Matthew Carr's Blog

Even by the crazed standards that we have become accustomed to in America’s already-existing-dystopia, the events of the last week demonstrated that the lunacy can always be cranked up several notches more than you might think possible. Last Monday, Trump and his sinister wife turned out at the White House for an ‘Easter Bunny Egg Roll’ to which dozens of unsuspecting children were invited.

This might have been an opportunity for Trump to show his human side, if the Mad Emperor had one, and if his country was mired in a savage conflict that he had started for no good reason. And so, after giving his autograph to various children and boasting how much they could sell it for on the Internet, he appeared on the White House balcony, flanked by the Easter Bunny, to rant about Iran.

It was a darkly comical spectacle no satirist could have invented, which managed to be profoundly stupid, vaguely sinister, and completely unhinged at the same time, as Trump snarled, threatened and bragged while the Easter Bunny stared demonically at his audience like a ventriloquist projecting words into Trump’s twisted mouth.

Trump probably isn’t familiar with the humanoid rabbit Frank in Donnie Darko who warns the disturbed teenager that the world is going to end. Nevertheless, he looked equally disturbed and disturbing, as he grimaced alongside to the grinning rabbit, and reiterated his threat to annihilate Iran completely because:

They just don't want to say ‘uncle’. They don't want to cry as the expression goes 'uncle,' but they will. And if they don't, they'll have no bridges. They'll have no power plants. They'll have no anything.

This was the same children’s game that Ronald Reagan once referred to in regard to the Sandinistas, when the CIA were mining and shooting up Nicaraguan harbours, and the Contras were murdering teachers and nurses in rural health clinics. Reagan had a certain aw shucks folksy charm that masked the savagery, and he probably wouldn’t have bragged about blowing up bridges and power plants in front of an audience of children.

But Trump had no qualms whatsoever about threatening to obliterate Iran while the kids played with their Easter eggs on the White House lawn. And the next day, he was at it again, promising that a ‘whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again’ if the Iranian ‘animals’ did not open the Strait of Hormuz.

In 1972, Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were discussing which targets to hit during the Operation Linebacker II bombing campaign of North Vietnam. After going through possible targets, the following exchange occurred:

President: See, the attack in the North that we have in mind, power plants, whatever's left - POL [petroleum], the docks. And, I still think we ought to take the dikes out now. Will that drown people?
Kissinger: About two hundred thousand people.
President: No, no, no, I'd rather use the nuclear bomb. Have you got that, Henry?
Kissinger: That, I think, would just be too much.
President: The nuclear bomb, does that bother you?...I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christsakes

In the end, the US did not blow up the dikes or use a nuclear bomb. But the reasons were not based on any moral calculus. For Nixon and Kissinger, killing ‘about two hundred thousand people’ was an acceptable attrition rate, and the fact that Kissinger regarded a nuclear bomb as ‘just too much’ does not imply any moral objections to what would obviously have been a much higher death toll - the objections were purely political.

But Nixon at least had an advisor who would contradict him, and whose advice he actually listened to. It is difficult to imagine that Trump has anyone telling him that anything might ‘just be too much’ - or that he would listen if they did. And that is why millions of people went to bed on Tuesday night, not knowing whether they would wake up to find the US and Israel carrying out mass atrocities, and Iran unleashing its own low-level devastation on the GCC countries.

In effect, the entire world was entirely at the mercy of a complete lunatic who openly boasted of his willingness to carry out war crimes. And the fact that such a thing was possible represents an extraordinary failure of politics, morality, and humanity, which points to a deeper sickness both inside and outside the United States. In theory, there were people who could have stopped Trump or at least tried to: members of his administration; Republican senators and congressmen and women; generals; world leaders and diplomats.

None of them did a thing, or at least anything that counted. Very few condemned either the monstrous acts Trump threatened to carry out, or the gross language he used to make these threats.

These were the depths to which America and the world descended on Tuesday, 7 April, 2026, while thousands of Iranians gathered at bridges and power plants to form human shields, and waited for the missiles and the B52s. The rest of the world could only hold its breath and wait to see whether the criminal rapist reality tv star would really do something that Kissinger might have regarded as ‘just too much.’

And the next morning - hurrah! - we woke up to find that Trump had decided not to end a civilisation after all. A collective sigh of relief spread across our ailing planet that could be heard in the Artemis II tracker. America and Iran had agreed to a ceasefire and the Mad Emperor had withdrawn his threat, for the time being. Up went the markets. Down went the oil. Thank you, American Madman. Nice Madman. So grateful, Madman. God bless America.

