of his troublesome siblings inhibit what else he can do in the next few years? •

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“We’re brothers, we help one another,” the Israeli prime minister replied. “You recognise a truth that everybody should recognise, but few governments have so far — that this has been our capital for 3000 years, since the days of King David.”

According to Israeli foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar, “we have an alliance of believers between Jews and Christians, based on deep faith and biblical roots. We are opening a new, historic chapter in our relations.”

Fiji’s recent diplomatic support for Israel contrasts with international condemnation of Israeli policy in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. Just before Rabuka inaugurated the embassy, a UN commission of inquiry concluded that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. And he’s far from the only Pacific leader to throw their support behind Israel.

Netanyahu’s welcome to Rabuka highlights his own international isolation since the International Criminal Court’s decision to issue an arrest warrant for the Israeli leader. Successive US presidents have welcomed Netanyahu to Washington, and he has been feted by congressional leaders, yet his arrest warrant alleges “war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare and of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”

So why do so many Pacific island leaders stand with a man accused of genocide and crimes against humanity, and a nation at war with Palestinians and itself?

Rabuka was in Israel the week after the fifty-fourth Pacific Islands Forum leaders meeting. Gathered in Solomon Islands between 8–12 September, regional leaders had adopted a declaration recognising the Blue Pacific as an “Ocean of Peace.” The concept was first proposed by Rabuka, who reiterated the importance of regional solidarity, non-alignment and collective security in a 2023 address to the UN General Assembly.

As he welcomed the launch of the Ocean of Peace Declaration in Honiara on 10 September, Rabuka stressed: “The world knows that we, the Pasifika people, mean business and it starts here with us.” But for many Pacific church and community leaders, this rhetoric is undercut by support for Israel’s unremitting attack on Palestinians, even though US president Donald Trump has called for an end to Israeli military operations in Gaza under a new peace deal announced this month.

During the Forum meeting, the Pacific Conference of Churches, or PCC, called on Pacific governments to “safeguard civilians; support an enforceable ceasefire and humanitarian access; pursue accountability under international law and refrain from actions that pre-judge final status issues; recognise Palestine; and invest in a just peace worthy of our Ocean of Peace.” The PCC unites thirty-five national denominations and eleven National Councils of Churches across the region.

“We have to be clear,” says the PCC’s general secretary, Reverend James Bhagwan. “If we are to be gathering at a time talking about an ‘Ocean of Peace,’ we cannot talk about peace in our region and then support people who do war, do murder and do harm on others.”

Palestine is not high on the Forum’s agenda, but after the Hamas attacks and hostage-taking of 7 October 2023, the debate could not be avoided.

Pacific leaders gathered the following month in Rarotonga, Cook Islands, at the 52nd Pacific Islands Forum. Mobilised by the early reports of civilian casualties during Israel’s reprisals in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, Cook Islands women rallied outside the November 2023 Forum, with a banner calling on Pacific leaders to “please condemn the killing of displaced Palestinians and God’s innocent children in Gaza.”

Israel retained widespread community support after 7 October 2023, drawing on historic traditions of Christian Zionism. Since then, however, civil society groups across the Pacific islands’ region — from Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands to Fiji, Tonga, Sāmoa and New Caledonia — have protested against the Israeli massacre in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. Through petitions, vigils and rallies, activists have condemned Israel’s attacks in Gaza, and criticised the death of Palestinian civilians and non-combatants. Though small, the diversity, reach and passion of these protests is unprecedented in the islands, as elsewhere across the globe.

For Reverend Bhagwan, the crisis in the Middle East has been a moral turning point, in a world torn apart by geopolitical competition and government attacks on human rights and international law. “We grieve every life taken and reject every hatred — antisemitism, anti–Arab racism, and Islamophobia. We pray for and accompany Palestinian Christians and all communities affected by violence. Peace requires justice, reconciliation requires truth, security requires equal rights and the end of collective punishment and occupation.”

For many years, Western powers followed US policy to defer recognition of Palestine, but Israel’s massacre and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza and provocations in the West Bank have broken the dam. At last month’s eightieth session of the UN General Assembly, ten Western states (France, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Portugal, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Andorra and Belgium) announced recognition of Palestinian statehood.

While welcoming their belated decision, many civil society groups have pushed governments to back their rhetoric with concrete action, through sanctions on the Netanyahu government and an end to arms sales to Israel. But such sentiments are often a minority opinion across the Pacific islands.

Support for Israel among conservative Christians has been boosted by groups such as the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem. Established in 1980, the ICEJ claims to represent evangelical Christians around the world “who stand with Israel and the Jewish people based on biblical principles and promises.” ICEJ has branches in ninety countries, including five in Oceania (Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Sāmoa and Cook Islands).

PCC’s James Bhagwan acknowledges the support for Israel among many Pacific Christians, but says: “The Pacific Conference of Churches is very concerned about the narratives around Christian Zionism that are being pushed, to gain political traction around the Pacific for the support of Israel. But it is wrong theology — it is theology being twisted for political purposes. It’s the same when theology gets twisted for ethnonationalism, for racism, or as an excuse to neglect or even harm the marginalised communities in our region.”

Across the region, only Vanuatu has formally recognised Palestinian statehood. Other states have provided diplomatic support to Israel for decades. For some governments, this public commitment has deep roots: in line with US policy, the Federated States of Micronesia has not cast a single UN vote critical of Israeli policy in the past ten years.

As he was sworn in to office in September 2025, Sāmoa’s incoming prime minister Laaulialemalietoa Leuatea Polataivao Fosi Schmidt said Sāmoa was founded as a nation under the “God of Israel.” Leuatea wore a scarf with the colours of the Israeli flag, and held a shofar, the ram’s horn used in Jewish rituals. Years ago, Leuatea was baptised in the Jordan River and, assuming office, he pledged: “I stand for Israel, the land of God. It doesn’t matter if the entire world is unhappy about it, that’s up to them, but Sāmoa will stand with the land of God.”

Some governments have also cracked down on pro-Palestine protests. In Fiji, police have refused permits for Palestine support rallies, even as marches for Israel have been approved. The carrying of Palestinian flags and symbols has been banned at some events.

At a time of diplomatic isolation, Israel has welcomed the votes of Pacific governments in the UN General Assembly. At the start of the current crisis in October 2023, the vote on a General Assembly resolution for humanitarian assistance to Palestinians passed 124–14. Six of the fourteen No votes came from Pacific Island states. A resolution in June 2024 calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza was overwhelmingly approved, with 149 countries voting in favour. Of the twelve states that voted against the resolution, seven — Fiji, Federated States of Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Tonga and Tuvalu — were Pacific nations.

In February this year, Fiji’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations Filipo Tarakinikini delivered an oral submission to the International Court of Justice urging the court refuse a UN General Assembly request for a non-binding ruling on the legality of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories. Fiji’s former Labour prime minister Mahendra Chaudhry, deposed in a 2000 coup, noted that “Fiji is the only country, aside from the United States, to lend support to Israel in the current proceedings. To end this decades-old conflict, majority world opinion favours the Palestinians getting their occupied territories back, with full recognition as an independent sovereign state.”

On 12 September, the UN General Assembly voted 142–10 to adopt a resolution on the peaceful settlement of the question of Palestine  and the implementation of the two-state solution. Following the usual pattern, six of the ten No votes came from Pacific island states, with Fiji and Sāmoa also abstaining. Less than a week later, prime minister Rabuka flew to Jerusalem to open Fiji’s embassy.

Palestinians have long argued that East Jerusalem should be the capital of an independent Palestinian state. The status of Jerusalem has been contested under international law since Israel occupied the city during the 1967 war. In 1980 UN Security Council Resolution 478 reaffirmed that East Jerusalem is an occupied territory and called on all UN member states to withdraw diplomatic missions from the city.

This policy was maintained until 2017, when Donald Trump recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and announced the relocation of the US embassy from Tel Aviv. The Trump administration was isolated in a 14–1 vote at the UN Security Council, but the resolution that criticised the decision was vetoed by America’s then UN ambassador Nikki Haley.

In a subsequent emergency meeting of the UN General Assembly — a rare occasion — UN members voted 128–35 to ask nations not to establish diplomatic missions in Jerusalem. Only seven other countries joined the United States and Israel to vote against the resolution, including four island nations. Papua New Guinea voted in favour of this resolution — only to change its policy six years later. In 2023 PNG prime minister James Marape announced that his nation would open an embassy in Jerusalem, recognising it as Israel’s capital.

“For the first three years, the nation of Israel is paying for the cost of the embassy,” Marape told the ABC. “But going forward, they’ve indicated land available for us and we look forward to proceeding, setting up our permanent mission there.” The PNG government had made a “conscious choice,” he said. “This has been the universal capital of the nation and people of Israel. For us to call ourselves Christian, paying respect to God will not be possible without recognising that Jerusalem is the universal capital of the people and nation of Israel.”

In October 2024, the Israel Knesset legislated to prohibit consulates rather than embassies being established in Jerusalem. By then, the United States had been followed by Honduras, Guatemala, Kosovo, the Czech Republic, Papua New Guinea and Paraguay to open embassies in Jerusalem.

First floated at a 2023 meeting between Rabuka and Netanyahu, the Fiji government’s decision to open an embassy in Jerusalem sparked anger amongst church and civil society groups. Fiji’s NGO Coalition on Human Rights said Rabuka was “callously ignoring the unfolding famine and mass starvation in Gaza that is being deliberately orchestrated by the state of Israel.” Leading feminist Shamima Ali, chair of the NGO Coalition, condemned the Fiji delegation for standing alongside Netanyahu, “who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes, including starvation as a method of warfare and crimes against humanity.”

Rabuka, in turn, condemned her remarks, but also took aim at the leading daily Fiji Times for reporting them: “It is unbecoming of the major newspaper of an emerging power in the Pacific.” Editor-in-chief Fred Wesley responded: “While many people in Fiji venerate Israel and Mr Netanyahu, it is very important that we all understand that much of the world does not see them in a good light. Much of the world agrees with the view that the NGO Coalition has expressed. It is important that we all know this fact and reflect on it.”

Israel is one of six nations that has an application pending for Dialogue Partner status with the Pacific Islands Forum (a relationship that currently links twenty-one countries — the United States, China, France and Japan among them — with the eighteen-member regional organisation).

Alongside Ukraine and Saudi Arabia, Israel wants the partnership status that gives access to the annual Forum summit of regional leaders. But all Dialogue Partner applications were frozen in late 2023, pending a new partnership policy that would determine which countries actively support Forum policies and priorities, compared to those mainly hunting for UN votes.

As the diplomatic tide turns, and the International Court of Justice continues its investigation into presumed genocide in Gaza, the Netanyahu government is expending diplomatic capital to reinforce the shrinking number of countries that will support it in the United Nations. In a statement on 21 August, Israel’s foreign ministry announced that Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel will prepare an official tour of Pacific Island states, including Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Nauru, Palau, Tuvalu and Tonga, which support Israel and the United States at the United Nations.

Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar said his deputy “will lead the delegation to engage in discussions aimed at deepening and advancing Israel–Pacific relations in a wide range of bilateral, multilateral, and strategic fields.” Scheduled for this month, the tour reflects “Israel’s profound appreciation for the Pacific Island states and underscores Israel’s commitment to strengthening cooperation with them.”

This debate will continue until there is a ceasefire and political settlement in Gaza, and civil society organisations across the Pacific will maintain their pressure on their governments.

“Regarding the plans by some Pacific countries to shift embassies from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, we counsel restraint,” said PCC’s Reverend James Bhagwan. “Such moves sit uneasily with our Ocean of Peace vision and with international law. We urge governments to avoid steps that pre-ajudge Jerusalem’s final status or normalise ongoing violations. Keep missions in Tel Aviv until a just and negotiated settlement is reached.” •

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Taking refuge, like many others, in a bomb shelter, I followed news of a massive wave of drones moving westward across Ukraine. Soon, news channels were reporting that several had crossed into Poland and Rzeszów airport, in Poland’s southeast, had been closed for security reasons. By early morning, news reached us that airports in Warsaw and Lublin had also been shut down.

The fact that many of the drones were unarmed didn’t lessen their significance. Some recent Western intelligence sources have suggested that they may simply have been sent off their course by Ukraine’s jamming — a theory also advanced by intelligence sources in Russia’s ally, Belarus — but events since then strongly suggest the incursions were deliberate.

Experts note that Russia could have been targeting Poland strategically to disrupt logistical support for Ukraine, given that Poland’s border regions are crucial transport arteries. The drones’ route followed logistics corridors to Ukraine, particularly targeting Rzeszów airport, a vital hub for military and humanitarian aid. By threatening Poland, Russia could also be seeking to undermine NATO’s credibility and pressure Kyiv towards unrealistic peace talks. Equally troubling, Russia has now tested NATO’s response times and decision-making processes, exposing vulnerabilities it could exploit in the near future.

Later that week, on 13 September, Russian drones crossed into Romania. Moscow dismissed them as “unidentified flying objects.” Romanian F-16s tracked them but did not engage. Then, on 19 September, Russian fighter jets breached Estonian airspace, lingering twelve minutes before Italian jets responded. Estonia has now also invoked Article 4, another sign of growing alarm.

Equally ominously, Russian and Belarusian forces have launched a series of Zapad-2025 (West-2025) military training drills near Lithuania’s border. Does anyone still remember the similar drills on Ukraine’s border in December 2021 — drills that supposedly “meant nothing”? It is now a rhetorical question: ask Ukrainians who are still fighting and living through this war.

The danger lies not only in the drones themselves but also in the political hesitancy they have highlighted across Europe. Ukraine’s experience should be a warning: the danger signs began with Russia’s unidentified “green men” in Crimea in 2014 and continued with the so-called “hybrid war” in Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions. They culminated in the West’s slow response to Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion in 2022. Each time, the caution emboldened the aggressor, becoming a weakness.

Yet many European and world politicians remain reluctant to acknowledge this. Such blindness is dangerous: what starts as an incident involving “unidentified drones” or an “unintentional” violation of airspace could escalate into a mass-scale strike on critical infrastructure, government buildings and the peaceful population sleeping at night.

Although Polish authorities initially referred to the drones as “objects,” their attitude hardened the following day. The government declared a no-fly zone within thirteen kilometres of the Ukrainian border, closed the border with Belarus, and imposed airspace restrictions in Poland’s eastern regions until 9 December. Prime minister Donald Tusk told parliament that the country faced an “enemy that did not hide its hostile intentions” and his government invoked Article 4 of the NATO Treaty, requesting security guarantees. An important step, yes — but it comes in the fourth year of Russia’s full-scale war in neighbouring Ukraine. Poland also successfully requested an emergency session of the UN Security Council to discuss the violation of its airspace.

Polish authorities have since announced that their anti-drone units will receive training in Ukraine, drawing on the extensive experience accumulated by military forces there. But is this enough, given Russia’s history of aggression and its capacity to send up to 500 drones per day in the near future?

Among the incident’s other consequences was the activation of high-level NATO discussions and public statements. Member states quickly realised that one of their allies could be under threat. Yet no decisive action followed — not for NATO’s collective protection, not even in the form of additional sanctions or clear deadlines.

Poland’s foreign minister Radosław Sikorski floated the idea that NATO should begin shooting down Russian drones over Ukrainian territory. Russia immediately declared that such a move would mean open war with NATO. This is hardly the first time Moscow has issued such an ultimatum: it has threatened war against NATO if its members sent weapons to Ukraine or if Ukraine attacked targets inside Russia — both “red lines” that have since been crossed. The real question is why the option of intercepting drones over Ukraine was not discussed seriously well before those nineteen drones entered Poland. How many Ukrainian lives could have been saved?

This is precisely the moment to recognise the shift in Russia’s war against Ukraine: it is no longer contained within Ukrainian borders but has already become a war against Europe. Russia is testing NATO, probing the defences of its member states, and signalling its imperialistic view that no Eastern European country is beyond reach. Whether Europe treats this as a wake-up call or another passing headline may shape the continent’s security for years to come.

NATO’s and Poland’s “concerns” have continued to mount. What comes next, and at what scale, if Russian drones can target Poland’s capital, where one of last week’s drones was shot down — something few could have imagined when missiles, bombs and drones first began falling over Kyiv?

Is Poland ready for hybrid or even full-scale war with Russia? Is Europe? The evidence suggests otherwise. Of the nineteen drones, only four were destroyed in the air. Former Polish president Andrzej Duda conceded Poland lacks adequate counter-drone systems, relying instead on aircraft interception, an inefficient and outdated response to the speed and scale of the modern drone warfare.

Looking back ten days later, the separate incursions appear to have been part of a series of well-planned acts of hybrid warfare. For three and a half years, Ukraine has borne the brunt of Russia’s full-scale war. Now the focus has shifted westward. Russia is probing NATO’s weak points, testing whether symbolic gestures and verbal reassurances will continue substituting for real defence measures. So far, neither Poland, Romania nor Estonia has responded decisively.

As Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky stressed, these are systematic actions demanding a systematic, collective response. At this week’s emergency UN Security Council session, Sikorsky foreshadowed that any Russian missile or aircraft entering NATO airspace “either deliberately or by mistake” would be shot down. The European Union is preparing to meet with Ukraine and other Eastern European countries to discuss the creation of a “drone wall” along its eastern border, but experts warn that building such defence system might take at least a year.

Will Europe and NATO be ready for the next “incursion”? What role will the United States take in shaping collective security along the eastern borders of NATO? Why, despite support for Ukraine’s war effort, has nothing been done over the past three and a half years to prepare for such an eventuality, especially given the murderous, mass-scale, drone attacks already carried out against Ukraine? Why was Europe not been more concerned by the hundreds of armed drones flying daily over the heads of Ukrainians?

The uncomfortable truth is that NATO countries have not adequately prepared for such incidents, nor learned from Ukraine’s hard-earned experience in countering drone warfare. With limited resources, Ukraine has already developed a layered, adaptive defence system. NATO states, with much greater political and economic means, lag behind. Unless Europe, Ukraine and NATO work quickly on political unity, coordinating defence systems, and rapid decision-making, the question will not be whether but when Russia escalates further against NATO infrastructure — and how devastating its consequences will be for Europe and especially for Ukraine. •

The post Russia tests the boundaries appeared first on Inside Story.

They do so from positions of authority. Both authors, one on the American side and the other on the Palestinian, have been embroiled in peace efforts for more than a generation. Each in his own way has concluded that talk of a two-state solution in present circumstances is unhelpful since it conveys an impression that constructive efforts towards peace are being made when, at best, the issue is being fudged.

In an interview with National Public Radio, Malley says that “at bottom, the US spoke one language but did not really put its effort where it said it wanted to go” when it sought to promote Middle East peace. Agha, in the same interview, was more direct, describing the pursuit of Middle East peace as a “fake process” doomed by “a combination of illusions, delusions, lies, noise, missteps [and] misreadings.”

Given their respective roles — Malley as an adviser in Bill Clinton’s Camp David process, Agha on the Palestinian side — their individual and joint disappointment is understandable. They have reluctantly concluded that until and unless an American administration commits itself to a peaceful outcome there is little or no chance of a breakthrough. Indeed, things may get worse, if that is possible.

In other words, a two-state solution will remain an illusion fostered by Western leaders as a bromide for the hard decisions required to force a settlement.

Looking back to the Oslo process in 1993, which momentarily raised hopes of a breakthrough in Israeli–Palestine relations, the utterly depressing reality is that peace is now more distant than ever. The handshake on the lawn of Clinton’s White House between Israel’s prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was a high point in Middle East peacemaking.

That was September 1993, thirty-two years ago.

Under Oslo, the two sides were to work towards the creation of a Palestinian state, but Rabin’s assassination in 1995 by an Israeli zealot opposed to peace effectively put an end to a chapter in which a two-state solution might, just conceivably, have become a reality.

It is impossible to exaggerate the role of Rabin’s death in the rise of the Israeli nationalist settler right, and on the Palestinian side in the emergence of Hamas and its affiliates as a destructive element in a blood-drenched equation.

In hindsight, Rabin’s death should have put an end to illusions about Middle East peace based on the Oslo formula. But the illusion persisted, fostered by Clinton himself, who believed that by force of his own personality he could bring the parties together at Camp David in 2000, and again at Taba, Egypt, in 2001. Those efforts foundered for lack of will on both sides, along with poor preparation by Clinton’s Middle East team and divisions within the Palestinians leadership.

A quarter of a century after the last of those efforts, the world remains stuck in a two-state paradigm, even if circumstances could hardly be less propitious, with Israel proceeding with its war of annihilation in Gaza and its undermining of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and an American administration more aligned with Israel’s expansionist aims than its predecessors.

This invites the question: what is the point of the coming week’s UN debate, in which multiple countries, including Australia, will recognise Palestinian statehood and proclaim their commitment to a two-state solution? Such gestures will sound noble, even principled, but what will change in practice?

The short answer is not much, if anything. Countries like Australia will content themselves with having entered a protest against what is happening in the Gaza Strip and in the West Bank, where Jewish settlers are running riot.

In response to UN pressures, Israel and its Washington ally may well use international opprobrium to push even harder for a process that forestalls any hope for the Palestinians, even as Israel continues to pursue its annexationist policies in territories occupied in war. While this plays itself out it will become even clearer that references to a two-state solution are, if not illusory, then a pretext for avoiding difficult decisions that could exert real pressure on the protagonists.

Mention of a two-state solution obviates a need to talk about economic sanctions or restrictions on transfers of the military equipment that enables Israel to continue its destruction of Gaza, street-by-street, building-by-building, enclave-by-enclave. Leaders of countries like Australia will return home having lent their names to resolutions that will do little or nothing to alter the status quo.

If it does anything, the week will draw attention to various failed Middle East peace initiatives that litter the historical landscape like rusting ordnance in the desert — going right back to the British government’s Peel Commission in 1937, which first formulated a “two-state solution.”

The Peel Commission actually recommended two-and-a-bit states, one Jewish, one Palestinian, the “bit” being an enclave under international supervision that would incorporate the holy places of Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Its plan was laid to rest by Britain in 1938 after a furious reaction from the Arab residents of Palestine under the British mandate.

Key moments since then include the 1947 UN partition plan, with its fateful consequences for world peace; UN Security Council Resolutions 242 in 1967 and 338 in 1973, which effectively defined two states by calling on Israeli to withdraw to its pre-1967 war boundaries; the Palestine Liberation Organization’s tacit acceptance of Israel’s existence via its acknowledgement in 1988 of various UN resolutions; the Oslo process of 1993, which involved explicit PLO recognition of Israel’s right to exist; and, as mentioned, Clinton’s stumbling 2000 Camp David peace efforts.

In Tomorrow is Yesterday, Malley and Agha offer little hope that anything approaching peace might be in prospect. They canvass various possibilities, including a binational state in which Jews and Palestinians reside as equals within the same territory. This is about as likely to happen as Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the UN’s outspoken rapporteur on Palestine, Francesca Albanese, becoming reconciled.

Another suggestion they canvass is for a Palestinian territory to join — or re-join — Jordan in a federation. This would involve a highly unlikely return to the future, since Jordan relinquished its claims to Palestine in 1988.

The bleak conclusion is that until and unless a US administration force feeds a peace process not much constructive will happen. Of course, this will not prevent leaders of Western democracies like Australia proclaiming their adherence to a two-state solution as the holy grail of the Middle East peacemaking in the absence of a better idea, or worse, as a substitute for tackling the issues involved. This would include accepting a UN report that Israel is breaching the terms of the Genocide Convention in Gaza.

You can be sure this is terrain, stretching all the way back to the Oslo Accords of 1993, that Anthony Albanese and foreign minister Penny Wong will be reluctant to traverse. As Robert Malley puts it “something has gone terribly wrong in the [past] thirty-two years.” •

The post Two-state illusions appeared first on Inside Story.

Yet the cheerful young soldiers enjoying beautiful weather didn’t have much to do apart from chat and laugh with their fellow citizens. An optimistic view is that Trump’s authoritarianism tends to be performative, a “secondhand reproduction of the strongman aesthetic of other strongman states” as one commentator described it.

Sending in the troops is meant to signal power and control. Yet many locals saw it as a lesser example of the president’s peccadillos. The mild response reflects America’s reverence for its military and for the office of president, whatever the nature of the man at the top.

In a town obsessed by politics, power and policy, the president’s personality always matters. Trump is using his power to pulverise Washington, pole-axing government departments and budgets and pushing thousands of public servants out the door. Trump supporters believe the president acts to smash the “deep state”; Washington sees more nihilistic destruction than policy purpose.

Trump as the rampager from New York was given sporting expression at the baseball when I saw the New York Mets thrash the Washington Nationals at the start of a three-match series. The Nationals won the series 2–1 over the following nights, so the deeper symbolism is the capital’s resilience. (Beyond sports razzmatazz, baseball is the natural setting for a hotdog with the lot, an American culinary masterpiece only beaten by crabcake in a diner. Always with beer.)

For Trump, bashing Washington is as American as apple pie. Americans are even more jaundiced about Washington than Australians are about Canberra. The way Americans distrust their government drew this lament fifty years ago from one of the nation’s great chroniclers: “I do find curious and disturbing the constant hatred of government which is of course a hatred of themselves.”

The sage was the writer Gore Vidal (1925–2012), who grew up in Washington, where he lived with his grandfather, a US senator. Vidal’s fascination with politics saw him stand for election to both the US House of Representatives and Senate, and produce a seven-novel series, Narratives of a Golden Age, tracking America’s history from 1775 to the cold war.

Seeking to understand Trump’s place in that history, I reached for Vidal’s 1300-page brick of a book, United States: Essays, collecting his reporting and commentaries from 1952 to 1992.

Vidal would be fascinated and infuriated by President Trump, just as he was by Richard Nixon (one of his plays was An Evening with Richard Nixon). Vidal saw Nixon as “too gorgeous and outsize an American figure for any contemporary to put into a clear perspective.” That’s Trump to a capital “T,” gorgeously gaudy and as outrageous as he is outsized.

As he demonstrated in an essay on Nixon, Vidal would applaud the “No Kings” protests against Trump’s regal pretensions. While the sovereign of Britain was known to her subjects as Our Queen, he wrote, “the emperor of the West is known to us aficionados as The Goddamned President.” Vidal mused that the US president “is ours in a way that the Queen is not England’s, because she was invented by history, while Nixon made himself up, with a lot of help from all of us. As individuals, the presidents are accidental; but as types, they are inevitable and represent, God help us, us. We are Nixon; he is us.”

Now there’s a thought for any American to contemplate: “We are Trump; he is us.”

Pondering such an equation, Vidal wrote, “the fact that Nixon was corrupt some of the time, and complex and devious all of the time, is constantly emphasised in order to make him appear uniquely sleezy — and the rest of us just grand. Yet Nixon is hardly atypical. Certainly his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, far surpassed Nixon when it came to mendacity and corruption… Actually, corruption has been more the rule than the exception in US political life.”

In Trump, Vidal would see the same sense of personal grievance that Nixon brought to politics, and the same eagerness to use the government to go after all the hated enemies. Rough language and vicious politics can express paranoia as well as serve authoritarian aims.

Vidal called Nixon “an infamous man who has done great deeds for his country” by striking a detente with the Soviet Union and embracing China. Using that infamous-man/great-deeds standard, Vidal would find much to applaud in Trumpworld. He would disdain the red Make America Great Again cap, but his essays advocated MAGA policies; he would detest the Trump personality but embrace his America First vision. Indeed, Vidal was arguing American First long before Trump decided politics was a great business opportunity.

Vidal thought America should fix its own problems, not those of other countries. Dismantle the National Security State and the military-industrial complex. Abandon the “American empire.” Junk military alliances and fight no more foreign wars. Vietnam’s enduring lesson, he thought, was that “we have no right to intervene militarily in the affairs of another nation.”

Shunning great power responsibilities would be a turn towards America’s economic interests. Like Trump, Vidal thought America best served itself by making a profit out of foreign friends and foes. Vidal pinpointed a key moment of decline as 1985, when America became an international debtor nation: “Like most modern empires, ours rested not so much on military prowess as on our economic primacy.”

Vidal’s deep distrust for America’s vast military establishment meant his simple recipe for budget repair was to slash defence spending. Reared in the isolationist tradition, he saw the second world war as the moment when America opted to become a garrison state. By the 1990s, Vidal wrote, old isolationist arguments were alive again. Referring to what is now the Trump dichotomy, Vidal said Americans divide “between those who think America comes first versus those who favour empire and the continued exertion of force everywhere in the name of democracy, something not much on display here at home.”

Today the foreign policy commentators lament how Trump is dismantling the tools of diplomacy and abandoning alliances so the US can stand alone. For Vidal, that would redeem much else about Trump’s crassness.

As Vidal portrayed US history in his Golden Age books, the land of the free and the home of the brave has always mixed crude politics with soaring rhetoric. Trump is just one more character in the cacophonous cavalcade of American leaders — a cavalcade with lots of conniving and corruption mixed with the conviction and the courage.

Vidal would salute Trump’s political career as “one of the most interesting events of our time” (a line he used about Nixon). He would see Trump not as an aberration but an exuberant expression of the way America always does politics.

The Vidal-flavoured bumper sticker for Americans is that judgement, both gleeful and ironic: Trump is us. This sharpest of shafts rests on the optimism of a writer who loved America for all its faults. The “us” of America is always greater than even its strongest presidents. And America will absorb and then outgrow Trump as it has all its leaders. •

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Some of the similarities are obvious. On both occasions, violence by security forces caused protests to escalate. In 1998, the shooting of students at Jakarta’s Trisakti University triggered mass rioting, generating the final crisis that forced Suharto to step down. Last week, the killing of a motorcycle taxi driver, Affan Kurniawan, sparked an uptick of rage across the country. Protesters began to attack and burn government buildings (at least eight regional parliament buildings were burned down, by my count) and to launch mass raids on the homes of prominent politicians, such as People’s Representative Council (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat, or DPR) member Ahmad Sahroni and finance minister Sri Mulyani.

In 1998, as today, the backdrop of the protests was partly economic. In 1998, the Asian financial crisis caused Indonesia’s economy to collapse, driving millions into poverty and forcing many companies into bankruptcy. Economic conditions are not so severe today, but the economy is slowing, and the middle class is shrinking. Central government efficiency measures have badly affected numerous sectors: many regional governments, for instance, have raised land and property taxes in response. Labour informality and precarity are rising, both with the growth of the gig economy and with layoffs in manufacturing. And all this comes amid severe economic inequality.

This setting helps to explain key features of the recent protests, such as participation by members of labour unions and rideshare drivers, even the targeting of the home of Sri Mulyani — so long the darling of middle-class liberals and reformers, now the public face of austerity to many protesters.

Perhaps the greatest similarity between 1998 and 2025, however, is that both protest waves built on a subculture of street protest that had been growing for several years. The trigger in 1998 may have been the Asian financial crisis, but protesters that year were able to draw on the experiences — and the antipathy to governmental authority — many of them had built up through several years of escalating social and political unrest. An ethos of protest and opposition to the Suharto regime had spread on campuses, in sections of the middle class, and among many members of the urban poor, laying the groundwork for 1998.

Today, the dynamics are similar. The protests of 2025 definitely didn’t come out of nowhere. Instead, they are at least the fifth major wave of youth-led mass protest since 2019. First came protests in September and October 2019 triggered, above all, by DPR and government moves to strip the hitherto very effective Corruption Eradication Commission (Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi) of key powers.

A year later, in 2020, another wave of protests greeted the passage of the so-called Omnibus Law on Job Creation, which among things accelerated the shift toward casualisation of the labour force and weakened environmental protection for natural resource investments. The “emergency warning” (peringatan darurat) protests of August 2024 the February 2025 “dark Indonesia” (Indonesia gelap) protests had distinct triggers and immediate targets, but all of these waves expressed a similar critique of Indonesia’s political elite and the corruption that pervades it. The economic and class dimension is stronger in the current protest wave, but that too builds on features already present in earlier episodes.

Each of these five waves of protest has represented another marker in Indonesia’s democratic decline and authoritarian revival. But they are also significant in their own right, pointing toward the emergence of a new protest counterculture in Indonesia’s towns and cities.

Building on earlier traditions of social protest, this new counterculture is centred on a deep and growing antipathy to Indonesia’s governing elite. United by new modes of online communication, ever-changing networks of loose organisations, as well as connections among more established institutions, such as student executive councils, labour unions and NGOs, this movement is ideologically diverse — but it’s united around common threads of opposition to oligarchy, anger at the corruption of the ruling elite, and rejection of growing economic inequality.

Indonesian scholars and activists have noted the “rhizomic” quality of the new youth protest and social movements, and their diffuse and leaderless patterns of organisations. While some celebrate these qualities, pointing out the participatory character of the new youth movements and how their flexibility makes them difficult to eradicate, others have argued they lack the organisational strength and ideological clarity needed to bring about fundamental social and political change.

The recent protests can thus be understood as product of a clash between two worlds of Indonesian politics: the world of official representative politics and the subculture of youth protest that rejects it. Part of what explains the severity of the protests is that, while the protesters understand the world of the politicians quite well, the reverse seems not to be true — at least until now.

When it was announced that DPR members would gain generous new allowances — a key precipitating event in the current round of protests — on top of their already large salaries, these politicians obviously saw themselves as gaining a well-earned reward. Elected politicians routinely complain about the onerous expectations of cash and other forms of assistance they face from constituents, and many of them undoubtedly believed their de facto wage increase would help them address this problem.

But the announcement and the verbal somersaults of those justifying it — to say nothing of footage of DPR members dancing happily during a recent parliamentary session — came while many Indonesians were experiencing deepening economic hardship, betraying a remarkable lack of understanding of how such news might be received by members of the public.

Throwing fuel on the fire, some DPR members went on social media to mock and disparage the protesters. Ahmad Sahroni, a particularly wealthy and brash politician, called protesters seeking the dissolution of the DPR the “stupidest people on earth,” prompting media outlets to remind readers of his fantastic wealth. Sahroni soon got his comeuppance when protesters attacked and looted one of his homes, parading luxury items they found there — such as a life-sized Ironman sculpture — on social media.

How could the gap between these worlds become so wide that Sahroni and other DPR members could make such fateful miscalculations? In the early years of the post-1998 Reformasi period, elected politicians were at least somewhat attuned to the world of street protest. They had seen how it could bring down a regime, and they were careful to pay attention to what protesters wanted and, where possible, to concede — even if only partly or symbolically — to their demands.

Time passed, and most of that first generation of post-Reformasi politicians passed from the scene, to be replaced by a new breed of politicians (often the children of the first generation) who were inculcated in, and products of, the culture of money politics that has grown within Indonesia’s democratic institutions. As vote-buying and other forms of patronage politics became increasingly entrenched as the main way to win elections, DPR members and other politicians had to invest increasingly vast sums of money in their campaigns. More and more of them come from wealthy business backgrounds, or from established political dynasties.

These shifts have changed the political culture and patterns of work within Indonesia’s representative institutions too, increasing representatives’ need to use their official positions to generate income, or at least to access streams of patronage. A decade or so ago, as a researcher one had to tread carefully when investigating topics such as vote buying or informal fundraising within the DPR. As time has passed, my impression is that DPR members and other politicians have become increasingly open about discussing such topics, as these practices have become normalised.

Insiders, too, give accounts of how new members of institutions like the DPR are inducted into a culture of corruption by their seniors. A few months ago, one relatively young member of the DPR explained to me and colleagues what it’s like to be a member of that institution:

[I]f you talk about defending the rights of the people, they will laugh at you, they will come to you and say “don’t be too serious”… “don’t be so holy.”… But if you talk about money, well, they will all come and deal with you very seriously and carefully. If you want to explain which projects will give you 30 per cent, they will brag about it.

Ordinary Indonesians notice these changes too. Corruption investigations — especially those launched in the past by the KPK — exposed the fabulous wealth of many politicians, with raids on their homes exposing collections of Hermès bags, Lamborghinis and similar luxuries. Politicians themselves have become increasingly open about flaunting their wealth on social media. At the same time, we know that politicians’ policy preferences track with those of high-income voters, rather than with ordinary citizens, in areas such as social welfare and redistribution.

In short, years of patronage politics have created an ever-widening gap between the political world of the governing elite who inhabit Indonesia’s democratic institutions, and that of the young protesters whose forebears played such an important role in putting those institutions in place.

Despite the many similarities, differences between the protests of 1998 and 2025 also stand out. For one thing, much of the violence on the part of rioters, and the looting, has been much more targeted so far than in 1998. In 1998, especially during Jakarta’s May riots, people attacked symbols of wealth and property in general, and there was much racist targeting of ethnic Chinese persons and property in particular. This time, as well as violence generally being at much lower scale, there have not been (so far as I am aware) verified reports of anti-Chinese violence — despite many rumours and fears that it was imminent. Instead, violence has been directed against figures and symbols of state authority: the police, official buildings, the private homes of politicians, and the like.

The political objectives of the current protesters, by contrast, are much more diffuse than those of their forebears in 1998. What gave the Reformasi movement much of its power was the precise nature of its goals, embodied in a number of daunting, but ultimately achievable, goals: the overthrow of Suharto, the end of the military’s “dual function” (dwifungsi), the dismantling of restrictions on political expression, and so on. Those goals could be achieved in part because the protesters were able to find allies, not only among members of mainstream political parties, religious organisations and the like, but also within the ruling civilian and military elite, many of whose members ultimately abandoned Suharto and threw in their lot with Reformasi.

Today the protesters’ goals are not limited to forcing out any particular leader or party, or even to repeal a limited set of laws or regulations. To be sure, they have many such targets — many of the protesters call on president Prabowo Subianto to step down, for the DPR to be dissolved, and for various laws and regulations to be repealed. But what they really stand for, above all, is rejection of the entire ruling elite.

And the entire ruling elite, more or less, stands united against them. This was symbolised dramatically on 31 August when leaders of all the major political parties lined up next to Prabowo as he delivered a speech in which he mixed concessions (cancelling the DPR members’ new allowances) with threats (accusing protesters of engaging in treason — makar — and terrorism).

As a result, it’s hard to see any way by which the current confrontation between the two worlds of Indonesian politics will disappear soon. To be sure, the current wave of protest may well disperse soon, as did the previous ones — in fact, it seems to be on this pathway as I write this piece. But so far, each wave has been followed by another, on virtually an annual basis. That pattern seems likely to continue. Elite politicians are trapped in a system of patronage politics that they would find hard to escape even if they wanted to. As a result, the protesters are a long way from achieving their goals, and their antipathy to Indonesia’s political class is unlikely to dissipate.

This, too, makes the current period seem different from the late Suharto era: back in the 1990s, even when protests were suppressed by the military, the most militant groups always believed they were working toward a defined goal: the overthrow of the Suharto regime. Today’s targets are not so well defined, and are captured by terms — oligarchy, corruption, and the like — which point toward deeply entrenched informal relations of power. Ending such phenomena will require deep systemic change, rather than a limited number of formal legal adjustments or reforms.

It’s hard to envisage such change occurring with the current crop of elite politicians holding elective office. Yet replacing them is not easy either. When progressive activists have ventured into the electoral arena in Indonesia they have almost invariably failed (in sharp contrast, for example, with Thailand). The elite politicians the protesters so revile enjoy massive organisational and material advantages that make them very difficult to beat, especially when so many voters have come to expect patronage in exchange for their votes. These politicians also operate political machines that reach right down into the communities where ordinary Indonesians live throughout urban and rural Indonesia — something the protesters also lack.

Overthrowing Suharto was a titanic achievement. The goals of the current round of protesters are arguably no less daunting. •

This article first appeared in New Mandala, an online magazine hosted by the Australian National University’s Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs.

The post The two worlds of Indonesian politics appeared first on Inside Story.

Ten years on, Germany is remembering those heady late summer days. Newspapers and magazines are publishing countless feature articles, interviews with key participants and portraits of men and women from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Eritrea who have since become German citizens.

By the time that summer was over, Germany was a different country. Not only did the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees, most of whom have remained, make a profound difference. But anxieties about and resentment of their presence have translated into electoral victories for the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD. And contested memories of those tumultuous weeks in 2015 have transformed German politics more broadly.

Most of the journalists writing about the tenth anniversary of the refugee arrivals have focused on Angela Merkel’s “Wir schaffen das!” (“We are able to do this”). Since Konrad Adenauer’s reign in the 1950s, German chancellors have used parliament’s summer break to front the media for the annual Sommerpressekonferenz, an extended press conference, and it was on such an occasion, on 31 August 2015, that Merkel first used the three words that would come to define, and haunt, her twelve years in office.

Merkel’s plea is now mostly understood as a prediction. As such, it raises two questions. Was Germany able to deal with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees within the space of just a few weeks? And have they since been successfully settled?

If “Germany” meant the German government, then the answer to the first question has to be “no.” The influx overwhelmed federal and state authorities. They lost count of the new arrivals, not least because some of them transited through Germany to Sweden and other countries. Even now it is impossible to come up with a reliable estimate of the number of refugees who entered Germany in September and subsequently applied for asylum.

The agency that became emblematic of the state’s ineptitude is generally known only by its acronym, LaGeSo. Berlin’s Department of Health and Social Affairs had the job of registering all refugees arriving in the nation’s capital and assigning them a facility where they could sleep and be clothed and fed. When I visited LaGeSo, a large complex of offices in the Berlin suburb of Moabit, in 2015, I witnessed scenes that I had not expected to see in twenty-first-century Germany. There was no semblance of order. Hundreds of people were camping out on the street hoping eventually to be processed.

But that visit also showed me why a focus on the capacities of federal and state governments told only half the story. Volunteers handed out water and food, provided advice and calmed the nerves of people who were confused by the chaos. Because civil society came to the rescue, Germany was able to deal with the newcomers, accommodate them, feed them and provide them with some orientation.

People who had never before taken an interest in asylum seekers welcomed refugees at train stations, donated clothes, accompanied new arrivals to the immigration office or the doctor, provided toys and organised activities for children and set up language classes. Some invited refugees to live with them. It has been estimated that in 2015 every fourth German was assisting the new arrivals in some way.

The answer to the second question — was resettlement successful? — depends on whom you ask. Most academic researchers agree that, by and large, those arriving in 2015 have made a new life in Germany and settled as well as could be expected. But they usually qualify their answer. Yes, labour market participation rates for men who entered the country ten years ago are actually slightly higher than for other male residents. But participation rates for refugee women are far below the national average. And refugees with tertiary education or specialised skills have often been unable to find a job where they could make use of their training and experience.

Yes, most have long moved out of refugee hostels. But some have had great trouble finding suitable accommodation. Apart from a general shortage of housing in German cities, there is a particular shortage of flats that can accommodate families with more than three children, and some landlords are reluctant to have tenants who are black or Muslim. Ten years on, the city state of Hamburg is still accommodating more than 5300 people in hotels at a cost of €83 (A$148) per person per night. Others have been housed in tents, even in winter.

Yes, many of those who came as children have done exceptionally well at school and speak German fluently. But the same isn’t true for some of the adults, and particularly for women who were unable to read when they arrived.