This does not mean that reason had prevailed, let alone morality - both qualities are entirely absent from the Trump administration or his cult. And the most likely outcome is that someone, somehow, had convinced the Mad Emperor that by merely agreeing to accept Iran’s 10-point plan as a basis for negotiations, he could claim a great victory and slither out of the mess he’d made. This was how the propaganda machine played it anyway. As the White House put it:

President Donald J. Trump laid out clear objectives in Operation Epic Fury — and in just 38 days, the greatest fighting force the world has ever known has met those objectives with overwhelming strength and lethal precision.

According to the slavering Christofascist Pete Hegseth: ‘Iran begged for this ceasefire — and we all know it,’ while Liar Barbie told journalists that the US had achieved a victory that ‘the President and our incredible military made happen.’ On and on it went. All that strength and lethal precision - it’s enough to make you go weak at the knees. But as many people outside the cult have pointed out, this victory is as hollow as victories get.

Firstly, none of the original war aims set by Caligula and his henchmen have been met, and bragging about re-opening the Strait of Hormuz does not count because a) the Strait was already open before the war started and b) it is not yet fully open now.

Secondly, Iran has emerged from the war with more leverage than it had when the war started, and - somewhat astonishingly for a country whose government was massacring its own citizens just over three months ago - it has won the propaganda war, and projected itself as a defiant and resilient nation that has skilfully resisted the illegal US-Israeli assault for nearly two months, and shown strategic vision and tactical skill in fighting the war on its terms.

Trump and his minions can brag about American lethality and precision till kingdom come, but none of this was able to prevent Iran from widening the ‘battlefield’ to the point when it was able to turn its weaknesses into strengths. That does not mean that Iran has won the war either, but from the regime’s point of view, survival is a kind of victory, and it has made possible a ceasefire, in which Iranian negotiators are able to make demands, not merely submit to them.

The ceasefire does not mean that the threats that Caligula made last week are null and void. Israel is still carrying out murderous strikes in Lebanon - more than 250 killed and 1,000 injured in ten minutes of mayhem last week - with the clear intention of wrecking any agreement. The negotiations in Islamabad may well break down. Even before they began, JD Vance warned Iran not to ‘play us’ - a laughable warning coming from the country that pretended to negotiate with Iran in February and then attacked it.

On arrival in Islamabad yesterday, the Hillbilly Faust declared: ‘If the Iranians are willing to negotiate in good faith, we are certainly willing to extend an open hand.’ After the last two months, neither the Iranians nor anyone else is likely to believe that this is an administration that ‘acts in good faith.’ And no one should assume that this ceasefire will be extended to a permanent truce. This morning, the two sides left Pakistani without reaching agreement.

We still don’t know what the sticking points were, and now the world is back where it was at the beginning of this week, waiting for Caligula’s next crazed tweet. Yesterday Trump shared a post suggesting that the US might mount its own naval blockade in the Strait of Hormuz in order to ‘out-blockade’ Iran. Today, he announced that the US would begin this blockade and also stop ships that have paid a toll to Iran.

This move is clearly intended to neutralise Iran’s control of the Strait and prevent Iran from benefitting from it financially, but it doesn’t open the Strait, and it’s hard to see how blockading the blockaders will loosen Iran’s choke hold on the petrodollar economy, and the GCC economies in particular. Like Trump’s genocidal threats last week, it smacks of desperation.

Behind the lying, the propaganda and the bombast, even this administration must know that America has not won this war, and Trump is still mad and bad enough to seek an elusive ‘victory’ using the methods that he threatened last week.

Such an outcome that would suit Israel very well. According to the New York Times, (paywalled) Netanyahu played a decisive role in convincing Trump to attack Iran in February, with promises of an easy win and personal glory for the idiot-President.

Netanyahu clearly underestimated Hezbollah as well as Iran, and that is one reason why the IDF continues to wreak havoc on the civilian population of Lebanon, because this is what it always does when it can’t defeat its enemies militarily. Iran has made it clear that Lebanon must be included in the ceasefire, and for the ceasefire to become permanent would mean negotiations with Hezbollah - anathema to Israel and humiliation to its leader.

To avoid this possibility, Netanyahu needs Iran to remain in the war, and the more devastation Israel inflicts on Lebanon, the more likely it is that Iran will continue to fight, and a wavering Trump can be brought back in.

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The problem Netanyahu has, is that that American support for Israel is waning in the long-term across the spectrum, and destroying Iran - assuming that goal is even possible - will not change this dynamic. It is even possible that a vindictive Trump will blame Israel for the bloody fiasco of Operation Epic Fury, and force Israel to comply in Lebanon with whatever is agreed in Islamabad.

None of this can be guaranteed. As things currently stand, almost any outcome is possible. But whatever happens, this war is likely to be a watershed moment in America’s imperial decline, both militarily and economically. Already, the war has shown that military ‘lethality’ does not necessarily translate into viable political or geopolitical outcomes, and that countries using cheaper military technologies can resist the American Behemoth.