And yes, many of those who arrived in 2015 have decided to take out German citizenship. But some Ausländerämter, the local government offices responsible for non-citizens, take several years to process applications for naturalisation.

To give them credit, most journalists have taken note of the research about refugees’ employment, education and training, and housing. But other contributors to public debate seem to have let themselves be guided by preconceived ideas rather than evidence.

Politicians on the right of the political spectrum, including chancellor Friedrich Merz of the Christian Democrats, have claimed that the settlement of the new arrivals has not been a success. Merz and his conservative allies in the Christian Democratic Union and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, argue this is further proof that Angela Merkel’s response in 2015 was wrong.

Those on the far right have gone further and blamed all asylum seekers and refugees for crimes perpetrated by a handful.

And what about the refugees themselves? Even those among the new arrivals who have settled most successfully — securing a German passport, reuniting with their families and finding gainful employment — have not been unequivocally positive about their experience. A recently published study found that in 2023 of those who applied for asylum between 2013 and 2022, only 65 per cent felt welcome — twenty percentage points lower than five years earlier. The key reason for their misgivings is deeply worrying: particularly in the past three years, migrants generally, and refugees in particular, have often experienced racism.

There is yet another way of assessing whether Germany was “able to do this.” Rather than focusing exclusively on the refugees who arrived that year, it’s worth remembering what happened in 2022. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Germany accommodated more than a million refugees from that country — more, incidentally, than had arrived from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere in 2015. Compared with 2015, 2022 was undoubtedly a success story — which suggests that the authorities learned from the mistakes made seven years earlier (with civil society again playing a key role too).

But another difference between Germany’s response to the arrival of asylum seekers in 2015 and those fleeing Ukraine in 2022 has also been apparent to non-Ukrainian refugees. Why, they have asked, have the Ukrainians be treated so much more generously than us? Ukrainians were not required to seek asylum, they were immediately allowed to work, they could choose where to live, and they had access to the same social benefits afforded to Germans.

In her memoirs published late last year, Angela Merkel credited her co-author and long-time political adviser Beate Baumann with the idea of declaring “Wir schaffen das!” at the 2015 Sommerpressekonferenz. “She is right,” Merkel remembered thinking at the time. “If I convey this message, I can provide encouragement and at the same time show that I am aware of the magnitude of the task.”

But what exactly was that task? Was it to provide shelter to hundreds of thousands of people, most of whom carried only a small backpack when they arrived? To process a large number of asylum applications? To help successful applicants to settle?

Five days before the Sommerpressekonferenz, Merkel had visited a reception centre in the small town of Heidenau in the southeast of Germany. On 21 and 22 August up to a thousand people, some of them mobilised by the far-right National Democratic Party (which was represented on the Heidenau town council), had rioted in front of a former hardware store repurposed to accommodate asylum seekers. They had attacked the police deployed to ensure that buses ferrying asylum seeker to their new accommodation could safely reach their destination.

When Merkel visited on 26 August, she was abused by some protesters. Footage showed a woman yelling “cunt” — which many viewers would have found more shocking than the vitriol poured on the asylum seekers. Others chanted “Volksverräterin” (traitor), a term the Nazis used for their internal enemies.

In her memoirs, Merkel claims that she was focused on her statement to the media as she left the building where the refugees were housed, and only became aware of the mayhem created by the protesters when she listened to the news. That may have been the case. But afterwards she appeared shocked by the experience.

When she addressed the Sommerpressekonferenz five days later, she prefaced her “Wir schaffen das!” with a statement that clearly referenced the Heidenau riots and possibly also the hatred she herself had experienced. “We need to clearly distance ourselves. There can be no apologies,” she said. “The key is not to show even the slightest bit of understanding. No biographical experience, nothing that happened in the past, nothing, absolutely nothing justifies [their] stance.”

Merkel doesn’t remember “Wir schaffen das!” through the prism of Heidenau in her book. Journalists and politicians pontificating about the tenth anniversary of the “refugee crisis” rarely mention Heidenau. In fact, the tenth anniversary of the racist riots of 21–22 August 2015 didn’t receive much attention, though a recording of Merkel’s plea of 31 August, “Wir schaffen das!” has for weeks been replayed in the electronic media.

Irrespective of whether or not Merkel’s refugee policy was informed by Heidenau, it makes sense to keep that protest in mind when asking whether Germany “has been able to do this.” Here, the answer is again “no.” The far right was not marginalised; to the contrary, the far-right AfD might well overtake the Christian Democrats at the next federal election; in opinion polls, it already leads in all five East German states. The sentiments that fuelled the protests in Heidenau and other places ten years ago have not diminished.

There are many reasons why these sentiments, and a concomitant penchant for authoritarianism, were deeply ingrained before 2015, and have remained so since, both in East and West Germany. One reason why racist attacks on people who are visibly different (on account of their religion, skin colour or language) are increasing is that Merkel herself, and much of the political establishment from the Greens to the Christian Democrats, did not heed her call: “We need to clearly distance ourselves. There can be no apologies.”

To Merkel’s credit, while she made some concessions to those wanting to curb refugee arrivals, she has kept her distance. Others have normalised a language that engenders racist violence. They include former chancellor Olaf Scholz, who in 2023 called for deportations of migrants “on a big scale.”

That same year, then opposition leader Merz claimed that asylum seekers come to Germany to have their teeth fixed, with the result that Germans can’t get an appointment with their dentist. In January 2025 he introduced a resolution into parliament calling for a harsher asylum regime, which was passed courtesy of the AfD. He justified his move by railing against “illegal refugees,” saying, for example, that Germany had a “massive problem” with crimes committed by foreigners, particularly asylum seekers, and that gang rapes perpetrated by asylum seekers were happening on a daily basis.

In Germany, as in Britain and the United States, people seeking protection are now held responsible for all manner of ills. More often than not they referred to as “illegal immigrants” or “illegal refugees,” including by government ministers.

But not all can be blamed on Merz, Scholz and other politicians who have helped shift the discourse about forced migration and protection. Refugee advocates must take some responsibility. They have relied on harnessing emotions (the pity prompted by Turkish photographer Nilüfer Demir’s image of a drowned boy, Alan Kurdi, for example) and on arguing that welcoming refugees makes economic sense.

They have failed to initiate an informed debate about the question: “Why ought Germany welcome refugees?” Such a debate should grapple with issues of justice and the question of whether solidarity (rather than pity) could be a useful foundation. Rather than simply referring to international law and the German constitution, it would need to try spelling out what exactly is meant by Article 1 (1) of Germany’s Basic Law — “human dignity shall be inviolable” — and to explain why the constitution’s drafters made the right decision when they put human dignity first.

The day of the 2015 Sommerpressekonferenz, 31 August, was not the day when the Merkel government formulated its response to the refugees stranded in Hungary and hoping to be able to proceed to Austria and Germany. It was five days later, on 4 September 2015, when Merkel and her Austrian counterpart Werner Faymann decided that Austria and Germany would not close their borders. It’s that decision (often erroneously equated with a decision to open Germany’s borders) that Merkel’s critics, including Merz, have subsequently identified as a momentous blunder.

For years, their mantra has been: “There must not be a repeat of the events of 2015.” Even Merkel agreed. But they have been unconvincing when asked what she should have done instead in early September 2015. Use the federal police or the army to protect the border? And what if somebody had tried to cross it anyway? Give the order to shoot any presumed intruder?

In her statement in front of the former hardware store in Heidenau, Merkel said that people who have been persecuted or are fleeing war have a right to be treated fairly and have their application for protection properly assessed. That has been the law (German law, as well as European law). It used to be German policy. No more.

The current coalition government of Christian Democrats, Christian Social Union and Social Democrats has proclaimed an Asylwende, an about-turn for Germany’s asylum policy. In May, the responsible minister ordered the federal police to turn back asylum seekers at Germany’s borders unless they are vulnerable (without clearly defining what vulnerability means). Since then, the police have barred 11,900 people from entering Germany, including 660 who said they wanted to make an asylum claim.

That is against European law. A court in Berlin has already said as much in a case concerning three Somali refugees. Even Angela Merkel, in a rare comment on current government policy, has condemned the minister’s decree. He doesn’t care and says he won’t budge. Of course, he may be emboldened by other EU member states, including Greece, Poland, Croatia and Hungary, that routinely flout European refugee and human rights law when they engage in pushbacks at their borders.

The new policy is hardly going to stop irregularised migrants from entering Germany. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the 660 who expressed a desire for asylum later managed to enter Germany, as Germany’s nine neighbours have no interest in accommodating them.

The new policy is designed to alleviate the concerns of a majority of Germans who believe there are too many migrants in the country and arrival numbers need to be drastically reduced. It is designed to tell them: “Look, we take your concerns seriously. You have a point. The government is now acting decisively.”

That policy too is going to shift the discourse further and help normalise the anti-migrant rhetoric spouted by leaders of the AfD (and increasingly by others). Merkel was right: “We need to clearly distance ourselves.” But in that regard, her plea “Wir schaffen das!” fell on deaf ears. •

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The vote was quick: we’d punish the watermelon by eating it. But Canadians have become a nation of label-readers and flag-flyers. My cousin, who had bought the contentious melon, was annoyed for not having checked its credentials.

In the past, Canadians were not big flag-flyers, but now it’s unusual to pass down a street from Vancouver to (even) Montreal without seeing a Canadian flag. Stores highlight Canadian goods with bright red maple-leaf stickers, and people in supermarkets stretch, squat and squint to check the origin of items.

This was the first time since 1967 that I’d spent the Canadian national day, the First of July, on Canadian soil. The experience was quite different from the last one long ago.

This year, we were in Campbell River, British Columbia, a town of 40,000 halfway up the east coast of Vancouver Island and a centre of sports fishing for a hundred years. The town fronts onto a two-kilometre channel, a series of islands and then the snow-capped mountains of the Coast Range on the mainland. It has recently become a base for professionals working online for companies in Vancouver, where housing is expensive and the metro population approaches three million.

Campbell River was in festive mood for the Canada Day holiday. We drove round the town counting maple-leaf flags and Canadian-themed hats and t-shirts. Long ago, such dress-up items were uncommon, and we liked to brag that Canadians were proud of not being proud of being Canadian.

There were no overt signs of antagonism — not even graffiti saying “Yankee go home” or “Trump’s grannie wears woollen knickers.” Yet one question hovered over most conversations: what would the petulant fourteen-year-old in the White House do next?

People are worried. Facetious gestures about the nationality of watermelons can’t hide the knowledge that if the US cavalry rode into Ottawa, as Putin tried to do in Ukraine, the stars and stripes would fly over the Canadian parliament in hours. Conversations sometimes turn to the nature of the civil disobedience Canadians would offer and how long it would last.

Canada has roughly the same population as Ukraine (about forty million), but Ukraine had an army of 200,000 when the Russian war began. Canada’s full-time army is less than 25,000. Ukraine also has territorial depth and land borders with friendly neighbours. The United States is Canada’s only neighbour, and nine in every ten Canadians live within a hundred miles, or 160 kilometres, of the border.

The two economies are tightly entwined, but it’s a python entwined with a garter snake — Canada’s forty million people wrapped up economically with the US’s 340 million. The US can do deep harm to the Canadian economy and perhaps drive Canadians either to beg for inclusion in the great republic or to become an exploited, Soviet-style satellite.

Of Canada’s exports, which amount to $435 billion, more than three-quarters go to the United States, much of them in the form of  petroleum products and vehicles. A car manufactured in North America can cross borders a number of times before the finished vehicle rolls off an assembly line.

Annexing Canada is a possibility as old as the United States itself. Some Canadians can reel off the dates when menaces from south of the border were resisted and seen off, and then slipped into obscurity: 1775–76, 1812–14, 1867, 1891. There was even “Plan Red,” a war-gaming invasion of Canada developed by the US military in the 1920s. (A comparable Canadian plan for invading the US was put together in 1921.)

To some Americans, absorption of Canada seems inevitable — and why, they ask, would Canadians resist it? Some Canadians have thought similarly. In 1965, the year Canada adopted its maple-leaf flag, George Grant, a conservative political philosopher from an elite Ontario family, published Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism. An independent Canada could not survive, Grant lamented, because it was too deeply bound up with the powerful capitalist experiment super-charging itself in the United States.

“Only nationalism,” Grant wrote, “could provide the incentive for planning; only planning could restrain the victory of continentalism… [N]o such combination was possible, and therefore our nation was bound to disappear.” To survive, Canada would have to create an economic and political system distinctly different from the US, a system that Canadians thought about, understood and believed in.

In the long term, Grant may prove right. But developments of the past sixty years, and especially the first six months of 2025, have led Canadians to recognise that they do live in a different socio-political environment from the United States. They see virtues in a parliamentary system that hinders the dominance of their politics by outrageously wealthy hucksters. They value their health system (however flawed), national pension plan and sensible gun laws.

Middle-class families are keen to have their kids educated in French and English. The monolingual primary school I went to in Victoria, BC, in the 1950s has been bilingual for two generations. My friends’ daughter and granddaughter were both taught by the same Québécois who moved to British Columbia in the 1980s.

As well as bilingual, Canadian governments have been committed for sixty years to making Canada multicultural — an evolving mosaic, not a bubbling melting pot.

In Alberta — Canada’s petroleum province, with its entrenched right-wing government — the newly chosen leader of the opposition New Democratic Party is Naheed Nenshi, an Ismaili Muslim whose family’s roots lie in Gujarat in western India. He retired undefeated after being elected three times as mayor of Calgary, Canada’s oil capital. In Manitoba, another prairie province, the NDP premier is Wab Kinew, an Ojibway First Nations man, only the third First Nations person to lead a US state or Canadian province.

Not all Canadians see virtues in the Canada I’m describing. The premier of oil-rich Alberta flirts with secession. Much like West Australians, Albertans often chafe at the policies of the national government, which, they say, robs the province and hampers its extractive industries. A June poll suggested 22 per cent of Albertans thought they’d be better off as an independent nation.

In Quebec, the centre of Francophone Canada, the Parti Québécois, which advocates the province’s independence, is narrowly ahead in opinion polls for the provincial election due next year. But other polling indicates that more than 60 per cent of Quebeckers would have voted against independence if a referendum on independence had been held in June.

When I left home for good on 1 July 1967, I intended that day to go to two weddings, one in White Rock, BC, the other across the border in Blaine, Washington. The venues were no more than a short taxi ride apart, but a bus accident meant I missed both. I was rescued when I got to Blaine by the mother of the groom, who had known me from kindergarten. She and her husband took me home for the night and drove me back into Canada the next day.

Like the cars manufactured in North America during the past twenty years, crossing the border in those days was a no-fuss reality. But borders ain’t what they used to be.

Donald Trump has given Canada’s sense of nationhood a hearty infusion of red and white blood cells shaped like maple leaves. When my wife and I left Canada last month, an old Japanese-Canadian friend gave us a Canadian flag, a red maple leaf rosette and two lollipops in the shape of maple leaves. Made from maple syrup of course. • 

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Indigenous Chamorro in the Marianas Islands have bitter family memories of the wartime fight between Japan and the United States to control their islands. The clash of imperial powers in the 1940s has echoes today in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, or CNMI — of which Tinian is one of three principal islands — at a time of strategic competition between the United States and the People’s Republic of China.

Tinian’s crucial role is often ignored in commemorations of the atomic bombings in 1945. Fighting their way across the Pacific, US marines defeated Japanese forces on the island in July 1944. They soon transformed the island into an airbase for striking targets in Japan, 2400 kilometres away. The refurbished North Field airstrip was the largest in the world at the time, with four 8500-foot runways and facilities to support more than 40,000 personnel.

The island served as the key base for the incendiary bombing of Japanese cities by the 313th Bombardment Wing, including the firebombing of Tokyo on 9 March 1945. An estimated 100,000 people died in that one attack, after more than 300 US aircraft bombed civilian housing. In Operation Starvation, the same force mined Japanese shipping lanes to reduce civilian access to already limited food supplies.

Months before atomic bombs were ready for use, the US high command proposed using airbases on Guam for a nuclear attack on Japanese cities. But an air force memo to the Manhattan Project in late February 1945 advised it now saw Tinian as “the most desirable island to base the 509th Composite Group.” In July, following the first successful detonation of an atomic device, known as the Trinity test, the US military prepared an arsenal of nuclear weapons to attack Japan. The initial target list included Kyoto, Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata and Nagasaki.

In the early hours of 6 August 1945, a B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, took off from Tinian for Hiroshima. At 8.15am, Captain Paul Tibbets ordered the release of an atomic bomb, codenamed “Little Boy,” over the Japanese city. The city of Kokura was scheduled for the next attack, but when bad weather intervened on 9 August the Bockscar flew instead from Tinian to Nagasaki, which was destroyed by the “Fat Man” bomb.

Most of the people killed in these two attacks were civilian non-combatants. By year’s end, an estimated 140,000 people had died in Hiroshima and 74,000 in Nagasaki. An estimated 38,000 of the dead were children.

A month after the attacks, General Leslie Groves, the head of America’s Manhattan project, misled Congress by declaring there was “no radioactive residue” in the two devastated cities. Contradicting evidence gathered in Japan by his own staff, Groves said that people exposed to radiation from the atomic blasts would not face “undue suffering. In fact, they say it is a very pleasant way to die.”

In reality, many nuclear survivors, known as hibakusha, lived on for decades, stricken by cancer, leukemia and other diseases caused by exposure to ionising radiation.

After the war, the United States administered these and surrounding islands in the northern Pacific as the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, the only strategic trusteeship created by the United Nations. Micronesia was still recovering from the wartime damage from US Marines fighting their way across scattered atolls and the US forces bombarding Japanese installations, with islanders trapped between the two imperial powers.

In 1946, soon after the Japanese surrender, the US military began to test nuclear weapons, with sixty-seven atomic and hydrogen bomb tests in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958. Following Britain’s hydrogen bomb tests on Christmas (Kiritimati) Island in the British Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony, the United States conducted another twenty-four nuclear tests on the island in 1962, using the old British airstrip and military base.

Eighty years after planes from flew Tinian to bomb Japan, the United States still administers some of these Micronesian islands as a colonial power. In the south of the Marianas archipelago, the US Indo-Pacific Command controls more than a quarter of Guahan (Guam). The US territory hosts key American military bases, including Apra Harbour Naval Station, Andersen Air Force Base and Camp Blaz, a new US Marine Corps base. Further north in the archipelago are Tinian, Saipan and Rota, the three largest of thirteen islands in the CNMI, an unincorporated territory of the United States created in 1975.

These bases are central to US plans to contain China in the western Pacific. Because Guam is within range of North Korean and Chinese missiles, the Obama, Biden and Trump administrations have spent billions of dollars upgrading airfields and dispersing fuel and ammunition supplies to neighbouring Micronesian nations.

Washington’s ambitions in the region aren’t going unopposed. Among the groups challenging the dominant narrative of the Micronesian islands as “the tip of the spear” for the US military in the western Pacific is Our Commonwealth 670.

“Our group is linking what we see as increased militarisation in CNMI to the ongoing militarisation of Guam, the desecration of indigenous lands and denial of indigenous rights,” Saipan-born educator and activist Theresa “Isa” Arriola, a member of Our Commonwealth and a leading voice questioning the military build-up in the islands.

“We formed because we wanted to educate the community and bring awareness to the narratives that so often surround the islands — that we are strategic locations. There’s a kind of geographic determinism that follows that logic, which says ‘you must be used for war in this broader war machine.’ So we want to push back on that, and link militarisation with demilitarisation, indigenous sovereignty and indigenous rights.”

For Chamorro people, the growing militarisation of Tinian reopens mental and physical scars. “The presence of World War Two is still very much a part of our community’s collective consciousness,” says Arriola. “Our grandparents talk about their experiences with the war. We also see it in the physical landscape: there’s unexploded ordnance still left on Tinian from World War Two. When they’re refurbishing the runway or other military projects, they find that old ordnance.”

As a child, Arriola found scraps of bombs on the beaches of Saipan. Today, unexploded ordnance, or UXO, remains a hazard in most wartime battlegrounds across the Pacific Islands. People are still being killed or maimed when they disturb ageing US and Japanese bombs, grenades and ammunition in Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Kiribati, Palau, Federated States of Micronesia and CNMI.

On Tinian, a US navy team disposes of UXO on land leased by the US Defence Department. But UXO outside these military leases is the responsibility of the local CNMI government. It must seek grants from the US Environment Protection Agency Brownfields program or finance under the US Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which provides grants for disposal of hazardous materials. These programs have been gutted as the Trump administration reduces funding to the EPA and other environmental agencies.

Under a program known as Agile Combat Employment, the US government has begun to refurbish second world war airbases in CNMI, the Federated States of Micronesia and Palau. In April last year, the US Air Force announced a US$409 million contract for Texan construction firm Fluor to refurbish and extend the old North Field airfield on Tinian. The Guam-based construction company Black Micro was also awarded a US$220 million contract to extend a cargo pad, taxiway extension, fuel tanks, roads and maintenance facilities on the island.

The US Defence Department has recently released environmental impact statements seeking public comment on further military expansion in Tinian, which would include live-fire ranges, a base camp, communications infrastructure and a biosecurity facility.

It’s a decade since the US military announced plans to use the CNMI island of Pagan for weapons testing, causing uproar in the community. In 2015, a draft EIS received more than 30,000 public comments in opposition. In response, the US defence department halted proposed military activity on Pagan and withdrew proposals for artillery, rocket and mortar exercises on Tinian.

The Pagan campaign linked community elders with younger activists, says Theresa Arriola, who are now opposing renewed plans for a military build-up on Saipan and Tinian. As the US military releases new EIS for public comment, community groups like Our Commonwealth, Marianas for Palestine and Prutehi Guahan are mounting community education programs but also demonstrating again militarisation of the islands.

“Right now on Tinian, they’re reconstructing the same runway they used in 1945 and there is the concurrent release of two major environmental impact statements,” Arriola says. “One is the CNMI Joint Military Training EIS, that outlines a lot of major changes on the island of Tinian, including live-fire training, public access restrictions and other hazards.”

In June, activists interrupted a public meeting on the proposed military training expansion in Tinian, chanting “No build-up!,” “No war!” and “Free, free, Palestine!” Chamorro activist Anufat Pangelinan told the Marianas Press: “We don’t want to be part of a war we don’t support. The Marianas shouldn’t be a tip of the spear — we should be a bridge for peace.”

Community groups questioned military plans to build a fuel pipeline over Tinian’s aquifer, the only potable source of water on the island. They raised potential hazards to fishing boats travelling between Saipan and Tinian during live-fire exercises. US Marine Corps Forces Pacific executive director Mark Hashimoto acknowledged that “the top five concerns that the community still has include water resources, solid waste, noise, the impact on police, fire, and medical capabilities, and also access to the military lease area.”

For Arriola, the EIS process doesn’t provide sufficient evidence for decision-makers, and downplays concerns over indigenous land and culture. “That’s what everybody is talking about — the land, and the health of the land for future generations and the ability to maintain indigenous sovereignty,” she says.

“Our community is suffering,” Arriola adds, “but most people aren’t reading through these extremely tedious, very cumbersome Environmental Impact Statements. It’s really complicated, and an undue burden that’s consistently placed on us, especially when multiple EIS are released. They don’t address a lot of our questions, they don’t have proper baseline data, they don’t have proper mitigation plans in place. We have a long history of seeing the skirting of environmental regulation or not properly implementing the EPA process.”

The challenge for community activists is the strong military culture across Guam and CNMI, and a long tradition of Micronesians joining the US armed forces to obtain training and economic opportunity.

The significant US presence means communities are economically linked to the military, says Arriola. “So it’s hard to say ‘I’m an activist and I disagree with someone joining the military.’ There are so many people amongst our friends and our family that are already in the military. It’s so much a part of the fabric of our everyday lives. So it’s not about faulting people for joining the military, but it is about critiquing the military-industrial complex that is keeping us so closely tied to the military as a form of survival.”

The upgrading of the wartime airstrip and other military plans for Tinian are often presented as a bonanza for local businesses. With hundreds of US contractors already on the island, cafe owner Marie Rose Bunao told local media that “business is mostly driven by department of defence projects. The military money goes into the community. Whatever they spend stays here.”

These resources can help replace reduced tourism since the Covid pandemic, amid scandals surrounding the collapse of a hotel and casino operation in Saipan. (An exclusive gambling license was issued in 2014 to Hong Kong–based Imperial Pacific International, which was soon embroiled in disputes over corruption, delayed construction and abuse of workers’ rights.)

Although the CNMI government is still owed US$160 million in back taxes from the casino fiasco, supporters of US military construction predict a new bonanza of investment. Tinian mayor Edwin Aldan says the current military expansion could bring over a billion dollars in investment over the next fifteen to twenty years.

“We are in a very tight economic situation right now,” Arriola acknowledges. “Civilian and military infrastructure are becoming so interlinked that you can’t uncouple them. But around the dinner table, you’re not talking about geopolitics,” she stressed. “You’re asking: Will we be disrupted by the noise with the planes flying overhead? Can I farm on my land? Should we worry about the water being contaminated? People worry about fishing access, and whether they’ll be able to access certain places in the water during training exercises. Will the ordnance disrupt the health of the environment and the water around us?”

The debate in Tinian has echoed across Micronesia since the Pentagon announced a new Guam-based military taskforce to coordinate defence operations in the northern Pacific.

As US media spruik the China threat, Ken Gofigan Kuper, co-founder of the Pacific Center on Island Security on Guam, says that his think tank aims to ensure that islanders themselves have a voice “amongst the cacophony that is geopolitical posturing.”

“Island security is very different from using islands for your security,” Kuper says. “We are trying to open up debate about what is considered islands security and believe much of the security conversation should be coming from islanders themselves, without having the terms dictated by Washington DC, by Beijing, by Australia.”

For Theresa Arriola, “it’s about re-framing the narratives about our islands. When you hear the word ‘strategic,’ let’s break that down. What does that mean? Do we want to engage with this level of military training because we’re being framed as strategic? What is that going to do to our environment and our culture in the long-term?  These are all questions we’re grappling with.” •

The post Tip of the spear appeared first on Inside Story.

The offending greeting was part of a leatherbound book Epstein’s partner Ghislaine Maxwell organised for the financier’s fiftieth birthday. According to the Journal, Trump drew a pair of small arcs denoting a woman’s breasts and signed with “a squiggly ‘Donald’ below her waist, mimicking pubic hair.” Trump concluded “Happy birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”

Trump’s immediate response to the Journal’s report was to sue, and to attack the article. “The Wall St Journal printed a FAKE letter, supposedly to Epstein. Also I don’t draw pictures. I told Rupert it was a SCAM, that he shouldn’t print this Fake Story. But he did, and now I’m going to sue his ass off, and that of his third rate newspaper.”

Trump’s ferocious reaction was driven by the sensitivity surrounding his relationship with Epstein, who died in prison in 2019. He and Epstein were good friends roughly from 1988 to 2004, and Epstein told journalist Michael Wolff that he was Trump’s best friend for ten years. “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years,” Trump said in a 2002 profile of Epstein in New York magazine. “Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them on the younger side.” Epstein was a guest at Trump’s second wedding.

The relationship soured in 2004 after both men tried to buy the same oceanfront property in Palm Beach, and Trump won. They appear to have had minimal contact after that.

Epstein was arrested in 2006, and in 2008 convicted on state charges of soliciting prostitution. A secret plea deal with federal prosecutors shielded him from prosecution for much more serious charges of molesting young girls. He received a soft prison sentence of eighteen months that required him only to spend nights in jail. The following year he was released altogether and resumed his business activities and his criminal behaviour.

In November 2018, prompted partly by the new ethos of the #MeToo era, the Miami Herald’s Julie K. Brown chronicled Epstein’s victims’ stories and questioned whether prosecutors had reached a sweetheart deal with him. Partly as a result of that reporting, Epstein was charged with recruiting dozens of underage girls to his New York City mansion and Palm Beach estate between 2002 and 2005 to engage in sexual acts for money. He died before being tried for those crimes.

Epstein’s death provided fertile ground for conspiracy theorists. The official ruling was suicide by hanging (“Two guards who were meant to check on him had fallen asleep, and two CCTV cameras in front of his cell malfunctioned at the critical moment,” reported the London Daily Telegraph’s Ed Cumming) but that conclusion was challenged by Epstein’s lawyers. When the Justice Department finally released a tape of events that evening, analysts found that nearly three minutes had been cut.

Several official inquiries concluded that Epstein died by his own hand. No evidence of any intruders was ever found, and Epstein certainly faced a very bleak future: decades of jail, public humiliation and many, many legal actions against him by the women and girls he had abused.

Trump immediately tied Epstein’s death to Bill Clinton: “Epstein had an island that was not a good place as I understand it. And I was never there. So you have to ask: Did Bill Clinton go to the island?” Although he professed to have no evidence that Epstein’s death was linked to Clinton, he continued to cast doubt on the cause of death even after the New York medical examiner ruled suicide. “I want a full investigation and that’s what I absolutely am demanding,” he declared. No such investigations were published in the remaining eighteen months of his first presidency.

The idea that Epstein was murdered fitted nicely into conspiracy theories about secret paedophile rings propagated by QAnon and others. The idea that a secret cabal of Democrats, Hollywood figures and global financiers ran a global child-trafficking ring gelled neatly with their distrust of elites and deep suspicion of government institutions and the media.

Questions about Epstein sometimes resurfaced in the years leading up to the 2024 presidential election. In a 2023 podcast, for example, Kash Patel, later appointed by Trump to head the FBI, lashed House Republicans for not trying harder to force the release of an alleged list of high-powered Epstein associates. During the election campaign Trump said he would declassify the Epstein files and was willing to release them. In October vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance declared, “Seriously, we need to release the Epstein list. That is the important thing.”

That seemed a real prospect in the first several months of Trump’s second presidency. Attorney-general Pam Bondi said Epstein’s “client list” was “sitting on my desk right now for me to review,” an imminent release of documents would contain “a lot of information,” and Americans would “get the full Epstein files.” The justice department had received a new “truckload of evidence,” said Bondi, including “tens of thousands of videos of Epstein with children or child porn, and “everything’s going to come out to the public. Americans have a right to know.” Trump declared that “100 per cent of all these documents are being delivered.”

A change in tone came around mid-May. On 16 May the two top FBI officials, Patel and Dan Bongino, both previously strong proponents of claims about Epstein, appeared together on Fox News and said Epstein had indeed died by suicide. Since then, several sources have claimed that Trump was told in the first weeks of May that he figured multiple times in the files, not necessarily engaged in illegalities but certainly mentioned in ways that would be politically embarrassing.

The first prominent person to publicly link Trump’s likely appearances in the files to the government’s behaviour was Elon Musk. On 5 June, at the height of his public feud with the president, he declared that Trump wasn’t releasing the Epstein files because he was in them.

Trump’s base wasn’t prepared, however, for the sharp reversal that came early the following month. Over the July holiday weekend leaders of the attorney-general’s department and the FBI approved a statement conceding that Epstein had indeed committed suicide; that there was no client list; that no unreleased evidence would “expose any additional third parties to allegations of illegal wrongdoing”; and that, in order to protect the privacy of victims, no further documents would be released.

Divisions within the blindsided MAGA base were soon on full display. Trump confidante and ally, Steve Bannon spent weeks in his War Room podcast — a propaganda mainstay of the MAGA movement — trying to pressure Trump to release all the files. According to Fox News host turned podcaster Tucker Carlson, “Even people who are fully on board with the bulk of the MAGA agenda are like, ‘This is too much, actually.’”

Most strident was prominent MAGA congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene: “If you tell the base of people who support you, of deep state treasonous crimes, election interference, blackmail, and rich powerful cabals, then you must take down every enemy of the People. If not, the base will turn and there’s no going back. Dangling bits of red meat no longer satisfies. They want the whole steak dinner and will accept nothing else.”

While Trump supported the claims of a cover-up before he regained the presidency, now he wanted the whole Epstein thing to go away. As early as 8 July, he lashed out at reporters: “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years. I can’t believe you’re asking a question on Epstein [when the Texas floods are so urgent].”

“We had the Greatest Six Months of any President in the History of our Country,” he declared on Truth Social, “and all the Fake News wants to talk about is the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax.” Early in July his message was simply to move on: “He’s been dead a long time… I don’t knw what the… fascination is.” Soon, however, it became a Democrat plot: “a hoax that’s perpetrated by the Democrats. And some stupid Republicans and foolish Republicans fall into the net.” The Epstein “files,” were “made up” by former FBI head James Comey. “They were made up by Obama. They were made up by Biden.”

But Trump’s efforts to persuade much of his base failed signally. One MAGA operative observed: “Villainising your base for caring about the thing you told them to care about is never a good strategy.”

It was into this combustible mix that the 17 July Wall Street Journal article landed. And it was Trump’s angry reaction to the publication of his birthday greeting to Epstein that gave the story such oxygen.

The Journal’s article was interpreted by many as a deliberate attack by Murdoch on Trump. The strongest proponent of this view was Steve Bannon. “This is a [political] kill shot by Murdoch,” he told journalist Peter Hartcher. “Murdoch has done it because he is in league with the deep state, which is out to destroy Trump.” Bannon predicted that “all of MAGA will rally around because of the attack on President Trump.” This, he added, will “blow up the Murdoch empire in the US.”

But treating the Journal report as part of a determined anti-Trump move by Murdoch overlooks key facts. Murdoch’s main two American outlets have prospered under Trump, though for different reasons. Fox News is attracting almost three million viewers in prime time, putting it well ahead of its cable news competitors and even ahead of the free-to-air networks. It has prospered by reinforcing the messages MAGA wants to hear.

The Journal has also prospered, though among a very different audience. Always much less of a propaganda outlet than its stablemate, it must maintain credibility with an audience that would otherwise go to another high-quality newspaper, such as the New York Times. It has maintained a more mainstream, pre-Trump Republican editorial line, consistently critical of Trump’s high tariff policies for instance. One editorial called Trump’s tariff plans “the dumbest trade war in history.”

Perhaps most importantly, the offending story seems likely to have been bottom-up rather than top-down: the work of WSJ reporters discovering and verifying the key facts rather than the result of a management directive. Thus, the question for the paper’s and company’s management was: should the story be suppressed? If the Journal had suppressed it, the self-censorship would have become public and damaged the paper’s reputation.

Further evidence that this is not a campaign driven from the top is the response of other Murdoch media. Since the Journal report, Fox News and the New York Post have largely stayed quiet on the matter. Fox News has only mentioned Trump’s lawsuit a couple of times in passing.

Indeed, soon after the Journal story was published, Fox News host Laura Ingraham, who was on air, told her audience that straight after the break news would be coming of a scoop by the Journal. Yet no mention of it followed, and Ingraham spent the remaining twenty minutes of her program on unrelated topics.

Trump himself saw the difference. Within hours of denouncing the Journal, he was effusive about Fox: “Everybody should watch Sean Hannity tonight. He really gets it. 9PM ET Fox News.”

The response of Murdoch’s Australian flagship, the Australian, has also been decidedly tepid. While the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age and Australian Financial Review have run several long and penetrating articles on the confrontation between Murdoch and Trump, in the first several days the Australian merely reported that the White House had taken away the Journal’s seat in the press pool on Air Force One. This lack of interest in such a newsworthy topic might suggest the Murdochs would like the story to go away, or perhaps that their editors are not yet clear on what line they should take.

While commercial and political pragmatism might suggest that both sides have an interest in de-escalating, so far there is no sign of this. One obstacle seems to be the personal antipathy between the two leading players. As is his wont, Trump framed his threat in personally demeaning terms: “I look forward to getting Rupert Murdoch to testify in my lawsuit against him and his pile of garbage newspaper, WSJ. That will be an interesting experience!!!” In turn, Murdoch is reported to have told associates “I am ninety-four years old and I will not be intimidated.”

Nor is there any sign of the Journal backing down. The paper would “vigorously defend” itself against the lawsuit, it said, and it has full confidence in the rigor and accuracy of our reporting. Since then it has published a follow-up article asserting that Trump was mentioned in the Epstein files. And then, on 24 July, it ran a front page article claiming that Bill Clinton, several major corporate figures and British ambassador Peter Mandelson all wrote greetings in Epstein’s now-notorious birthday book.

When Trump launched his case against the Journal, one law professor commented that the complaint was “full of sound and fury but lacks legal merit.” This second story on the birthday book strongly suggests the paper either has a copy or has seen (and photographed?) it, which means Trump’s case will collapse. Trump also claimed he doesn’t “do” drawings, even though four of his drawings were sold during his first presidency. Nor is there any sign that Murdoch or others are displeased with the Journal. In recent weeks it has been more of a nationally prominent agenda-setter than it has been for years.

Trump is unlikely to make any progress on the legal front, and he has been equally unable to shift the political coverage. His most determined effort came on 21 July when he released the (deeply flawed) report of his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, refuting claims of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Trump’s response was immediate: “Obama himself manufactured the Russia, Russia, Russia HOAX. Crooked Hillary, Sleepy Joe and numerous others participated in this, THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY! Irrefutable  EVIDENCE. A major threat to our Country!!!”

Even amid his unrestrained comments Epstein was lurking. The Gabbard records are “the most unbelievable thing I think I’ve ever read,” he said. “So you ought to take a look at that and stop talking about [the Epstein] nonsense.”

Despite the pyrotechnics — Trump’s posts including an AI-generated video of Barack Obama being arrested in the Oval Office — he failed to change the political agenda, perhaps because, as Washington Post’s fact-checker Glenn Kessler pointed out, there had already been four inquiries into Russia interference claims, including one led by Marco Rubio when he was in the Senate, which reached completely bipartisan findings.

The conventional wisdom is that Trump is scandal-proof. Already, for example, twenty-eight women have accused him of sexual assault or harassment, but his political career has continued to prosper. A key difference this time round is that the Republican base is so split. Congress is in its summer recess; indeed, it adjourned a day early precisely because the Republican leadership wanted to stop a bipartisan effort to release the Epstein material. Trump will hope that the heat of the affair dissipates over summer. If the scandal keeps metastasising when Congress returns, Rupert Murdoch will be the least of Trump’s worries. •

From the archive: Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump have had their ups and downs, but it’s mainly been down since 2020, reported Rod Tiffen in April last year.

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In March, Congress received one of the more staggering budget proposals in American history: a proposed 85 per cent cut to international affairs funding. This was designed to overhaul America’s foreign service agency, slash funding for the United Nations and effectively rewire the machinery of American global influence — all at a time when the world’s crises are demanding more of diplomatic officials, not less.

There was at least a fight in Congress. Democratic members of the Senate foreign relations committee warned the cuts would undermine American diplomatic efforts. “During a time of increasingly complex and wide-spread challenges to US national security,” they wrote, “this administration should be strengthening our diplomatic corps — an irreplaceable instrument of US power and leadership — not weakening it.”

Despite these objections and a brief procedural delay in the Senate, the bill passed largely along party lines. The reduction-in-force notices issued on 15 July signalled not just the start of layoffs but also the unravelling of a diplomatic architecture that had taken generations to build. What began as a budgetary line item has turned into a demolition of American diplomacy.

To be fair, the state department is no stranger to budgetary pressure. Towards the end of the cold war, without a clear antagonist, Washington “let its diplomatic muscles atrophy,” as former secretary of state Bill Burns wrote in his memoir. Between 1985 and 2000, funding for international affairs almost halved.

The state department didn’t fare well during Trump’s first term either. As the journalist Ronin Farrow outlined in War on Peace, key ambassadorships were left vacant, career diplomats sidelined, and budgets on foreign aid repeatedly targeted for steep reductions just as global challenges were intensifying.

But the current cuts are part of a bigger transformation: the surgical removal of people and programs that don’t align with the administration’s “America First” foreign policy.

The details were set out in secretary of state Marco Rubio’s April plan for the department, which takes aim at the “radical ideologues” and “bureaucratic infighters” he says have turned the department into a “platform for left-wing activists to wage vendettas” and “pursue their projects at the taxpayer expense, even when they were in direct conflict with the goals of the secretary, the president, and the American people.” In this worldview, the state department is a bastion of elite, politically correct civil servants, far removed from the day-to-day life of middle America, peddling views and values that are both controversial at home and alienating abroad.

This realignment was first flagged in Project 2025, a policy blueprint produced by a coalition of conservative think tanks outlining a sweeping reconfiguration of the federal government to ensure ideological conformity across agencies. In line with that plan, one of the administration’s primary targets has been foreign aid, with 90 per cent of contracts cut since President Trump announced a freeze on US foreign assistance. The federal agency responsible for foreign aid no longer exists.

But the changes go beyond aid, with officials instructed to cease initiatives and programs considered “counterproductive to American interests, wasting taxpayer money and provoking resentment abroad.” This includes reporting on political prisoners, women’s rights, persecution of LGBTQIA+ individuals and other human rights issues, a dramatic change from a worldview that saw democracy, human rights and civic freedom as underpinning America’s attempt to fashion a global order that suits its interests and goals.

Beyond specific activities, the administration’s plans for the state department focus on who is doing the work, extending deep into the department’s organisational structure. Across the board, the department is being reorganised into new offices and functions that align more closely with the administration’s ideological agenda.

The senior official for democracy and human rights, for example, is struck from the chart, and their bureau replaced with three officers under a deputy assistant secretary of state charged with “advancing the administration’s affirmative vision of American and Western values.” Similarly, the bureau of conflict and stabilisation operations, the agency once responsible for resettling refugees, must now support the return of “illegal aliens to their country of origin or legal status” as part of the bureau of population, refugees and migration.

Beyond the organisational chart, it is being made abundantly clear that loyalty trumps expertise, with political loyalists rather than seasoned civil servants being given senior roles. The role of director-general of the foreign service — a typically experienced role responsible for the state department’s diplomatic recruitment as well as overseas evacuations — is currently being performed by an inexperienced young lawyer, Lew Olowski, a staunch Trump loyalist with one foreign assignment to his name. Importantly, Olowski’s is “acting” in the role, so he won’t have to appear for confirmation before the foreign relations committee, bypassing the established bureaucratic process of an examination by Congress.

Another case in point is Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, a friend and former real estate executive with no diplomatic experience who is now the leading US negotiator on several high-stakes conflicts. The recent Iran nuclear crisis is one of those times when we can all see the importance of diplomatic skills, including clear communication, efforts to avoid misunderstandings, knowledge of de-escalation mechanisms and an ability to understand others’ perspectives.

Politically charged appointments to the rank and file of the state department are also on the cards. Under Executive Order 13957, issued in January this year, certain roles in the federal public service, including those “of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character,” would fall within the “excepted service” under Schedule F of the federal employee classification system. In effect, this means the president can hire and fire public servants at will, side-stepping established procedure and filling experienced career roles with political appointees. Another of Trump’s executive orders, which bans unions within some federal departments, means state department employees have effectively been left without representation. The result is a department in turmoil.

The impact of all these changes is not abstract. In an era of multiplying crises, the Trump administration will find out the hard way that business deals are no substitute for diplomatic skills. Dealing with the world — managing allies and adversaries alike — requires expert diplomacy. America’s global reach is founded on more than aircraft carriers: it depends on credibility, consistency and conversation. A retreating United States is a less reliable partner, ceding ground to competitors.

Six months into Trump’s second presidency, Australians won’t be surprised to see another tool of American power being dismantled, but the damage to the state department may be among the hardest to reverse. A cadre of highly skilled diplomats is difficult to rebuild. The danger lies not just in what’s being cut, but also in what’s being forgotten: that diplomacy is how nations survive each other. •

The post At war with diplomacy appeared first on Inside Story.

On 1 July, after a central committee meeting on economic policy, the official media revealed policy guidance designed to curb “disorderly” price competition and phase out outdated plant and equipment. A few days later China’s industry ministry held a briefing with leading solar manufacturers, urging an end to “irrational” pricing, improvements in quality and the closing of outdated plant. Beijing says it also wants to break down barriers in the domestic market and boost consumption.

China’s economy lost its momentum some time before Xi Jinping’s elevation to the presidency in 2012. The double-digit growth of the 1980s and 1990s had continued the first decade of the new century but then begun to wane. Realistic analysts think the current number, inflated a little by consumer stimulus, is near 3 per cent.

A big part of today’s challenge is a result of the speed of China’s past growth — and the fact that nothing much was done to plan for managing a much larger and more diverse economy. (China’s GDP in 2024 was an estimated US$18,943 billion, sixty times its 1980 value. Australia’s GDP grew tenfold in the same period.) Structurally, much of the country’s investment is managed locally, delaying critical developments like a national market for electricity. Provincial competition is what drives investment and why China has too many EV makers, too many solar manufacturers, too many steel mills, too many cement plants — too many of many things.

Beijing’s move to reduce “disorderly” competition is no surprise. The excess capacity created by intense competition between growth-focused provincial governments has been exacerbated by a weaker domestic economy and growing export challenges. By shipping excess product overseas, China has attracted an increasing protectionist response from its trading partners. At home, Beijing’s action may be its response to the failure of unprofitable companies to pay suppliers, which has become widespread — and the consequences should China’s small local banks fail under a squeeze of unpaid debt and continuing pressure to finance new projects.

Solar prices, for example, have fallen for seven consecutive quarters and yet China still makes enough panels to meet global needs twice over. This, on top of the well-known troubles in China’s enormous property construction sector, is adding to provincial governments’ heavy debt.

Yet the level of reported non-performing loans, or NPLs, in China’s banks remains officially low, at just over 1.5 per cent at the end of March. Accounts from smaller local banks — and some large commercial lenders — are less sanguine. The reported NPLs of large state-owned banks were only 1.22 per cent of the total in March, whereas small, local commercial lenders were dealing with rates of 2.86 per cent. ICBC, the largest commercial lender, reported a hike in NPLs from 1.34 per cent to 2.39 per cent over the last year. Provincial banks Bohai Bank (in Tianjin) and Harbin Bank reported rates of 12.37 per cent and 5.51 per cent respectively, both of which were up markedly.

China’s banks are under pressure to boost consumer spending by lending more freely, despite the fact that consumers are clearly not motivated. Surveys show consistently that consumers are prioritising saving, which is hardly surprising when China’s market for its main household asset — housing — remains very weak and employment uncertain.

Policy is both driver of change and burdensome baggage for President Xi. Excess capacity must be reduced, implying disruptive change in cities built on steel mills, cement plants and other by-products of a growth agenda led by property and industrial development.

Even the new growth industries, like solar and EVs, are scaled well above their sustainable capacity. When China’s biggest EV maker, BYD, cut prices in May, it was followed quickly across the sector. This prompted the head of one the nation’s largest auto companies, Great Wall Motors, to suggest that BYD had begun to resemble Evergrande, the property developer whose collapse remains a national scandal. One leading analyst says that only fifteen of the 129 EV brands in China’s market today are likely to be viable beyond five years. Other reports suggest state planners expect no more than six to survive. One sign of how this will play out came last month when a dozen EV manufacturers felt impelled to publicly commit to paying their suppliers within sixty days.

China’s past policy and future plans come together in its steel industry. The country’s steelmakers produce more than a billion tonnes a year, roughly ten times the output of either the United States or the European Union. In recent years, China has lifted exports to around 110 million tonnes a year, but even then its annual excess appears to amount to about 50 million tonnes. Wood McKenzie, a global analyst, thinks that excess will grow quickly to about 250 million tonnes.

From 2016, China’s steel and coal workers were offered education and financial support to help them transition to new roles. Most of that effort was absorbed by the consolidation of coalmining rather than steel, where various policy edicts appear to have had little effect other than shutting down plant that was already underused. About 2.5 million people are still employed directly in 360 relatively new steel mills.

Aside from the need to withdraw what must be heavy subsidies, China is pursuing two policies aiming to reduce steel capacity. One is its goal for peak carbon emissions, which implies a cut of 100 million tonnes per year by 2030; the other is a 2021 modernisation plan that seeks to phase out low-grade, outdated plant and reduce coal-based blast furnaces by a third. (Electric capacity would be unchanged.)

A large amount of capacity has been closed over the years, yet new capacity has continued to grow — partly courtesy of improved technology. The steel modernisation policy was suspended in August last year, potentially blocking any new investment. Similar measures, using more specific controls, appear likely, and will probably be expanded to cover oil refining, petrochemicals and other over-supplied or carbon-intensive industry.

Assuming China does manage to curb unsustainable production in these large-employer industries, Xi will still need to prevent provincial government from bailing out the affected companies while extending controls previously used for state enterprises into the private sector. Pushback from powerful interests is likely. Beijing’s recent messaging also suggests policy will emphasise breaking down market barriers and increasing consumption overall to rebalance the economy. These are new, influential elements of a forward-looking agenda that Xi has otherwise enforced with vigour.

Amid the struggles with property and a slower economy, Xi has emphasised technological innovation, efficiency and productivity. China’s new factories are models of AI-influenced robotics and logistics that create advantage for Chinese industry. Provinces are competing to build local data stacks designed for AI specialisation in health, finance, manufacturing and other chosen sectors. Within those policy-driven efforts, Beijing appears to be emphasising “quality growth,” implying not only higher value but also financial sustainability. This will require a mindset change among Communist Party leaders who have typically concentrated on GDP and other raw quantitative targets.

Recent messages about breaking down barriers and raising consumption also imply a shift. Xi himself has been scornful of consumption-boosting handouts, including stronger welfare payments, so the recent messaging is assumed to mean that China will expand health, education, aged care and other services. But that would require the increase in taxes that Beijing has repeatedly dodged in the past.

The market barriers Xi needs most to break down are provincial. As the progenitors of most industry, provinces like to promote their own: products made in one can face challenges marketing in another. Provinces typically sequester their power markets and have engaged in little cross-border trade.

Nationally, the standout example has been the electricity market, where some barriers have begun breaking down — if only because the populous, fast-growing east of the country was having difficulty in meeting demand. A new plan links the huge generating capacity of the west of China with the populous east and opens up the whole to competitive bidding.

The benefits are clear: Xinjiang, Mongolia and other areas in the west and north have both coal and, increasingly, massive renewable capacity. Coal plants in populous areas are an identified health hazard  — besides which, China’s fleet of power stations generally runs at less than 50 per cent capacity. An extensive hydroelectric capacity in the southwest also offers valuable benefits in balancing uneven renewables loads. So, while China’s massive expansion in renewables is making headlines, the surprise might yet be in its “marketisation” of power. A truly contestable market like Australia’s could deliver both decarbonisation and a considerable reduction in cost. Again, though, this reform implies yet more redundancies within China’s huge electricity industry.

Xi is cast as an authoritarian, empowered to subdue dissent and enforce the authority of the party. His anti-corruption campaign, which has disrupted the careers of around 1 per cent of the Communist Party’s 100 million–plus membership, is often assumed to be a means of suppressing opposition. Lately, some observers have been energised by the suggestion, in a string of enforcement actions at high levels in the military, that Xi is under threat. There is may be some truth in that. But details of the party’s internal machinations emerge only after a great deal of time has passed.

What is clear is that Xi’s change in economic direction will disrupt many established centres of power in China. In March, notably, the party’s central committee issued a notice reinforcing the so-called “eight point rules” promulgated immediately after Xi’s appointment in 2012. The original edict signalled a crackdown on “decadences,” effectively alerting people to the anti-corruption campaign. Guidance from the agency overseeing anti-corruption actions has linked those measures to Xi’s development agenda. Notably, the central committee for discipline inspection is pressing delegates to promote decarbonisation, prioritise innovation as well as health and education spending, and discourage corrupt influences and favouritism in business and investment.

While the tumult of US politics plays out over coming years, China’s experience is likely to be equally challenging, and probably risky. The stakes are high. •

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Depending on your political point of view, this 900-page legislative package — with its US$4.5 trillion in tax cuts and new spending adding more than US$4 trillion to the national debt — represents either the beginning of a new golden age that “unleashes economic prosperity and empowers every American while strengthening our nation’s defences and boldly looking to the future” (to quote the White House) or a dark day for the nation’s fiscal future and the upending of healthcare for patients, doctors and hospitals.

In so many ways, this is the archetypal Trump bill. It has all the superlatives he loves. It starts with the boastful name that reflects its size — it is the biggest reconciliation bill ever in terms of pagination and of spending and healthcare cuts. It also exemplifies all of Trump’s shortcomings — it ignores the impact on the federal budget and the national debt, egregiously benefits the rich over the poor, and breaks his commitments to never cut Medicare and Medicaid.

What originally started out as a fiscal bill covering one of Trump’s key domestic commitments — making permanent his 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations — quickly ballooned into the biggest and most expensive draw on the national debt ever seen, with impacts likely to be felt for decades. On its passage through the House and the Senate, Republicans couldn’t resist adding a welter of measures culled from the MAGA and Project 2025 agendas. Among them were $170.7 billion for immigration enforcement (making Immigration and Customs Enforcement the largest federal law enforcement agency in the nation’s history); cuts to clean energy spending predicted to result in decreased electrical capacity, increased power prices and an assault on efforts to tackle climate change; measures that will make it harder for Americans to finance their higher education; and provision for some individuals to deduct a certain amount of tip wages and overtime from their taxes (a Trump campaign commitment).

Perhaps the bill’s huge cost to the budget meant Republicans felt they had no choice but to make severe compensatory cuts in health and social services, but it’s just as likely that the $1.2 trillion cuts to Medicaid (the health insurance program for the poor) and the supplemental nutrition assistance scheme (or SNAP, known colloquially as food stamps) are an expression of their long-held attitudes to welfare. These cuts ignore the fact that Republican states (and the people who live in them) are disproportionately dependent on federal aid. And they ignore the fact that, while their severity will devastate millions of people, the savings will go nowhere near offsetting the cost of the high-income tax cuts.

Trump is claiming victory, although he had little to do with the shape of the final bill. He sat on the sidelines, he and his staff relatively disengaged from the policies and processes that go into pulling together a bill of this size (and one that is subject to the rules of reconciliation). His engagement came only when it looked like the votes were lacking and his 4 July deadline would not be met, when he resorted to arm twisting (or what sometimes looked more like political blackmail).

It’s clear that neither Trump nor the vast majority of Republicans who voted for the bill are aware of all its provisions and their implications. They have resorted to ideological slogans and made claims that will be hard to justify. “We really have independence now over the over-taxation, where we were being taxed out of our lives, independence from over-regulation, we have independence now from radical-left bureaucrats and independence from the largest alien invasion that I think any country has ever seen,” declared Trump after final passage.

The president now owns this bill and everything that is in it — the good and the bad and the ugly. And for a piece of legislation that contains so many provisions (some of which will take quite some time in implementation) affecting so many Americans, it has had a very poor start. Although Trump claimed the new law is the “most popular bill ever signed” it is historic in a way Trump will not admit to: it is the most unpopular piece of lawmaking since the 1990s. On average across pollsters, just 31 per cent of Americans support OBBBA, with 54 per cent opposing it. So it’s no surprise that it has done nothing to help Trump’s approval ratings, which, at 38 per cent, are lower than for any other modern president at the same time in their administration.

An examination of the main OBBBA provisions shows that many Americans face tough times — and given that the adverse impacts will fall hardest on people in Republican states who are (or have been) Trump supporters, tough times also loom for congressional Republicans who must face the voters in the midterms in November next year.

Republicans have embraced tax cuts since the Reagan era, claiming they spark economic growth. Trump is all in on this: “After this [OBBBA] kicks in, our country is going to be a rocket ship economically.” But there’s little evidence for this optimism and considerable evidence that past tax cuts, rather than supercharging growth, have driven budget deficits and increases in the national debt, as the independent Congressional Budget Office predicts in this case. The CBO says the federal debt will increase by US$3.3 trillion over the next decade; this does not include US$690 billion in additional interest.

The tax provisions in OBBBA generally benefit everybody, at least a little, but the wealthy will gain the most. People with incomes above US$1 million will save around US$60,000 compared with their tax bill if the current rates expired; those with incomes below US$30,000 (around the federal poverty level) will benefit by less than US$200. The poorest 20 per cent of Americans will receive just 1 per cent of the bill’s tax cuts next year, while the highest-earning five per cent will receive 44 per cent. “The bill stands alone historically for its unique upside-down mix of large tax cuts for the top, deep cuts that affect low- and middle-income people, and massive increases in deficits and debt,” said the president of the bipartisan Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.

The very people who gain least from the tax cuts will be hardest hit by the cuts to healthcare and food stamps. The new legislation will reduce federal spending on Medicaid by US930 billion and on food stamps by US$186 billion over the next decade. Most of these cuts are achieved by implementing work reporting requirements (despite the lack of evidence for their effectiveness) and setting up paperwork and procedural barriers (which hit hard at people with lower health literacy, lack of internet access and who live in isolated and under-served areas).

Other provisions undermine the Obamacare’s incentives for states to expand access to Medicaid and its subsidies to purchase insurance. Larry Levitt, the executive vice-president for health policy at the independent research centre KFF, says this bill will “cripple Obamacare” — effectively achieving what the president and Republicans failed to do in Trump’s first term.

Trump and the Republicans have engaged in the worst sort of gaslighting, claiming they are not cutting programs, merely cutting fraud, waste and abuse, and that no one will lose coverage as a result of this bill. They are playing a nasty game, insinuating that millions of the people who receive Medicaid and food stamp benefits are healthy and able-bodied and simply gaming the system. But their numbers don’t add up; experts say the majority of Medicaid beneficiaries currently already meet the work requirements or are in one of the exception categories; Medicaid is the primary provider of coverage for 63 per cent of nursing home residents; and research and real-world experience both show that work requirements don’t help people find or maintain work and are almost impossible to implement. As he signed the bill into law Trump acknowledged it included deep spending cuts but suggested that people “won’t even notice it.” “The people are happy, they’re happy,” added the president whose disapproval figures are plumbing new depths.

Experts estimate that between eleven million and seventeen million Americans will lose health insurance, which could lead to more than fifty thousand new preventable deaths each year. The loss of health insurance also means hundreds of rural hospitals will lose payments for the care they deliver and are at increased risk of closing. The majority of rural areas most affected are in red states.

The cuts to food stamps will affect more than forty million people (many of them the same people who will lose health insurance). This includes some sixteen million children, eight million seniors, and four million non-elderly adults with disabilities. As just one example of the pettiness embodied in OBBBA, people applying for food stamps are no longer able to deduct their internet costs when calculating their household’s net income, which is then used to determine how much households are entitled to receive in benefits.

Along with the major provisions in this package, a growing number of surprise smaller provisions are emerging. These include measures to strip Medicaid from Planned Parenthood for a year; eliminate the tax on gun silencers and short-barrel rifles; tax some of the remittances immigrants send home to their families; spend $40 million on Trump’s pet project, the Garden of Heroes; create Trump-branded savings accounts for children born in the next few years; subsidise Alaskan whaling and rum distilleries in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands; refurbish the plane Qatar gave Trump; and enable private jet owners to write off the full cost of their aircraft in the first year of purchase.

And then there are the implementation details Trump and Republicans are not so keen to talk about. A statutory requirement to automatically impose budget cuts when legislation increases the deficit means there must now be automatic sequestration cuts across all government programs, including Medicare. The Congressional Budget Office calculates these cuts to Medicare will amount to US$490 billion over the next ten years, starting in the fiscal year that begins in October. Republicans’ recognition of the political risks inherent in the package are reflected in the timing of its most generous tax breaks, which come early, and the delaying of most of its painful benefit cuts until after the 2026 midterm elections.

Getting OBBBA through Congress was a struggle for Republicans. There were major disagreements within the party and the bill passed both chambers only by the narrowest of margins. It will undoubtedly provide great campaign material for the Democrats in next year’s midterm elections, and already some Republicans, including senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, are indicating they are open to efforts to undo some of the most punitive provisions.

Emboldened by their victory, seemingly unhindered by public opinion, and perhaps cognisant that they might have only one more legislative shot in the barrel, Trump and the Republican leadership are now attempting to implement further spending cuts identified by the “Department of Government Efficiency.”

This week the Senate will take up a $9.4 billion package — already passed by the House — that includes more spending cuts, more tax cuts, and some of the provisions ruled ineligible under the reconciliation rules and excluded from OBBBA. Most of the funds targeted in this rescission package were enacted in March legislation passed by Congress, including on a bipartisan basis in the Senate, which Trump signed into law to fund the government for the rest of fiscal year 2025. Now the administration is setting about revoking them.

The spending cuts include the withdrawal of funding from global health programs, international peacekeeping and economic development efforts, and domestic community TV and radio stations supported by the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio. Nothing has changed since the funding was approved: these are simply programs (described by the Heritage Foundation as “woke and weaponised government funding”) that Trump has long opposed. The Senate must act (and gain House approval of their package) by 18 July to effect this proposal. Trump is threatening to withhold endorsements from Republican senators who don’t support his administration’s effort to claw back these congressionally approved funds.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has indicated he expects the White House to send multiple rescission packages to the Congress for action in “a multifront war against the deficit.” It looks like a concerted Republican attempt to wreak as much damage as possible on programs it dislikes in as short a time as possible, despite the evidence that these very actions could deprive them of their congressional majorities in the midterm elections in November next year. •

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Oddly, though, and little noticed, another dynamic has emerged in the six months since Donald Trump returned to the White House. This is the phenomenon of global governance without US participation, and it has been on vivid display at the Fourth UN Financing for Development Conference, or FfD4, in Seville, Spain, this past week.

These conferences don’t happen very often. A forum for the international community to review the progress of the Sustainable Development Goals and discuss new ways to finance their achievement in the Global South, the last one, FfD3, was in 2015.

Until three weeks ago, the negotiations for FfD4 had been fractious and protracted. Developing countries were angry at overseas-aid cutbacks by many of the world’s richest nations — notably the United States (which has abolished its aid agency, USAID) but also Britain, France and others. In turn, the developed countries insisted that developing nations should raise more resources from their own populations, both in taxes and savings. They wanted the private sector to be more involved in development; the poorer countries countered that global capital is not interested in their economies.

Negotiations seemed deadlocked. And then a strange thing happened. Having tried and failed to get the goal of “sustainable development” — a mainstay of the global consensus since 1992 — deleted from the text, along with all mention of climate change (ditto), the United States decided to withdraw altogether from the negotiations. Its delegation walked out.

The reaction of the remaining 192 countries was swift, and perhaps unexpected. They almost immediately agreed on a compromise text drawn up by the conference chairs (Mexico, Nepal, Norway and Zambia) and the UN secretariat. The Compromiso de Sevilla is an artful summary of a new global consensus (or at least, a consensus minus one) about how financing can be found for investment in health and education, sanitation and electricity, gender equality and environmental protection.

The Compromiso’s core principle can be described as “all of the above.” The world needs more grant aid and more business sector investment; higher domestic taxes and larger international flows; more lending and more debt relief. It contains a wealth of proposals in all these areas, and others, along with a broad commitment to making the “international financial architecture” fairer and more inclusive of countries in the global South.

No country is entirely happy with it. But the American withdrawal forced the remaining delegates to realise that — as one European put it to me — “we have more in common with one another, despite our differences, than we now do with the US.”

Critics of the agreement have not been slow to criticise. The text includes no new obligations on rich countries to provide more development assistance. Most of the world’s financial governance — in the IMF and World Bank, and in the frameworks for international tax cooperation and debt resolution — remain dominated by the developed countries in general and the United States in particular. The world’s financial system still rests on the US dollar, leaving developing countries at the mercy of American interest rates.

But another interesting thing also happened in Seville. As well as unanimously adopting the Compromiso de Sevilla, the conference launched the Sevilla Platform for Action, an array of more than 130 initiatives to expand and enhance development finance. These are supported not by the entire UN membership but by various “coalitions of the willing,” smaller groupings of countries (often from both North and South) in many cases alongside international institutions.

So, for example, forty-four African countries have signed up to a plan to modernise their tax collection systems. A coalition of seventy-two countries, the “Pact for Prosperity, People and the Planet,” has set up an expert group to examine whether post-crash financial regulation is preventing investment in emerging market countries. Spain and the World Bank will host a project developing standardised procedures for “debt for development swaps,” in which debt is bought back to release funds for investment in specific fields, such as nature, climate action or education. Even if only some of them lead to significant change, these initiatives offer an answer to the claim that FfD4 was all hot air.

The temperature in Seville this week has admittedly been sweltering, hitting a high of 41C on Tuesday. But in the (air-conditioned) halls and meeting rooms, the political temperature has been noticeably moderate. The mood has been one of cooperation and constructive debate: a search for common solutions and achievable commitments. “It’s amazing how much you can agree on when you don’t have to include the US,” one delegate observed.

The question of how to exercise global governance without the United States now turns to the G20. Since it was founded in 1999, the group of the world’s largest economies (now twenty-one of them, since the accession of the African Union in 2023) has often been dominated by the United States and its interests.

While the US hasn’t formally withdrawn from the G20, American officials have not been taking part in this year’s meetings, hosted by South Africa. The next ministerial-level meeting, of G20 finance ministers, is in Kwazulu-Natal later this month. I was told that the America embassy in Pretoria booked an entire hotel for the US treasury secretary Scott Bessent and his delegation. But with less than a month to go the embassy had no idea whether he or they intended to come. As for whether Donald Trump will attend the leaders’ summit in Johannesburg in November, no one knows.

And all this poses another question. The United States is due to hold the presidency of the G20 next year. Can a country that has stopped attending the G20 chair it?

As the current presidency, South Africa is pondering how it can secure unanimous agreement at its November summit (as the G20 requires) without its largest member. Canada, this year’s host of the G7, may be able to offer some advice. When it presided over the two-day G7 summit last month, Trump stayed only for the first twelve hours; the second day was just the “G6.” No general communiqué was therefore agreed. Individual pre-negotiated statements were issued on a slightly random list of specific issues that had US support: the Israel–Iran conflict, “transnational repression,” artificial intelligence, critical minerals, migrant smuggling, wildfires and quantum technology. For the rest, Canada issued a “chair’s summary” setting out the other issues the leaders (or at least, most of them) had discussed.

As a way of coping with the semi-participation of the United States, this method is about the best that can be done. But it doesn’t stop Trump from getting his way. A week ago — outside its formal meetings — the G7 agreed to exempt American companies from the global minimum corporate tax rate it had negotiated in 2021. The tax, a path-breaking measure aimed at preventing multinational corporations from moving their accounting profits around the world in order to pay the lowest tax rates, had incurred Trump’s ire. He had threatened a “revenge tax” on companies from the other G7 nations if US companies weren’t exempted. So the G6 caved in. “That’s fifteen years of progress abandoned, just like that,” a developing country official lamented in Seville.

Could the United States similarly force the scrapping of previous G20 agreements it no longer supports? Diplomats I spoke to in Seville thought probably not: by not participating in the various G20 working groups this year, the Americans are widely felt to have forfeited their right to influence the final outcome. And there are other member countries of the G20, notably China and Brazil, who are not so willing to cave in to Trump’s threats. But equally, it could mean that no communiqué is issued at the summit this year, or only a very skeletal document, with a chair’s summary having to suffice to reflect the overall discussion among the leaders.

As the nations of the world learn to govern their shared problems dealing with an unstable and unpredictable Washington, they are effectively making it up as they go along. But there is one major summit this year where the outcome can be fairly confidently predicted.

In November Brazil will host the latest UN climate change conference, COP30, in the Amazonian city of Belém. Having withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement, the United States will definitely not be there. That means we can be pretty sure what will happen.

No other country in the world rejects climate science as America now does. No other country formally eschews action to tackle rising emissions. So, at the leaders’ summit that opens COP30, Trump will be conspicuously absent. But for that very reason we can expect almost every other world leader to attend. They will be there to reaffirm their belief in international cooperation on climate change, and to commit to working together to tackle it. As in Seville this week, they will be there, in other words, to insist that there is still an “us” in “We the peoples,” even if there is no US. •

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Australia continues to greenlight coal and gas projects, and many more giant gas and coal projects are in the planning pipeline. Most of these projects will produce fossil fuels for export. The contradiction between this expansionist approach and Australian governments’ professed commitment to tackle climate change is painfully obvious.

Consider, for example, the recent federal approval of the proposed extension to Woodside’s North-West Shelf gas processing facility at Karratha, Western Australia, which followed approval from the WA state government last December. These approvals would see the facility operating until 2070 — twenty years after the world is aiming to hit net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.

The facility’s extension would be catastrophic for the climate. According to Woodside’s own figures, it would result in 87.89 million tonnes of carbon-dioxide-equivalent emissions into the atmosphere each year. (A helpful graphic produced by the Guardian vividly illustrates the scale of these emissions.) Over its life, the project’s total emissions will equate to 4.3 billion tonnes of CO₂e. Around 90 per cent of those emissions, or four billion tonnes, will come from burning the gas processed at the facility.

The project also underpins Woodside’s gambit to open up the Browse Basin for drilling — a “carbon bomb” that is itself estimated to cause up to 1.6 billion tonnes of CO₂e over its lifetime, equivalent to around three times Australia’s entire annual domestic emissions.

Five features of the new British guidance expose the flawed way in which the climate impacts of projects like the North-West Shelf Extension are assessed in Australia.

First, producers must disclose likely emissions from burning the produced fossil fuels

A key British Supreme Court decision in June last year (known as Finch) made clear that the country’s environmental impact assessment laws required fossil fuel producers to assess not only the climate impact of the “upstream” emissions from the project itself (“scope 1” emissions) — the venting and flaring of methane, for example — and the emissions from energy produced off-site to power the project (“scope 2” emissions). They must also assess the impact of the “downstream” combustion of the produced fuels (“scope 3” emissions).

Scope 3 emissions from fossil fuel projects can be up to twenty times higher than scopes 1 and 2, which is why fossil fuel producers prefer to avoid disclosing them.

It was the Finch ruling that prompted Britain’s Labour government to issue the new guidance. It confirms that the environmental impact assessments required by law for new oil and gas projects must take account of scope 3 emissions.

By contrast, the WA government’s environmental assessment for the North-West Shelf project effectively ignored the project’s four billion tonnes of scope 3 emissions. In its report recommending approval of the project, the WA Environmental Protection Authority acknowledged that the project’s greenhouse gas emissions were the key environmental factor. But it only imposed conditions on the project’s scope 1 emissions. It did not “consider it reasonable to impose conditions on Scope 3 GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions at this stage because those emissions are beyond the reasonable control of the proponent.”

As the Australia Institute argues in its appeal against the EPA’s report, this logic is perverse: “If greenhouse gas emissions are a key factor, and 91 per cent of those emissions cannot be mitigated because conditions cannot be imposed over those emissions, then the EPA should recommend the proposal not be allowed.”

The British guidance takes the more logical approach. It, too, acknowledges that “a developer may not have direct control over mitigation measures for avoiding, preventing or reducing scope 3 emissions.” But it doesn’t consider this to be a reason to exclude the climate impact of those emissions when assessing the project’s overall environmental impact. If anything, the guidance implies that the inability to control those emissions would make it more difficult to justify approving a project.

(The WA EPA, via guidance published in November 2024, now advises proponents to assess scope 3 emissions where these are over 100,000 tonnes of CO₂e in any year.)

Second, producers and governments must take responsibility for assessing the global climate effects of exported fossil fuels

As far as Australian state and federal approval processes are concerned, the Western Australian EPA’s approach to North-West Shelf is illustrative of a broader tendency to dismiss scope 3 emissions as “someone else’s problem.” In a revealing interview with the ABC, the former chair of the EPA, Tom Hatton (whose tenure ended before the North-West Shelf application), says he never saw it as the agency’s role to regulate scope 3 emissions: “For exported gas, those scope 3 emissions happen in jurisdictions outside of Australia, so it was never considered something that the state government, on advice from the EPA, would ever feel that they should condition, or put any conditions, on.” He added: “It would be a confusing international analysis, international arrangement, for Australia to do that.”

The last comment resembles an argument often made by fossil fuel companies when they defend new projects, and dutifully echoed by governments when they justify approving those projects: that taking account of the climate impacts of the overseas burning of Australian-produced fossil fuels undermines the alleged distribution of national responsibility for climate mitigation prescribed under the international climate regime.

But this alleged distribution is mythical. International climate agreements merely require countries to account for the emissions occurring on their territory; they do not envisage that they are exclusively responsible for such emissions. As the head of the Queensland Land Court held in an important case concerning a Galilee Basin coalmine proposed by Waratah Coal, the fact that the international climate regime prescribes certain mechanisms that are domestic in nature does not limit countries’ obligations to pursue the global goal at the heart of the climate regime — preventing dangerous climate change — which requires international cooperation.

The British guidance takes the same view as the court. It correctly notes that the consideration of the climate impacts of a British fossil fuel project are the same whether the produced fuel is burned in Britain or elsewhere. And it acknowledges that this requires a different, global, approach to accounting for emissions than the territorial approach adopted by states under the international climate regime.

Third, the impact of the project’s emissions must be considered in light of internationally agreed climate goals

Another trick fossil fuel companies like to use is to make the (annual or total) emissions from their project — even when these include scope 3 emissions — appear small by comparing them to very large numbers, like (annual or total) global emissions. An oft-used metaphor is that a single project’s emissions are just a “drop in the bucket” of the global climate problem.

Woodside’s North-West Shelf project again provides a helpful example: Woodside presents the project’s annual scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions of 87.89 million tonnes of CO₂e as being a mere 0.16 per cent of total global emissions in 2017; an increase it characterises as “slight.” The British guidance emphatically rejects this approach:

… characterising scope 3 emissions from a project solely in numeric terms against global GHG emissions would not on its own provide a meaningful expression of the global effect of those scope 3 emissions, because of the obvious difference in scale between individual projects and global emissions levels.

Rather, the impact of a project’s emissions must be understood in light of the internationally-agreed goal of the Paris Agreement: “Holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.” Specifically, the guidance requires companies to compare a project’s emissions to the more meaningful benchmark of the remaining global carbon budget for achieving the Paris Agreement’s temperature goal.

For a high (83 per cent) chance of limiting the increase in the global average temperature to 1.5°C, the remaining global carbon budget is a mere thirty billion tonnes. The North-West Shelf project alone would take up a staggering 14.3 per cent of that budget. It is hard to overestimate how extraordinary this single project’s climate impact is. If it’s a mere drop in the bucket, then it’s a huge drop in a tiny bucket.

Fourth, the cumulative impacts of a project must be seen in light of not only past emissions but also emissions from “existing and planned” future projects globally

Even that ratio of project emissions to remaining global carbon budget doesn’t adequately capture the climate impacts of new projects. It is wrong to consider an individual new project in isolation from all the future emissions that are likely to occur from other GHG-emitting projects in operation or in development around the world, for this would lead to “death by a thousand cuts.” Yet this is what happens in Australia when projects are assessed.

By contrast, the British guidance requires that each proposed project’s emissions be assessed against not only cumulative historical global GHG emissions but also future emissions from “existing and planned projects” globally.

Conservative estimates of emissions from globally existing and planned fossil fuel projects can be obtained from peer-reviewed published studies of “committed emissions” from fossil fuel infrastructure. For example, a groundbreaking study by Kelly Trout and colleagues finds that the (scope 1 and 3) emissions from the world’s operational or under-construction oilfields, gas fields and coalmines would amount to more than 900 gigatonnes, which is thirty times what now remains of the global carbon budget for 1.5°C (83 per cent probability). Those “committed emissions” figures even eclipse (by more than 80 per cent) carbon budgets that would give a mere 50 per cent chance of staying within 1.7°C.

I argue in a new working paper that only by considering a project’s emissions together with these cumulative emissions from such operational and under-construction fossil fuel projects globally, and in light of remaining carbon budgets, can the true climate impact of new fossil fuel projects be fully appreciated. New projects are not just big drops in a tiny bucket; they are adding water to a bucket that is already overflowing.

The British guidance requires proponents to assess their projects’ impacts in this way.

Fifth, the impact of the project’s gross emissions must be assessed

The last line of defence for fossil fuel advocates — and one beloved of Australian fossil fuel companies and governments — is the claim that their exported fuels will displace other fossil fuels in the market (conversely, “if we don’t mine it, someone else will”). Consequently, it is claimed that the “net” emissions (from all projects) will be lower than the “gross” emissions from the project in question. This kind of claim is typically coupled with a further claim that the life-cycle emissions from the proposed project will be lower than those of the displaced fuels, such that the project is actually net-beneficial to the climate.

Woodside makes a version of this “market substitution” argument when it claims that:

the provision of natural gas into markets has the potential to contribute significantly to the reduction in global GHG emissions by displacing higher carbon intensive power generation (e.g. coal-gas energy switch). As such, the Proposal may result in a net reduction in global GHG emissions.

Such claims, which were challenged in appeals to the WA EPA’s report, fell on deaf ears in the state approval process for the North-West Shelf project. Similar claims have long been accepted by Australian administrative decision-makers when deciding to approve new fossil fuel projects. For instance, former federal environment minister Greg Hunt accepted a variant of the market substitution argument made by Adani in relation to its controversial Carmichael coalmine, effectively dismissing the project’s staggering 4.7 billion tonnes CO₂e of overseas combustion emissions.

The British guidelines, which on this point follow an important decision by the High Court of England and Wales that quashed the approval for a proposed new coalmine in Cumbria, significantly restrict the scope for this kind of market substitution argument:

Scope 3 emissions from downstream combustion of the hydrocarbons should be considered regardless of any evidence that also may be put forward as to the extent to which “substitution” may occur (i.e. whether the hydrocarbons extracted as a result of the project will replace, rather than be additional to, other hydrocarbons that would otherwise be extracted elsewhere).

Substitution is not considered to be a factor affecting whether scope 3 emissions from a project’s downstream activities are an effect that needs to be assessed in the [Environment Statement].

The new British guidelines cast Australia’s environmental assessment processes for fossil fuel projects in an unflattering light, to say the least. But the British government is taking a more direct and decisive approach in relation to new licences for oil and gas exploration: it has committed to effectively ban them.

Australia’s environmental protection laws are so unfit for purpose when it comes to assessing the climate impacts of fossil fuel projects that this more direct route is required: the federal and state governments should simply prohibit new fossil fuel extraction projects. •

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The issue is welfare spending. Since its landslide election victory a year ago, the Labour administration has been in a fiscal bind. It inherited a mess from the previous Conservative government: a £22 billion shortfall in the in-year public accounts, taxes at an all-time high, government debt at nearly 100 per cent of GDP and borrowing at the limits of market tolerance. A huge tax-raising budget last November, the largest in modern times, looked to have relieved the problem. But in the first few months of this year weak growth and the prospect of Trumpian tariffs blew apart Labour’s plans, and chancellor of the exchequer Rachel Reeves was forced to find more money to fill the fiscal hole.

Ask any Treasury to find £5 billion this year and every year — with “raise taxes again” and “borrow some more” not judged to be acceptable answers — and just one response will be forthcoming. Only welfare spending offers up such sums for immediate cuts. This is partly because welfare spending is assumed to be generally unpopular with the public. And it’s also because — unlike cutting expenditure on, say, education, health or policing — it doesn’t lead to unionised public servants losing their jobs. It simply makes welfare recipients poorer. And how much power do they have?

More than Starmer and Reeves bargained for, it turns out. Labour’s plans were singularly harsh. To find their £5 billion, they decided to reduce eligibility for disability benefits. Under the current system, disability is assessed on a range of criteria — such as how much assistance a person needs to perform everyday tasks including washing and shopping — and claimants qualify for benefits according to how practically disabled they are. The government proposed to tighten the criteria so that, for example, someone unable to wash themselves below the waist would no longer qualify unless they were also severely disabled in some other way. It also planned to reduce the rate of the incapacity benefit paid to people deemed unable to work for health reasons, and to cut support for their carers. Between 800,000 and 1.2 million people would have lost support of between £4200 and £6300 a year by 2029–30.

The government claimed it was reforming an “unsustainable” welfare system. The overall cost of the benefits paid to working-age people (that is, not including pensions and child-related payments) is projected to rise by more than half in the next five years, from just under £50 billion in 2024 to more than £75 billion by 2030. That would take the benefits bill from 1.7 per cent of GDP to 2.2 per cent, around the size of current spending on defence. Any government, Labour said, would have had to make cuts.

The rising welfare bill mainly reflects a dramatic increase in the number of people of working age who are not working or looking for work. More than a fifth of working-age adults in the UK — 9.2 million people — are now deemed to be “economically inactive.” This is 700,000 more than before the Covid pandemic. The reasons are complex and not fully understood: it is partly to do with older workers taking early retirement, partly to an increase in long-term sickness and disability, and partly down to a rise in the number of “NEETs”: young people not in education, employment or training. The government has set out various plans to tackle these problems.

But the disability benefit cuts were not among them. As disability rights groups quickly pointed out, eligibility for those benefits has nothing to do with fitness for work. Cutting them would not incentivise people to look for employment; on the contrary, it is often only the financial help they receive — for example, for mobility — that enables a disabled person to hold down a job. The government’s proposed changes were not “reforming the system.” They were simply saving money. And doing so on the backs of some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in society.

For many Labour MPs this was simply unconscionable. They did not enter politics to do this. The government announced its proposals in March; by last week more than 120 Labour MPs had signed a parliamentary motion that would have killed the legislation. One frontbencher had already resigned and several more were threatening to. Starmer claimed that MPs’ criticisms were just the usual “noises off,” and blithely insisted that the plans would go ahead. And then suddenly on Thursday night he caved in. The benefit cuts would be abandoned for current recipients. New claimants would be paid less, but only after full consultation with disabled people’s organisations.

And how would this be paid for, given the centrality of the planned cuts to the government’s fiscal sums? It could not say. We shall have to wait till the budget next October to find out. But with the savings now estimated as only £2 billion a year, not £5 billion, it looks fairly certain that either or both of the two previously unacceptable answers — higher taxes or more borrowing — will need to be deployed.

Major U-turns are never a good look for a government’s reputation for competence. But this is Starmer’s third in as many months. He had already reversed Reeves’s highly unpopular abolition of the pensioners’ winter fuel payment for all but the poorest. And he had gone back on a decision not to order a public enquiry into the sexual abuse of vulnerable girls by gangs of men in some of Britain’s poorest towns. Such an inquiry was not necessary, he had previously said, as other inquiries had already been held; but there will now be one.

Even before this latest U-turn, Starmer’s approval rating had fallen to minus 46. In the most recent surveys of voting intentions, Labour is down to around 23 per cent, from the 34 per cent it won in last year’s election. Top of the polls, on around 27 per cent, is Reform UK, the right-wing populist party headed by veteran Brexiteer Nigel Farage. It is of little consolation to Labour that the Conservative Party is doing even worse, barely reaching 17 per cent.

What has gone wrong for Starmer? Labour MPs are offering three explanations, none of them giving much comfort to the beleaguered PM.

The first is that he and his advisers have become too obsessed with countering the threat from Reform. The new party is gathering most of its support from former Tory voters. But a proportion are switching from Labour, particularly in the party’s former industrial and working-class heartlands. These voters, it is believed, are anti-immigrant, anti-woke and anti-welfare. So Labour should be too.

Starmer’s Labour critics think this analysis is misguided. The Labour-to-Reform switchers may be cultural conservatives who don’t like immigration, but they mostly remain quite left-wing on economic issues. And quite a few of them have family members who are disabled or long-term sick, who care for them, or are otherwise dependent on the welfare system. These voters didn’t support the benefit cuts. And neither did those who are abandoning Labour to its left — to the Liberal Democrats and Greens — rather than its right. Labour MPs warn that focusing entirely on attracting potential Reform voters is making Labour deeply unattractive to a much larger cohort of voters in its new heartlands in metropolitan and middle-class areas.

The second criticism made of Starmer cuts even deeper. His MPs are asking what he actually believes in. This is not just because of the U-turns. It is because Starmer seems to find it very difficult to articulate it himself. A dull public speaker, the prime minister has failed to craft a consistent or compelling message about what his government is for. It has some distinctive policies — a higher minimum wage and more secure employment rights, an industrial strategy, an effort to build more affordable homes, a commitment to net zero. But Starmer offers no vision or philosophy that unites these policies, and no soundbites or slogans that imprint them on voters’ consciousness.

And then there’s the third criticism. This is the one you hear most insistently from his despairing MPs. Starmer is just not very good at politics. An MP only since 2015, with the training and instincts of the lawyer and civil servant he once was, Starmer simply doesn’t know how to listen to voters, how to keep his own MPs on board, or how to craft a communications strategy. The disability benefits fiasco demonstrated all these failings. His supporters worry that it wasn’t a bug in the way his government works, but a feature. •

The post Benefits and costs appeared first on Inside Story.

His administration sees colleges and universities — particularly Harvard University and other Ivy League institutions — as hostile to conservatives, biased towards minorities, hotbeds of antisemitism, and intent on perpetuating liberal or “woke” ideologies. Trump is also attempting to impose his approach on overseas institutions that receive US research funds, including those in Australia.

Universities like Harvard are not without their faults, of course. Merit and racial diversity are endangered by admissions systems that favour the children of graduates to encourage alumni ties and, importantly, donations. But it’s also true that “legacy” admissions have declined dramatically at Harvard, from around 33 per cent in the years 2014–22 (compared to an overall acceptance rate of around 6 per cent) to 16 per cent in 2025 (when the acceptance rate was a little over 3 per cent).

These institutions are also very rich, with endowments exceeding the  gross domestic product of many countries. Harvard tops the list with an astounding US$53 billion in reserves. There are restrictions on how much of this can be spent, however, with donor terms directing 70 per cent of the annual distribution of funds. In fiscal year 2024, Harvard spent US$749 million on financial aid for students and 55 per cent of its undergraduates currently receive financial assistance.

But Trump has said nothing about the inequities of legacy admissions, and nor has he pushed universities to offer more financial aid to students: his vindictive gripes lie elsewhere. Central is his claim that American universities are rife with antisemitism and support for the Palestinian militant group Hamas.