The fact that Iran has been selling its oil to China in yuan may also be a sign of things to come, in which other countries move away from the dollar, and even America’s allies turn away from an unstable and unreliable superpower that has no compunctions about plunging the world economy into chaos in order to achieve its aims.

There is no sign that the US government recognises any of this, or knows how to prevent or reverse it. Trump is now seeking a record-breaking $1.5 trillion military budget, at the expense of various social programs, in order to pay for this war and salvage his ‘reputation.’ Today, he tweeted that the talks had broken down because ‘ IRAN IS UNWILLING TO GIVE UP ITS NUCLEAR AMBITIONS!’

Given the previous Witkoff/Kushner negotiations, this is almost certainly a lie, and neither the capitals nor the exclamation marks make that lie any less than a lie. And then there was this:

In many ways, the points that were agreed to are better than us continuing our Military Operations to conclusion, but all of those points don’t matter compared to allowing Nuclear Power to be in the hands of such volatile, difficult, unpredictable people.

Many people will snicker at these words, as countries across the world struggle to cope with the war that Trump, not Iran, unleashed. Governments across the world are having to set emergency budgets, and mitigate the aftershocks of broken or damaged supply chains, and the impact of inflation, rising prices and energy costs. And in Lebanon, entire villages and neighbourhoods are being razed by a country that seems unable to do anything but kill and destroy, and which the wider world appears unwilling and unable to stop.

All this is not just happening, because one volatile, difficult, unpredictable lunatic managed to convince another that he could win some easy glory by bombing a country that neither nor many of his compatriots know much about. It is happening because so few people are willing to do what the pope and the Spanish president Pedro Sánchez have done, and condemn the countries that started an illegal war, and would rather escalate it than recognise their folly.

Until that changes, much of the world will continue to live in Trump’s demented head, hanging on every stupid word and tweet, and every vicious, unhinged threat. And no one really knows where it will end, and only Netanyahu and the Easter Bunny will be laughing.

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Easter - or spring if you prefer - is supposed to be a time of hope, reflection and renewal, but it is difficult to feel anything but horror, anguish and disgust as the Trump-Netanyahu wars continue to set the Middle East ablaze. In his Palm Sunday homily, Pope Leo denounced the ‘atrocious’ conflict waged by leaders who ‘make many prayers’ even though their ‘hands are full of blood.’

This message was clearly aimed at Pope Leo’s countryman, the playmobil crusader and self-styled ‘Secretary of War’ Pete ‘Deus vult’ Hegseth. But neither Hegseth nor his equally depraved master are the kind of men to pay much attention to the spiritual leader of the Catholic Church or any other religious faith. These are men for whom religion is only useful as a lubricant for war and domination, whose Jesus comes ripped, tattooed and armed with an automatic rifle or not at all, and mercy doesn’t even enter the equation.

Anyone who doubts this need only consider last Wednesday’s presidential address to the American people, in which the ‘commander-in-chief’ of the stupidest and most insane war in American history threatened to bomb Iran ‘back into the Stone Ages, where they belong’ whilst also informing his audience that discussions with the enemy ‘are still ongoing.’

These discussions are almost certainly a fabrication, and the message from General Bonespur was unambiguous: America will reduce Iran to ruins unless its leaders come to terms. American wars have reached this stage before, in Japan, Korea and also in Vietnam, where Nixon once attempted to terrify the North Vietnamese into thinking that he was an unstable ‘madman’ who would blow up dikes or use nuclear weapons unless they ended the war.

The Vietnamese were not cowed, and it is doubtful that the Iranians will be either, but with Trump, madness is not a strategy. He really is every bit as mad and as bad as he looks and sounds. In the primitive moral universe that he and his henchmen inhabit, the destruction of Iran’s electricity generators, desalination plants and oil refineries is entirely possible.

Nor is it beyond the bounds of possibility that Trump might use nuclear weapons to snatch ‘victory’ from Iran’s ruins. Strip away the trappings of pseudo-religion, technological prowess and modern political power, and this is a man who is far closer to Neanderthals than the country with a 1,000-year history that he proposes to annihilate.

Even by his own dismal standards, his address was a delirious whirlpool of vainglorious bragging, venomous incoherence, and downright delusion. He accused Iran of carrying out the attack on the USS Cole. It didn’t. He also claimed that Iran carried out the Oct 7, 2023 attacks. It didn’t do that either. He repeated his lie that the assassinated general Qasem Soleimani was the ‘father of the roadside bomb’, and bragged about having him killed.