In early March, responding to the findings of the administration’s Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, the Department of Education threatened sixty institutions of higher education with potential enforcement actions if they do not fulfill their legislative obligation to protect Jewish students on campus.

The administration also expanded into higher education its attack on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, or DEI, initiatives. In February the Department of Education issued a letter warning institutions to stop using “race-based preferences” in admissions, financial aid, hiring, training and other areas or risk losing federal funding. (These demands extend to Australian universities and research institutes that receive US research funds.) The department has launched investigations into fifty-two universities in forty-one states, accusing them of using “racial preferences and stereotypes in education programs and activities.” As part of its aggressive targeting of colleges and universities for allegedly flouting the president’s priorities, the department is also probing universities that allow transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports.

Trump has also taken aim at university endowments — which give universities a measure of insulation from his demands — by signing executive orders to enforce disclosure of large donations and foreign gifts. Other measures introduced by executive order would reshape the college accreditation system in line with the administration’s political priorities. Washington insiders report that the administration is planning to further up the ante by examining where endowments are invested — scrutinising them for ties to China, support for green energy and the application of environmental, social and governance criteria the White House doesn’t support.

On top of this, Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill (yes, that’s what it’s actually called), passed by the Republican controlled House of Representatives and now in the Senate, raises taxes on university endowments. The tax rate, graduated according to the size of a university’s endowment relative to American enrolments (foreign students don’t count), would increase from the current flat rate of 1.4 per cent to a maximum of 21 per cent.

Add to that the impact on students, staff and academic visitors of antagonistic immigration policies, including the State Department’s recent announcement that it would stop interviewing applicants for student visas and “aggressively revoke” visas for Chinese students, and American universities and colleges clearly face a tough future.

Given the long history of attacks by Trump and his vice-president J.D. Vance on institutions of higher education, these hostile measures should be no surprise. In 2022, just weeks after announcing his third presidential bid, Trump announced a “free speech policy initiative” that would strip federal research dollars and student loan support from universities involved in “censorship activities or election interferences.”

Vance, a Yale graduate, now talks about his “totalitarian” alma mater’s “liberal bias.” In a 2021 speech entitled “The Universities are the Enemy” he declared that “we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” In 2024 he told CBS News that the United States “could learn from” decisions made by authoritarian Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, including his controversial crackdowns on dissidents at universities.

In a speech to Yale University in April, Californian Democratic congressman Ro Khanna argued that Trump and Vance fear universities because they pose a threat to their consolidation of power in the executive branch. “Vance calls the university the enemy because he knows what lives here: historians, economists, law professors and scientists who threaten him not with force, but with ideas,” Khanna said.

Despite the early signals, universities and colleges have been shocked by the administration’s efforts to limit academic freedoms, the advancement and dissemination of knowledge and the ability of these institutions to support and protect students and staff from discrimination, inequities and, most recently, arrest and deportation.

Trump’s vengeance — for that is what it surely is — has been directed primarily at Columbia University (perhaps because his businesses have been engaged in a real estate battle with the university) and Harvard, the nation’s oldest university, both of which Trump and MAGA see as overrun with elites and liberals.

In contrast to the major law firms, media and IT companies and other institutions that have chosen to do deals with Trump, Harvard is taking a stand against what university president Alan Garber calls “assertions of power, unmoored from the law.” “The university will not surrender its independence or its constitutional rights,” Garber wrote. This has so far meant the loss of $2.2 billion in funding from the National Institutes of Health and $2.7 million worth of Department of Homeland Security research grants, and threats that the university will lose its ability to enrol international students unless it turns over records on visa-holders’ “illegal and violent activities.” Federal agencies have been instructed to cancel remaining contracts with the university.

“Everyone knows that Harvard has lost its way,” Trump has posted on social media. “Harvard is a JOKE, teaches Hate and Stupidity, and should no longer receive Federal Funds.” As always, he is fixated on making an example of those who push back against him. Trump says the “last thing I want to do is hurt them [Harvard]” but he maintains he has no choice, and Harvard is fighting back. “So Harvard has to behave themselves. Harvard is treating our country with great disrespect. And all they’re doing is getting in deeper and deeper and deeper. They’ve got to behave themselves,” he reiterated.

The attacks have continued. Trump has threatened Harvard’s tax-exempt status and, most recently, his administration has ordered it to stop enrolling international students. Although a federal judge has temporarily blocked the revocation of the university’s ability to enrol or keep its international students, the issue is far from resolved. Australian students and academics are among those in limbo.

Trump and his administration seem determined to undermine Harvard’s financial health and global influence regardless of the cost to the nation’s prestige and economy, to specialised knowledge and learning, and to innovation. They are using  Harvard as an example to scare other institutions into compliance.

Despite concerns about the rebellious ideas and political ideologies they might generate, institutions of higher education have occupied a special place in America from the nation’s beginning. Founding fathers Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and George Washington all saw education as a means of supporting the principles of liberty and republicanism. But the Federalists worried about colleges and universities being overcome with “seditious” ideas from the French revolution, while students aligned with Jefferson and his fellow Republicans claimed that Federalist educators were attempting to impose their own conservative dogmas.

The notorious McCarthy era brought efforts to “eradicate Socialism, Communism, and all forms of Marxism from the schools and colleges of America, and to stimulate sound American education.” A generation later, it was Republican president Richard Nixon who first said, “The professors are the enemy.” Nixon made that remark, later quoted uncritically by Vance, in a 1972 conversation with his national security adviser Henry Kissinger, towards the end of a series of campus disruptions, occupations, riots and police shootings.

But nothing has been as personally vindictive, hard-hitting on multiple fronts and lawless as the Trump attacks. “The way that the Trump administration has gone after Harvard — and higher ed in general — doesn’t really have any precedent in US history that I know about,” said influential economist and Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs in a recent interview with the New Republic.

Inevitably these attacks have been compared with crackdowns on universities by twentieth-century figures including Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Mao. In a more recent case, the Central European University (founded by George Soros) was forced out of Budapest by the increasingly authoritarian Viktor Orbán, ultimately moving to Vienna in 2018. But despite the lessons from the past, many American universities have leaned toward institutional caution and even retreat on policies like DEI.

In fighting back, the higher education sector is encumbered by two problems. The first is the longstanding and inherent reliance of tertiary education and academic research on government funding. This research is mutually beneficial, of course, with government-funded research producing an enormous variety of scientific, medical, technical and other breakthroughs.

The second is that many Americans are not supportive of higher education. Gallup polling over time shows an increasing proportion of adults say they have “little or no confidence in higher education.” Confidence has dropped particularly among Republicans, who say they are concerned that colleges push political agendas, are not teaching relevant skills and are very expensive. A 2024 Pew Research Center poll found that only a third of Republican voters (and 20 per cent of conservative Republican voters) had a positive view of colleges’ impact.

Some of this can be attributed to a network of right-wing and libertarian think tanks working closely with Republican politicians to manufacture a culture war against educators and academic institutions. (Ironically, many, if not most, of these people are graduates of elite universities.) Forgotten by many is how, after the second world war, universities became engines of social progress, with the GI Bill expanding access to college for millions of returning soldiers.

Increasingly this ill-feeling is also being generated by the White House. “A lot of Americans are wondering why their tax dollars are going to these universities when they are not only indoctrinating our nation’s students, but also allowing such egregious illegal behaviour to occur,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said during a recent briefing.

For Trump, the battle itself is the whole point of this fraught and multifaceted campaign. It plays to the identity politics of his core MAGA constituency of white, non-college-educated, working-class voters. Most recently people in the administration have begun talking about the need for more people in trade schools rather than elite universities. That is merely a partisan talking point — there has been no effort to use the funds cut from Harvard or Columbia to fund vocational colleges. It’s also worth remembering that almost all of the Ivy League schools are in blue (Democratic) states.

In just a few short months Trump has inflicted serious and long-term damage on America’s higher education system. Despite their problems, these universities and research institutions have been an important source of America’s enormous economic prosperity and influence. It’s impossible to know how and where these efforts — what Vance describes as “necessary correctives” required for “basic democratic accountability” — will end. But there is one certainty: there will be long-term national and international ramifications. •

The post Trump’s war on knowledge appeared first on Inside Story.

The most obvious flaw in his argument is that the Aboriginal flag and Torres Strait Islander flag were both proclaimed as flags of Australia nearly thirty years ago, in July 1995, under section 5 of the Flags Act. Dutton’s predecessor as Liberal leader, Scott Morrison, went a step further in 2022 when he arranged for the copyright of the red, yellow and black Aboriginal flag to be transferred to the Commonwealth of Australia to allow wider public use.

In neighbouring New Caledonia — a French Pacific dependency just 1500 kilometres off the coast of Queensland — a similar debate has erupted over the question of whether two flags should fly at the Congress, town halls, schools and other public institutions.

French control over New Caledonia came in 1853 with the raising of the French bleu-blanc-rouge tricolour at Balade as the Melanesian islands were annexed. To this day, opponents of independence proudly brandish French flags as presidents and prime ministers arrive from Paris.

The flag of Kanaky, by contrast, was adopted at the September 1984 congress of the Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste, or FLNKS, New Caledonia’s main independence coalition. It was first raised by FLNKS president Jean-Marie Tjibaou on 1 December 1984, the day the independence movement declared the provisional government of Kanaky.

The FLNKS described the multi-coloured flag as “three horizontal bands of which the colours are, from bottom to top: green, which represents the land of our ancestors, the wealth of the soil and hope, the country; then red, which symbolises the blood that’s been spilt for the struggle, socialism and the unity of the people; blue, which represents the sky and the Pacific environment, the sovereignty of the Kanak nation in the Pacific; then towards the flagpole, a golden circle which represents the sun, on which is drawn in black the case [traditional hut] with its flèche faîtière [totemic ridgepole].”

For many Loyalists who want the Pacific colony to remain within the French Republic, the flag is at best a partisan symbol, and at worst an incitement to violence (a feeling exacerbated by the six months of riots and clashes between Kanak protestors and French police that wracked New Caledonia in 2024).

To deal with this tension, the 1998 Noumea Accord — the political framework agreement that has governed New Caledonia for more than a quarter of a century — proposed the creation of new national symbols reflecting a “common destiny” that could unite communities in New Caledonia.

But it wasn’t until 2007 that New Caledonia’s citizenship minister Déwé Gorodé established a committee to develop those symbols. She announced a competition to choose new designs for banknotes, a national anthem to replace the French Marseillaise, and a motto to reflect both indigenous Kanak identity and the multicultural nature of the community.

This process led to the adoption of a new motto and hymn for the islands. The motto Terre de Parole, Terre de Partage (Land of the Word, land of sharing) was joined by the anthem Soyons Unis, Devenons Frères (Let us be united and become brothers), composed by seven young members of the Melodia children’s choir.

The committee also agreed on new designs for Pacific franc banknotes (the CFP denomination used across the francophone Pacific). The new, brightly coloured plastic notes feature a range of local flowers, birds, turtles and fish. Only the rarely used 10,000 CFP note includes some recognition of the Melanesian history of the islands, with images of the Kanak case (traditional hut) and the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre, a cultural and art space in Noumea named after the assassinated FLNKS leader.

Choosing a new flag and name for the country nevertheless remained contentious. “We soon came to a consensus on the anthem, motto and currency, to reflect our Kanak heritage, but also the commitment that all members of the community have made to build a common destiny,” Déwé Gorodé told me at the time. “However we were unable to agree on the name of the country and the flag, so we’ve put those aside for the moment. These two things are intensely political, and behind this discussion lies the fundamental issue of national sovereignty.”

The flag debate was pushed ahead by conservative politician Pierre Frogier in a February 2010 speech. As leader of the anti-independence party Rassemblement, Frogier proposed that both flags should be displayed at public buildings as a gesture towards reconciliation between independence supporters and opponents.

In July that year, French prime minister François Fillon flew to Noumea for a joint flag-raising outside the French High Commission. “I have the distinct honour as the president of the Kanak Customary Senate to present our flag to you on this historic day,” said customary leader Julien Boinemoa, “where it will officially rise in the New Caledonian sky, after having been long contested by a part of the population because it symbolised the Kanak nationalist cause.”

The following month, Frogier joined leaders of the largest independence party Union Calédonienne to jointly raise both flags outside the Southern Provincial Assembly, which is dominated by anti-independence politicians. Within a few months, independence supporters were buoyed by the sight of their flag flying at town halls, public schools and government offices across the islands. But the sight of the flag flying in anti-independence strongholds in the Southern Province angered some French loyalists. Frogier’s initiative had unleashed a debate that has continued for fifteen years.

Philippe Gomès, leader of the anti-independence party Calédonie Ensemble and a decade-long critic of “two flags flying,” wants a single, newly designed flag “adopted through a definitive consensus that brings New Caledonians together.” He professes to respect the FLNKS flag “for what it is, but I do not see the shared future. Therefore, it is neither legitimate in substance nor in form.”

The issue came to a head in 2021, when independence politicians gained a six–five majority in New Caledonia’s multi-party government. In July that year, Louis Mapou became the first Kanak independence leader to serve as president of New Caledonia in nearly forty years. As one initiative to promote a “common destiny” uniting all New Caledonians, his government proposed that driver’s licences should include both the French tricolour and the flag of Kanaky.

Two years later, the Mapou government announced the “the FLNKS flag” would appear alongside the national tricolour on the credit-card-size license. The decree elicited a predictably fierce response from the anti-independence Générations NC party, led by Nina Julié and Nicolas Metzdorf (who serves as one of two New Caledonian representatives in the French National Assembly). Six of its members, including Julié and Metzdorf, lodged a case before the Administrative Tribunal of New Caledonia to reverse the decision.

In a July 2024 ruling, the tribunal annulled the government’s decree on the grounds that the flag of Kanaky — unlike the anthem, motto and banknotes — was not one of the identity symbols officially adopted by New Caledonia. “This ruling also implies,” it said, “that the Government of New Caledonia must circulate, from 1 January 2025, a new model of driver’s license without the disputed flag, with a penalty of 100,000 CFP francs [A$1450] for each day that the new licence is not circulated.”

Later that year, before the ruling could be implemented, Mapou was defeated in a no-confidence motion and replaced by Alcide Ponga, current president of the conservative Rassemblement party. In Ponga’s new multi-party government, however, responsibility for the transport sector fell to Gilbert Tyuienon, a veteran member of the Union Calédonienne party. The independence politician simply refused to counter-sign the paperwork that would order transport officials to remove the contentious flag.

Once again, Générations NC sought enforcement of the administrative tribunal’s ruling, this time with a successful appeal to the Administrative Court of Appeal in Paris. An April 2025 ruling demanded government action and payment of the outstanding fine, which amounted to 10.7 million Pacific francs (A$155,000). The court also increased the fine to 150,000 francs for each day until the government ordered transport officials to develop a new format for the license.

Having angered the independence movement, Nina Julié then proceeded to attack President Ponga, even though his Rassemblement party collaborates with the anti-independence Loyalist bloc. In a public polemic, she demanded that Ponga initiate legal action against Tyuienon so that “he personally assumes the payment of the penalty resulting from his refusal to enforce the law.”

Her public attack angered Rassemblement official Xavier Rossard, who replied that “as we negotiate the institutional future of New Caledonia, the unity of supporters of France should not depend on issues like the driving license.”

Since February, France’s Overseas Minister Manuel Valls has been meeting with New Caledonian political leaders to forge a new political statute to replace the 1998 Noumea Accord. As well as longstanding differences between the FLNKS and anti-independence parties over self-determination and sovereignty, tensions have sharpened among the parties that wish to remain in the French Republic.

Like Peter Dutton’s remarks about the Aboriginal flag, the public polemics about the driver’s licence seem less about the symbols themselves and more about positioning in the lead-up to the next elections — in this case New Caledonia’s provincial polls scheduled for 30 November.

The Loyalist bloc, led by Southern Province president Sonia Backès and Générations NC leader Nicolas Metzdorf, have refused to accept French proposals for a new shared sovereignty, even though smaller anti-independence parties have been willing to continue the discussions on a pathway to independence. When the Loyalists forced the breakdown of negotiations in mid-May, Metzdorf stormed: “We have been clear from the beginning. We will never accept independence, independence in association, or a trajectory towards independence.”

A quarter of the way through the twenty-first century, divisions continue within settler-colonial states — from Australia to New Caledonia and beyond — over colonial history and Indigenous sovereignty. New Caledonia’s strident debate over a small piece of plastic highlights the depth of unresolved issues in this group of islands colonised in the nineteenth century.

The next tribunal hearing on the driver’s licence will be held in June, but the debate over which flag should fly — and which should fall — will continue. •

The post Flag fall appeared first on Inside Story.

Readers might be left with the impression that the government has initiated violent means to force regions to comply with structural reforms designed to deal with diehard adherents of rebel or Assad-era commanders. Both attacks are presented as signs of a failure to find a useful role for ex-fighters whose records for savagery have prevented their absorption into new security forces or administrative structures.

In the wings, Israeli leaders have loudly claimed a role in protecting the Druze communities in the governorates south of Damascus. Israel’s narrative-shaping machine, Hasbara, has quickly cranked into gear, with prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu filmed on the Golan plateau in front of Mount Hermon. Gazing across the Syrian Hauran he claimed that Israel had come to the aid of the threatened Druze and suggested Islamist elements of the Assad era might have stored weapons depots across the three southern provinces.

Do the Druze want to be saved? A large Druze presence in Israel’s north enjoys many of the privileges of full Israeli citizenship (even enrolment in the IDF) and Israel has for decades used the much larger Druze concentrations in Syria as a means of gaining purchase in that country. The ever-eloquent Bezalel Smotrich, whose party provides the numbers holding together Netanyahu’s cabinet, had no hesitation in declaring his hand when he said publicly that Israel’s campaign in Gaza and its wider dimensions would only end with Syria’s dismantlement.

President al-Sharaa has shown little sign of wanting to cooperative with Netanyahu’s use of distractions across Israel’s borders to help strengthen the Israeli coalition’s hold on power. He has avoided using the vapid language of the Assad era, which customarily referred to the “Zionist enemy,” instead opening an indirect channel to Israel to underline his resolve to keep Syria together in the face of formidable economic and social tensions.

Al-Sharaa has also ended Syrian governments’ decades-long refusal to allow Syrian Druze to attend ceremonies in the Israeli heartland of Galilee at the shrine of their prophet, al-Nabi Shu’ayb, a figure linked to the Old Testament prophet Jethro. Some 600 Syrian Druze were given the green light to travel there in late April, hardly evidence of a Syrian ruler determinedly hostile to the Druze. Though the visit was widely reported (without commentary) in the Israeli media, it was entirely overlooked by Western outlets more interested in bad news stories out of Syria.

Less than one in twenty of Syria’s 700,000 or more Druze live in the zone contiguous with Israeli-held Golan. Outside Damascus the highest concentration of Syrian Druze is on the fringes of mountainous area around Jebel al-Hauran, 110 kilometres or more from the UN zone separating Israel and Syria. In between lies territory largely populated by Sunni, Orthodox Christians and Circassians, with only sprinklings of Druze. The challenge of biting off such a large chunk of Syria would dwarf anything the Israelis have historically attempted in firming their borders.

One theme that has rarely emerged in official Western commentaries is the need to preserve Syria’s territorial integrity rather than allow it to fall to numerous outside claimants. The question is how that integrity might be preserved in the face of avaricious claims by neighbouring countries. Israel’s attempt to stake a claim on southern Syria (four of the country fourteen provinces) might signal that Israel doesn’t share this ambition. As early as the week of Assad’s fall it asserted a right to intervene in enfeebled Syria. Since then it has claimed the right to destroy all of Syria’s weaponry and materiel and mounted a campaign of bombardments, even including targets, such as the outer enclosure of the Damascus presidential palace, that were designed to demonstrate Israeli resolve.

Until this month, Western responses had nevertheless been muted. Countries that supported the years of sanctions devised to punish the old regime have been hesitant to accept that sanctions are an ill fit if the aim is to avoid further complicating al-Sharaa’s job of keeping Syria unified. If the president falters then that will be time to say so, but at this point a well-rounded acknowledgement of what he is up against would be more helpful.

Three months after inaugurating his salvation government, al-Sharaa has clearly had a shaky start. After reporting on the initial nightly crowds celebrating the fall of Assad’s tyranny in the streets of Damascus, much of the Western media has settled back into the “rinse and repeat” school that marked the thirteen years of conflict. Massacres are reported with no analysis of what viewers were seeing. The one-dimensional picture relentlessly pursued during the Syrian conflict makes tempting television but often obliterates vital background.

For Syria’s goal of being readmitted to international forums, a more telling development was al-Sharaa’s meeting with French president Emmanuel Macron in Paris on 8 May. Macron set the terms of the visit cautiously, emphasising that the removal of sanctions must be a staged process in line with developments on the ground. It must also be matched, France says, by a structure for dealing with past wrongs — a necessary step in isolating those elements, still on the loose, that were responsible for past massacres of civilians.

Al-Sharaa seemed to be listening. During his visit he met with an exiled Syrian constitutional lawyer, Moatasim al-Kilani, who later told the media that al-Sharaa had assured him an independent Transitional Justice Commission was forthcoming and noted that “national justice cannot be built on slogans.”

Then, just yesterday in Riyadh, the US president trumped more hesitant Western leaders by announcing the lifting of American sanctions on Syria and the resumption of relations with its government. Apparently at the suggestion of the Saudi Crown Prince, this is an unexpected but welcome move.

But such progress could be threatened if Western countries turn a blind eye to Israel’s toying with a break-up of Syria. Surely the Israeli claim to a special security interest has worn thin in the face of the massively disproportionate loss of civilian life and destruction in Gaza over the past eighteen months.

A hundred years ago France found that tackling a separatist campaign in Druze-land — the Great National Revolt of 1925–27 — turned into the bloodiest confrontation it faced during the Mandate era. We should be mindful of the extent of infighting between religious and political factions on the Druze side of that encounter. Those divisions enabled the French to play favourites, reassert control and eventually fold the Jabal al-Druze, or État des Druzes, into a unitary Syrian state.

Running a Druze canton is not a challenge to be recommended. And it is incumbent on Israel’s friends to remind them that the breakup of Syria as a gesture to appease the Israeli far right is not a shared ambition. •

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US treasury secretary Scott Bessent may only have had to walk a few hundred metres from his office to meet his fellow finance ministers from around the world, but he hadn’t bothered to attend the last such gathering in February, so there was no guarantee he would attend this one either.

As it turned out, there was no need to worry. Bessent not only came, he also gave an important speech setting out the new administration’s approach to international economic governance. And it was not the scorched-earth approach many had feared.

The United States would not be withdrawing from the IMF and the World Bank, as some had believed it might. On the contrary, Bessent said, the Trump administration would seek to use these institutions to promote its America-first objectives. So the IMF should “call out” China for its “globally distortive policies and opaque currency practices” and it should stop focusing on “climate change, gender, and social issues.” The World Bank should not prioritise renewable energy but invest in nuclear power and gas as well — and it should stop lending to China.

Bessent’s speech had a near-universal reaction from those attending the Washington gatherings. “A huge sigh of relief,” one World Bank executive confided to me. These were the kinds of things you’d expect any normal Republican treasury secretary to say, I was told; they would mean some shifts but not a fundamental overturning of either institution’s policies. China was due to “graduate” from World Bank eligibility soon anyway; new nuclear plants are not economically viable, so the Bank’s approach to energy investment will not, in practice, need much revision. If Washington wants these institutions to talk less about climate change, that can be done. But climate risks are real economic risks, so investment to mitigate them will continue.

Bessent’s speech even held out a faint hope of progress. He asked the IMF to bring borrower countries and their creditors together to deal with “debt distress” — the crisis faced by the many lower-income countries more or less unable to pay their debts. His call echoed the words of the IMF itself, whose managing director Kristalina Georgieva used her own remarks at the Washington meetings to argue that some poorer countries need urgently to restructure their debts — that is, to get some kind of debt relief.

What Bessent didn’t say — but Georgieva did — is just how much worse the Trump administration’s trade policies have made these countries’ economic circumstances. In its annual World Economic Outlook, issued last week, the IMF downgraded its growth forecasts for the entire global economy and for almost every individual country. It blamed the extreme uncertainty caused by Trump’s on-again-off-again tariff announcements. And it pointedly observed that the countries that will be hardest hit by what it was not shy to call the US-induced “trade war,” alongside the global slowdown and the reductions in overseas aid accompanying it, will be the poorest and most vulnerable.

It’s worth recalling the extent of the tariff increases Trump imposed a month ago — increases that, though suspended, may yet be restored in July. Based on the administration’s trade deficit formula, almost universally derided by economists, they include tariffs of more than 40 per cent on some of the poorest countries in the world, such as Lesotho, Madagascar, Myanmar and Syria. Overall, says the UN’s trade and development agency UNCTAD, twenty-eight of the low-income countries that face higher tariffs each contribute less than 0.1 per cent to the US trade deficit.

While the tariffs will therefore make no material difference at all to the US balance of payments, they will devastate these countries’ economies. Lesotho has a large relative trade surplus with the United States because it has a per capita income of just over US$1000 a year, and so it imports very little. But over the last two decades — supported by US tariff exemptions — it has developed a vibrant textile industry exporting Levis and Wrangler jeans to the United States. Those exports now contribute more than 10 per cent of the country’s entire annual national income. With the United States imposing a tariff of 50 per cent, up to 30,000 people working in the jeans factories face losing their livelihoods, and the country its largest source of foreign revenue.

Madagascar is in a similar position. Like Lesotho it exports textiles to the United States, along with vanilla (for which it supplies four-fifths of the global market). One of the world’s most climate-vulnerable economies, recently hit by both droughts and hurricanes, it will be catastrophically hurt by a tariff of 47 per cent. Both Madagascar and Lesotho are also suffering the withdrawal of most of the US aid they previously received.

High levels of debt exacerbate many low-income countries’ plight. The IMF calculates that around half of the world’s poorest countries are in, or at high risk of, debt distress. Many borrowed lavishly in the period after the 2008 financial crash when interest rates were low, finding new lenders in the private sector and among Chinese banks alongside more familiar Western government creditors. But post-Covid inflation has pushed interest rates sharply higher. With most poorer countries not yet having fully recovered from the pandemic, and growth prospects looking grim again, the conditions are ripe for fiscal crises.

UNCTAD estimates that more than fifty developing-nation governments — nearly half of them in Africa — are now spending at least 10 per cent of their budgets on debt interest payments. More than three billion people live in countries that devote more funds to debt payments than to health or education.

New finance, meanwhile, has more or less dried up. Net flows have turned negative — that is, more money is flowing back to repay lenders than is coming in for investment. Many developing countries have only been saved from default by emergency IMF loans, with much of that money simply pouring back out again to repay private creditors from the rich countries.

And climate change is making the situation worse. Countries experiencing more frequent and more severe extreme weather events are having to spend more on disaster relief and recovery, and correspondingly less investing in education, job creation and growth. Meanwhile, rising temperatures and erratic rainfall are hitting agricultural production. As climate risks rise and growth prospects decline, borrowing becomes more expensive, reducing investment still further. It becomes a vicious circle.

But both the extent of the debt problem and the role played by its specific climate-related components are receiving increasing recognition, with a number of intense discussions away from the formal meetings in Washington last week.

At the same time as Georgieva was making her call for debt restructuring, World Bank chief economist Indermit Gill was repeating his own. The UN secretary-general’s adviser, former Egyptian investment minister Mahmoud Mohieldin, spoke at a number of meetings consulting on potential debt policy reform. Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and former Argentinian finance minister Martin Guzman chaired a meeting of the Vatican’s Jubilee Commission, an enquiry into sovereign debt set up by the late Pope, which is due to report next month. And an expert group established by the governments of Colombia, Kenya, France and Germany issued a major report linking debt to the environmental agenda.

The report, Healthy Debt on a Healthy Planet, sets out a program of reform to tackle what it describes as the “triple crisis” of indebtedness, climate change and nature loss being experienced by many low-income countries. It calls for the IMF and World Bank to incorporate climate and nature impacts more fully in their economic and financial analysis. It proposes new programs of debt relief for the most debt-distressed countries in return for higher investment in climate and nature resilience. And it argues for greater financing of that investment, including “debt for nature” and “debt for climate” swaps and leveraging private capital for climate mitigation and adaptation.

Launched at a packed meeting in the grand surroundings of the Colombian ambassador’s residence, the report offers a challenge not just to the IMF and World Bank but also to the array of finance ministers attending the Washington meetings. South Africa, which currently holds the presidency of the group of the world’s largest economies, the G20, has vowed to make debt relief a priority this year.

Before last week it was widely believed that neither China nor the United States would be willing to make concessions, so little progress would be made. But Scott Bessent’s speech may have changed the game. Attention is suddenly turning east. The developing countries are asking: will China be willing to come to the debt relief table? •

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What a change. As election day looms on 28 April, Trudeau is gone and the Liberals are the frontrunners, cresting 40 per cent with victory in sight. Conservative support has only modestly sagged, but is stuck in the high 30s. NDP support has been halved to less than 10 per cent and the Bloc Quebecois has also declined. Seat projections are volatile, but all indicators are that the Liberals will be re-elected to a fourth term and possibly an outright majority.

Who is responsible for this miraculous turnaround? Step forward, Donald Trump.

While it may not have been his intention, Trump’s aggressive tariff policies toward Canada, now expanded to the rest of the world, and his constant musings about making Canada the fifty-first state, precipitated a revolution in Canadian politics. This existential threat managed to finally dislodge the no longer popular Trudeau from office and reframe Canadian politics away from the Liberals’ mixed governing record to the simple ballot question of who is best able to take on Donald Trump.

Rarely has a Canadian election been less about issues and more about the vague concept of  “leadership.” The parties won’t release their full platforms until just days before the vote, and there has been little discussion of significant policy differences. Instead, the prevailing issue is Trump. While the two major parties and their leaders disagree somewhat in their approach to the tariff threat, the incoherence and erraticism of Trump’s policies make even those differences insignificant. Instead, Trump is a valence issue — one in which there is a broad consensus on direction, with the only question being who is most-suited to lead the way.

The winner of that reframing is Liberal leader and prime minister Mark Carney, Canada’s newest politician and the beneficiary of remarkable luck and timing. The great loser is Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, who seemed destined for the prime ministership until Trump flipped the script.

Let’s start with the lucky Mark Carney. Born and raised in western Canada, Carney left the country at the age of nineteen to attend Harvard before moving on to Oxford for a doctorate in economics. He then spent thirteen years at Goldman Sachs, with postings in London, Tokyo, New York and Toronto. He left the private sector in 2003 for a position at the central Bank of Canada in Ottawa, later moving to a senior role in the Department of Finance. In 2008 he took the top post at the Bank as its governor, just in time to face the global financial crisis.

Carney’s work in the crisis was widely praised; he was seen as a cool-headed pragmatist putting his golden resumé to good use. After a five-year term with the Bank of Canada he moved to Britain and took the same position as governor of the Bank of England. Once again, he found himself on duty as a crisis emerged: this time Brexit. While sceptical of the Leave case, he again gathered wide respect as a competent pragmatist steering through economic turmoil amid enormous political and market pressure.

Carney finished his term and returned to Canada in 2020. His choice to again live in Ottawa rather than the financial capital of Toronto was an obvious clue that his ambitions remained in the public rather than private sector. He had long been identified as a candidate for public office, and for more than one party. He was reportedly courted in 2012 by Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper to join his cabinet, though details are murky.

What is undisputed is that Liberal officials made a serious effort in 2013 to encourage Carney to stand for the vacant party leadership; Carney declined the invitation, though he left enough clues to suggest the idea was not out of the question. That race was won by Justin Trudeau, who brought the party to a glorious 2015 victory but then slid to minorities in 2019 and 2021 and even deeper unpopularity, and atrocious polling figures, in 2024.

Carney continued to flirt with politics, never quite taking the plunge. He dabbled in the private sector, becoming vice-chairman of Toronto-based investment conglomerate Brookfield, a board member for global fintech Stripe and, later, chair of Bloomberg. He leaned into environmental causes, organising global conferences, forming taskforces and writing a book. He also finally declared his party loyalties, appearing at a Liberal convention in early 2021.

Yet he remained evasive. He didn’t run in the 2021 election, an obvious point to join the team, and his public activities remained more policy-dense than openly partisan. As the Liberals under Trudeau slid in the polls, Carney’s reticence to join a sinking ship became almost comical.

Meanwhile, Trudeau’s own position became less and less tenable. The party’s terrible polling was accompanied by disastrous by-election losses of formerly safe Liberal seats in Toronto and Montreal. Yet Trudeau gave no sign of leaving, and was protected by his party’s longstanding barriers against leadership challenges. Anti-Trudeau insurrection was limited to a few caucus gadflies and underground rumours.

The Liberal position weakened further in September 2024 when the NDP abandoned the confidence-and-supply agreement that had propped up Trudeau and his colleagues since 2022. Throughout late 2024 the Conservatives repeatedly triggered non-confidence votes to bring down the government, which was saved only by last minute deals with the NDP and/or the Bloc, who had their own fears of being buried in a Conservative landslide.

But then came Trump’s second win. The US president-elect blew up Canadian politics in November by declaring his plan for 25 per cent tariffs on America’s two closest neighbours. While in hindsight it was merely a foretaste of the global disruption to come, the pledge immediately dominated Canadian politics. Trump then doubled down with musings that Canada would be better off as the fifty-first state, reigniting two hundred years of national paranoia about American annexation.

Canada went into crisis mode, and Carney was a possibly inadvertent player in the moment of truth. On 13 December, Trudeau told his finance minister Chrystia Freeland that he was moving her to a new but vague portfolio of Canada–US relations to deal with the Trump crisis, and that her finance job would go to Carney. The incensed Freeland quit three days later, citing disagreements with Trudeau’s entire strategy and bringing an emergency cabinet shuffle a few days later. Many expected Carney to show up that day, but he did not, and it remains unclear if he even knew of Trudeau’s plan. Over Christmas, speculation grew that a Trudeau resignation was finally coming, yet it was still not clear where Carney would fit.

Things quickly fell into place once Trudeau resigned on 6 January. Carney declared his candidacy and most party figures — except for ex-minister Freeland and two others — stepped aside. Despite his lack of a parliamentary seat, he quickly became the frontrunner, his global resumé and experience seemingly tailor-made for the Trump challenge. He romped to victory on 9 March with 85 per cent of the membership vote and was sworn in as prime minister on 14 March. Then, not much more than a week later, he called an election for 28 April. Liberal poll support, rising since Trudeau’s resignation, surpassed the Conservatives in early March and has stayed there since. After years of reticence, the stars had aligned and Carney’s magic moment had arrived.

If Carney has had a very lucky 2025 so far, his opponent Pierre Poilievre has had a nightmare. Once looking destined for a triumphant majority, he is increasingly likely to finish in second place. Like other right-wing politicians inside and outside the United States, Poilievre has learned that being seen as close to Donald Trump, who only tolerates sycophants, not mere allies, can be politically dangerous. Trump has wrecked Poilievre’s plan to fight an election on the Liberal record and forced him to spend valuable energy articulating his own patriotism and distance from Trump.

The Conservative leader increasingly looks purpose-built to deal with yesterday’s challenge: taking down Justin Trudeau. In parliament since 2004, when he was twenty-five, he built a steady career as the Conservative attack dog, skewering Liberals while building presence and loyalty in the party. As party leader from 2022 he cruised the country buoyed by a feeling of inevitability and equipped with a twenty-first century conservative platform that emphasised cost-of-living and housing affordability and targeted Trudeau’s elitist progressivism with a promise of populist disruption. He has taken particular aim at the carbon tax, a complicated carbon-pricing regime that is sound economics but led to higher prices at the gas pump. Party fundraising was through the roof, and Poilievre was a master of slogans, with “Canada is Broken” and “Axe the Tax; Build the Homes; Fix the Budget; Stop the Crime.”

But then Justin Trudeau had suddenly gone and the ballot question changed. The Trump threat ignited a swell of national pride that overwhelmed any sense of brokenness; flags proliferated and shoppers avoided American products. Toronto-born comedian Mike Myers, best known for his 1990s performances in Wayne’s World and Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery and as the voice of Shrek, inspired a national “Elbows Up” campaign, a term from ice hockey that indicates a readiness to defend and fight.

Poilievre, who spent only a short time as a minister in the Harper government and whose only experience outside politics is the short internship at a manufacturer he won as part of a “If I Was Prime Minister” essay contest, seemed far less qualified to take on Trump than did the global finance expert who steered through the GFC and Brexit. Despite a much more disciplined and rational style than the American president, his reliance on populist anger placed him uncomfortably close to Trump-style politics, and the chaos in Washington drove Canadians to seek continuity rather than disruption. As a final blow, Carney’s first act as prime minister was to pause the carbon tax, robbing Poilievre of his top issue.

Still, there was hope for the Conservatives as the election was called. Carney may have been the Bright New Thing, but history suggested the gloss would soon wear off. In both 1984 and 1993, unpopular prime ministers were replaced by newcomers who briefly shone in the polls but then collapsed in the election campaign and endured humiliating defeats.

And those two leaders had been experienced parliamentarians, while Carney was a newcomer to partisan politics. He struggled at times in the new role, snapping impatiently at an interviewer and displaying occasional clumsiness as a newcomer starting at the top. He had to explain why his former company Brookfield had relocated its head office from Toronto to New York, and evaded questions about his private wealth, which he had placed in a blind trust but did not disclose or sell. His Oxford doctoral thesis was dug up and found to have numerous minor plagiarisms, at best a sign of sloppiness. Most of all, his command of French, essential for success in national Canadian politics, was limited and sparser than his opponents’, raising questions of his viability among Quebec voters.

Carney did shoot himself in the foot early, defending a Liberal MP of Chinese background who had remarked that his Conservative opponent, also Chinese-Canadian and under indictment in Hong Kong for political activities, should be turned over to Chinese authorities for a bounty. Carney accepted an apology from his MP and defended him for several days until the MP resigned as a candidate, only to be replaced by another candidate with possible ties to the Chinese government.

Liberal operatives were also found to have made and circulated “Stop the Steal” buttons at a Conservative policy event in an attempt to tie the Conservatives to Trump-style election denial. (Poilievre immediately affirmed that he would accept the election results.) Carney apologised for the error but merely said the staffers had been “reassigned.”

Yet missteps like this didn’t detract from Liberal momentum, and the shameless glee and opportunism of the Liberal turnaround became hard to miss. Nova Scotia’s Sean Fraser, who had resigned from cabinet and politics at the Liberal low point in December (to spend more time with his family, he claimed) suddenly reversed his plans, saying he had a heartfelt conversation with Carney who had promised him more family-friendly hours. Industry minister Anita Anand and other once-departing Liberals similarly decided that politics wasn’t so bad after all. Carney and comedian Myers filmed a lighthearted “Elbows Up” commercial together. Depression and a sense of inevitability were replaced with zest and the excitement of sweet comeback.

In turn, Conservatives are turning their guns on each other. Poilievre and his campaign manager Jenni Bryne, a legend in party circles for her tough partisanship, seem determined to stick to their original strategy of focusing on the Liberal record, tapping into the fears and grievances that had sustained them for so long, rather than pivoting to engage wholesale with the Trump question. The internal grumbling broke wide open with stunning public remarks by another prominent Tory campaigner, Kory Teneycke, who oversaw the re-election of Ontario premier Doug Ford in February with an explicit “Protect Ontario” platform. Teneycke accused his federal counterparts of “campaign malpractice” and repeatedly criticised the failure to pivot; Ford later echoed his campaign manager, saying “the truth hurts.”

But it is also true that Conservative support has only dropped slightly since Christmas and Poilievre’s message continues to resonate with many. The key problem is that non-Tory voters are all huddling behind Carney. While the Conservatives see victory slipping from their grasp, things are even worse for the New Democratic Party, and even more bittersweet.

Since the 1960s, the NDP has consistently expressed the most wariness of the United States, opposing free-trade agreements and the integration of the Canadian and US economies — the very arrangements that make Trump’s threats so existential. But its support has collapsed, siphoned off by the Liberals as frightened progressives turn to centrist Carney as their best hope against Trump and what they see as the Trump-lite Poilievre.

Even former leader Tom Mulcair, deposed from his post in 2016, urged voters not to waste their vote on the NDP. Projections now suggest support will fall below the minimum twelve seats needed for party status in the House of Commons and leader Jagmeet Singh, who has delivered mediocre results since 2017, is unlikely to stay on.

A similar if less dire fate may await the Bloc Quebecois, which is likely to fall below its current thirty-three seats. Again Trump is to blame; while French-speaking Quebecers have long been sceptical of their place within Canada, the prospect of absorption by the United States is far more horrifying, leading to an unlikely but pragmatic embrace of Canadian nationalism that again benefits the Liberals despite Carney’s less than total fluency in French. Even the tiny Green Party, with its two seats, may be a casualty; traditionally a convenient catch-all for voters disillusioned with the major parties, it could be left behind in the rush to join Carney with elbows up.

The great hope of the Conservatives was the national party debates, held on 16 and 17 April in French and English. (In a refreshing sign of normalcy amid the Age of Trump, the time of the French debate was changed at the last minute to accommodate an important Montreal Canadians hockey game.) It was hoped that the inexperienced Carney would sag in French and make a game-changing flub against the tested and experienced Poilievre. But Carney acquitted himself well both nights, exuding a sense of maturity and cool judgement despite Poilievre’s repeated attempts to turn the focus to the Liberal record. At one point Carney turned to Poilievre and said “Mr Poilievre, you spent years running against Justin Trudeau and the carbon tax and they’re both gone.”

Election day is 28 April, and the only real question is whether the Liberals will win an outright majority. Any more Trump bombshells like White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s 15 April affirmation that Trump still favours annexation will likely only drive Canadians further into Carney’s arms. Poilievre is likely to fall short of his goal of the prime ministership, though his solid vote and immaculate credibility within the party is likely to preserve his leadership. But like other moderate right-wing leaders around the globe he will continue to struggle to position himself against a chaotic and self-centred president who does him no favours. Meanwhile, Mark Carney is well within reach of his dream job. Now he must fulfil the role on which the country has placed its hopes. He must take on Donald Trump, with elbows up. •

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Essentially, Trump says US voters have chosen to declare economic victory and put a moat around their nation’s consumption. Domestic producers will be protected from foreign competition, whether from China, Europe, Australia or even Norfolk Island.

US defence strategy, which has involved extensive international deployments in a string of bases and alliances, now looks like a protection racket. Friends have become foes, neighbours threatened and enemies like Russia embraced.

While the Morrison government veered sharply toward a tight US alignment, Anthony Albanese has evidently steered back toward the foreign policy basics attributed to John Howard. That is: Australia chooses to have a strong security alliance with the United State while also recognising its economic relationship with China.

In the wake of Trump’s flood of highly provocative policy steps, many of them plainly challenging our notions of a close alliance, even stalwart promoters of the US security relationship are suggesting that Australia should consider a less dependent approach. Given the known uncertainties of the AUKUS agreements, the questions emerging for Australia may be profound. Not least because the outlook for China is also in flux.

President Xi Jinping came to power as a reformer — but not of the kind that characterised the post-Mao economic and social liberalisation. Rather, he appears set on re-establishing a “core leadership” and sustaining the central role of the Communist Party. The second part of that equation is evident in two campaigns that might be termed structural. Xi put a brake on the pursuit of growth through undisciplined and excessive debt and he has prosecuted a long running, top-to-bottom anti-corruption campaign.

The “core leadership” question is harder to pin down because Communist Party politics are rarely exposed to sunlight. Some scholars and commentators have pointed to the lack of firm leadership in Beijing in the period before Xi’s elevation. That is, the tight leadership of the Mao’s successors was lost in the next generation. Some believe leadership during that period was more of a loose feudal structure in which leading figures oversaw their own turf without cohesion or common purpose.

In any case, there’s no doubt that Xi was vested with singular powers and authority — which he has used. And he has been conducting a reform campaign for the CPC and China that is probably at least as cathartic as the one Trump is pursuing. But the two leaders have almost opposite objectives.

China needs to develop a much higher degree of value in its economy to avoid the “middle-income trap” that often bedevils developing nations. Its shrinking and ageing population not only limits any future labour-cost competitiveness but also implies a higher degree of domestic consumption. Its political and economic baggage is considerable.

Xi’s rhetoric and broad strategies have been technocratic in the sense that technology and innovation are priorities. His key phrase — “high-quality development” — captures the idea of higher productivity and higher average incomes as well as improved social outcomes and services. Lately, he has very publicly recognised the key role of China’s private entrepreneurs, having sharply rebuked a number of them in his early years. But he undoubtedly favours state enterprises and those private organisations who very clearly recognise their status obligations within the Chinese system.

China’s and the US position in global trade are even more sharply at odds now, even though US policy under Biden was already aimed largely at limiting Chinese technological and economic growth. As a result of the over-investment of past years, China’s industry has massive capacity in many sectors. And as its growth has slowed, excess capacity has flowed over into exports that have driven down prices in many global markets.

High quality growth — as Xi appears to define it — is also about domestic self-sufficiency, a factor that has become more important as the US has tightened controls on technology and research interactions and trade. China has a wide range of large-scale research and innovation programs, some evident in recent developments in AI and semiconductors and others in ambitious research for biotechnology and health sciences. Xi has also fostered a strong focus on factory automation and advanced technologies in transport and logistics, all designed to enable more sophisticated, competitive product development.

While much of the public focus on tensions between the US and China is on Taiwan and the South China Sea, one clear source of risk for both is fiscal. The US government’s debt and rising deficits are already at levels investment markets baulk at. So far — despite the DOGE rhetoric — Trump’s strategies appear to be increasing deficits and promoting inflation that will inevitably increase the cost of debt repayments. The US government’s interest payments already exceed its defence budget.

China’s “two sessions” leadership meetings earlier this year were largely rehearsals of established policy themes. But one striking fact emerged. China’s fiscal revenue is not growing. Even though the official measures claimed 5 per cent GDP growth last year, revenues barely grew; and while this year’s GDP growth is again forecast at 5 per cent government revenue is expected to grow only 0.1 per cent.

China’s fiscal revenue 2014–25. Source: Rhodium Group

The reality is that China’s investment- and debt-based economy hit a wall and only a big boost non-tax revenues compensated for the fall in taxes and land sales revenue. Anecdotal accounts suggest that at least some of that non-tax revenue was obtained by dubious means. With the accrued debt of local governments weighing heavily, Beijing can’t keep kicking the fiscal can down the road, especially if tighter international trade terms put more pressure on exporters reliant in some way on government support. China probably faces significant industry rationalisation, which the attendant risk of social instability — something for which Xi has exhibited little tolerance.

Beijing has been moving toward a market-based system for electricity, a reform that offers considerable benefit. But it implies a substantial reduction in the size of the industry — which is huge — because the average load factor is only 50 per cent of nominal generating capacity. Steel is in a similar situation, challenged already by the curtailing of excessive construction investment, and its diversion to export markets is likely impractical and in any case a target of trade sanctions. Even the rising EV sector is facing factory closures, with the regulator of state enterprises announcing in late March that “consolidation” was coming. Where once China had around one hundred EV manufacturers it now has about forty. But many of the more aggressive developers are private companies, so it will be interesting to see how the regulators manage the more “competitive” outcome they have targeted. One way and another, China is in for some big challenges in its fiscal capacity and substantial parts of its employment base.

In a sense, both Trump and Xi have the same political challenge: what Xi has referred to as “common prosperity.” Xi has the job of sustaining the status of the Communist Party, presumably by attacking the corruption among elites that threatened the party’s credibility and by delivering social stability and wider economic equity. Trump promises a return to postwar middle-class comfort and values through economic protectionism.

Both countries need to increase taxes; both have been reducing taxes. Both appear to have little runway left. Decisions will need to be made.

As Xi and Trump work through their very different agendas, one choice stands out. Where Xi promotes technocrats in leadership and pursues technocratic solutions, Trump’s prejudices have already seriously disrupted or simply wrecked a range of hugely influential US research agencies and programs and curtailed research funding at a range of universities. Trump clearly prefers to have inexperienced loyalists in charge and they have made clear their intention to act on his — often destructive — instincts. And while he has cowed or won over America’s digital commerce leaders, their companies are heavily reliant on global open markets. In fact, all of the so-called “magnificent seven” obtain more than half of their revenue outside the US — and in Nvidia’s case it’s closer to 90 per cent.

Washington pyrotechnics have naturally preoccupied people around the world. But it would be wise, certainly in Australia, to keep an eye to our north. China’s leadership faces key decisions that will inevitably affect Australia’s outlook in material and other ways. Elsewhere in Asia, Vietnam’s new leadership has embarked on a massive restructuring of its bureaucratic architecture — a radical development that will go to the heart of its power and policy arrangements. And to our immediate north, Indonesian president Prabowo Subianto appears to be testing the country’s hard-won fiscal credibility with a seemingly illogical budget strategy.

After decades of comfortable, prosperous security Australia’s outlook is clouded by issues that have few easy solutions. It is bad time to make policy decisions that rest on conventional assumptions. •

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In many respects this will be an ordinary Singaporean election — the government will undoubtedly be returned with 85 to 95 per cent of parliamentary seats — but a host of features also make it distinctive.

Barring a last-minute surprise, the most obvious difference between this and any election since 1959 is that no member of the Lee family is either running as prime minister or lined up to be the next prime minister. Former PM Lee Hsien Loong has already handed the top job to his former secretary, Lawrence Wong and there is no younger member of the Lee family in parliament or cabinet.

Lee’s access to power is secure for the time being — he remains in cabinet as senior minister, a position his father once occupied — but his influence will wane without a relative waiting in the wings. Talented members of cabinet (and perhaps some whose self-confidence might be more obvious than their talent) will become increasingly unwilling to fall into line with yesterday’s man, and whatever plans Lee may have for a future beyond the premiership of Lawrence Wong must be considered contestable.

This situation leads directly to another unusual aspect of this election. Although the ruling party is not at risk of losing government, the prime minister may fall if the results or the campaign are worse than expected. The PAP’s last election campaign, in 2020, was run by deputy prime minister Heng Swee Keat, and was intended as his final step on the road to the prime ministership. But both the campaign and the result were so far below expectations that he eventually removed himself from the line of succession.

Given the PAP’s structural advantages, it seems unlikely that it will lose more seats than the ten it lost in 2020, but if it does, or if its share of the vote declines further from the 61 per cent it received in 2020, then the sharks will start circling Wong sooner rather than later.

It is undoubtedly for this reason that Wong has thrown himself so wholeheartedly into giving away government-sponsored shopping vouchers and other goodies. The government first deployed this overt style of pork-barrelling in a modest way in the 2020 election, but Wong has turbocharged it with the enthusiasm of a convert. We will have to wait and see if it works, but it is a sign of the government’s heightened level of insecurity that he feels the need to break so decisively with the legacy of founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, to whom populism and pork barrelling were anathema (and unnecessary).

This sense of desperation points to another, more basic element of novelty in this election: a series of self-inflicted embarrassments burdening the government’s image.

The most obvious is the fact that a former cabinet minister, S. Iswaran, was convicted in late 2024 on corruption charges for taking more than S$400,000 in “gifts” from a notorious businessman but served just four months in jail before starting a few months of home detention. (Whether it is the conviction or the short jail time that is the major point of embarrassment is a moot point.) Add to this a series of news stories about the luxury and wealth of some cabinet ministers, the former PM’s use of cabinet, parliament, the police and other arms of state power to pursue a private family dispute, and some spectacular mishandling of the domestic politics of the Gaza war, and you can see why they might be feeling a bit insecure.

Then there is the most recent own goal: the December 2024 revelation that the government had briefly authorised the release of everyone’s identity card number and other critical private details into the public domain. This was not a security breach by a hacker. It was part of a government plan to protect Singaporeans against identity theft that went disastrously wrong. Thus far no minister has been held to account.

The unavoidable truth is that Singapore has a B Team in charge and everyone knows it. It is this strand of self-awareness that has driven the government to reach deep into both the grab-bag of authoritarian repression and the toolkit of populist pork-barrel politics.

The problem at its most basic is that they don’t have a Lee Kuan Yew anymore. He stepped down from the premiership in 1990, stopped being a routine reference point in government sometime in the 2000s, retired from cabinet in 2011 and died in 2015 at the age of ninety-one.

It was Lee Kuan Yew who built Singapore’s system of “electoral authoritarianism” and was intimately involved in building and sustaining its uniquely successful system of state-directed capitalism. And it was Lee who kept both enterprises ticking over and in sync for decades. He was both a highly competent micro-manager and a political creature to his bones. They don’t make them like that anymore. He started in politics as a rabble rouser and master schemer who successfully destroyed an incumbent government in fair elections overseen by British colonial officials. He then turned on and destroyed the elements of his own party who were hostile to him and his close associates.

Regrettably, the complex system of elite regeneration that he also built has not been able to throw up anyone even close to his stature or acumen. No member of today’s cabinet was politically active before being nominated for parliament because being politically active, even in the PAP, would have been taken as showing poor judgement and unhealthy interests. Every member of today’s cabinet was presented with his or her position after being invited to a tea session with a group of senior ministers and put through a series of psychological tests, all of which was followed by a series of what are best described as job interviews.

These are retired civil servants, military bureaucrats (albeit flag-rank generals and admirals), doctors, lawyers, academics, bankers and business managers for whom entering politics was a logical, risk-free career move — the ultimate promotion. Little wonder that Lawrence Wong accepted the top job from Lee Hsien Loong by declaring, “I am ready for my next assignment.”

Lee Kuan Yew was a political force forged in fire, but today’s cabinet is a cossetted gaggle of paper pushers. The world needs paper pushers, of course, but not necessarily as national leaders. •

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Ten days ago, news that a Chinese social media influencer is facing expulsion brought mainland spouses into the spotlight yet again. Resident on a family visa and active online as “Yaya in Taiwan,” the woman had her visa revoked after she was revealed to have posted an online video in which she supported China’s use of military force to achieve unification. As of 15 March, she had ten days to leave the island. Among the roughly 380,000 Chinese spouses — mostly wives — of Taiwanese residents, she is reportedly the first to be expelled.

A day after this story broke, it was pushed off the front pages by a major statement on national security from president Lai Ching-te. In it, Lai identified seventeen measures designed by his government to strengthen Taiwan’s defences in response to increasing pressure by China’s military and influence operations by its United Front.

The statement has drawn more than the usual amount of attention internationally because it includes a reference to China as (in the official English translation) a “foreign hostile force.” The phrase outraged the government in Beijing. Drawing deeply on the special reserve of quaint English vocabulary it uses with reference to Lai Ching-te, China’s state-owned media denounced him as a “vile character” harbouring “evil designs,” his words “oozing with clear malice.”

Locally, Lai’s proposed revival of military courts, abolished in 2013, has attracted the most attention. Although the plan is designed to deal with disloyalty within the military, critics fear it might open the way for a possible return to martial law, which would threaten the independent judiciary, freedom of speech and of the press, and democratic political system that make Taiwan distinctive.

But the statement also bears on Yaya’s case. Noting the timing of the national security meeting from which it emanated, the “pan-blue” (unification-leaning) newspaper United Daily News sardonically enquired whether it was not just a reaction to the “mainland spouse” revelation, and accused Lai Ching-te of policy on the run in response to online pressure. Regardless of timing, the defence statement reflects the government’s concern with United Front work in Taiwan. Yaya’s online promotion of unification with China is generally deemed to fall into that category.

Who exactly is Yaya? Her face under the trademark baseball cap has become well known. Her full name is Liu Zhenya, she is a native of Hunan province resident in Taipei, and she is apparently married to a Taiwanese. She has three children — a resource valued by a small country that is racing South Korea to the bottom of the fertility league table. She describes herself as an ambassador for cross-straits exchange with Heilongjiang, a province very far from Hunan where she once filmed her daughter on a cross-straits visit, bringing lollies from semi-tropical Taiwan all the way to China’s snowy north. Despite a strong online presence evident in her 400,000-plus followers on the Chinese platform Douyin, little else has emerged about her circumstances.

After news of her cancelled visa went viral, rumours about her migration to Taiwan began to circulate. According to these rumours, Yaya had in the first instance divorced her husband in China to marry a Taiwanese. Then she waited till she could secure a residence permit, divorced the Taiwanese husband, remarried her original Chinese husband and came back to Taiwan with him, her parents, and two children. In this way, it was said, one Chinese woman with a residence permit was able to introduce six Chinese into Taiwan, all of them desiring to take advantage of Taiwan’s excellent medical insurance.

This rumour might simply reflect Taiwanese anxieties over infiltration from China if not for the fact that the story of Yaya’s serial marriages has circulated in China, too, and more probably reflects the simple attractions of fake news. Responding on video, Yaya declared she had been married only once. All her children were born in Taiwan and her parents were back in Hunan. They had just visited Taiwan just twice, she said, each time to help their daughter after childbirth. She had used her healthcare card only for those births. Her account has been verified by Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council.

Although Yaya’s online life includes few other details about her real life, it does show that she was seriously engaged in propaganda for the unification of China and Taiwan. In this respect, the offending video was not a one-off. A remarkable feature of her videos is the use she makes of her small daughter, Xiaodanggui (Little-Must-Return), a rather scary child with an awesome capacity for churning out slogans along the lines of “we must never, ever forget we are Chinese!” and “in the whole world there is only one China!”

In one post, Yaya shows her visiting Mao Zedong’s birthplace Shaoshan to pay her respects to “beloved Chairman Mao.” In another, she interviews her about whether she would like to go to school in China. The child replies stoutly: “I’d really like to go back to the mainland for school, but if every person who loved Taiwan chooses to leave, then who would there be to protect our Taiwan [women de Taiwan]?”

It is unclear whether Little-Must-Return will return to China with her mother, or whether she will be left behind in Taiwan to carry on the struggle.

Taiwan is not like China. Freedom of speech is not only a law but a practice. The Taiwan People’s Communist Party has come under investigation on suspicion of accepting funds from China, but it is nonetheless free to raise the Chinese flag in Taiwan and call for unification with China, as it did on Chinese New Year this year.

Discussion of Yaya’s pending expulsion has focused on this issue. What does freedom of speech mean if someone like Yaya, legally resident in Taiwan, isn’t free to voice her political opinions? In a widely reported response to this question, interior affairs minister Liu Shyh-fang said that “freedom does not fall from the sky” and could not be used to advocate the military unification of China and Taiwan.

In terms of political impact, Yaya pales into insignificance alongside another “mainland spouse,” He Jianhua, formerly prominent in the Women’s Federation in China and extremely active as an organiser of Chinese women in Taiwan. He Jianhua did end up in court in 2017, but the case against her failed, with the judge ruling that there was no evidence of her “pulling knives or drawing guns,” or encouraging anyone else to do so, and hence no criminal activity.

Yaya, however, went a step too far. Asserting that Taiwan is China’s sovereign territory was one thing. When she added that this was sufficient reason “for the mainland to reunify Taiwan by force” she created grounds for revocation of her visa. Yet she appears shocked by the cancellation of her visa. In the video she made to correct the rumours about her marriage, she also protested her love of Taiwan and her appreciation of Taiwanese society. Having for so long conducted propaganda with impunity, she probably didn’t realise there were legal limits to what could be said.

Since the Yaya case surfaced, attention has turned to other Chinese spouses with online accounts. Enqi in Taiwan, originally from Anhui, is one. Her mission has been to introduce Taiwan’s people and customs to her family back home, via video, and to introduce all the wonders of the vast mainland to her Taiwanese “compatriots.” Another is Xiaowei, from Guizhou, who runs a Douyin account called Husband, Wife and Three Kids in Taiwan Province. Like Yaya, she has done her bit for Taiwan’s population, and again like Yaya she is raising her children as Chinese nationalists. After Yaya’s visa was cancelled, Xiaowei appeared online to pay tribute to her as a wonderful mother. Both Enqi and Xiaowei have been summoned for interviews by the Bureau of Immigration.

All of this is creating difficulties for what is a singular minority in Taiwanese society. Even before the Yaya case, this group of immigrants was often in the news. Early last year a debate about reducing from six to four the number of years a Chinese immigrant needs to wait before applying for Taiwanese citizenship was opposed by noisy demonstrators crying out against “population cleansing.”

For cross-strait families, the process of gaining legal residence is burdensome, with repeated applications for extension of residence necessary over the course of the six years and a minimum period of six months per year residence in Taiwan to advance to the next stage. A reduction in the number of years would mean less paperwork and greater freedom of movement for the applicant. (The bill proposing the reduction to four years was reintroduced in January this year. The Yaya case makes the change unlikely.)

Many nevertheless choose to remain long-term residents. Like Chinese permanent residents in Australia, Taiwan’s mainland spouses confront a dilemma: their Chinese passports and household registration cards enable them to move easily back and forth between Taiwan and China, managing a mix of family and economic matters. With a Chinese passport and a renewable Taiwan residence permit, they can have the best of both worlds. This appears to have been Yaya’s calculation. Had she progressed through the naturalisation system to secure Taiwan citizenship, she would not have been deported.

Others again, a large minority, are now citizens with voting rights and Taiwanese children. But evidence of integration into Taiwanese society is not necessarily a protection. Although their everyday interactions with the host society seem harmonious, they feel under attack from the media because of their supposed pro-China sympathies.

Xu Chunying, chair of the Cross-Straits Marriage and Family Alliance and a Taiwan People’s Party candidate in the 2024 election, resigned her candidacy because of the smear campaign against her. And yet — as an older woman who feels Chinese with a daughter who feels Taiwanese — she is fairly typical of pan-blue voters in Taiwan. The stereotype of mainland spouses like her is that they all want Taiwan to “return” to the Chinese fold, but even among those of them who do favour “one China,” few believe that this means unification under a single central government in Beijing.

For China, however, these women are all potential agents for United Front ideological and social work. Under its current czar Wang Huning, the United Front emphasises people-to-people, Fujian-to-Taiwan relationships in its Taiwan operations. Attention to cross-straits marriages has intensified, with officials sponsoring, attending and addressing group weddings and congratulating the couples on their embodiment of the ideal of national unification.

This activity shows the route by which brides can be recruited for United Front work. Whether China actually needs them is a moot point. On 18 March Taiwan reported fifty-nine Chinese planes, six ships and two balloons within its defence zone in the twenty-four hours to 6 am that day. Huge amphibious barges capable of disgorging troops and tanks deep into the island are rolling off the docks in Guangzhou Shipyard, less than four hundred nautical miles from the Taiwan coast. If war does happen, Little-Must-Return’s piping voice will be lost in the thunder of artillery. •

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“We have a concern that this resolution is a reaffirmation of Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs),” read the prepared statement. “Agenda 2030 and the SDGs advance a program of soft global governance that is inconsistent with US sovereignty and adverse to the rights and interests of Americans… Therefore, the United States rejects and denounces the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals.”

For those not familiar with the SDGs and the Agenda that accompanies them, they are the global targets for the eradication of poverty and hunger, universal education, clean water, gender equality, environmental protection and other development objectives. They were adopted unanimously by all 193 members of the UN in 2015. (Progress has been uneven since, but the goals were strongly reaffirmed at the UN Summit for the Future last year.)

In practice, it’s of little consequence that the United States has decided rhetorically to reject the SDGs. But this unprecedented statement serves as a useful marker of how far Donald Trump’s ideological campaign is reaching into the furthest outposts of American government and policy.

And it accompanies actions with very significant consequences. On Monday secretary of state Marco Rubio confirmed that more than four-fifths — in excess of 5000 — of the overseas aid programs run by the US Agency for International Development were being terminated. USAid itself is to be dismantled and its remaining programs absorbed into the state department. Almost all USAid staff based overseas have been put on paid leave, and 2000 officials in the United States were told their jobs will be eliminated. Rubio’s announcement came a month after Elon Musk declared that he and his “Department of Government Efficiency” had “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the woodchipper.” The USAid website has been taken down.

American NGOs have been explaining what these cuts will mean. USAid spent US$40 billion last year, mainly in seventy-seven low- and lower-middle-income countries, in areas such as maternal and child health, malnutrition, primary education, clean water, malaria and TB prevention and humanitarian disaster relief. Summarily ending these programs will have “terrible” impacts, says Oxfam America, particularly in crisis-torn countries such as Sudan, Yemen and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and those dependent on US aid to fund basic health and education services.

Oxfam has joined a lawsuit with employee unions against the federal government, arguing that closing USAid without congressional approval is unconstitutional. International aid organisations have meanwhile begun axing thousands of jobs funded by the cancelled USAid grants.

The attack on US overseas aid includes funds for developing countries to tackle climate change. Trump’s decision to take the United States out of the Paris Climate Agreement was announced on the day of his inauguration in January. It was accompanied by the “rescinding and revoking” of the US International Climate Finance Plan adopted by the Biden administration, which last year provided $11 billion in grants and loans for emissions reduction and climate adaptation in developing countries. This was around 8 per cent of the global total.

Among other targets the cuts remove US$4 billion from the UN Green Climate Fund, and last week the US announced it is pulling its funding out of the much-trumpeted Just Energy Transition Partnerships, which support South Africa, Indonesia and Vietnam to transition away from coal-fired power. The US has also withdrawn from the board of the UN Loss and Damage Fund.

Its cuts to overseas aid are the starkest indication of the Trump administration’s new approach to global governance, but there are others. A quarter of a century ago the US helped create the G20, the group of the world’s largest economies. Since then it has played a leading role in the forum, helping to coordinate global economic policy and promote US-friendly development in the global South. Last month, though, when the first of this year’s G20 ministerial meetings took place in South Africa, the US stayed away. Rubio explained his absence in a post on X: the G20 presidency South Africa, he said, was “using G20 to promote ‘solidarity, equality, & sustainability.’ In other words: DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] and climate change.”

It was a surprising argument. In the discourse of international relations, solidarity, equality and sustainability are standard terms, and tackling climate change a universally agreed goal. No other Western country had batted an eyelid at the South Africans’ slogan. But Rubio was making clear that the Trump administration is not going to play the accepted game. The following week the US treasury secretary Scott Bessent refused to attend the G20 finance ministers’ meeting.

The US absence made it impossible to reach decisions at either the foreign or the finance ministers’ meetings. The G20 operates on a basis of unanimity, and the officials the US sent said they were not authorised to take positions. So neither meeting was able to issue the usual agreed communiqué. Instead the South Africans released a “chair’s summary” of what had been discussed. The finance ministers’ summary begins: “Generally, members: 1. Expressed support for the G20 South African Presidency’s theme of ‘Solidarity, Equality, Sustainability’ and discussed international policy cooperation to further promote global prosperity and address key shared challenges.”

It is not, in truth, a big deal that the G20 couldn’t come to any decisions. Much of what it does is to make lowest-common-denominator statements to which its members can all agree, often largely made up of sentences they have accepted previously. (This saves negotiating time.) The world is not generally much affected by them. But it is not always the case, and on those occasions when decisions really do need to be made, the absence of the US could be crippling. This year, for example, South Africa wants to come to an agreement on relieving rising debt in Africa, which is severely hampering many countries’ development. But without the US this will be impossible.

It is not yet clear whether Trump has really decided to boycott the forum. The US is due to hold the G20 presidency next year. But it is hard to see how it can do so if it doesn’t take part this year — especially when its general approach to international relations now stands so far outside the global consensus.

Further questions loom. Could the US pull out of the World Bank, and the other multilateral development banks in Africa, Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean? These are institutions it largely created — the World Bank in 1945, in the aftermath of the Second World War; the others in the 1960s, during the heyday of American power and post-colonial optimism. But today they are bastions of the causes Trump dislikes the most, climate change and gender equality. All of the banks focus a proportion of their anti-poverty work on increasing economic opportunities for women and education for girls; and most now devote at least 40 per cent of their total investments to climate mitigation and adaptation in low and middle income countries. This amounted to US$75 billion in 2023.

There are grounds for thinking the World Bank might be in Washington’s sights. As has been widely noted, the Trump presidency is following much of the blueprint laid out in Project 2025, the plan assembled by the conservative Heritage Foundation. Project 2025 calls for the US to pull out of both the Bank and the International Monetary Fund, arguing that they “espouse economic theories and policies that are inimical to American free market and limited government principles.” (This will come as something of a surprise to their many critics on the left, who see them as too pro-market.)

Project 2025 also says the US should force “reforms and new policies” on the two institutions, which would be difficult if it left them. But others on the right have taken up the idea, describing in detail how the US withdrawal from the Bank could be legally achieved.

The prospect looks sufficiently likely that some of America’s erstwhile allies among the Western powers are actively preparing for alternative scenarios. US withdrawal is one; in another the US might stay in but actively attempt to block World Bank programs, such as on climate, it now opposes. The US has already asked for some such investments to be brought to votes at the banks’ boards, clearly intending to vote against them. At the World Bank this may not be sufficient to stop them being approved; the US, with 16 per cent of equity and voting rights, can be outvoted by other country shareholders. But at the Inter-American Development Bank or IDB, where its shareholding is 30 per cent, the US has an effective veto on lending. It voted last month to oppose the Bank’s nature and climate strategy (forming an unlikely alliance with Venezuela), leaving countries in the region fearful of what will come next.

Perhaps surprisingly, US withdrawal from the World Bank would not have much of a financial impact. Under the Bank’s statutes, shareholders can only withdraw the dollar value of the capital they originally put in, which in the US case is US$3 billion — only around 1.2 per cent of the Bank’s total current equity. That amount would almost certainly be replaced by other shareholders — notably by China, which has long sought greater voting power but has always been opposed by the US.

The Bank would no doubt have to move its headquarters from Washington DC. But its investor status would be unimpaired: the credit rating agency Fitch has noted that even if the US withdrew, the Bank would retain its coveted triple-A credit rating. (In fact, among the major multilateral development banks, only the Inter-American Development Bank would suffer a downgrade if the US pulled out its capital.)

Whatever it decides on membership of these various banks, the Trump administration’s turn against the prevailing consensus on international development and economic governance will inevitably have an impact on relations between the global North and South. Over recent years there has been rising anger in the developing world at the perceived double standards of Western countries. Rich nations that claimed to champion the global poor failed to release their surplus Covid vaccines when the poor desperately needed them. Donors who explained that fiscal realities were forcing them to cut their aid budgets have found apparently unlimited funds for Ukraine. Harsh critics of human rights violations in Africa gave unconditional support to Israel in its war in Gaza.

Unsurprisingly, many governments have found China a more amenable development partner. Over the last decade its Belt and Road initiative has invested the equivalent of more than a trillion US dollars in developing countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America. Most of this has gone on much-needed infrastructure: roads, railways, dams, ports and power supply. China has invested widely in mineral and fossil fuel extraction, and in buying and developing agricultural land. While Western-led development banks and bilateral donors impose onerous environmental and social conditions on their aid, China is much more relaxed. It naturally exacts a diplomatic price, drawing countries increasingly into its geopolitical orbit. But for most of them it has been an acceptable bargain.

America’s withdrawal from international aid will surely accelerate this shift. It was reported last week that more than 700 diplomats at the state department and USAid had written to Marco Rubio warning that the aid cuts will undermine US security, leaving power vacuums in key parts of the world that China and Russia will eagerly fill. “Foreign assistance is not charity,” their letter argues. “Instead, it is a strategic tool that stabilises regions, prevents conflict, and advances US interests.” Trump clearly isn’t listening. But it would be something of an irony if his actions helped make China great again. •

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We built a country east and west and north. We built it on an infrastructure that deliberately resisted the continental pressure of the United States. For 120 years we’ve done that. With one signature of a pen, you’ve reversed that, thrown us into the north–south influence of the United States and will reduce us, I am sure, to a colony of the United States because when the economic levers go, the political independence is sure to follow.

Canadians didn’t find Turner’s words sufficiently convincing, and Mulroney’s Conservatives went on to win a majority and pass the agreement into law. Nearly four decades later, though, as Canada finds itself at the mercy of the trade policies of the Trump administration, the warning is all too relevant.

And yet those same trade policies have precipitated a remarkable turnaround in Canadian politics, with the unpopular Justin Trudeau replaced by political newcomer Mark Carney, whose resumé seems tailor-made to take on Trump and has the potential to bring the governing Liberals back from the political dead.

Since November, Trump has repeatedly threatened 25 per cent tariffs on goods from Canada as well as Mexico, and then stepped back to varying degrees. Tariffs did finally go into effect on 4 March, but the next day Trump exempted the crucial automotive sector, along with some other goods, for another month. Oil exports had previously been held to 10 per cent, but starting this week Canada will also be subject to Trump’s general steel and aluminium tariffs on top of the broader 25 per cent.

The tariffs — which may well have changed again since this writing — make a mockery of the free-trade agreement signed by Trump in 2018 to succeed the North American Free Trade Agreement, itself the successor of the original 1988 agreement Mulroney and Turner fought over. At the time, the 2018 negotiations felt aggressive and unbearable; now they seem quaint, with Trump having since departed entirely from legal or factual reality. He now frequently expresses disdain for Canadian trade entirely, declaring in January that “we don’t need them to make our cars… we don’t need their lumber… we don’t need their oil and gas, we have more than anybody.”

Given Canada’s heavy dependence on American trade, it’s not surprising that the tariffs have dominated political discourse here. Trump’s nominal aim is to punish both Mexico and Canada for allowing rampant fentanyl across the border, an accusation without factual basis. Nevertheless, since November Canada has invested heavily in new border security and other initiatives to try to appease the US president while preparing countertariffs in response.

Turner’s 1988 words have extra force because Trump’s economic policies are nested in what he claims to be his larger political goal: the annexation of Canada. As with all things Trump, it is impossible to discern whether this is a serious intent or a bargaining tactic. Regardless, Canada feels at the economic mercy of the United States and worries that a loss of political independence will follow.

But Trump’s plan may backfire, for his aggressive actions are only provoking the opposite response. His second administration has created havoc in a hundred areas that seemed settled and beyond politics; the Canada–US trade relationship is only one of them. But in no other country have Trump’s actions created such a complete flip in political fortunes.

“Canada is broken” was a widespread theme during 2024. The country seemed adrift under the no longer popular Justin Trudeau, his progressive policies seemingly inadequate for current economic realities. But the Trump threat has galvanised national pride and resistance. Maple leaf flags have blossomed and “buy Canadian” is the mantra, with Canadian firms wildly advertising their domestic roots. Only 9 per cent of Canadians express interest in joining the United States, and public warmth toward the southern neighbour has plummeted.

No less a figure than former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper, who Trudeau defeated in 2015, says that Canadians should “accept any level of damage” to ensure the country remains independent. “I would be prepared to impoverish the country and not be annexed,” he added, “if that was the option we’re facing,”

Two months ago the Liberal Party under Trudeau seemed headed for oblivion, but the Trump disruption has turned the tables. Under a new leader elected on Sunday, the party now has a serious shot at re-election. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, having lost the enormous lead in the polls he enjoyed for over a year, faces the dilemma of how to position himself in the Trump II era.

If there is a winner amid the Trumpian mess, it is that new Liberal leader, Mark Carney, who only formally entered politics two months ago and yet won a staggering 86 per cent of party members’ votes at the weekend and will soon be sworn in as prime minister. Carney boasts a golden resumé and some lucky timing. Of modest background, he studied at Harvard and Oxford, earning a doctorate in economics from the latter. He then spent more than a decade with Goldman Sachs in various global centres before being recruited as a senior public servant in Ottawa. In 2008 he became head of the central Bank of Canada, where he was widely credited for his steady hand in that year’s financial crisis. In an unusual reminder of Canada’s colonial connection, he was appointed governor of the Bank of England in 2013, in time to steer it through Brexit.

Carney stepped down from that post in 2020 and returned to Canada, making little secret of his interest in another position: prime minister of Canada. He became a fixture at Liberal events yet resisted taking the plunge by running for a parliamentary seat or moving to truly partisan activity. Instead, he spent his time on policy councils and corporate boards. As Trudeau’s Liberals plunged in the polls last year, Carney’s reticence became almost comical, reaching a nadir in December when Trudeau botched a cabinet shuffle by telling his finance minister Chrystia Freeland he was moving her aside to make a place for Carney. The insulted Freeland resigned, while Carney — possibly unaware of Trudeau’s plan — once again elected to remain on the sidelines.

But Freeland’s resignation was the final blow for the unpopular prime minister, spurring further caucus rebellion and a reluctant 6 January resignation by Trudeau. Ten days later Carney announced his candidacy for the leadership, finally entering formal politics at the age of fifty-nine. Freeland also announced her candidacy, amid high expectations but also fears that she would follow the Conservatives’ Kim Campbell as another short-lived female prime minister given the captaincy of a sinking ship.

Other senior ministers declined to run, leaving only two other candidates, thirty-seven-year-old House leader Karina Gould and former MP Frank Baylis. The two-month race, quick by Canadian standards, finished on 9 March with the results of a mass vote of party members. While he was widely expected to win, Carney’s landslide was truly impressive, leaving second-placed Freeland with only 8 per cent and the others at 3 per cent each.

In normal times, an almost sixty-year-old who had spent his entire career at the top of the financial world and done nothing relatable for the average voter since graduating from high school in Edmonton in 1983, would not be a strong bet for office. But Trump times are not normal times. Carney’s track record of cool excellence amid crisis and his lack of ties to Trudeau’s governing record have made him irresistible to large segments of the party and the public, at least for the moment. In addition to sweeping the membership vote, he also bested his rivals by wide margins within the parliamentary caucus and in polls of both Liberal supporters and the general public.

Most amazing was the drop in support for the Conservatives, who consistently led the Liberals by 20 per cent or more throughout 2024. The latest figures show a much narrower gap, with some polls even putting the Liberals under Carney slightly in the lead. While it might not last, the Liberal turnaround is astounding and the new leader’s timing impeccable. “If it’s not a crisis, you wouldn’t be seeing me,” Carney has himself said. “I’m most useful in a crisis. I’m not that good in peacetime.”

If Carney is a political winner in the Trump crisis so far, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has so far been a loser. For two years he feasted on the declining Liberals and their stubbornly unpopular leader. But Trudeau’s departure, spurred by the tariff crisis, took away that easy pleasure, and Carney can plausibly distance himself from Trudeau’s unpopular policies by truthfully pointing out he wasn’t in the room.

By any measure Carney is a “business Liberal,” a wing of the party composed of pragmatic centrists that often seems defunct but keeps coming back, and his initial policies follow that theme. Poilievre’s longstanding top target has been “the carbon tax” — a complex Liberal carbon-pricing regime that is sensible public policy but unpopular politics. Carney’s pledge to eliminate it, along with the rise in capital gains taxes and other contentious policies, has blunted Poilievre’s attacks.

The Conservative leader and his party have been left with an unprecedented strategic problem. For decades Canada’s Conservatives have had a happy relationship with the United States, of which Mulroney’s free-trade agreement is emblematic. While the Liberals have equivocated according to circumstances and the left-wing New Democrats have been the most sceptical, the Conservatives have been reliably but not slavishly pro-American. But Trump’s antics have blown apart that safe default and robbed the party of initiative and momentum.

The onslaught has left Poilievre with little option but to join the unified call for countermeasures and national unity. He has issued his own warnings to Trump alongside his predecessor Harper’s pledge to impoverish the country if necessary. And the speed, extremism and chaos of the Trump takeover in Washington will force him to spend more and more effort differentiating himself while his opponents will argue he is merely Trump-lite.

Poilievre must also keep his party united. He won his post because of his ability to straddle its centrist and populist wings, including the “trucker convoy” of right-wing protestors that occupied downtown Ottawa three years ago. Much like Stephen Harper, he puts enormous effort into tending the party and ensuring its more volatile elements feel respected, while managing to remain vague about the extent to which he agrees with them. This will get harder, since a segment of the party is pro-Trump, notwithstanding the tariff threat, and welcomes attacks on diversity policies and other progressive initiatives. Although Trump recently did Poilievre the backhanded favour of calling him “not a MAGA guy,” Carney’s centrism holds new appeal to those who previously chose the Conservative leader as the only alternative to Trudeau.

And the test for both leaders is imminent. Carney is likely to call an election soon after being sworn in, both to capitalise on momentum and because he has little other choice. Parliament returns on 24 March after being prorogued since January as part of Trudeau’s exit plan. The Liberals hold a minority in the House of Commons and Carney, without a seat of his own, is presumably not interested in watching from the galleries. With the Conservatives having spent months trying to bring down the government, which was kept alive primarily by the fourth-place (and increasing ambivalent) New Democratic Party, there is little sense in Carney trying to keep the current feeble regime alive.

Carney might have won the leadership with ease but his performance in a general election is anyone’s guess. Other prime ministers replacing unpopular leaders have seen initial surges of popularity but gone down to massive defeat; among them is the aforementioned John Turner, another business Liberal who replaced a prime minister named Trudeau (in his case in 1984) but was soundly defeated and went on to fail in his comeback attempt against Mulroney four years later.

Carney, who has faced largely friendly crowds and media so far, is only charismatic by central banker standards, and his French — essential for Canadian national office — doesn’t flow easily. Beyond hot-button items like the carbon tax, he has been more aspirational than specific about his policy plans, and while he himself wasn’t part of the Trudeau government, the rest of his likely team was. He also carries baggage accumulated during his corporate years, including the decision by Brookfield, a conglomerate of which he was board chair until January, to move its head office from Toronto to New York.

And no one should discount Pierre Poilievre. Trump may be an enormous distraction, but Poilievre is a disciplined and nimble campaigner with a longstanding focus on the cost-of-living issues that are top of mind for most Canadians. The Conservatives have been so successful in fundraising that they have already opened the spending gates against “Carbon Tax Carney” (despite his plans to cancel the policy). And Poilievre has announced few policies of his own so far, a wise move that allows the party to pivot to take on Carney. Still, the election will centre on which leader is best able to stand up for Canada against Donald Trump, and both leaders can make a strong claim.

Justin Trudeau, once the brightest light in Canadian politics, is now so unpopular that he gave only a short speech at the 9 March leadership election gathering, which was light on the traditional tributes to the outgoing leader. Instead the star was ninety-one-year-old Jean Chrétien, prime minister from 1993 to 2003, who gave a rousing speech — twice as long as Trudeau’s — emphasising the history of Canada–US relations. Addressing Trump, he said, “From one old guy to another old guy, stop this nonsense. Canada will never join the United States.”

But Chrétien’s message was ultimately one of hope. “Historically, despite our friendship, we have had problems but we always found a way to solve them,” he said. “We have worked with and collaborated with the US in the past and I’m telling you we will do so in the future.” He also joked that Trump should receive the Order of Canada for uniting Canadians “as never before.”

Like Trump’s other targets, Canada faces a serious and perilous challenge. But that challenge has brought the country together and given the Liberals a surprising new lease on life under a novice but crisis-tested leader. Canada might be under economic threat but it hasn’t lost its political independence. Instead, it has gained new political energy. •

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Expertise and experience in the pertinent area aren’t relevant: his choice as education secretary, for example, is most famous for her role in the wrestling industry.

Being mega-rich helps. Trump has so far nominated thirteen or more billionaires to government posts. His cabinet alone is worth at least $7 billion, sixty times the collective wealth of Joe Biden’s cabinet. Being associated with Fox News also helps: twenty of Trump’s picks so far have been Fox News hosts or contributors.

But for the most senior national security and law enforcement jobs, the overriding qualification is simple: potential appointees must endorse Trump’s fiction that the 2020 presidential election was stolen by the Democrats. It is a symptom of how quickly the unthinkable becomes the new normal that this has attracted so little attention.

None of these appointees is likely to believe Trump’s claim. Immediately after the 2020 election the Republicans mounted more than sixty legal challenges; all of them were dismissed. In the four years since then, no evidence of any significant fraud has emerged. More than that, theories of foul play have been debunked — most expensively the claims about rigged voting machines that resulted in Dominion Voting Systems receiving almost a billion dollars from Fox News. As the Washington Post data analyst Philip Bump wrote last year, “No election in American history has been scrutinised as robustly and ceaselessly as the 2020 election.”

Trump’s appointees are also aware of Trump’s cynical history of labelling as a fraud every election result he hasn’t liked since Obama’s landslide win in 2012. They also know that influential Republicans were positioning themselves to allege fraud yet again in the months leading up to the 2024 election. “As things stand now there’s zero chance of a free and fair election,” the Heritage Foundation’s Mike Howell charged in July last year. Such concerns magically evaporated when the result came out right.

So what sort of government are these expedient liars likely to deliver?

Trump’s first-term approach can be characterised as malevolence tempered by incompetence. His first major action — the “Muslim ban” banning migrants and visitors from seven predominantly Muslim countries — was blocked by the courts; his signature policy, repealing Obamacare, failed to get through Congress. Setbacks like these are what he was determined to avoid when he makes his return to the White House.

So far, there is no apparent lessening of his malevolence. Indeed, four more years of accumulating grievances have fuelled a strong new focus on retribution. As the election neared, writes Fintan O’Toole, a close observer of US politics, Trump’s rhetoric became “increasingly surreal, vituperative and lurid” and he increasingly spoke of “the enemy within.” The chair of the joint chiefs of staff should be executed, he declared; the NBC television network was guilty of “treason” and would “pay” for it; the Democrats were running a Gestapo administration; Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney should go to jail; and the special prosecutor overseeing his trials, Jack Smith, should be thrown out of his job and out of the country.

One key appointment points to the vigour of Trump’s quest for retribution. His appointed head of the FBI, Kash Patel, served in the first Trump administration and then wrote a book that provides a list of “deep state” officials to target. Trump called the book “a blueprint to let us take back the White House and remove these Gangsters from all of Government.’’

So the malevolence is at least as great, but is it still tempered by incompetence? Certainly Trump’s second administration has got off to a very different start. In 2016 the federal government set aside a large amount of money for both parties’ candidates to staff their presidential transition teams. Trump and Hilary Clinton had both built massive teams of people ready to enter the fifteen big departments and hundreds of smaller federal agencies and see what was happening inside. A thousand or so Obama officials were waiting for them, along with briefings that had taken them six months to prepare.

But then, days after the election, Trump simply fired the 500 or so people on his transition team. “Chris, you and I are so smart that we can leave the victory party two hours early and do the transition ourselves,” he told a perplexed Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, who had assembled the team. Soon he also fired Christie. It is hard to fathom such arrogance and laziness.

Trump was much better prepared this time. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a 900-page manifesto compiled by a team of right-wing ideologues (including many ex-Trump staffers), methodically spelt out how to reshape the American government. Whenever its recommendations provoked controversy during the campaign, Trump distanced himself from the document. But several of its authors were among his early appointees, and its prescriptions are clearly driving Trump’s assault on government institutions.

The better preparation doesn’t end there. Trump has also identified more possibilities for his own enrichment. Not content with selling caps, mugs and even his God bless the USA bibles, he opened new money-making avenues in the days before his inauguration. He announced two meme cryptocurrencies with outrageous market values, $TRUMP and later $MELANIA, both of them likely to ruthlessly exploit the more credulous among his followers. In practice, he will be doing his best to write the rules governing business ventures from which he and his family are profiting.

Underlying the preparations for Trump’s second term is a self-serving diagnosis of the frustrations of the first. Trump’s laziness, limited abilities or short attention span weren’t the problem, or the inherent flaws of his plans. The administration was sabotaged by traitors in its midst.

In search of people who would do exactly as instructed, Trump turned over staff at a high rate: four chiefs of staff, four press secretaries and seven communications directors in just four years. Part of the problem, as economist Noah Smith wrote, is that “almost all of the people who work for him seem to end up hating him.” His longest-serving chief-of-staff, John Kelly, described him as “a person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution and the rule of law.” Another former chief-of-staff Mark Milley described him as fascist to the core.

For the Trumpists, though, the problem was not Trump but the appointees. Straight after the 2024 election Donald Trump Jr. declared he would be “heavily involved” in the 2025 transition, adding: “I want to make sure, now that we know who the real players are, the people who will actually deliver on the president’s message, the people who don’t think that they know better than the duly elected president of the United States.”

Two examples will suffice. Trump has fired (with no reason given) the current chair of the joint chiefs of staff, America’s central military group, and appointed air force lieutenant-general Jon Caine to the position. Announcing the appointment, Trump said that Caine had told him, “I love you, sir. I think you’re great, sir. I’ll kill for you, sir.”

Having appointed one loyalist to head the FBI, Trump appointed another, far-right commentator Dan Bongino, as his deputy. Bongino, who has cheered Trump’s “total personnel warfare” on his program, once produced two toy robots — an orange one representing Trump and a blue one he called “liberal screaming Karen” — and used the Trump robot to beat “Karen” over and over. “Yes!’ he yelled. “This is how we fix this place.”

In a well-known passage, the great scholar of totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, argued that totalitarian regimes “invariably replace all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”

Arendt stresses the political dimension of such appointments, giving top priority to loyalty and conformity, but they are also the perfect recipe for what psychologists call groupthink. Groupthink occurs when cohesive, united groups make disastrous decisions because they ignore dissonant information and place their priority on maintaining internal consensus. When all members share the same worldview, they are more likely to stereotype outsiders as ignorant or evil and less likely than a more diverse group to consider risks, costs and counter-arguments.

The dangers of groupthink in the second Trump presidency — already obvious — are compounded by other factors that make bad decisions more likely.

The first is hubris. After his second and more decisive victory, Trump is “infused with the swagger of impunity,” writes O’Toole. His confidence stems from having outmanoeuvred his political foes, evaded any serious consequences of his myriad legal battles and even escaped an assassin’s bullet.

All American presidents can influence government contracts and the drafting and implementing of regulations. Each of them is surrounded by people and groups keen to take advantage of the largest source of patronage in the democratic world. Every big corporation and interest group is keen to maintain a positive relationship with the White House.

In dealing with a president like Trump, guided not by rules and procedures but by a sense of a world divided into allies and enemies, the incentive to behave deferentially is even greater than usual. The heads of many of the America’s biggest companies in the country have dutifully travelled to Mar-a-Lago since Trump’s election: they include Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sergey Brin and Sundar Pichai, Amazon and the Washington Post’s Jeff Bezos and Open AI’s Sam Altman.

Because the American media has become so intertwined with corporate interests, companies’ political strategies can easily impinge on editorial decisions. The national TV network ABC paid Trump $15 million to settle a defamation case that most commentators thought it could win. Mark Zuckerberg eliminated Facebook’s American fact-checkers, claiming the recent election was a cultural tipping point and fact-checkers had destroyed more trust than they created. Jeff Bezos has banished “anti–free market” views from the Washington Post’s opinion page.

Not only is there more internal conformity in Trump’s second administration, but he will also face far fewer external checks and balances. He has more solid support in Congress from a cowed Republican Party and more appointees in the bureaucracy and judiciary.

Even knowing all this, the pace of Trump’s first month in office has been astounding. He and Elon Musk have taken to heart the Silicon Valley mantra — move fast and break things — and are daring the courts and Congress to keep up. Of these actions, several are clearly illegal; they include an order contravening the constitution’s stipulation that all people born in the United States are entitled to citizenship and a freeze on much spending already authorised by Congress. In these cases, the White House is effectively daring the courts to try to enforce the law. Trump’s blanket declaration, echoing Napoleon, is that he who saves his country doesn’t violate any law.

One of Trump’s aims is to undermine the system’s capacity to check his actions. He fired fifteen of the independent inspectors-general who keep a check on federal agencies. (Without offering any reason he ignored the regulation that requires him to give Congress thirty days’ notice of such an action.) Elon Musk’s attempts to increase government “efficiency” is all sledgehammer and no scalpel. Apart from the immediate chaos, apart from the injustices done to innumerable individuals, and apart from the suffering inflicted by the closing of programs, what are the long-term institutional effects?

But perhaps the most alarming actions involve Trump’s weaponisation of the wheels of justice. He has fired several career lawyers who worked on legal cases involving him, making clear this was the reason for their dismissal. Several senior FBI leaders have been told to leave the agency or be fired. Legal actions arising from the administration’s abrupt actions could take months or years to work their way through the system.

The consequent chaos — unprecedented as it is — is occurring at a moment of relative stability. But what if conditions become less benign? Imagine if the current outbreak of avian flu got completely out of control. Medical and healthcare institutions will have had their capacity to respond weakened, and the government’s response would be guided by anti-science health secretary Robert Kennedy Jnr. Where would be the voices arguing for fast and appropriate preventive measures?

Or imagine a further intensification of severe climate-induced weather patterns. During the Los Angeles wildfires and after the fatal air crash at Washington DC airport, Americans have had a taste of how Trump responds to disasters. His reactions to future disasters will be predictably vituperative but his administration’s readiness to reduce the damage is in doubt.

Trump inherited an economy described by the Economist as the envy of the world. Inflation and unemployment have been low and growth relatively high. Although it is hard to know how much is posturing and bluff, and how much will actually be put into practice, there is a possibility that Trump’s tariffs will lead if not to a damaging trade war then to higher prices and supply-chain shortages. His pledge to cut business regulations and his uncritical support for the crime-infested crypto-currencies could have multiple consequences, foreseen and unforeseen.

Karl Marx once quoted Hegel’s observation that everything important in history happens twice. What he forgot to add, said Marx, was that they occurred the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. The Trump presidencies look likely to reverse Marx’s axiom.

Among the farces of the first Trump administration was its failed attempt to build a southern border wall — a wall Mexico was meant to pay for but didn’t. But there were also real tragedies, including the separation of more than 5000 children from their parents at the border with no plan to reunite them. And if America’s official response to Covid had been the equal of other affluent democracies, an estimated 188,000 more people would have survived.

The second time around, however, with the White House and the upper echelons of government gripped by Trumpian groupthink, the scope for tragedy is much, much greater. •

The post The second time as tragedy appeared first on Inside Story.

“We did whatever we could get away with within a very tight budget,” says architect Paul Karakusevic. He’s showing me the foyer of a new apartment block on the Kings Crescent Estate in the inner-London borough of Hackney. Outside, Karakusevic points to where the blonde Danish bricks of the new apartment blocks “kiss” the darker yellow bricks of retained council housing. Similar in bulk and height, they frame a landscaped courtyard.

The style, I read later, is “the new London vernacular” and aims to draw on the city’s built traditions. The Observer’s architecture critic, Rowan Moore, summed it up as “brick, rectangular, well-proportioned, unfussy — a kind of improved Georgian with better insulation, more generous windows and fewer twiddly bits.”

This is one of many municipal projects designed by Karakusevic’s practice, Karakusevic Carson Architects, which specialises in the regeneration of council housing. Its finish and features defy the clichéd crime show depictions of brutalist British council estates riven by grime, neglect and decay. There is no rubbish, graffiti or dumped furniture; no shadowy corners or dark underpasses.

Originally completed in 1971, Kings Crescent is undergoing a makeover with Hackney Council as developer. The first two phases of renewal finished in 2017 and phases three and four are just getting underway.

At the end of its transformation, the roughly four-hectare site will comprise 767 apartments. About two-thirds will be new, the rest substantially renovated. Half will be sold to private buyers at commercial prices; the other half are designated “affordable,” a term that includes shared-equity housing, rentals discounted 20 per cent or more, and deeply subsidised “social” homes with average weekly rents of £125 (A$250). The whole complex is designed to be “tenure blind,” making it impossible to tell owners from tenants.

With 182 dwellings per hectare — about ten times the density of new suburbs on Australia’s urban fringes — it’s a prime example of medium-rise, high-density housing. But Kings Crescent doesn’t feel crowded. The tallest two blocks on the site will be just twelve storeys high, the rest stop at six. Along with much-needed homes come medical facilities, a community centre, retail outlets, gardens and playgrounds.

I’ve come to see if there are lessons here for the renewal of Australia’s ageing public housing stock, especially in Victoria, where the government is determined to demolish all forty-four of the state’s public housing towers.

Behind green hoardings a giant jackhammer pounds the ground for the next phase of construction. On this icy February day, we’re almost alone on the street that intersects the Kings Crescent estate from east to west. Apartment blocks from the first two phases of the project line the north side, with space for new buildings and a large garden square to the south.

Delivery vehicles and taxis can enter the street at either end, but the urban design firm Muf has “interrupted” it with random boulders, piles of logs, an oversized hammock and a long communal table. This neighbourly space — a “playable street” — links the estate to surrounding suburbs, transport and the twenty-three-hectare grounds of Clissold Park, with its small herd of deer.

Like much of Britain’s postwar council housing, the original Kings Crescent estate looked inward, its central pedestrian zone intended to shield residents from city noise and traffic. In practice, it felt defensive and cut off: rather than encouraging social interaction, the ground-level areas seemed forlorn and abandoned. And by the mid 1990s the estate’s two dominant tower blocks had fallen into serious disrepair.

“They were poorly built in the first place,” says Karakusevic, “and no one wanted to live there.” Inner London’s population had almost halved in the postwar decades, reducing demand for council housing. From the 1980s, sell-offs under Margaret Thatcher’s right-to-buy scheme cut the council’s rental income, eroding its capacity to carry out essential maintenance. “Those who could afford to move out did,” says Karakusevic.

Just thirty years after they were built, the dilapidated towers were slated for demolition. In February 2000, Hackney Council organised a “net first” live stream of the implosion of the nineteen-storey Barkway Court. The twenty-storey Sandridge Court was brought down two years later, with an actor from the popular soap EastEnders pressing the plunger. The fact that it was the seventeenth council tower to be blown up in the borough shows how quickly high-rise flats went from innovation to eyesore in the popular mind and in planning circles.

“Dystopian”: the Kings Crescent estate in 2012. Karakusevic Carson Architects

But inner-London’s population had already begun to rise again, and local authorities lacked the resources to respond. Sitting tenants could buy their council homes at a massive discount but councils were forced to use that revenue to pay down debts rather than invest in new housing. Along with other restrictions, this made it all but impossible for local authorities to borrow. Municipal home-building ground to a halt.

Attempts to redevelop the Kings Crescent estate foundered. For more than a decade, residents in the remaining medium-rise council housing looked onto a wasteland of rubble. “It was real dereliction, and used as the backdrop for dystopian films,” says Karakusevic. “Residents wanted the council to make it good again.”

In 2007, Labour prime minister Gordon Brown eased council borrowing restrictions, opening a path to finance a rebuild. But then the global financial crisis hit, and austerity measures slashed grants to local government.

Late in his term, though, Brown had also launched a design competition to renew a neglected and maligned housing estate in Barking in East London. Karakusevic Carson won, giving the firm its first big public housing commission. Since then, the practice has grown to more than seventy architects and has been honoured with scores of prizes, including Royal Institute of British Architects awards for King’s Crescent. The practice is developing masterplans for fifteen London councils and has projects on the go in Toronto, Paris and Barcelona. Karakusevic hopes to work in New York and is consulting for Homes NSW in Sydney.

In recent years London boroughs were also encouraged back into the business of building by Labour mayor Sadiq Khan, who grew up on a council estate. In 2023–24, almost 13,000 affordable homes were completed in London, double the number when Boris Johnson was mayor eight years earlier.

Many more are under construction after Khan secured £4.8 billion to support his five-year Homes for Londoners program. City hall claims London started twice as many council homes in 2022–23 as the rest of the country combined, though to call this a “golden era” of council house building is a stretch. It may be a renaissance, but it’s of a different scale and character to municipal dreams of the past.

In the immediate postwar decades, councils had large design departments and half of all architects were public servants. During the 1970s, local authorities around England built about 200,000 council homes every year, with not-for-profit housing associations providing another 13,000 affordable dwellings. In the past five years, only about 60,000 affordable homes have been completed annually, and only about one in ten of them are council houses. Most were built by housing associations or by private developers required by planning rules to include affordable dwellings in major projects.

And while the general category of “affordable” housing has been growing, the subset of homes set aside for people in the most desperate circumstances has not. Last year fewer than 10,000 “social rent” homes were completed in England. By comparison, more than 50,000 dwellings were built in other “affordable” tenures (including 20,000 sold under shared equity schemes).

Given that the number of social homes lost to sales and demolitions is almost triple the number added, ever fewer homes are available for those who need them most. As other affordable options have spread, says a 2024 House of Commons briefing, the number homes for social rent has fallen.

Without enough social housing to go around, councils are forced to put people up in temporary accommodation — private rentals, spare rooms, bed and breakfasts or budget hotels. It’s meant to be a last resort, but in England almost 120,000 households, including more than 150,000 children, live in this precarious system. They can be stuck in temporary accommodation for years, forced to move frequently from one place to another. Conditions are generally abject — cramped, unhygienic and often without cooking or laundry facilities.

“Play Street”: a summer view of the main Kings Crescent thoroughfare. Karakusevic Carson Architects

Housing people this way costs about £75 per night, so London boroughs collectively spend £1 billion a year on temporary accommodation — roughly the same amount available to them under Sadiq Khan’s Homes for Londoners program. In Hackney alone, around 3500 households live in temporary accommodation, and the wait for a two-bedroom flat on council’s housing register is more than fifteen years.

In face of this acute distress, critics ask why the borough and its architects are not building more deeply subsidised social housing. At Kings Crescent Estate, 275 existing council homes have been retained and refurbished, but half of the 492 new apartments are for private sale and most of the rest are set aside for shared-equity schemes or less heavily discounted rentals.

This is not Karakusevic’s ideal world. “Cities have to provide truly affordable housing if they are to function,” he says. “The market will never provide truly affordable housing because private developers have no incentive to build it.”

As he points out, most government subsidies for housing flow to the private sector for things like for site remediation, infrastructure development and first-time buyer subsidies. And while the government budgets more than £30 billion for housing, the vast bulk goes on housing benefits — on helping tenants pay their rent, often to private landlords — leaving a tiny proportion devoted to new housing. As rents increase, government spending on benefits rises too, further constraining investment in building.

Under current financial models, councils and architects like Karakusevic have little room to move. “Council projects have to stand on their own feet,” he says, “so they have to cross-subsidise social housing with market rate rentals and private sales.” Revenue from commercial sales is what makes the Kings Crescent project viable; without that, there would be no refurbishment at all.

Claire Miller, CEO of the UK’s largest housing association, Clarion, laid out the stark calculations before a parliamentary committee. Building a new two-bedroom flat in London costs about £400,000, she said, but the average subsidy is just £60,000, and social rent returns revenue of £100,000 over thirty years. That leaves a funding gap of £240,000.

The gap is filled from two sources: private sales, and councils opting to supply more intermediate housing options like shared-equity schemes and discounted rents, often aimed at nurses, teachers and other key workers. These intermediate tenures are priced to be “as affordable as council can make them without going backward financially,” says Karakusevic.

In Hackney, households are eligible for these intermediate homes if their annual income is below £60,000. (The average nurse’s salary in London is around £40,000 a year.) Affordable rents are set at a third of average local incomes, but this could still be almost double the deeply subsidised rent for a social home.

The irony with projects like Kings Crescent is that the pot of money for social housing increases as the value of private sales rises, which runs counter to a wider aim of making housing more affordable overall. On the other hand, the need to attract private buyers pushes councils to carry out high-quality refurbishments on rundown estates that would otherwise deteriorate further. Social tenants then benefit from well-designed, well-constructed apartments and marked improvements in public amenity and shared open space.

For this cross-subsidy formula to succeed, Karakusevic cautions, designs must be worked out in collaboration with the estate’s existing residents. “Regeneration is problematic,” he says. “It has to be right for the people who are there, so they are not pissed off.”

Karakusevic was taken aback when he heard about Victoria’s decision to demolish all its public housing towers before engaging with residents. He sees top-down approaches as counterproductive and prefers to consider each redevelopment proposal separately. “Plan it carefully, each project individually, with urban designers and architects, working hand in hand with residents,” he says. “What can be retained? What needs replacing? What are the opportunities for tactical and strategic infill, for enhancing the public realm and landscaping, for greater density and public amenities?”

Through resident engagement at Kings Crescent, his practice won community approval to put more dwellings on the estate than were there in 1971. Previous attempts at redevelopment had been less ambitious.

“Early wins are really, really important,” adds Karakusevic. The community needs to see “a proof of concept” in the form of better housing, new facilities and an improved public realm. As examples, he shows me balconies glassed in to create “winter gardens,” adding space and warmth to older flats, and basement garages converted into apartments, transforming sites of anti-social behaviour into extra “hidden homes.” Muf founder Kath Shonfield calls this “premature gratification” — residents get tangible evidence that their concerns and interests are being taken seriously.

Another condition for successful redevelopment is that residents can remain in their homes. Ideally, new homes are built next door to existing ones and tenants move straight across when construction finishes. “A single move should be a key aim,” says Karakusevic.

Victoria’s state government has ruled out such an approach. Housing minister Harriet Shing rejected suggestions that new apartments could be built on open space nearby before existing towers are demolished, telling the Age that residents should not be forced to live on a construction site.

If residents do have to move, says Karakusevic, then they should be rehoused as close as possible to where they live, ideally across the road, and not “decanted” to some distant suburb.

Critics of Victoria’s plans for its public housing argue that demolition should be a last resort, with towers upgraded and refurbished instead. They reckon this would not only be cheaper and less disruptive, but would also have less impact on the climate given the amount of carbon embodied in the existing structures.

Karakusevic thinks such questions must be answered on a case-by-case basis. “Lots of housing built in the 1960s is junk,” he says. “Is there any point in patching up a building for twenty years when you can replace it with a building that will last 200 years?” Nor is refurbishment carbon-free, he points out, since it releases, on average, about two-thirds as much carbon as a rebuild.

He thinks the most important questions in public housing renewal are what structures get built and how long they endure. “A brick can last 1000 years,” he declares, reminding me of the Roman walls still visible in parts of London. Centuries from now, he hopes, people will still be living in his apartments on the Kings Crescent Estate.

Admirable as his architecture is, though, a big difference from the past era of public housing remains. Instead of Kings Crescent being made up of council homes as in its original incarnation, half the dwellings will be privately owned.

When I press Karakusevic on why more social housing wasn’t included, he tells me residents wouldn’t have accepted it. Matching the original number of council homes and funding the redevelopment with cross-subsidies from private sales would have meant squeezing 1200 flats onto the site and entailed building much higher.

“Towers are very unpopular,” he says, “and commercial viability doesn’t necessarily increase with height, because the higher you go more expensive it gets.”

Karakusevic is convinced that public agencies, rather than the private sector, should lead the renewal of public housing. And he thinks Australia’s state governments could get back into the game just as local councils like Hackney are doing in Britain. “It’s not that complicated,” he insists.

He is no fan of market-based approaches like “inclusionary zoning,” which force developers to include a share of affordable dwellings in their commercial housing projects. This compromises designs, he believes, potentially siting a stumpy “affordable” building next to a luxury tower, for example, or “bloating” apartment blocks with extra floors or, worse, creating separate entrances for different classes of residents.

Better, he thinks, to tax developers and funnel the revenue to public authorities to build social housing. “We can’t just fix the housing crisis by creating more supply,” he says. “We need the right housing, in the right places, for the right people, and it must be built to last.”

“If it is beautiful and elegant, people will want more of it in their neighbourhood,” he says as I admire his firm’s work. “If you just build junk, people will resist anything new. If it’s bad density, with a poor public realm and low levels of maintenance, people won’t like it. Stick to the right recipe and make it really good.”

Karakusevic is fond of a Dutch saying: “The bricks don’t make mistakes, people do.” It’s a caution to heed as we redevelop public housing in Australia. If we don’t get the quantity and quality of homes we need, there’ll be no one to blame but ourselves. •

The post A brick can last a thousand years appeared first on Inside Story.

I’m talking, of course, about the German elections of 1930, which saw Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party increase its previous vote by more than fifteen points. The Reichstag he came to dominate is where the newly elected Bundestag will convene in late March for its inaugural session.

Other than that, the parallels between the elections in September 1930 and February 2025 can seem far-fetched. Yet Sunday’s record results for the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD — which won 20.8 per cent of the vote, 2.5 points more than the Nazi party ninety-five years earlier — have ensured that what happened in the early 1930s has been in the minds of many.

Close to two million people have joined public rallies against the far right since the beginning of 2025. Even more so than during the 1930 election campaign, the wooing of votes was accompanied by loud protests against the party of the far right, which has long been accused of having much in common with Weimar Germany’s Nazis.

The morning after this month’s election, Beatrix von Storch, deputy leader of the AfD’s parliamentary party in the Bundestag, was interviewed on German radio. She generally strikes me as one of the far right’s more repulsive figures, particularly because of her views about migrants, but this time she had a point. The AfD had been identified as a right-wing extremist party, she told the interviewer, because of its demands to close Germany’s borders and to “deport all illegals.” “But now,” she went on, “suddenly everybody is of the view that this is exactly what this country needs.” Since the Christian Democrats had recognised that what the AfD wants is “just normal common sense,” Storch concluded, the labelling of the AfD as extremist was no longer tenable.

Over the past few years, the Verfassungsschutz — the domestic intelligence organisation whose full name rather clumsily translates as Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution — has investigated whether or not the AfD is extremist. It has focused on statements made by the party’s leaders, including Storch, about migrants, that run counter to the Constitution’s articles 1(1) (“Human dignity shall be inviolable”) and 3(3) (“No person shall be favoured or disfavoured because of sex, parentage, race, language, homeland and origin, faith or religious or political opinions”).

Misleading claims by the AfD that articles 1 and 3 apply only to German citizens have attracted comparatively little public attention; instead, the media have highlighted isolated instances in which AfD politicians have trivialised the crimes of Nazi Germany. Former AfD leader Alexander Gauland’s 2018 remark that the Nazi past was “just a piece of bird shit in a successful German history spanning more than a thousand years” is among the remarks frequently cited as evidence.

The AfD has always vehemently rejected the suggestion that it bears any similarities to the Nazi party – usually by saying that, unlike Hitler’s Nazis, it is not extremist. Lately, AfD leader Alice Weidel has introduced a new argument. In her conversation with Elon Musk, broadcast live in January on X, she said: “The biggest success after that terrible era in our history was to label Adolf Hitler as right and conservative. He was exactly the opposite. He wasn’t a conservative… He was a communist, socialist guy.”

Such a ludicrous rewriting of history aside, Storch and the Verfassungsschutz are right: it’s the disdain for the human dignity of others that ought to disqualify the AfD. Storch’s claim that the Christian Democrats have adopted some of the AfD’s views on migrants is also correct; but her assumption that such views are no longer problematic because they are shared by mainstream politicians is wrong.

How have AfD politicians been able to claim that they and the leaders of the Christian Democrats are now singing from the same hymn sheet? Since 2014, the AfD has obsessively vilified asylum seekers and demanded that Germany seal its borders. In 2015, only a minority of Christian Democrats (including Friedrich Merz, the man likely to lead the incoming German government) criticised chancellor Angela Merkel for inviting Syrian refugees to seek protection in Germany.

By the time Merkel left office, the view that she had been too generous and too naive was shared by the majority of her party. But it wasn’t until 2023 that demands to turn away asylum seekers and immediately deport all those whose protection claims had been unsuccessful won overwhelming public support. By the time the election was called late last year, most Germans considered migration and asylum to be by far the most pressing issue to be dealt with by the next government.

Anti-refugee sentiment had increased after knife attacks in Mannheim on 31 May 2024 and in Solingen on 23 August 2024. Four people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time died. The perpetrators: a Syrian man and an Afghan man who had both been asylum seekers and identified as Islamists.

Then, on 20 December 2024, a psychiatrist originally from Saudi Arabia killed six people when he drove a car into a Christmas market in the East German city of Magdeburg. The fact that he had renounced Islam and sympathised with the far right was largely lost in the ensuing media hype.

A month later, on 22 January, a young man from Afghanistan attacked a group of children in the Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg, killing a young girl (of Moroccan descent) and a man who tried to stop him. The perpetrator had been in Germany since 2022, had unsuccessfully applied for asylum and, in accordance with the Dublin regulations, had been scheduled to be removed to Bulgaria, where he had first entered the European Union. He was evidently suffering from a mental illness and since the murders has been kept at a psychiatric hospital.

By the time of the Aschaffenburg murders, the election campaign was in full swing and already dominated by issues of asylum and migration. Friedrich Merz had earlier said he didn’t want the campaign to focus on these issues — for good reason. Olaf Scholz’s government was deeply unpopular not least because of a rise in the costs of living and the country’s economic performance, and Merz no doubt hoped to focus on the perception that he would manage the struggling German economy more competently than Scholz and his deputy, treasurer Robert Habeck of the Greens.

Merz had also categorically ruled out relying on the votes of AfD members of parliament in the Bundestag. Yet that’s precisely what he did a week after the Aschaffenburg murders. On 29 January, Christian Democrats tabled a resolution demanding that anybody attempting to “illegally” enter Germany be pushed back and that all people required to leave the country be imprisoned. Social Democrats, Greens and the left-wing Linke and its offshoot, the socially conservative Alliance Sarah Wagenknecht, rejected the motion. It was passed with the votes of the Free Democrats and the AfD, although it was critical of the AfD’s demand for the “remigration” of all non-citizens.

When the tally of votes was announced, the AfD members of parliament cheered while the Christian Democrats fell silent, as if they could not quite believe what they had done. Merz and his party had always maintained that they would respect the Brandmauer, the proverbial firewall designed to isolate the AfD. Now they had taken to it with a wrecking ball. And the timing couldn’t have been worse, with the vote coming two days after the Bundestag had commemorated the eightieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

Greens and Social Democrats were outraged, but they too had demanded Germany admit fewer asylum seekers and deport more of those whose claims had been unsuccessful. They had argued for a tough new Common European Asylum System providing for the internment of asylum seekers, including children, at the European Union’s external borders. Greens and Social Democrats had made little attempt to explain to the public why it made no sense to blame “criminal foreigners” for all Germany’s woes, and why a million Syrians who had been accommodated in Germany since 2014 couldn’t possibly be held responsible for the murders committed by just one of them.

With both the Greens and the Social Democrats not wanting to rule out joining a Merz-led government, their outrage also lacked credibility. By contrast, the Linke could claim to have always defended the rights of asylum seekers and refugees. It fell to the left-wing party’s new co-leader, Heidi Reichinnek, to give a passionate impromptu speech after the controversial vote had been taken, which she concluded by proclaiming: “We are the Brandmauer!… To the barricades!” When the speech was posted on TikTok, it attracted millions of clicks.

Protests erupted all over Germany. On 8 February, 250,000 people rallied in Munich alone. A Holocaust survivor, ninety-nine-year-old Albrecht Weinberg, decided to return the order of merit he had received from the German government. Michel Friedman, a former vice-president of the Council of Jews in Germany and a high-profile Christian Democrat, left his party. Even Angela Merkel, who had hardly ever commented on current affairs since departing politics in 2021, chided Merz.

What motivated Merz? Two explanations have been put forward. According to the first, his decision to introduce the resolution — even if it meant that it could be passed only with support of the far right — was testament to his temperament. He is considered impulsive and thin-skinned, so maybe he was so troubled by the Aschaffenburg murders that he felt compelled to act decisively.

This explanation has a weakness: Two days after the controversial vote, and with full knowledge of its reverberations, the Christian Democrats tabled a bill in parliament that was designed to legislate some of the measures they had demanded in their resolution. Promoting the bill, Merz referred to “daily pack rapes” allegedly committed by asylum seekers in Germany. This time, a sufficient number of Christian Democrats and Free Democrats decided not to follow him, and the bill was voted down despite unanimous support from the AfD.

According to the other explanation, Merz was trying to bolster the Christian Democrats’ vote at the expense of the far right. If that’s true, he failed. Despite the shockwaves generated by the vote, the polls hardly changed. There were only two discernible consequences on election day: a greater proportion of the electorate cast their vote than at any election since 1987; and the Linke, whose vote had been expected to remain well below the 5 per cent threshold, scored an astonishing 8.8 per cent.

As expected, the Christian Democrats won the election, albeit with the second-lowest vote in their history. As expected, the AfD came second, 7.8 points behind the Christian Democrats. As also expected, the three parties that had formed the outgoing government lost heavily: the Social Democrats recorded their worst-ever result and the Free Democrats did not even clear the 5 per cent hurdle to be represented in the Bundestag. The Greens, who had expected to perform much better than in 2021, went from 14.7 to 11.6 per cent. The Alliance Sarah Wagenknecht, which had done well at the European elections and at three state elections last year, missed the 5 per cent threshold by a mere 13,435 votes.

Even more so than in previous elections, the results were extremely uneven. A map depicting which candidates won each of the 299 electorates is predominantly black (Christian Democrat) in the West and predominantly blue (AfD) in the East. In the former communist East Germany, excluding East Berlin, AfD candidates won forty-five out of forty-eight electorates. Of the remainder, two went to the Linke and one, the electorate of Potsdam near Berlin, to the Social Democrats’ Scholz. In West Germany (including West Berlin), on the other hand, not a single AfD candidate came first. Of the six electorates in East Berlin, an AfD candidate succeeded in one, three went to the Linke and two to the Greens.

In Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, an electorate in inner-city Berlin, the Linke candidate scored 34.7 per cent, only four points ahead of the Greens candidate, while the AfD remained well below 10 per cent. In Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge, in the southeast of Saxony, the AfD candidate won 49.1 per cent of the vote, two-and-a-half times the combined results of the Social Democrats, Greens and Linke; his previous claim to fame is that in 2020 he was suspended from the police force for organising a demonstration against the government’s Covid-19 measures at a time when such public gatherings were prohibited.

Significantly more men than women voted for the AfD, and significantly more women than men voted for the Linke. The Linke did particularly well among young voters; pensioners were more likely to vote for Social Democrats and Christian Democrats, with more than two-thirds of those over the age of seventy casting their votes for either of them. The Greens appealed to tertiary-educated voters, the AfD did not. None of these differences came as a surprise.

It could be argued that the AfD’s doubling of its vote should not have been unexpected either. After all, the far right has been doing well pretty much throughout the global North. Think of the election of Donald Trump, the far right’s success at the 2024 European elections and last year’s federal elections in Austria, where the far-right Freedom Party topped the polls. From the perspective of its neighbours, such as the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Italy, France, Belgium and Slovakia, to name but a few, the AfD’s 10.4 per cent at the 2021 federal elections was an outlier, and Germany has finally caught up. But global trends are no more than that: trends — as the Spaniards learned when their Socialist-led government was re-elected in 2023 and the far-right party Vox lost rather than gained votes.

The most recent edition of the magazine Spiegel features a fictive statement published by the leaders of the Christian Democrats, the Free Democrats and the Greens. “Governing in these adverse times is hard work with no guarantee of success, fame or public gratitude,” Spiegel journalist Stefan Kuzmany lets them say. After carefully considering all risks and opportunities, the party leaders agree that irrespective of the outcome of the elections, Scholz ought to continue in his thankless role.

Given Friedrich Merz’s unbridled ambition, which was thwarted first by Angela Merkel, then by Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer and in 2021 by Armin Laschet, nothing will stop him now. But he ought to consider the fate of his predecessor. When Scholz was elected in December 2021 he had just pulled off an unlikely victory and led a government that seemed enthusiastic and competent. His government failed largely because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which hit the Germany economy hard, but also because of the Free Democrats’ destructive intransigence. He may have had an inkling of the latter, but could not have anticipated the former.

This time around, at least five major challenges lie ahead. All of them are daunting. The first has to do with Germans’ current disenchantment with the political process. Never before has an incoming chancellor been as unpopular as Merz is now, and never before has a new government faced an electorate as sceptical, if not outright hostile. But there is no money in the kitty to fund tax cuts or other measures that could win over a disenchanted public.

Second, the German economy is in recession. It needs to be kick-started, which will only be possible if the new government agrees to borrow large amounts of money, which Merz has always ruled out. If he changes his mind, or if his coalition partner, the Social Democrats, forces his hand, he will need to convince parliament to change the Constitution. Articles 109 and 115, introduced by the Merkel government in 2009, stipulate a fiscal rule, the Schuldenbremse, that limits the budget deficit to 0.35 per cent of GDP. A change of the Constitution would require a two-thirds majority, and therefore a deal either with the AfD or with the Greens and the Linke (which would agree only if the borrowed funds were not used to fund defence spending). In his desperation, Merz has even been exploring the option of changing the Constitution before the newly elected parliament sits for the first time.

Then there is climate change, which did not feature in the election campaign but will need to be tackled urgently. If Germany is to benefit from the global roll-out of carbon-neutral technologies, it will need to not only transform its economy but lead by example. It will also need to invest heavily in research and development — at a time when the economy is struggling and leading companies are considering moving parts of their business abroad.

The biggest challenge will be posed by the American president. For the past seventy-five years, the Federal Republic prospered because it relied on the transatlantic partnership with the United States. Germany got away with a comparatively low defence budget, and with not having to take a leadership role, except within Europe (and then only in concert with France). That has changed. Ukraine, Germany’s neighbours and countries such as Canada will expect the world’s third-largest economy to marshall the opposition to Trump’s United States and to Russia and China. How it can do that is anybody’s guess.

Finally, Merz has promised to solve all problems to do with asylum and migration. His likely coalition partner may have other ideas: the Social Democrats have already said they won’t agree to measures that contravene European law and the German constitution. The AfD is likely to table legislation designed to implement the Christian Democrats’ election manifesto (which, when it comes to the question of asylum, bears some uncanny resemblance to the AfD’s manifesto). What would Merz do in that case? Blackmail the Social Democrats by threatening to vote with the AfD? And would he thereby be able to keep the AfD in check? Bavaria’s premier Markus Söder may have had a point when he said a couple of days ago that the incoming government would be “democracy’s last bullet.”

The day before Sunday’s German election I joined a protest rally against the far right in Hamburg. The mood was initially subdued: far fewer than the expected tens of thousands of people had turned up, and it was a typical gloomy February afternoon. None of us would have voted for the AfD anyway, and even the 40,000-strong crowd that did eventually gather wouldn’t have persuaded a single person to cast their vote not for the far right but for a democratic party.

Upon my return home, I cheered myself up by retrieving an election poster (below) I’ve kept since 1972. It shows two men on a Harley Davidson: Willy Brandt, the Social Democratic chancellor, and his deputy, Walter Scheel of the Free Democrats. Next to them stands a frustrated Franz Josef Strauß, then the leader of the Christian Democrats’ Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, and the Social Democrats’ reactionary bête noire.

The 1972 campaign could hardly have been more different from the one in the winter of 2024–25. Brandt stood for a brighter future and a more democratic Federal Republic willing to bridge the Cold War divide and establish civil relations with the Soviet Union, Poland and the German Democratic Republic. Like many others of my generation, I wore a “Willy wählen” (vote Willy) button. Our optimism was not curbed by the fact that elsewhere the world seemed to be stuck in an earlier age. The United States, then under Richard Nixon, was still fighting a war in Vietnam. Georges Pompidou, Edward Heath and Giulio Andreotti, all conservatives, were at the helm in France, Britain and Italy.

It would be wrong to assume that we were unaware of the problems besetting the world. After all, this was in the midst of the Cold War. Germany spent 3 per cent of its GDP on defence — one-and-a-half times as much as now. Earlier in 1972 the Club of Rome had published The Limits of Growth, which predicted that the world was about to deplete its available natural resources; it had become an immediate bestseller and was widely discussed, particularly among young people. But there was still hope, in spades.

Only four parties were serious contenders at that election: the Christian Democrats; their Bavarian sister party; the Social Democrats; and the Free Democrats. The latter two had been in a coalition since 1969, but the government had lost its majority when some of its own defected in protest against Brandt’s policy of rapprochement with the Soviet Union, which had won him the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1971. More than 91 per cent of eligible voters cast a ballot because the choice was clear: in favour or against the government’s foreign policy, a vote for the left or a vote for the right.

During the 2024–25 campaign, with Free Democrats, Greens and Social Democrats all offering themselves as future coalition partners of the Christian Democrats and all agreeing that Germany needed to “control and curtail” the admission of people seeking Germany’s protection, the old left–right divide was no longer so evident. Neither the electorate nor the major parties seemed overly interested in a vision for the future, while there was broad agreement that the recent past, especially under Scholz, was deeply unsatisfactory.

Many of the political views held by Strauß and other right-wing conservatives in 1972 align with those espoused by Storch and her colleagues today. But unlike Strauß’s Christian Social Union, the AfD is intent on destroying parliamentary democracy, subverting the rule of law and heavily qualifying the Constitution’s Article 1(1): “Human dignity shall be inviolable.” As happened in the early 1930s, other parties may underestimate the far right’s resolve and let themselves be tempted to rely on its support.

Friedrich Merz dismissed the recent demonstrations against the far right. For him, it seems, anti-fascism is as objectionable as fascism. Like many in his party, he seems to think that the Linke is to the left what the AfD is to the right. In fact, the Christian Democrats have committed to never form an alliance with either.

Willy Brandt would have known better. He may even have appreciated Reichinnek’s call “To the barricades!” Brandt witnessed not just how the Nazis dismantled the Weimar republic but also how right-wing conservatives aided and abetted them. He belonged to a small socialist party to the left of the Social Democrats and was forced into exile as soon as Hitler came to power. When he returned to Germany after the war, initially as a journalist working for a Norwegian newspaper, he rejected the notion that all Germans were guilty but insisted that they all bore responsibility for the crimes of Nazi Germany.

Responsibility is an appropriate response to being implicated in past injustices. It is also a stance that is often called for in response to current or impending wrongs. On a square in the inner-city Hamburg suburb of Ottensen, somebody put up a banner (below) the morning after the election. Reading “Bleibt solidarisch,” it encourages passers-by to keep extending their solidarity to others.

Letting the AfD dictate the political agenda, as Free Democrats, Greens, Social Democrats and, in particular, Merz’s Christian Democrats have done, has been irresponsible. The shrill demands for more deportations and pushbacks at the border have helped to normalise racism and the view that non-Germans could be blamed for everything: from higher incidents of sexualised violence to a lack of childcare places. Racist speech has in turn engendered an increase in physical violence against foreigners and people who look like they might be foreigners.

A return to the early 1930s is not yet on the cards, but it pays to be vigilant. A return to the optimism of 1972 (or 2015, for that matter) isn’t likely either, at least not anytime soon. In the meantime, responsible political leaders and civil society may want to try hanging on to what they have. For that, the injunction “Bleibt solidarisch” is a good starting point. •

The post What’s new in Germany? appeared first on Inside Story.

It is a world in which the old certainties no longer apply; in which the US president openly supports ethnic cleaning in Gaza, hoping to turn it into an investment opportunity; in which the alleged “leader of the free world” publicly ventilates imperialist dreams of taking over Greenland or Canada; in which the US administration openly intervenes in Germany’s election campaign, promoting a far-right, anti-democratic party; in which the globe’s second-largest trading nation ignores the free trade treaties it has signed and threatens tariffs on both close neighbours and distant friends.

It is also a world in which the US administration is cosying up to autocrat Vladimir Putin but dismisses as a “dictator” Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of a democracy fighting for survival. The most important country in Nato is attempting to impose a postwar settlement on Ukraine that makes Germany’s treatment under the much-maligned 1919 Treaty of Versailles appear lenient. In fact, the proposed minerals deal to “pay back” America’s artificially inflated wartime contribution to Ukraine’s defences forced commentators to reach for analogies closer to the darkest moments of European colonialism: the exploitation of Belgian Congo.

Given this state of affairs, more and more of America’s former friends begin to think seriously of contingency plans. Europe in particular might have to figure out how it will go it alone in future, or even negotiate a world where Uncle Sam is not friend but foe.

In principle, notwithstanding the many obstacles, there is nothing to prevent Europe (which despite Brexit still includes Britain as far as military arrangements are concerned) from looking after its own security. The twenty-seven EU countries spent some €326 billion on defence in 2024, up from €279 billion in 2023. Some analysist worry that these figures understate Russia’s spending power by ignoring differences in the local cost of materials and labour. Adjusted for what’s called “purchasing power parity,” the figures are nearly even: $462 billion by Russia compared to $457 billion by the EU and Britain combined. This balance is achieved by an average share of military spending of 1.7 per cent of GDP in the latter countries as opposed to 6 per cent in Russia.

It is difficult to see how Russia could keep abreast of any substantial lifting of expenditure in Europe to 3, let alone 5 per cent of GDP. Europe has 5.6 per cent of the world’s population producing more than 14 per cent of global GDP (adjusted for PPP). Russia, the self-proclaimed great power, produces only 3.5 per cent of the world’s goods and services. Its population has been declining steadily since 1995 and now stands at 1.75 per cent of the globe’s humans (compared to more than 4 per cent in 1955, during its superpower days).

It is entirely possible to imagine a future in which Europe is leveraging its economic power much more aggressively to look after its own security. If the United States continues to demonstrate that it can no longer be trusted, it might well be forced to do so.

A European defence framework would not require a European army, as Zelensky has daydreamed. It would merely require European-wide cooperation along Nato lines (even if the arrangement might no longer be Nato if the United States really withdraws from the continent). A small-scale model of such collaboration exists in the Baltic, and could be scaled up. Given the right investment, France and Britain could provide the necessary nuclear shield should the United States withdraw its own.

None of this will happen overnight. All of it will take time, money and political will. Given the state of politics and economies across the continent, it might never happen. But there is an increasing realisation among citizens of Europe that the United States is at best a “necessary partner” (51 per cent of respondents in a recent survey) rather than an “ally” (22 per cent). And in the same survey, taken before Trump took office, an increasingly vocal minority considered Uncle Sam a “rival” or even an “adversary” (11 per cent).

On Sunday, the man poised to become the next German chancellor, the convervative Friedrich Merz, stressed that achieving “real independence from the US step by step” was an “absolute priority” of his Europe policy. This statement came from a convinced transatlanticist. “Never in history,” wrote James Angelos in Politico, “has a German head of government had more affinity for the United States.” But even he has been shaken from his complacency. “We woke up from our dreams,” the former promoter of strong US–EU ties wrote recently to his supporters, “and had to learn to understand that our world is no longer what it was supposed to be.”

He is far from alone. Even outside observers now counsel the Europeans that “America is Europe’s enemy.” It is certainly becoming more and more likely that “the transatlantic alliance is over,” to use the off-the-record words of an unnamed British government official. In Brussels, too, worries are growing that “the US leadership is finding common ground with Russia in seeking to destroy the EU.” And it is quite possible that, after taking an ice bath and a sauna to help calm the nerves (as the Finnish president suggested), the Europeans will begin to “talk less and do more.” •

The post Welcome to the age of strategic chaos appeared first on Inside Story.

If anything unites them it’s admiration for Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. Deneen especially likes its policies to encourage larger families (designed to avoid the need for any immigrants whatsoever). Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts believes Orbán’s “defeat” of progressives and promotion of conservative Christian values “should be celebrated.” Vice-president J.D. Vance is a longstanding fan; conservative polemicist Rod Dreher is happiest, it seems, relaxing with the latest edition of the Hungarian Conservative.

So it’s no mystery that Princeton University’s Kim Lane Scheppele, a sociologist who once worked in Hungary’s constitutional court, has been in high demand in recent weeks. A partial list of her media engagements includes interviews with Associated Press, PBS News Hour, Slate, CNN, Democracy Now! and her “old friend,” the redoubtable Nobel laureate Paul Krugman.

Outside the world of right-wing punditry and activism, Orbán is probably best known for having transformed Hungary into what he calls an “illiberal democracy.” Illiberal it may be, but “democracy” is quite a stretch. In her analysis of the 2022 election, the fourth consecutive win for Orbán’s Fidesz party, Scheppele shows how Hungarian elections “hinge less on party platforms, campaigns, and attractive candidates than on election laws — laws that Orbán intentionally shapes to disadvantage the opposition.”

The Hungarian electoral system’s shortcomings go back to compromises struck when communist governments were teetering across Central and Eastern Europe in 1989. Hungary already had a multiparty system, but it was so heavily constrained that party leaders had to try to imagine what rules would give their party the best chance of success once elections were freer. Some favoured a system of “party lists,” others wanted single-member electorates. All of them wanted to exclude small parties.

The compromise, writes Scheppele, was a new election law that “lacked any mechanism to ensure that parliamentary-seat distribution would match the distribution of party votes.” The results of the first election under the new system, in 1990, made this vividly clear. “The largest vote-getter, the centre-right Hungarian Democratic Forum [later dissolved], won 25 per cent of the vote but received 43 per cent of the seats. The second-highest vote getter, the centre-left Free Democrats, won 21 per cent of the vote” — almost as much — “but only 24 per cent of the seats.”

Orbán took a bad system and made it worse. Having won government in 1998 and then lost it in 2002, he set about devising the means not just to regain government but also to hang onto it indefinitely. Although his main opponents at the time, the Socialists, managed to retain government in 2006, their mishandling of the global financial crisis gave Orbán the opening he needed. His Fidesz party returned to government in 2010 with more than 80 per cent of seats, a dangerous super-majority:

He could amend the constitution at will, which he did twelve times during his first year in office — including removing, early on, the four-fifths hurdle for rewriting the constitution. Less than a year into his first term, Orbán unveiled a new constitution drafted behind closed doors, debated before parliament for only nine days, and passed on a party-line vote. The new constitution was accompanied by hundreds of new laws, many affecting elections.

The new constitution left to the government the drawing of new electoral boundaries. Predictably, Fidesz drew the boundaries to suit its own interests, locking up opposition voters in larger electorates and maximising its own yield from its supporters. Writes Scheppele: “A study of the initial districts showed that if Fidesz and the left-opposition won equal numbers of votes under this new map, Fidesz would come out ten seats ahead.”

The list of electoral fiddling since then combines dubious practices — changes in the qualifications needed to vote, coercion at polling booths, new rules for allocating “excess” votes under the party-list system — with broadscale efforts to restrict public debate and undermine the rule of law. Media proprietors have been forced to sell their outlets to the government’s friends; judicial independence has been undermined; the Constitutional Court’s powers have been curbed. In the words of a European parliament resolution, Hungary has become a “hybrid regime of electoral autocracy.”

At the root of Hungary’s appeal to figures on the American right (and some on the Australian right) is a recognition that their political aims don’t have majority support. Hungary seems to show how a determined minority can capture government by keeping its real aims secret — by running as populist and governing as plutocrats, to paraphrase one journalist’s description of Trump’s approach early in his first term — and then tightening its grip on power.

Trump is doubling down on the side of the plutocracy this time round, which probably explains why the polls are already revealing growing concern about Elon Musk’s assault on government and why his own approval ratings are already falling. (Just yesterday, pollsters at Morning Consult reported that “comfortable majorities of voters would preserve or expand funding for the Department of Defense, the Department of Education, the National Institutes of Health, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,” all targets of Musk’s offensive.) Orbán knows his real aims aren’t popular either: otherwise, why the need to rig the system?

The American journalist Zach Beauchamp uses the term “the reactionary spirit” to capture this belief that any tactics are acceptable in the war against liberalism. It’s different from other forms of conservatism, he writes in his recent book, “because it produces a particular form of extreme-right politics, specifically an anti-democratic one.” Not surprisingly, the United States and Hungary are among the four countries he discusses in detail (the others are India and Israel).

In each, he writes, “a conservative party in a seemingly stable democracy has become a vehicle for the ambitions of a far-right strongman bent on locking his opponents out of power.” And, in each, “that party has undermined basic principles of democracy through measures like changing election rules, politicising the judiciary, attacking independent media, and abusing regulatory powers for political advantage.”

As Scheppele told journalist Peter Geoghegan, “Orbán has been to US conservatives what Sweden once was to American social democrats. In a small country, far, far away, there is proof of concept that one’s political philosophy works.”

Of course, there are many reasons why Trump and Musk can’t simply take the Orbán path. In a country of fewer than ten million people it’s much easier to control the media, the judiciary and the population at large. Many much larger and quite powerful American states are outside the control of the Republican Party. The US opposition is much more united than the splintered anti-Fidesz forces have been in Hungary. The US Congress is a separate centre of power, and in a fair election the House of Representatives is likely to be back in Democratic hands in two years’ time.

Nevertheless, Trump and his coterie are already doing enormous damage, at home and abroad, in the attempt. “American conservatives have embraced Orbán for his anti-woke agenda and for winning election after election in the heart of Europe,” Scheppele told Geoghegan. “But what I worry about most is not the ideological affinity. Orbán is really no ideologue and neither is Trump… Ideology brings people in but in the end, both are transactional. In the heart of government, Orbán already has and Trump is quickly acting to consolidate power in very few hands.”

Project 2025 drew heavily on Orbán’s strategy, Scheppele added. “First you defund everything your opponents do. Then you purge the civil service of those who are not loyal to you. Then you threaten the media with economic sanctions so they fall in line. You pack the courts; you cow the parliament. All major actions of state are designed to cut off any form of accountability to anyone outside the tight inner circle. The point of all this is to shove public money into private pockets. Orbán is teaching all of those things and the Trump team are not dull pupils.”

Ironically, just as Orbán’s influence on the American right has become crystal clear, the popularity of his own party has plummeted. Politico’s poll of polls shows Fidesz’s support, 54 per cent at the last election, down to 37 per cent and the opposition Respect and Freedom Party — a more conventionally conservative newcomer also known as Tisza — rocketing to 41 per cent.

Fidesz’s current problems started with a paedophile scandal early last year that cost the country’s president and justice minister their jobs. “But the underlying discontents,” says Timothy Garton Ash, a distinguished historian of Central Europe who recently visited Budapest, “are much deeper: all the accumulated dissatisfactions of fourteen years under one and the same government. Inflation last year was 18 per cent. People see the failings in public services and read about Orbán’s cronies getting fabulously rich.”

Hungary’s often-divided opposition is no doubt learning from its successive defeats (and so are voters). The country’s next election, due next year, will be the big test of Orbán’s quest to impose one-party rule. •

The post Hungarian playbook appeared first on Inside Story.

The country looks likely to achieve one of its longest-held foreign policy ambitions, gaining admission to the ASEAN regional political and economic grouping, later this year. Though not quite a done deal, hope is growing in Dili that ASEAN will make a decision at its May meeting rather than holding off until October.

East Timorese parties are united in this ambition, and the leadership hopes accession will drive foreign investment and open new markets, particularly in sectors like tourism, and help shift the economy from oil and gas dependence. While some civil society organisations question the economic benefits and administrative burdens, the prospect of more investment and the security benefits of closer integration with its geographical neighbours — including its former occupier — weigh heavily in its favour among the country’s leaders.

Timor-Leste’s likely accession is particularly remarkable in light of the tough stance Ramos-Horta and Gusmão have taken towards the military regime in Myanmar, an ASEAN member, which resulted in the expulsion of its chargé d’affaires from that country in 2023. As Southeast Asia’s most democratic country, Timor-Leste is regarded by local UN commentators as having an “outsize voice” in the international arena.

Recent progress on negotiations over the Greater Sunrise oil and gasfield has also sparked optimism in Dili. Negotiator Steve Bracks and his Timorese counterparts have seemingly satisfied both Australia and Timor-Leste and drawn already improved bilateral ties closer.

Australia will allocate close to $50 million from its future royalties to a dedicated infrastructure fund for Timor-Leste in a deal that will also include an increase to 10,000 in the number of East Timorese places in Australia’s labour mobility schemes by 2027–28, with skills training and English-language programs included. Australia’s willingness to cut a deal clearly reflects the evolving geopolitical dynamics of the Indo-Pacific.

But the position of Greater Sunrise’s commercial partner — whether it’s Woodside Energy or any future owner — is likely to determine the major question of whether the field’s oil and gas is processed in Timor-Leste or Australia. (Importantly, infrastructure funds under the agreement will only flow once the development of Greater Sunrise is underway.) An independent report declared all competing options technically viable, adding that onshore processing in Timor-Leste would likely return greater benefits to the country — a point Dili is keenly emphasising. Woodside itself is reported to have an open mind on the issue. Ramos-Horta recently declared that Timor-Leste would prefer to work with Australia and the existing partners in the joint venture, stating that Timor-Leste has been “holding off” interest from Chinese and Kuwaiti firms.

Just as Timor-Leste makes progress in the international arena, though, domestic concerns are pressing in. The government’s Strategic Development Plan is focused on major infrastructure spending and political stability measures — welfare transfers, and state contracts to potentially restive elements — in the hope of attracting increased investment. The strategy has preserved political stability, but at the expense of diverting funds that could be used to lift basic development indicators like education, health and agricultural output.

With the latter therefore tending to be the focus of donor programs, the sudden suspension of USAID operations is concerning. Though the US program is well behind Australia’s expenditure, it funded important health-sector governance and agriculture programs. In the contest for geopolitical influence, the US administration is raising an isolationist white flag — at least in terms of soft power — and raising the stakes for other longstanding donors.

While much international commentary focuses on Timor-Leste’s looming “fiscal cliff,” associated with the rapid annual expenditure of its sovereign wealth fund, other domestic issues warrant attention. Among these, decentralisation is key. Like its neighbouring Pacific countries, Timor-Leste has a demographically young population — the median age is twenty-one — which means that jobs and training are a far greater preoccupation than in a country like Australia, with a median age of forty-two. Labour mobility programs are important, but they alone can’t substitute for economic diversification.

Rural-to-urban migration, fuelled by the economic drawcard of the capital, has placed increasing strain on the urban environment of Dili, highlighting the slow pace of the decentralisation agenda. More young Timorese would stay in the districts if improved training and job opportunities were available. Urban overcrowding and poor planning practices are worsening Dili’s flooding and climate change–related challenges. The experience of peri-urban settlements in neighbouring Melanesia highlight a potential source of political instability.

Apart from the exclave of Oecussi, and the island of Atauro, which have well-developed decentralised administrations, progress on municipalisation has been relatively slow, despite increases in pay for appointed municipal presidents and a new web portal. But Oecussi’s budget alone far exceeds the resourcing available to the remaining thirteen municipalities, including Dili itself.

The problem was brought into stark relief last month with the resignation of the president of the Dili municipality, Gregorio Saldanha, citing a lack of decision-making autonomy and heavy-handed control by the Ministry of State Administration. Saldanha, a key figure in the clandestine resistance, was the main organiser of the Santa Cruz protest in 1991, which ended in the infamous massacre by Indonesian military forces that proved a turning point in the struggle for independence. His comments reflect local concern that too little has been invested in devolving actual powers, hindering progress on the local economic development plans that could slow rural migration to Dili.

Underinvestment in basic development indicators is also generating public attention in other ways. Rising political figure Fidelis Magalhaes, a former senior minister, has proposed declaring a national emergency in relation to child malnutrition, which remains stubbornly high, and the poor standard of public education. Despite measured poverty falling since 2002, it remains entrenched at somewhere around 40 per cent. But whether the notable improvement between 2007 and 2014 — a fall in the poverty rate from 50 per cent to 42 per cent — has continued in the last decade is more difficult to assess, with recent estimates still relying on outdated data from 2014–16. As Ramos-Horta acknowledged recently, government efforts to reduce extreme poverty and child malnutrition since 2002 still leave much to be desired. Only when the 2024 Living Standards survey is released this year will it be possible to fully assess the impact of recently improved social welfare measures and school feeding programs.

Finally, despite a notable five-year increase in life expectancy since 2002, concerns about the public health sector have grown. Slow service delivery, ageing equipment and the uncertain availability of pharmaceuticals in public hospitals have been pushing people towards more expensive private pharmacies. Rising debts have complicated the practice of sending more serious patients abroad for treatment. La’o Hamutuk, a Timorese NGO, notes that just 19 per cent of the 2025 budget is allocated to education, health, water and agriculture, including 6.2 per cent for health.

Timor-Leste’s efforts to maintain political stability since the 2006–07 political-military crisis have been broadly successful — for which the “old firm” is owed much credit — and the much-awaited ASEAN accession and Greater Sunrise deal are looming. But the country’s relative underinvestment in boosting basic development indicators, and its slow progress on municipalisation, have the potential to derail progress on political stability in the longer term. As Timor-Leste celebrates significant foreign policy successes, significant domestic challenges lie ahead. •

The post “Old firm,” continuing challenges appeared first on Inside Story.

On the same day the Home Office announced that a record number of arrests in January after its “blitz on illegal working” had targeted nail bars, car washes, convenience stores and restaurants.

Widely picked up by the media, the two releases were timed to coincide with the second reading debate on the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill. Keir Starmer’s Labour government hopes the legislation will convince the public that it has the borders under control.

It has reason to be worried. Candidates from Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party ran a close second to Labour in many electorates at last May’s election. Now two polls by separate research companies put Reform ahead of both Labour and the Conservatives for the first time. The anti-immigration party claims to have amassed more than 200,000 members and is aiming to eclipse Labour’s total of 309,000 to become the country’s biggest party.

In an attempt to counter the Reform’s surge, Labour has resorted to spruiking the government’s recent border control achievements in unbranded social media posts coloured in the turquoise hue more usually associated with Farage’s party. The border security bill is Labour’s alternative to its predecessor Conservative government’s failed plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda for processing, a scheme inspired in part by Australia’s offshore detention regime. After four years and £700 million only four “volunteers” ended up in the central African country.

The scheme was stymied by a Supreme Court ruling that refugees would be at risk of being returned to places of persecution. Before losing office, the Tories tried to get around that decision by signing a treaty with Rwanda, but even if it had gone ahead the plan wouldn’t necessarily have deterred asylum seekers from crossing the English Channel in small boats. The only certainty was that the astronomical expense would have mounted. The UK’s National Audit Office calculated the cost of sending an initial 300 asylum seekers to Rwanda at £569 million (A$1.13 billion) or about £1.9 million per person.

According to Labour home secretary Yvette Cooper, scrapping the doomed program has enabled the government to redeploy 1000 staff to beef up immigration enforcement and removals. She says the new border security bill will give the authorities “counterterror-style powers… to go after the dangerous criminal gangs that undermine our border security.” Echoing John Howard, she declared that “it should be governments, not gangs, who decide who enters our country.”

Also this week, separate from the border security bill, the Home Office announced that anyone who enters Britain illegally after a dangerous journey will be refused citizenship. The measure, clearly targeted at deterring Channel-crossers, will apply retrospectively to people already living in the UK, including those granted protection as refugees.

Not all Labour MPs are enamoured of the government’s attempt to bolster its image as tough on borders. Stella Creasy, MP for Walthamstow, criticised the new citizenship approach for guaranteeing that refugees will forever remain second-class citizens. Backbencher Clive Lewis argued that releasing the deportation footage was a tactical mistake, since nothing the government does will ever be “harsh or cruel enough for those who are utilising this for political gain.” He said that “mainstreaming racism” gives groups like Reform “permission to go further and further using more racist rhetoric.”

The Home Office claimed its blitz on “illegal working” is vital to restoring order to the immigration system because it undermines the promise of “false jobs” used by smuggling gangs to sell spaces on boats. This conforms to the view, promulgated by both Labour and the Tories, that people risking the sea crossing to England are “economic migrants” rather than refugees.

Bearing in mind that these are not mutually exclusive categories — what refugee doesn’t also want paid work? — analysis by the Refugee Council shows that Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Eritrea, Sudan and Iraq made up six of the top seven nationalities arriving on small boats — all countries noted for human rights abuses and/or violent conflict. (The other was Vietnam, hardly an upholder of liberal freedoms.) The council notes that just over half the asylum applications processed in Britain in the year to September 2024 were granted protection in the first instance, and almost half of all rejections were subsequently overturned on appeal.

At least sixty-nine people died attempting the channel crossing in 2024, making it the deadliest year on record. This alone would suggest that people who put their lives on the line to get on boats are driven by desperation and won’t be easily deterred by stepped up removals or crackdowns on undocumented workers.

The problem for Labour is this: no matter how many nail salons and convenience stores it raids, no matter how many undocumented workers it sends home, no matter how efficiently it processes asylum applications and removes people who are found not to be refugees, the popular gauge of the government’s border control “success” will always be measured in the number arriving in small boats without authorisation. While Labour has deported 19,000 people since it took office, more than 23,000 people crossed the English Channel in roughly the same period

Labour has swapped one three-word slogan — “stop the boats” — for another — “smash the gangs.” But both approaches amount to much the same thing — an effort to secure the border through tighter policing and harsher penalties. Australia, with its long maritime approaches, was able to stop the boats by forcing them back to Indonesia. But stepped-up border security rarely deters unauthorised arrivals, and instead forces people deeper into the arms of smugglers and onto even more dangerous routes.

As Daniel Trilling, author of Lights in the Distance: Exile and Refuge at the Borders of Europe, told the Guardian, increasingly harsh measures have helped to shape the current situation. “One of the big reasons for the increase in small boat crossings was the huge amount of money poured into making access to ferries and lorries more difficult,” he said. “That pushed people to take more desperate measures. The more securitised the route, the more it has to be controlled by middle men.”

At the end of March, the Starmer government will host a “landmark” Border Security Summit at the historic Lancaster House in London, with delegates from more than forty countries, Australian officials no doubt among them. Whether the talks will be a “watershed moment in the UK’s fight against Organised Immigration Crime” or just another occasion to display tough-on-borders rhetoric remains to be seen. •

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He was not referring to the havoc last Tuesday at India’s Maha Kumbh Mela, when crowd control collapsed, thousands of shuffling worshippers tumbled onto each other and up to sixty people were killed and many more injured. He was talking about the Maha Kumbh of 1977, and he made his remark on the most auspicious bathing day of the festival — the same day as the tragedy at this year’s event.

The Maha Kumbh Mela is the six-week Hindu festival proclaimed by UNESCO to be “the largest peaceful congregation of pilgrims on earth,” held at Prayagraj (formerly Allahabad) in Uttar Pradesh. An astrological formula — “when Jupiter is in Aries and the sun and moon are in Capricorn” — produces one every eleven or twelve years. Bathing at the confluence of the Ganga, Yamuna and mythical Saraswati rivers during this time washes away sins and promises escape from the cycle of rebirth.

Devotees claim the festival originated in “time immemorial,” and it certainly has a well-documented history going back more than 200 years. Once the British colonial bureaucracy arrived, the Maha Kumbh Mela became a happening that governments couldn’t ignore.

We know about the old Brahmin’s comment because he had befriended an ill-prepared academic pilgrim, Nabaneeta Dev Sen, a professor of comparative literature at Jadavpur University in Kolkata and the recently divorced wife of economist Amartya Sen. After attending a conference in sunny, southern Hyderabad, she decided on impulse to return home via the much-talked-about festival. In her book The Holy Trail: A Pilgrim’s Plight, she explained how she embarked on an uncomfortable but deeply affecting experience.

“I uttered, ‘Jai Kumbh’,” she wrote, “and took a dip… the water was freezing… I tried to invite other thoughts. This was Triveni Sangam [the confluence of three rivers], the sacred spot;… if someone bathed here during the auspicious hour, one would find release from the bond of rebirth.”

Dev Sen’s newly acquired Brahmin “uncle” held her rain-sodden bag of clothes and handed her the damp bundle when she came out of the water after a few seconds. A veteran of Maha Kumbh Melas in 1954 and 1966, he had taken pity on a lone woman poorly equipped with sandals, a couple of sweaters, a spare sari and a shawl. It had been raining and the night temperature fell to about 10 degrees centigrade.

The intense pressure to make this year’s festival the biggest Maha Kumbh Mela ever — and thereby the biggest gathering of believers in the world — created huge risks. Organisers were expecting an almost incredible 100 million people to bathe in twenty-four hours. The bathing precincts extend about twelve kilometres on both sides of the river, but the most desirable spot is the “nose,” the point where the three rivers (two real, one mythical) meet.

The numbers game is not new, but 2025 is the first Maha Kumbh held while Bharatiya Janata Party governments and Narendra Modi reign supreme. The BJP saw this year’s festival as another building block in the grand façade of a Hindu-supremacist India. One estimate suggests the BJP state government invested $1.2 billion dollars in preparations, and the national government contribution is likely to be no less. Authorities expect the Kumbh to earn many times its cost through the sale of concessions and taxes on huge sales.

Billboards, posters and endless digital content on tens of millions of smart phones proclaim the virtues of the renewed Hindu India and the importance of Narendra Modi and Yogi Adityanath, the chief minister of the state of Uttar Pradesh.

Before this year’s festival began, BJP supporters praised the preparations for an enormous but safe event. They scoffed at the ineptitude of a non-BJP government’s management of the last Mela, in 2013. “How Mahakumbh 2025 Is Fixing the Mistakes of Mahakumbh 2013,” a sympathetic news site proclaimed.

After last week’s chaos and deaths, needless to say, the opposition quickly blamed the government for callous incompetence, especially for the very special treatment given to VVIPs — Very Very Important Persons. Ordinary folk shuffled in endless lines, too tightly packed to be safe, while VVIPs had a direct path to the choicest bathing site barricaded for them and their vehicles.

VVIPs are a reminder of the first Maha Kumbh Mela after independence in 1954, made memorable by a horrific stampede in which more than 350 people died. Vikram Seth devoted a chapter of his bestselling novel A Suitable Boy to the disaster. The newly independent government of Jawaharlal Nehru, also playing the numbers game, had aimed to use the Mela to promote its first Five-Year Plan and impending transformation of the country from poverty to prosperity. The Mela was to have an “educative” as well as a spiritual significance, with a publicity campaign “carried on in such a manner as to make even the uneducated understand the Plan.”

The inquiry into the 1954 disaster put the term “VIP” into Indian languages. Dignitaries, including the president and prime minister, ate a leisurely lunch while hundreds died in a human avalanche a few kilometres away. It was hours before they were aware of what had happened.

At the inquiry into the disaster, desperate officials explained their urgent need to make provisions for “VIPs.” The judge who headed the inquiry deplored the fact that “this unfortunate expression” had “gained currency” and was angered that officials had “allowed the use of, and even used themselves, the expression of ‘V.I.P.’” His outrage did little good. Within ten years, VIP was so overused that a new acronym, VVIP, had become necessary.

Numbers at the Maha Kumbh Mela have long been important for governments. In the nineteenth century, British rulers tended to encourage attendance because it enhanced revenue for the new railways and tax revenue from merchants who provided services.

In January 1942, though, with the Japanese storming through Malaya on the way to Singapore, authorities tried to discourage attendance by stopping the sale of railway tickets to Prayagraj for a month. The pilgrims came anyway.

The British governor of the province accepted what he couldn’t stop, came to the Mela and received “an address of welcome” from “the sadhus and mahants [holymen] of the various akharas [religious sects].” They declared that “the forces of right will ultimately triumph and we shower our blessings on the British and their allies for final victory.” An estimated 800,000 people bathed on that day.

The 1966 festival coincided with the conclusion of a war with Pakistan and the almost simultaneous death of prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, who had led the country through the war, and the arrival of Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s daughter, as the new prime minister. Millions of pilgrims that year also returned home to the uncertainties of the Bihar famine.

When Nabaneeta Dev Sen made her impetuous journey to the 1977 Kumbh, Indira Gandhi had been running her authoritarian “emergency” for seventeen months. About to call elections, she flew to the Kumbh to seek the support of the crowds and an assembly of holymen — as the British governor of UP had done in 1942. They presented her with a ceremonial shawl, but by the end of the year she had lost the election and spent a night in prison.

The deaths at this year’s Mela have been played down in Indian media. The largest-selling English print daily, the Times of India, editorialised that it was “important to keep this news in perspective” because “in a gathering as vast as Kumbh, some disorder is almost inevitable.” The paper pointed out that Alzheimer’s disease was the seventh most important cause of death worldwide but such deaths “never make Page 1.” A BJP spokesman agreed: “The tragedy… was most unfortunate” and “there will be criticism that one should take in one’s stride.”

In Chennai, the Hindu, a little bolder, published a piece that highlighted studies showing that when crowds reach a density greater than five people per square metre “the likelihood of death or serious injury is high.”

This year’s deaths have put pressure on the fifty-two-year-old Yogi Adityanath, chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. Adityanath, who wears the saffron robes of a holyman, is seen by many as the eventual successor to the seventy-four-year-old Narendra Modi, but he has rivals as well as explicit political opponents. He sees “a conspiracy” in how the media — especially the foreign media — treated the deaths on 29 January, and sees the coverage as an effort to create “a global embarrassment” and “besmirch the glory of the event.”

In today’s world of disasters, he probably doesn’t have much to worry about. •

The post Yet, look at the chaos appeared first on Inside Story.

The results of the seven weeks of voting were a surprise. The BJP went into the campaign headlining prime minister Narendra Modi and calling on voters to give him not just the 300 seats the BJP held in the old parliament, but an overwhelming majority of 400 seats.

Yet instead of gaining a hundred seats, the BJP lost sixty, forty of them in their usual north Indian stronghold of Uttar Pradesh.

After two terms of commanding majorities in the Lok Sabha, the party was forced into a coalition with a few of its junior partners in a loose alliance. The two largest partners are regional parties led by wily veterans who, like Modi, have been chief ministers of their states many times. They have already shown that, in return for suitable rewards, they are willing to keep the BJP-dominated government in power.

In the aftermath of its electoral setback the BJP quickly showed its vitality as a political organisation. It consulted with grassroots members of its vast cadre and firmed up its relationship with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Boy Scouts-cum-Brown Shirts organisation that founded the BJP, and of which Modi has been a member since adolescence. And it turned up the heat on its ever-simmering stew of anti-Muslim activities.

This strategic change was rewarded in November when the BJP won elections in two important states: Haryana, which borders New Delhi, and Maharashtra, the second-largest state in the union and home to the financial capital of Mumbai.

These surprisingly comfortable victories underlined the weakness and incoherence of the national opposition and the failings of the once-dominant Indian National Congress, still in the numbing control of descendants of Indira Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru.

In these elections the BJP had an enviable economic story to tell. India’s economy has been growing strongly at about 7 per cent a year since 2021. Yet GDP growth has not produced the millions of new jobs young voters are desperately searching for, with their disenchantment over unemployment playing a part in the striking losses in Uttar Pradesh. India also performs worse on a number of quality of life benchmarks than its neighbours Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka.

The problem for Indian governments is the structure of the economy, which does not generate enough “real jobs” — ones that offer predictable wages in profitable activities. India is still a relatively small player in global manufacturing. Its economy flourishes in service industries (especially information technology), domestic construction, real estate and finance — but these sectors employ a small proportion of the population.

India’s economy depends on relations with China and the United States. Most Indian exports are US-bound — products like diamonds and jewellery, pharmaceuticals and refined petroleum products. Most of its imports — manufactured goods, components, chemicals and pharmaceutical ingredients — come from China.

Modi and US president-elect Donald Trump appear to like each other. If their bonhomie extends to tariffs, the Modi government hopes Trump will make problems go away by granting waivers where needed. At the same time, heavy US tariffs on China are expected to shift investment from China to India. Apple and Foxconn are already making billion-dollar investments in plants in south India.

India appeared to be placing big bets on the Trump–Modi equation in December when the BJP accused the Biden administration of carrying out “a deep state agenda” to undermine India’s success story and besmirch the Modi government’s achievements.

In its own neighbourhood, India contends with a pushy China and the collapse of Sheikh Hasina’s pro-India government in Bangladesh, where there is uncertainty about what sort of regime will succeed it. Aggressive Islam-first groups have attacked Bangladesh’s Hindu minority, giving Hindu supremacists in India an opportunity to call for Indian intervention. Sri Lanka too has a new leader who, though now seemingly a democrat, was once a member of a violent anti-Indian organisation.

For Australia, India looms larger than ever before. The Quad, that non-alliance of Australia, the United States, Japan and India, continues to search for ways to demonstrate its usefulness since it is avowedly not about “containing China.” Australia is also home to a million people of South Asian origin, three-quarters of whom are from India. With 240,000 speakers, Punjabi ranks fifth among non-English languages spoken in Australian households. This new diaspora puts human fibre into Australia’s relationship with India.

But the diaspora can cause political issues, as it has in Canada and the United States, where Sikhs — who form a large portion of Punjabi-language speakers — have clashed with Hindus over campaigns for an independent Sikh state referred to as “Khalistan.” There’s little doubt that the tangled and violent story of Khalistan is talked about in Australian homes too. Preventing old wounds from being opened will require Australian law to be enforced promptly and diligently.

Meanwhile, in India, the Hindutva bus will continue to roll confidently along, demanding deference to the RSS–BJP vision of what it is to be a Hindu and a true citizen of India, and, as a respected Indian analyst wrote, “pushing minorities into disempowerment and marginalisation.” •

This article first appeared in East Asia Forum.

The post The Hindutva bus rolls on appeared first on Inside Story.

“The United States — long a key constant in Australia’s international environment —is now the main variable,” he wrote well ahead of November’s election. And after Trump sealed his win, he questioned the wisdom of any optimism based on Australia’s relatively unscathed experience during his first term.

“Trump’s second term will be different,” Scott wrote in Lowy’s Interpreter in November. “He is more influential in the Republican Party, which, in turn, has majorities in both houses of Congress. Trump can also assume a sympathetic Supreme Court, to which he appointed three judges. More importantly, his rapid nomination of committed MAGA [Make America Great Again] loyalists to key positions shows he is better prepared and more determined to radically remake America and, by extension, the world.”

Assuming they are confirmed by the US Senate in coming days, Trump’s nominees for key intelligence and security posts must concern Canberra. Pete Hegseth as defense secretary and Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence seem woefully underqualified, and in Gabbard’s case possibly compromised. Kash Patel has variously threatened to turn the FBI — counterpart of ASIO and the Australian Federal Police in counter-intelligence and counterterrorism — into a museum of the “deep state” or an instrument of political purges.

And locked onto Trump is the Strangelovian figure of Elon Musk, promoting the far right-wing Alternative für Deutschland in the upcoming German elections, and generally disseminating cyber-AI misinformation and slander.

Then there is Trump’s own loose handling of intelligence secrets. Early in his first term, he revealed to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador highly classified information about Islamic State supplied by an ally. After stepping down in 2021, he took boxes of classified documents back to his Florida home and stored them carelessly.

The apolitical professionalism of the US national security bureaucracy was one important safeguard during Trump’s first term, recalled Scott. “But his politicisation of the Pentagon, the Department of Justice, the FBI and other intelligence agencies will necessarily impinge on the close networks of Australia–US cooperation that were least affected during his first term.”

Should Trump make a new, more concerted attack on that apparatus, writes Scott, Australia might need to make discreet changes in security and intelligence cooperation and start looking at the US in a new way. “The national security bureaucracy is not geared towards assessing the United States with the same objective distance with which it views countries such as China.”

American pressure to join a tighter economic and strategic squeeze on China would also put Canberra in a bind. Trump’s nominations for secretary of state (Marco Rubio), national security adviser (Michael Waltz) and UN ambassador (Elise Stefanik) are all China hawks. “An American policy on China that combines economic warfare with a more threatening security posture would pose quandaries in the region,” says John McCarthy, former Australian envoy in Washington, Tokyo, Jakarta and New Delhi.

At the other end of the spectrum of possibilities is Trump’s belief in his ability to make historic pacts with the authoritarian counterparts he admires. “Taiwan is 9500 miles away. It’s sixty-eight miles away from China,” he said in July, adding that Taiwan “took our chip business from us. I mean, how stupid are we?” Thinking aloud further, he said the “immensely wealthy” Taiwan should be paying the United States for protection. “I don’t think we’re any different from an insurance policy. Why? Why are we doing this?”

“Trump could abandon allies and cut a bilateral deal with China or blunder into a conflict,” wrote Scott. “In between those two extremes is the scenario that Australia most wants but seems least likely: a set of US policies that would constrain China, balancing its military and economic power without unnecessarily restricting trade and investment.”

Scott is now submerging into a new role and unavailable for further comment, but it is fair to assume his apprehensions are widely shared within Canberra’s defence, foreign affairs and intelligence agencies, as well as in political circles, think tanks and lobbies.

On Taiwan, the first extreme would enormously affect Australia’s bilateral commitment to the AUKUS nuclear submarine plan. What would be the point? But we can assume that AUKUS architect Scott Morrison, recently a guest at Trump’s Mar-a-Largo home, bent the incoming president’s ear and got him onside for now, though the transactional Trump can be expected to extract more Australian billions for expanding US submarine yards and then — who knows? — tell Canberra the US navy has no submarines to spare.

Closer to home, meanwhile, the ten security, espionage and police agencies that make up Australia’s intelligence community are waiting on announcements about possible changes. In September 2023 the government commissioned former departmental head and economist Heather Smith and former DFAT and ONA senior official Richard Maude to review their functions. The pair reported last June, and a sanitised public version of their findings and any government decisions are expected soon.

In this period of suspense, Canberra’s end-of-year slowdown was enlivened by the reaction to the inquiry into strategic think-tanks by Peter Varghese, the former head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and director-general of ONI’s predecessor, the Office of National Assessments.

Published just before Christmas, and with the Albanese government agreeing to its main recommendations, Varghese’s report confirmed for Canberra’s China hawks that the inquiry was a “Get ASPI” exercise — a reference to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which is funded by the Defence Department and a range of donors including armaments firms.

Notably, Varghese recommended that the $40 million of annual government funding allocated to the half dozen institutes focused on defence, strategic policy and national security (of which ASPI gets about $8 million) be continued for the next two fiscal years but then made contestable for a five-year funding commitment. He also suggested a widely drawn committee of department secretaries should set priorities for research.

On ASPI’s governance, instead of the defence minister appointing its executive director and entire council, the minister would appoint only the council chair and two other members, with the opposition appointing two and the council itself recruiting three others. The council itself would choose the executive director.

None of this was immediately drastic, except that Varghese recommended, and the government agreed, that the ASPI office in Washington — set up by then defence minister Peter Dutton in June 2021 with a special $5 million allocation and opened the next year by his Labor successor Richard Marles — be refused further funding after the current financial year. “Having ASPI freelance in this area only muddies the waters,” Varghese said.

The outrage in the pages of the Australian thundered into the new year. Justin Bassi, the ASPI head appointed by Dutton against the preference of the ASPI council two months ahead of the 2022 election, saw it as a step towards tighter government control of research that might cause diplomatic ripples. He predicted that champagne corks would fly at the Chinese embassy, which some years back showed its irritation at reports on mass brainwashing of Uighurs and influence operations here. Shadow defence minister Andrew Hastie and shadow home affairs minister James Paterson, both self-styled “wolverines” against Chinese influence, said Labor’s plan would “neuter” ASPI.

Hawkish former ASPI head Peter Jennings, whom Varghese had accused of “op-ed overreach,” also fired back, describing the closure of the Washington office as Varghese’s “least worthy” recommendation. “Varghese wants his old shop, DFAT, to be the sole player,” Jennings wrote. “This is just about turf.”

Bassi said the ASPI office would be a vital help in upholding Australian interests by lobbying the US administration and congress during the Trump administration. But how it would do anything other than give Trump ammunition against Australia is unclear: ASPI has consistently argued that Australia’s military is woefully under-resourced and unready for an imminent war with China and, contrary to the Albanese government’s approach, China should be confronted bluntly regardless of economic fallout.

Varghese went out of his way to emphasise he was not advocating cutting ASPI’s funding because of past overreach. “Indeed, the idea that a think tank should be shut down because the government does not like its analysis or the opinions of its executive director is a dangerous one and contrary to the value of policy contestability in a liberal democracy,” he said. “That is why the decision of the previous government to cease funding the China Matters think tank was so regrettable.”

As Inside Story recounted, the Morrison government withdrew funding and tax deductibility for the Sydney-based China Matters institute in 2020, with its eminent business and government council members painted in the News Corp tabloids as dupes of China “lobbying against Australia’s national interests.” The China-watching think tank closed down last year. Some of Varghese’s current critics arguing for diversity of policy advice were instrumental in the funding cut-off.

What has gained comparatively little commentary are signs that Varghese chafed at the terms of reference he was given. “Currently, there remain large gaps in coverage, especially in relation to Australia’s major regional relationships,” he wrote. “It is understandable that the predominance of effort in terms of strategic policy work in the sector has a US alliance focus. But that strategic policy focus should be extended to our strategic relationships with the major powers of the Indo-Pacific such as China, India, Japan, Indonesia and Korea, which get far less attention than they warrant.”

Anyone for an ASPI office in Tokyo, Jakarta, New Delhi or Seoul? One suspects most of Canberra’s security analysts, if posted there, would find themselves fish out of American water. •

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Kartlis Deda embodies the legacy of Georgia’s location at the crossroads of empires. She is testament to the centuries of invasion and occupation that have shaped a national psychology of cultural resilience under siege. On a clear day, I can see her standing vigil on the mountainous horizon from the roof of my home in central Tbilisi.

Georgia has been in turmoil since late November when its ruling party, Georgian Dream, suspended the country’s bid for European Union membership less than a year after it gained full candidate status. Every night since then, hundreds of thousands of protesters have braved freezing temperatures, water cannons, tear gas and other forms of violence to demonstrate against what they see as the theft of their European future by a pro-Russian regime. Once a beacon of democracy in the South Caucasus, Georgia is staring down the barrel of an authoritarian future.

The November announcement was just the latest in a series of actions taken by Georgian Dream (which has governed since 2012, most recently under prime minister Irakli Kobakhidze) that seem to be leading the country away from its liberal democratic path into Kremlin-style authoritarianism. Behind the scenes is Georgian Dream’s founder and de facto leader, oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili, who made his fortune in Russia in the 1990s and has long been accused of loyalty to the Kremlin.

Over the past year alone, Georgian Dream has introduced a wave of Russian-style legislation designed to encroach on civil liberties, undermine the independence of Georgia’s democratic and legal institutions, and centralise power. Yet it continues to insist that its dealings with Moscow are pragmatic rather than fraternal.

Almost a year ago, I observed the protests outside parliament after Georgian Dream passed a controversial law opposed by many in Georgia as well as by the country’s Western allies. Dubbed the “foreign agents’ law,” the legislation requires any Georgian group that receives more than a fifth of its funding from abroad to register as an “agent of foreign influence.” It closely mirrors laws introduced in Russia in 2012 since used to justify extreme suppression of independent media and civil society.

Although the ruling party claims the law will protect Georgian statehood — a jingoistic appeal finely attuned to Georgia’s collective imperative of national survival — critics say it goes against its promise to the Georgian people to pursue full integration into the European Union and NATO, a pathway enshrined in Georgia’s constitution.

With thousands of protesters adorned in colourful Georgian and EU flags facing off against a dark horde of riot police in Tbilisi’s ironically named Freedom Square, the city’s streets are presenting a powerful image of a nation at a crossroads.

The unrest intensified after Georgian Dream secured a fourth term at October’s parliamentary elections amid widespread reports of electoral manipulation and voter intimidation. Salome Zourabichvili, Georgia’s last president elected by popular vote, spearheaded the public revolt against the result by labelling the government as illegitimate and its actions as “evidence of Russia’s presence.” (Georgian Dream replaced popular presidential elections with electoral college appointment last year.)

At seventy-two, Zourabichvili has emerged as a surprisingly formidable opponent of Georgian Dream. She attracts support not with populist sloganeering or demagoguery, as is common practice among leaders in post-communist contexts, but by positioning herself as the guardian of Georgia’s constitution and custodian of the county’s last remaining democratic institution.

Despite being replaced in late December by Mikheil Kavelashvili, a former professional footballer handpicked by Ivanishvili, Zourabichvili has vowed that her mandate will end only when Georgian Dream holds new elections under international supervision and reinstates Georgia’s constitutional framework.

When I watched Zourabichvili leave Tbilisi’s presidential palace for the final time on a chilly Sunday morning a few days after Christmas, I glimpsed something of the Kartlis Deda in her presence, transcending her petite stature. “This building was a symbol only as long as a legitimate president was sitting here,” she said. As the year ticked over into 2025, Georgian Dream had successfully consolidated control of all the institutions of government.

Many observers have drawn parallels between Georgia’s current protests and Ukraine’s 2013–14 Euromaidan revolution, which was prompted by then-president Viktor Yanukovych’s reneging on Ukraine’s association agreement with the European Union in favour of closer ties with Russia. Images of state security forces using water cannons, tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse demonstrators in Tbilisi do indeed bear a striking resemblance to the civil unrest in Ukraine that prompted Russia to annex Crimea and incite the insurgency in Ukraine’s Donbas region that laid the groundwork for full-scale war.

Yet Georgia provides its own parallels, for it has already experienced both revolution and war with Russia since achieving independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Its people have very little taste for more of the same, especially with Russia already effectively occupying around a fifth of their territory.

While Georgia’s sociopolitical crisis is often framed as a battle between pro-Russian and pro-European forces, this only tells part of the story. Understanding Georgia’s current political moment means taking stock not only of the challenges of statecraft and nation-building in Russia’s shadow, but also of Georgia’s history, its deep-rooted identity formation and the paradoxes of its European aspirations.

The impulse to preserve and protect Georgian identity is the oldest and strongest component of the country’s national consciousness. For centuries, Georgia’s mountainous geography has served as a natural vault for its sacred treasures. Ancient monasteries became fortresses where manuscripts, icons, and religious items were hidden from invading armies; surrounded by difficult terrain and protected by tower houses, they remain not just physical repositories of Georgian culture but also symbols of national continuity, survival and resistance.

Concealing cultural artefacts paralleled a more profound struggle to maintain Georgian identity in the face of repeated attempts at erasure and assimilation. After Tsar Paul 1 annexed the country in 1801, abolishing the Georgian monarchy and instituting direct Russian Imperial rule, a systematic policy of Russification persisted in various forms through the imperial and Soviet periods until Georgia’s independence in 1991.

Particularly damaging were Soviet attempts to reshape Georgian society with forced collectivisation, purges and the cultivation of a local communist elite loyal to Moscow rather than Georgian national interests. Stalin himself — born Ioseb Jughashvili in the Georgian town of Gori — embodied this colonial dynamic, rising through Soviet ranks to become the architect of unprecedented repression of his native country and its people.

That trauma was exacerbated by Georgia’s brief but significant period of independence between 1918 and 1921. While imperfect, and often invoked in the present day in ways that reveal the competing visions and romanticisms of the country’s uneven development, the Democratic Republic of Georgia, with its progressive institutions, enlightened constitution and ambitious sociopolitical and economic reforms, was one of the world’s first social democracies.

The Red Army’s forcible incorporation of Georgia into the Soviet Union in 1921 thus represented more than an occupation. It was the destruction of a promising democratic experiment and the source of national trauma that continues to influence modern Georgian nation-building and self-understanding.

Since Georgia gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 its sovereignty has been tied to two interconnected struggles: (re)establishing democratic institutions and behaviours and resisting the Russian threat. Both goals are inextricable from Georgia’s European aspirations and have taken on deeply existential dimensions that has not always proved conducive to civic resilience and democratic consolidation.

First, a mythology of Georgia’s innate “Europeanness” is often invoked to play down Russian influence. It emphasises three foundational elements of the country’s European heritage: its early adoption of Christianity; its mythological ties to ancient Greece (and thus the Western canon) through the figure of Medea and the Golden Fleece legend; and its democratic traditions, presented as a lineage from medieval participatory governance through to the early twentieth-century republic. That lineage is used to suggest a natural and continuous democratic disposition in Georgian political culture impeded primarily by Russia.

The “returning to Europe” story has often substituted for more difficult discussions about what a transition to democracy actually means for Georgia. When Georgians speak of freedom, rights, sovereignty and other values that have become intwined with the country’s European aspirations, those values are traditionally associated less with Western understandings of personal liberties than with the desire for national autonomy, survival and self-determination.

The focus on EU candidate status and other formal markers of Western integration has served as an alibi not just for substantive democratic reform but also for a public reckoning with the unresolved legacies of Georgia’s early post-Soviet nation-building, which have contributed to uneven socioeconomic development, resentment, separatism, civil war, Russian occupation and the failure to integrate ethnic minorities.

Georgia’s democratic transformation has been strengthened by grassroots aspirations and key moments of national mobilisation, such as the 2003 Rose Revolution, which have oriented it away from the Kremlin and towards Euro-Atlantic integration. But the lack of critical engagement with Eurocentric national narratives and the upheavals of Georgia’s independence have allowed Soviet-era practices and power structures to adapt and endure rather than be systematically reformed.

Second — and this is a controversial claim in the present climate — Russia functions as both a genuine threat and a pernicious rhetorical framework in Georgia. Without question, Russia poses a persistent and significant risk to Georgia’s stability, sovereignty and security. But the tendency to use Russian threat as a pretext for delegitimising contentious viewpoints or uncomfortable truths about domestic issues has impeded the frank public discussion and collective historical self-reflection necessary for genuine reform and reconciliation.

Georgian Dream has skilfully capitalised on this dynamic. The party’s initial electoral success in 2012 came largely in response to then-president Mikheil Saakashvili’s increasingly unpopular neoliberal reforms and confrontational approach to Russia, which many believed had led to the 2008 Russo-Georgian war. After twenty years of upheaval, Georgian Dream’s victory appeared to represent a new epoch of consolidated democracy, peace and stability in Georgia. It was the first time in the country’s independent history that a government had voluntarily relinquished power.

Georgian Dream’s capture of state institutions was gradual rather than immediate. Under Ivanishvili’s influence, the party has cynically invoked Russian hostility to justify Kremlin-style authoritarian policies and practices in the name of safeguarding Georgia’s security and sovereignty. It’s an approach designed to deflect attention from democratic backsliding and efforts to compromise Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic integration.

Georgian Dream’s fearmongering increased significantly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, ostensibly to buffer Georgia from a similar fate. Yet its weaponisation of public fears of Russian aggression has also functioned as a means of self-preservation. Ivanishvili calculated that maintaining economic ties with Russia while using the threat of war to suppress domestic opposition offered the most stable path for retaining his personal power, wealth and control.

In the lead-up to the recent election, the party launched an Orwellian propaganda campaign featuring images of destroyed Ukrainian cities juxtaposed with vivid photos of intact Georgian cities. “No to war!” read the captions on the black-and-white photos, which listed the ballot numbers of the opposition parties. “Choose peace!” read the caption of the colour photos featuring the ballot number of Georgian Dream.

As part of this posturing, Georgian Dream has also claimed that a “Global War Party” has brought together Western powers, the Ukrainian leadership and Georgian opposition groups allegedly seeking to open a second front in Georgia against Russia. Outsiders might be baffled by such conspiracy-peddling in a country that has pinned its future security on Western integration. But the claim aligns with Georgian Dream’s broader campaign to undermine trust in Europeanisation without alienating the majority of voters who support EU membership.

Over its twelve years in power, the party has transformed its rhetoric on the EU, recently claiming that Georgia will only join the bloc on its own terms, “with dignity.” By decoupling the idea of Europe from democracy and liberal rights, it has dangled the carrot of Georgia’s European future with one hand while undermining the accession process with the other. It’s a riff on Hannah Arendt’s classic definition of self-perpetuating authoritarianism, and one that resonates with the EU’s own swelling illiberal ranks.

In this way, Georgian Dream has weaponised not just the Russian threat but also Europe itself. The tactic resonates strongly among the mainstay of its voter base: the older, religious, non-urban people who have been hit hardest by the upheavals and conflicts of the past three decades and remain deeply sceptical of change. Electoral fraud aside, this constituency would have ensured Georgian Dream remained the largest party in parliament after the recent ballot. Without an outright majority, however, the party would have had to compromise and form coalitions — something Ivanishvili was not prepared to do.

By framing liberal and LGBTQ+ rights as threats to Georgia’s deep-rooted Christian Orthodox identity, Georgian Dream has created a powerful electoral strategy which — combined with vote-buying and intimidation — has consolidated its political dominance while still paying lip service to Georgia’s European “Christian values” trajectory.

This positioning creates a paradox for Georgia’s European aspirations. While Georgian Dream’s stance against social reforms and Church-backed fearmongering about liberal rights resembles Russia’s ideological anti-Westernism, it aligns even more closely with growing conservative movements in EU member states such as Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and even Italy that advocate for a “Christian values” Europe.

Significantly, the first foreign leader to publicly endorse Georgian Dream’s victory was Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who arrived in Tbilisi shortly after the disputed ballot to congratulate the party for not letting Georgia become “a second Ukraine.”

On the one hand, thus, Georgian Dream cannot simply be characterised as “pro-Russian.” Its rhetoric mirrors current EU debates about alternative models of European integration that don’t require the wholesale adoption of liberal social policies. On the other hand, a country like Hungary has the luxury of promoting traditional values from inside the EU–NATO club. Georgia’s geopolitical vulnerability to Russia means it can’t afford to alienate Western partners whose strategic interest in Georgia rests almost solely on its ability to keep to its democratic path.

In the hands of Georgian Dream, the European “traditional values” card is thus fundamentally ironic: it risks undermining the very independence from Russia that Georgia’s Orthodox Church has historically fought to protect.

As pundits love to claim, the small Caucasian country is at a crossroads. But rather than framing the road ahead as forked between Russia and the West, it is more apt to see it as a choice between unconstructive historical patterns and the civic maturation that could transform European ambitions into genuine democratic resilience.

With Georgian Dream’s authoritarian grip on power and willingness to deploy violence against citizens, this will not be an easy fight. International partners have a crucial role to play, not through mere platitudinal statements of concern but with targeted pressure that raises the costs of democratic backsliding and demonstrates solidarity with Georgian citizens.

But external support can’t substitute for domestic will. The current crisis demonstrates how legitimate concerns about Russian interference can coexist with the need to critically examine domestic vulnerabilities. If Georgians truly want to parlay their European aspirations into a more stable democratic future they must back up their anti-Russian rhetoric and grassroots consciousness with a deeper sociocultural and historical reckoning.

Georgia’s opposition and civil society organisations must find ways to transcend historical patterns of fragmentation and personality-driven politics, building broader coalitions to challenge state capture while demonstrating the values of open society they advocate. This means moving beyond reactive protest cycles and simplistic rhetoric towards initiatives that connect diverse groups to conversations about how to collectively build a shared future.

This process is likely to be painful, particularly when it comes to rebuilding trust in the wake of the current protests. Georgians, not Russians, must be held to account for beating, detaining and brutalising their fellow citizens under orders from Georgian political leaders. It is a terrible truth to bear, but the assault on civic freedoms has come not from foreign adversaries but from within.

As Georgia’s protests enter their seventh week in Tbilisi, there are no signs the movement is abating. The streets have become a stage for multiple sectors of Georgian society — from grandmothers to DJs to veterinarians to ethnic mountain communities — to demonstrate the breadth and depth of their opposition to Georgian Dream’s authority.

The calls of these citizens are clear and simple. They don’t want a Maidan-style revolution, they want the government to return to a constitutional framework and to hold new free and fair elections. This is an important milestone in Georgia’s democratic development, demonstrating civil society’s capacity to mobilise peacefully for institutional reform rather than regime change.

During these weeks I’ve witnessed Georgians continuing the traditions underpinning their national solidarity and survival. Small businesses stay open into the wee hours to offer protesters warm drinks, phone-charging stations and sometimes even hot showers. Farmers travel from the regions to distribute produce to their exhausted compatriots demonstrating daily in the city. People light orthodox prayer candles in the street. Groups break into impromptu polyphonic song. On New Year’s Eve, a communal festive table stretching hundreds of metres down Tbilisi’s central avenue, named after a national poet, was set for strangers and friends to toast the coming year together.

Georgian Dream has grossly miscalculated this moment and overplayed its hand. It is now the government — not Russia, nor Europe — that faces the pointy end of Kartlis Deda’s sword. But the party has also managed a feat that most of its Western counterparts today find near impossible. It has galvanised a whole society to come together to fight for its constitutional legacy and democratic future.

For Georgians, this is a battle for national survival they have fought continuously for hundreds of years. It’s impossible to imagine them backing down. •

The post Kartlis Deda’s sword appeared first on Inside Story.

Canada survived the aggressive trade policies of the previous Trump administration with much effort and angst. As it faces a second round, though, it lacks the political unity that carried it through the first. The country is entering its own political transition, with Trudeau’s popularity spiralling downwards and his government falling apart. As of this writing Trudeau remains prime minister and leader of his Liberal Party, but his time in power is dwindling and everyone — except perhaps the PM himself — knows it.

Canada’s political disarray was obvious in the chaotic reaction to Trump’s tariff bombshell, with leaders scattering in all directions. While Trudeau launched his preferred tactic, the charm offensive, by inviting himself to dinner, his occasional parliamentary partners, the New Democrats, called for a “war room” to “fight like hell.” Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, leading by a wide margin in the polls, criticised Trump’s threat while declaring it another reason why the country needed an immediate change in leadership. And provincial premiers made their own incoherent contribution: Ontario Progressive Conservative premier Doug Ford threatened to cut off electricity exports to northern US states but fellow conservative Alberta premier Danielle Smith rejected any cut in oil and gas exports.

Canadians were also quick to throw Mexico under the bus, arguing privately and sometimes publicly that there was no comparison between the two borders, and that Canada, too, was worried that Chinese manufacturers were using Mexico as a backdoor entry. Annoyed Mexican diplomats responded by calling for a united front.

The business community’s reaction was more measured. Horrified by the potential devastation wrought by 25 per cent tariffs on an economy deeply integrated with the United States, but having survived the previous Trump trade drama, most called for another unified approach: “Team Canada” would acknowledge Trump’s underlying concerns about border security and insufficient defence spending while accelerating the perpetual campaign to educate America political leaders about the extent of the intertwining of the two economies.

Many Canadian policymakers conceded that Canada could indeed do better on enforcing the border and increasing defence spending. But opinion was more divided on the question that characterises all dealings with Trump: whether his announcement was a calculated bluff or a real plan in the face of reason and reality.

The debate about how to confront the tariff threat dominated Canadian public discourse for the first half of December. But not the second. At 9.07 am on Monday 16 December, Trudeau’s deputy prime minister and finance minister, Chrystia Freeland, announced her immediate resignation from cabinet. Unusually for Canadian politics, Freeland released a stinging letter to Trudeau stating that “you and I have found ourselves at odds about the best path forward for Canada” and specifically citing the tariff threat.

Freeland’s other bombshell was the revelation that Trudeau had told her he no longer wanted her to serve as finance minister. Throughout the Trudeau years, Freeland has been his go-to minister for crises, leading the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, in the first Trump administration, redeployed as intergovernmental affairs minister to deal with regional tensions, and then appointed finance minister to lead the post-pandemic recovery.

Trudeau had indeed told Freeland that he was once again shifting her to the hottest topic of the moment, this time a ministerial post specifically dealing with Canada–US relations. But the position came without a department or other established portfolio, and Trudeau had not included her in his Mar-a-Lago entourage. He also told Freeland he had a new finance minister in mind: Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of Canada and then of the Bank of England, who has made no secret of his interest in high elected office.

The most bizarre twist and the sharpest insult to Freeland was Trudeau’s timing: she was scheduled to deliver Canada’s autumn economic update, essentially a mini-budget, on Monday afternoon, a task the prime minister apparently still wanted her to do before she cleared her desk for Carney. Her abrupt morning resignation meant the country lacked a finance minister for the several hours until public safety minister and Trudeau loyalist Dominic LeBlanc was given the job late in the afternoon. The ministerial speech accompanying the update was cancelled and copies were distributed without government comment.

Trudeau’s catastrophic mishandling of Freeland amid the dire economic threat may be the final dimming of his dwindling star. The Liberal Party has polled terribly since mid-2023 and recently lost by-elections in formerly safe Toronto and Montreal seats. With the Conservatives on track for a huge majority, the Liberals are likely to do worse than their previous historic low of 2011.

It was Justin Trudeau who brought them back from that near-oblivion with the triumphant majority victory in 2015 that vaulted him to global celebrity status. A decade later, reaching the end of his second minority government, the glow is gone. But he has resisted calls to step aside. The Liberal Party has no mechanism to challenge a sitting leader and, while others want to replace him, there is no single rival to lead the rebellion. Freeland could join a distinguished club with former Liberal finance ministers John Turner and Paul Martin, who also resigned or were pushed out by prime ministers but later returned to take the job themselves. But their departures were not amid a crisis.

Donald Trump is quick to perceive and exploit weak spots, and he doubled down on his tariff bombshell with an even more alarming idea: annexing Canada entirely. A week after the Mar-a-Lago dinner, he referred to Trudeau as “Governor” of the “Great State of Canada,” and on 18 December posted “Many Canadians want Canada to become the 51st State. They would save massively on taxes and military protection. I think it is a great idea. 51st State!!!”

Nothing could strike more deeply at the Canadian soul. Nineteenth-century Canada’s foreign policy was dominated by fears of and resistance to American territorial expansionism; twentieth-century Canadians were preoccupied with differentiating their country culturally and socially from its neighbour to the south. The 1988 federal election was Canada’s most existentially challenging ever, dominated by fears that a proposed free-trade agreement with the United States would lead to absorption. Free-trade proponents won the day, and the globalisation trend of the early twenty-first century diminished fears of American ties.

But the shift in global trade winds and the rise in American protectionism, promoted by Democrats as well as Republicans, has left Canada anxious and exposed. Trump never mused about annexation in his first term, but perhaps the uneasy Canadian reaction to December’s remark about statehood told him he was on the right track. Even if it was nothing more than Trumpian bombast, it boosted Canadian blood pressures and increased the chaotic climate of anxiety and hysteria about how to respond.

Well before Trump’s re-election, Canada had begun enacting new border and immigration restrictions, including a drastic tightening of international student visas and new attempts to control unauthorised crossings of the porous land border. The autumn economic statement included a C$1.3 billion (A$1.5 billion) package of new border security plans. In a follow-up announcement the next day, new finance minister LeBlanc, still holding the public safety portfolio, made the point clear by saying “We have taken note of President Trump’s comments.” The government had less to say about Trump’s demands for a rapid increase in defence spending. (Canada has long lagged many of its NATO counterparts, never coming close to the long-set floor of 2 per cent of GDP.)

The mechanics of imposing an instant 25 per cent tariff by 20 January are unclear, especially as it would almost certainly violate the Canada–US–Mexico free trade agreement, or CUSMA, negotiated in 2018 to replace NAFTA by the previous Trump administration alongside Canadian representative Chrystia Freeland. But CUSMA is up for renegotiation in 2026; whatever the meaning of Trump’s immediate threat, it is clearly an opening salvo for those negotiations.

Difficulties surrounding the original CUSMA negotiations led Trump to declare Trudeau “dishonest and weak” during his first term and dismiss Freeland by saying “We don’t like their representative very much”; after Freeland’s December resignation, Trump posted that “her behavior was totally toxic, and not at all conducive to making deals which are good for the very unhappy citizens of Canada. She will not be missed!!!” While no one has any illusions that it is easy to do coherent business with Donald Trump, perhaps it is indeed time for a new negotiating team.

But it is not clear when change will come. Freeland’s resignation set off a chaotic week in Canadian politics. Trudeau had already faced calls by a few of his MPs to step down, and the number grew to twenty-one of his 153 member caucus by the end of the week. He cancelled his scheduled year-end interviews with various media outlets.

On Wednesday, newly minted finance minister LeBlanc announced he was keeping his new job and that Carney would not be joining the cabinet. A long-awaited reshuffle on Friday to deal with other political retirements, in which Carney was likely meant to be the centrepiece, promoted eight MPs to ministerial posts, no doubt disappointing others who had hoped to be rewarded for loyalty to the boss. More dissenters emerged, though it was difficult to grasp the full extent of rebellion. A letter to Trudeau from the chair of the twenty-three member Atlantic regional caucus, for example, said “our Caucus is of the view that it is not tenable for you to remain as the Leader” without clearly stating if the view was unanimous.

Trudeau clearly is losing support, and both Freeland and the elusive Carney are reported to be actively organising leadership bids. But for the moment only a minority of MPs openly oppose him, and even if they were a majority they lack the means. While the Conservative Party allows a direct caucus challenge and vote on the leader — leading to the demise of Poilievre’s predecessor Erin O’Toole in 2022 — the Liberals have repeatedly rejected adopting this mechanism, despite the slow insurrection waged by Paul Martin against Jean Chrétien a quarter century ago in the absence of any other option to challenge the leader. Even after a resignation, Canadian leadership contests, with their mass-member votes, normally take many months.

And the Liberals don’t have many months. The nominally fixed date for the next election is 20 October, but the government has only a minority of seats in the House of Commons, and the New Democrats, who have propped up the Liberals up since 2022, withdrew from their confidence-and-supply agreement last September. Facing their own problems in the polls, the New Democrats hemmed and hawed through the Canadian autumn about bringing down the government, and leader Jagmeet Singh finally announced on 20 December — after the House had risen for the holidays — that he was ready to move a motion of no-confidence in the government (though he was silent on whether this included supporting motions by other parties). The Bloc Québécois, which had some success extricating policy concessions from the Liberals in turn for parliamentary support, is now also committed to bringing down the government.

The House of Commons is scheduled to resume sitting on 27 January, with the Conservatives certain to test Singh’s promise at the first opportunity. The Conservatives may also pursue a backdoor option of proposing a motion of non-confidence through the public accounts committee. This rickety plan is unlikely to be accepted by the government as a true confidence test, but the lack of written rules to guide Canadian practice leaves it plausibly open.

For his part, Trudeau has a long-shot option of postponing a loss of confidence by proroguing parliament for a few weeks or months — a tool used in the past by both major parties to get out of sticky situations, though the Liberals’ 2015 platform promised to stop the practice. The only widely acceptable reason for prorogation would be to accommodate a Liberal leadership race.

Even though 20 January looms, Canadian politics is primarily inward-looking at the moment. While “Team Canada” is slowly coming together to respond to Trump’s threats, it lacks decisive and stable leadership. Instead, all eyes are on Trudeau and whether he will accept that his caucus is slowly but relentlessly turning against him, that the parliamentary clock is ticking, and that the polls indicate disaster. Yet throughout 2024 he resisted hints that it was time to go, and those supposedly privy to his inner thinking reported he continued to see himself as the best option for the party.

The Freeland catastrophe didn’t appear to weaken that resolve. “Like most families, sometimes we have fights around the holidays,” he said at the Liberal parliamentary holiday party, where the departing Freeland was mobbed for selfies. “But of course, like most families, we find our way through it.” And he seemed to believe it. •

The post First casualty? appeared first on Inside Story.

Premièred in Manhattan in November last year, Anderson’s performance was revived in May and a live a recording released on YouTube. Following the American election the recording has gone viral. It does seem to capture the mood of a nation anticipating the arrival of an administration promising to disband most of the government structures it has inherited.

As the date of the inauguration looms, though, a curious distraction has emerged, jostling for prominence in news headlines and generating intense social media engagement. Growing numbers of the American public have started to wait for something else: an explanation. Why are large numbers of drones being spotted nightly by citizens of New Jersey and surrounding states, some apparently travelling in formation, some dipping to low flight paths, making them clearly visible above houses and roads?

“Everyone is asking for answers,” says New Jersey mayor Murello, who along with twenty-four other mayors from that state and governors from New York and Maryland converged across party lines late last week to demand an explanation from Pentagon representatives. They left frustrated, having been offered nothing more than evasive assurances. All Homeland Security would say was that the drones aren’t of foreign origin and don’t pose a threat.

That, as many commentators pointed out, doesn’t add up. If the government doesn’t know what they are, how can it be confident there is no threat? And if it does know but is choosing to leave the public in an information vacuum, it is opening the door wide to conspiracy theorists and other amateur sleuths. “The longer you go, the more outlandish people are going to start thinking,” as one New Jersey reporter put it.

Public concern has been building since the second week of November when accounts of large drones in the New Jersey skies were reported in USA Today. Witnesses included state law enforcement officers, who set up a program to monitor the activity.

With reports continuing to flood in, the Pentagon’s “nothing to see here” rang hollow. Video recordings showed craft flying over the Picatinny Arsenal and Earl Naval weapons station; others were reported hovering above coastguard vessels.

Last Friday evening New York governor Kathy Hochul ordered the temporary closure of runways at Stewart airfield due to drone activity in the airspace, issuing a statement that “this has gone too far.” A few hours later, reports of “heavy UAS [unmanned aerial systems] movement” led to a four-hour shutdown at the Wright Patterson Airforce Base in Ohio, a facility of critical importance for airforce command.

Considering the national security implications and the legitimate anxieties of citizens about a potential crash in their neighbourhood, social media dialogue in those first weeks was remarkable for its restraint. If it was a US security operation, why was this not being acknowledged? Was it a corporate data-gathering exercise? Was it a search for nuclear material that had somehow been dropped in the area?

Of course, there was also talk of UFOs, especially on X, but posts on Bluesky and Threads consisted mainly of people sharing accounts of what they saw and expressing mystification and exasperation with federal authorities for essentially giving the brush-off. The thought that witnesses might be dismissed as conspiracy nuts was in many people’s minds, causing outrage among those who’d made reports of craft hovering above their own houses at low altitude.

As the furore entered its fourth week on social media, scepticism was gaining the upper hand. A widespread awareness of disinformation campaigns has perhaps raised the bar: people don’t want to be taken for fools or be caught out scare-mongering when an apparent crisis turns out to be a nothingburger.

Political divisions along these lines have also started to surface in the past couple of days. Donald Trump pronounced his view that “something strange is going on” and that the drones should be shot down if they threatened national security, while vocal Trump critic Adam Kinzinger, a former Congressman with experience in the Air National Guard, put it all down to mass hysteria.

The Kinzinger view was reinforced by a claimed sighting from former Republican governor Larry Hogan, who videotaped “dozens of large drones” over his house in Maryland and posted the evidence on X, where it earned a community note pointing out that this was the constellation of Orion. Cue the satirists, who are having a field day suggesting that stars, regular planes and anything else with a legitimate presence in the air are cause for suspicion. People are looking at the sky a lot more than usual. Might that not be part of the problem?

At the conspiracy end of the spectrum, UFO controversies are active, though those with a seasoned interest in these phenomena are more likely to counsel their audience to practice critical thinking than launch into a sensationalist tirade.

Australian journalist Ross Coulthart, an advocate for the view that UFO sightings have been subject to cover-up, delivered a two-part report for the You Tube Channel NewsNation. His interview with journalist Katie Corrado, reporting from Picatinny Arsenal, was professional and informative. The word “alien” was mentioned only once, and in passing. Corrado, who had witnessed the fly-overs herself, showed no inclination to speculate along those lines. People were not rushing to explanation, she said, nor at this stage were they panicked. They were “unsettled.”

Coulthart followed up with two of his regular consultants, John and Gerry Tedesco, whose project Nightcrawler is an ongoing investigation of unexplained aerial phenomena, with state-of-the-art spectral equipment. In other words, they are professional UFO hunters. Had they been in touch with the FBI and Homeland Security over the situation in New Jersey? Yes, was the answer, “though there’s not a lot we can share publicly.” Their insider “contacts,” though, raised many questions to which they thought the public should be demanding answers.

“That is really alarming,” Coulthart said, adding that the level of ignorance admitted by official spokesmen was “breathtaking.” The way to open the door to serious UFO speculation is not to run Project Blue Book–style conspiracy narratives about hidden certainties, but to ramp up the uncertainty factor so that refusal to comment becomes an issue in itself.

On the other side of the UFO hypothesis is the counter-conspiracy theory of Project Blue Beam, which promotes the idea that phenomena designed to raise suspicion of extraterrestrial activity are actually a false flag used by governments to generate panic and distract public attention when critical agendas are in play. Proponents of this theory are strong advocates for their version of critical thinking, the premise being that the powerful agencies of Deep State are engaged in an enterprise of mass deception so constant that mental resistance is the challenge.

Among them is Chase Hughes — “I’m the guy that trains psy-ops” — who runs a YouTube channel purporting to educate the public on how to tell when they are being “prepped.” When the public feel threatened, the need for a saviour can be projected onto a political leader, who is then in a position to call for increased powers. It’s a gradual process, he emphasises, the first phase being to induce escalated levels of speculation, but without panic. That comes later. The government has a fully prepared plan, he insists, to stage a simulated UFO attack.

The Project Blue Beam narrative has been promoted by high-profile influencers from the Trump camp, including Alex Jones and Roseanne Barr, but is somewhat hard to reconcile with repeated and unequivocal statements from official quarters that these are normal craft, with regulation lights and signalling.

“The drones are coming,” declared late show host Stephen Colbert with mock seriousness at the start of his first monologue this week. Whatever may or may not be going in the skies over New Jersey and surrounding states, the reality is that some psycho-social phenomenon has arisen, itself calling for explanation. As to that, Laurie Anderson may be our best guide. An ominous sense that something is coming, something no one is fully able to account for, is spreading across the United States. •

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Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, the leader of the most right-wing government in Israel’s history, is also a big fan of these famous cigarros cubanos. His wife, Sara Netanyahu, on the other hand, enjoys her champagne: Dom Pérignon, if you don’t mind. Even the cheapest bottle of Dom will set you back about $400. Mrs Netanyahu also believes that diamonds are a girl’s best friend.

Luckily for Israel’s premier power couple, they have rich friends willing to keep them supplied with A-grade stogies, pricey bubbly and jewel-encrusted bracelets. Unfortunately for them, evidence came to light that these valuable commodities, amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars over several years, might have been exchanged for prime ministerial favours.

Israeli police began investigating in December 2016. Besides the accusations of exchanging favours for gifts, it is also alleged that Mr Netanyahu did favours for media owners in return for positive news coverage. The most powerful man in Israel was indicted in 2019 and stands accused of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. He is currently defending himself before the Israeli courts.

In early 2023 footage of the police interrogations of Mr Netanyahu, Mrs Netanyahu and various other witnesses was leaked to the veteran American documentary film-maker Alex Gibney. Gibney enlisted the Emmy-nominated director Alexis Bloom to turn this material into a documentary. He also brought on board the Israeli investigative journalist Ravid Drucker. The Bibi Files, which screened last week at the Jewish Film Festival in Sydney, is the result.

Though not especially cinematic — it looks like a longer-than-normal and very well produced and edited Four Corners — it’s a fascinating piece of work. Courtesy of the leaked footage, we go inside the room where powerful people, stripped of their charisma, must face the law of the land.

At its heart The Bibi Files is the story of a married couple who have seemingly lost their moral compass by committing the sin of hubris. One of the several critical voices in the film summarises the Netanyahu’s position simply as: “I deserve it, and I can get away with it.”

Prime Minister Netanyahu handles his ordeal under interrogation with a mixture of bluster and table thumping. “There is a whole industry trying to incriminate me,” he complains at one point. Well, yes, it’s called the Israeli justice system.

He calls the claims made against him delusional nonsense. But every so often his face flickers with anxiety. When he’s not obfuscating, he says he can’t recall important events. One of the police officers risks some gentle chiding. “Do you realise,” he asks, “that you respond to 95 per cent of our questions with ‘I don’t remember’?”

The portrait that emerges of Sara Netanyahu is even more damning. She drinks too much. She shouts at staff and berates underlings. Two witnesses say that Bibi is scared of her. Though unelected, she has great influence on government decision-making.

Her personality is powerfully revealed in the police footage. Under questioning, she is contemptuous of the officers who are simply doing their job: “Your evidence is complete and utter bullshit!” she yells at them. But, by God, she is loyal to her man. “Listen to me,” she says to the cops. “The prime minister is the most principled and honest person in the world.”

Besides the PM and his wife, the film is populated by a cast of colourful characters. Several aged Israeli billionaires dressed like schlubs in sneakers and T-shirts turn up to be hauled over the coals. Maybe they don’t think it wise to flaunt their wealth during a corruption investigation.

Among those who supplied booze and cigars to Bibi and Sara is the Hollywood wheeler-dealer Arnon Milchan. “You can’t say no to them,” says his personal assistant Hadas Klein. “There’s no such thing as showing up empty-handed.” In return, Milchan is alleged to have received a tax benefit and had a US visa problem sorted out after the prime minister intervened personally with the then secretary of state John Kerry.

Milchan’s equally badly dressed fellow billionaire Shaul Elovitch is alleged to have traded the journalistic integrity of a news website he owned for Netanyahu’s signature on a document that released hundreds of millions in cash to him at a time when the banks had him by the proverbials.

If proven, this is surely corruption. But it’s not gold-medal winning corruption. What Gibney and Bloom really want the world to know is the bigger story of how the corruption investigation has affected Netanyahu’s decision-making as prime minister.

“Nothing concentrates the mind like the prospect of being hanged,” as Nimrod Novik, a former adviser to former Israeli PM Shimon Peres, reminds us. “With Netanyahu, nothing concentrates his mind more than the sound of the prison gate slammed behind his back.”

Despite being charged with corruption, Netanyahu refused to resign from office, as many advised him to do. The major centre-left parties in the Knesset refused to support him, so he turned to Israel’s far right in order to survive politically. He welcomed into his cabinet men who just a few years ago he would refuse to be photographed with.

A violent racist named Itamar Ben-Gvir is now national security minister. His fellow right-winger Bezalel Smotrich is finance minister. Ami Ayolan, the former head of Shin Bet, Israel’s version of ASIO, calls Smotrich a “Jewish terrorist.”

In 2023 Netanyahu introduced judicial reforms that would have altered the balance of power in favour of the legislature and away from the judiciary. To many Israelis it looked like an attack on democracy itself, designed to protect the PM from the nation’s legal system. As Ayolan explains in The Bibi Files, Netanyahu was attempting to “break the bones of the system before they are coming close to determining his political and personal fate.”

The move triggered the biggest street demonstrations in Israel’s history. In early 2024 the Supreme Court ruled against the new law, arguing that it would have caused “severe and unprecedented damage to the basic characteristics of the State of Israel as a democratic state.”

By then had come the horrors of Hamas’s 7 October attack, the largest loss of Jewish life on a single day since the Holocaust. The makers of The Bibi Files make the argument that many of Netanyahu’s decisions as a wartime PM are about keeping himself in power, and therefore out of jail.

In November 2024 the International Court of Justice issued an arrest warrant against Mr Netanyahu for alleged crimes against humanity relating to the war in Gaza. It’s unlikely that he’ll ever be arrested and taken in handcuffs to The Hague.

But the domestic corruption charges examined in The Bibi Files are a different matter. They could yet see him end up in prison. Being prime minister is no protection from the law in Israel. His predecessor as PM, Ehud Olmert, was convicted on similar corruption charges and ended up in the Big House for more than a year.

After many delays, Netanyahu was back in court last week. In his first day of testimony, true to form, he blamed a biased media for getting him into this mess.

The charges against him were laughable, he said. Why didn’t anyone understand? He only allowed himself a rare cigar — and he never had time to finish it anyway because of the pressure he’s under as PM.

“Sometimes I sin with a cigar that I can’t even smoke in peace because of the constant interruptions,” he complained to the court, “And by the way, I hate champagne.” •

The Bibi Files is available to stream on DocPlay. The film can’t be shown in Israel because footage of Israeli police interrogations can only be broadcast there with the permission of the person being interrogated.

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The Baath Party, built on the core of a national army drawn from Syria’s Alawite heterodox community, came to power in 1970. More than two-thirds of the country’s population were Sunni Muslims, and a much smaller percentage, including the Alawite population of the coastal mountains, had historic links to Shi’ite offshoots of Islam. Baathism had sought to lift up an impoverished Alawite community that had advanced within the military under Ottoman and French Mandates favouring recruitment from coastal regions whose population followed a largely secular approach to Islam.

The scion of the Assad family, Hafez al-Assad, had risen to political power via his career in the airforce, and was using savage repression to tighten an increasingly tyrannical grip. When the largely Sunni population of Hama, on the eastern flank of the coastal mountains, rose up in 1982 in response to the regime’s failed economic policies, the army (under Hafez’s younger brother Rifaat) shelled the town into submission.

By the time I took up a diplomatic posting in Damascus in the post-Hama era, Syria’s state-dominated economy had stagnated and the system was being held together by repression, cronyism and corruption. Before he died in 2000, Hafez al-Assad had made clear that his successor should be drawn from his immediate family; in the event, power passed by default to option number three, his youngest son Bashar, who was hastily pulled out of his quiet life as an ophthalmologist in London. Bashar’s reserved, even awkward, demeanour contrasted not just with his father’s rock-like persona but also with his uncle Rifaat’s obvious relish for meeting dissent with massive firepower.

During his first decade as president Bashar tinkered with some of the absurdities of Baathist economics. Observers often assumed that these changes would eventually be accompanied by political reforms, but they had failed to realise that modernising the fringes of the economy would simply open paths for a new generation of cronies to practise corruption on a mammoth scale.

When the first embers of rebellion broke out in 2011 (often falsely attributed to the “Arab Spring”), it was difficult to predict how Bashar’s image-makers would rise to the challenge. Many assumed the young president would at least lend an ear to the public’s complaints about their worsening circumstances, but Bashar instead responded with ruthless, Hama-scale repression, this time deployed across the whole country.

After my retirement from the Australian foreign service in 2003, I had decided to further pursue my interest in the archaeology of the Middle East. The first edition of my book about Syria’s extraordinary heritage, Monuments of Syria had hit the shelves just as the initial wave of modest economic reforms was encouraging a new foreign exchange source for the country: tourism. I realised that the best way of combining writing with visiting the region was to lecture to the Australian and British tour groups whose interest had partly been awakened by my writings.

My last visit to Syria, with a group of English enthusiasts, was in April 2011. The embers of revolt were igniting, prompting worried calls to London to see what could be rescued of the program. On earlier tours I’d found that good-quality Syrian guides were an essential ingredient, and on this occasion we had the most outstanding local expert I’d encountered, Ahmad Yassin. His skills enabled me to confine my role to chats on the bus and discussion around the dinner table, where Ahmad also imparted his understanding of Syria’s mix of cultures.

I vividly remember how, on day five of the tour — 30 March 2011 — we set out from Palmyra to take the long motorway corridor up to Aleppo. Ahmad and our driver were naturally keen to listen to Bashar address the nation in response to rising casualties among largely unarmed demonstrators. The widespread hope was that Bashar would defuse the tension and offer something that would lead the nation back from the brink.

He did no such thing. He reeled off the usual Baathist lines interspersed with accusations (not entirely unwarranted) that the rebellion was being fuelled by outside fighters who had fled from the chaos across the Euphrates in Iraq. Ahmad and our driver were totally deflated, and the bus ride finished in silence. I left Syria four days later with my fears for Syria leavened only by happy memories of Ahmad’s commitment to the idea of his country as an assemblage of the numerous cultures and ethnicities we had seen on our tour.

Ahmad’s sense of Syria drew on the positive side of Baathist secular education, which he blended with his own Muslim upbringing while always carefully avoiding contentious claims. As the crisis descended into new levels of nightmare I received reports that his health had declined. He was still in his thirties when he suffered his first stroke; a second took him not long after.

After the tumultuous events of the intervening thirteen years, Bashar al-Assad’s lanky figure had acquired the rigidity of the statue of his father that dominated the motorway to Homs up until the day after Damascus fell. Long detested as a North Korean–style monstrosity, the patriarchal megalith was expertly hacked away at the ankles until it toppled backwards.

Hafez’s son had refused all suggestions (from Arab peers and even from the Russians and Iranians) that it might be time to go. He remained as obdurate as ever until the Russians provided a plane to take him to Moscow “in the most secure way possible,” to borrow the words of Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov.

Of course, the war isn’t over yet. One of the major complications is the relationship between the group that now controls Damascus, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, and the pro-Turkish “Syrian National Army” (formerly the “Free Syrian Army”), which formed the northern flank of the drive to take Aleppo a fortnight ago.

It may be too optimistic to hope that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham will be guided more by Nelson Mandela’s transition model in South Africa than by the chaotic US-led attempt to helicopter a totally new administration into Baghdad in 2003. So far, the installation of a governing structure in Damascus has avoided alienating most elements they had quietly succumbed to the rule of the Assads. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s leader has dropped his nom-de guerre, al-Julani, and reverted to his family name (al-Shaar); in interviews he has invited minority ethnic and confessional groups to believe they have a stake in the success of the new government. But will the former al Qaeda fighters in Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s ranks expect more reward for the years spent isolated in Idlib after they were moved from Aleppo under the “deconfliction” agreement in 2017 sponsored by Russia and Turkey?

It could be quite some time before any “peace dividend” is evident in the eastern regions of Syria where other external players may linger, hoping to cash in their chips. On the central Syria steppe, the countryside between the north–south motorways and the Euphrates basin is peppered with “Islamic State” stay-behind elements whose attacks on oil and gas drilling teams or itinerant Syrian officials climbed to almost 500 this year. The US presence in northeast Syria and a smaller US enclave on the Syrian side of the borders with Jordan and Iraq have done little to tackle these problems. In the northeast sector, Turkish distrust of US collaboration with the largely Kurdish “Syrian Democratic Forces” is likely to complicate any dismantling of this foreign presence.

Finally, in an astonishing display of overkill, the Israel Defence Forces have mounted more than 500 attacks on bases, depots, anchorages and airfields of Syrian regular forces over the past week. They have also reserved their right to wipe out what remains of Syria’s conventional forces, including its entire naval resources, which might have played a part in creating a Syrian government with real authority. Israel’s wilful destruction of possible evidence of chemical weapons has also headed off any attempt to investigate the issue under recognised international mechanisms.

None of the players (internal and external) who have contributed to the tragic meltdown in Syria since 2011 can claim to be without fault, but some can still make amends. Nor can Baathism be assigned all blame for the actions of every group that streamed into the country over the years to end the Assads’ tyranny, some of them so determined to bring down Bashar that they brought even worse disasters. This risk was rarely perceived by outside commentators who publicised the brave battlers as another manifestation of an “Arab Spring” in the hope they would eventually nudge aside the murderous Salafists. It was the latter who soon dominated the ranks of the rebels.

Thirteen years of “civil war” — a term that glosses over the more dynamic contribution of outside players — have robbed Syria of most aspects of a viable state essential to restoring the economy, rebuilding infrastructure and rehousing the millions who have been displaced internally or abroad. An immediate end to the international community’s sanctions would incentivise, not hamper, this restoration process.

Syria sometimes surprises the world with its capacity to survive the worst natural and human-made disasters. As the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham forces took Aleppo this month, work was nearing completion on the minaret of the city’s Great Mosque, which had stood for eight centuries as the lighthouse of the city’s complex history. After it fell in a heap of rubble in April 2013 during the early battle for the old city, observers scoffed at the possibility it could be put back together. As the before and after photos below show, they were wrong. With luck, the minaret can serve again as a symbol of Syria’s regeneration. •

Minaret of the Great Mosque in Aleppo seen in 1984. Ross Burns

Work almost completed on the minaret’s restoration, as seen last month by the Aleppine photographer, Salah al-Maraashi (with his kind permission).

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