Nor is there a nano-particle of evidence to support Trump’s boast that but for his 2018 withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) between Iran and the PS5+1 countries:

There would have been no Middle East and no Israel right now, in my opinion — the opinion of a lot of great experts — had I not terminated that terrible deal

‘A lot of great experts’, who might as well have been little green spiders climbing up the walls of the Mad Emperor’s dream palace. And then there was this:

Regime change was not our goal. We never said regime change, but regime change has occurred because of all of their original leaders’ death. They’re all dead. The new group is less radical and much more reasonable.

It is tedious but necessary to point out that Trump did indeed say that regime change was the goal, when he incited the Iranian people to rise up against their government, before deciding to destroy their society instead. And Iran’s continued commitment to asymmetric ‘horizontal escalation’ does not suggest that its current leaders have become less radical and more reasonable than the ones the US and Israel assassinated.

But reality is what the Mad Emperor thinks it is in any given moment, no matter how convoluted or contradictory its premises turn out to be. And so the war has been won, even though it is still going on. And Iran has been ‘decimated’ even though it is still fighting. And America ‘is winning, and now winning bigger than ever before’ even though its inability to win this particular conflict is precisely the reason why Trump is threatening to bomb Iran into the Stone Age.

Behind the liarhorrea and the geopolitical hallucinations, the Emperor and his minions are clearly desperate to get out of the war they swaggered into like drunks in a bar fight, and at least look as if they won it. Hegseth is now sacking generals and chaplains, no doubt because these generals have reservations about what they are being are asked to do. And Trump has threatened to blow up ‘each and every one’ of Iran’s electricity generators as part of his ‘Stone Ages’ strategy.

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The US and Israel have already targeted universities, medical centres, schools, and pharmaceutical manufacturers. Last week it struck the 100-year-old Pasteur Institute - a medical research center in Tehran, and the Daro Bakhsh Pharmaceutical Factory, a medical production hub which produces antibiotics, cardiovascular drugs, and intravenous fluids used in hospitals.

The day after Trump’s Stone Ages speech, the US bombed the Karaj B1 suspension bridge connecting Tehran to Karaj, the largest suspension bridge in the Middle East, in a ‘double tap’ strike that killed eight people and wounded ninety-five. Some of the victims were members of the emergency services who had came to help the injured from the first strike. Others were picnickers who had gathered alongside the river beneath the bridge to celebrate Nature Day - an ancient festival which marks the end of the Persian New Year.

According to tradition, Iranians hold barbecues in the countryside and tie knots in grass to bring good luck and rid themselves of the bad luck of the previous year. That was the day the US struck a bridge which it claimed was being used to transport drone parts and military equipment. Trump immediately bragged that the US had blown up Iran’s ‘biggest bridge’ and threatened more devastation in a capitalised message that King Kong might have typed if he knew how to:

IT IS TIME FOR IRAN TO MAKE A DEAL BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE, AND THERE IS NOTHING LEFT OF WHAT STILL COULD BECOME A GREAT COUNTRY!

We have long since passed the point when such language is shocking or surprising, and Iran has listed eight bridges in the Gulf which it intends to blow up in retaliation. If or when that happens, you can be sure that Iran will be universally condemned. Yet Trump’s threat to blow up Iranian bridges and power plants has received little or no criticism from America’s allies, even the countries that Trump has been insulting for much of the last few weeks.

Criticism has not been entirely absent. Emmanuel Macron has condemned Trump for his lack of seriousness and consistency, and for undermining NATO. Macron has also pointed out that the use of military force to open the Strait of Hormuz is ‘unrealistic’. Keir Starmer has questioned the legality of the war, using the kind of polite language that you might expect a vicar to use in response to a golf club looking to impinge on the village green. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz recently moved from his initially supportive position on the war to condemning Trump for a ‘massive escalation’ of the conflict.

But none of these statesmen have criticised any of the acts I have mentioned above or questioned their legality, even though more than 100 US legal experts have said that US-Israeli strikes might constitute war crimes. None have condemned Trump for blowing up bridges or pharmaceutical factories or threatening to blow up power plants. By contrast, Iran has been consistently criticised for its ‘reckless’ strikes ever since the beginning of the war. On Friday, the day after the US blew up the B1 bridge, Keir Starmer criticised Iran once again for a ‘reckless’ drone attack on a Kuwait oil refinery - a criticism he has also used repeatedly since Iran first retaliated to the US-Israeli assault.

Let’s be clear: such attacks are reckless. Targeting civilian infrastructure is a war crime whoever does it. Many of Iran’s attacks on its neighbours undoubtedly fall within this category, even within its more limited means. But nothing Iran has done has been more reckless than the decision by the US and Israel to attack it in the first place.

Both these countries have near-total air supremacy - although, as recent events have shown, not as absolute as Trump thinks. They also have vastly superior weaponry and firepower, which gives them the ability to strike almost anywhere in Iran at will. Both countries have used this power to carry out strikes on ‘dual use’ infrastructure targets that are more reckless - in their disregard for civilian lives - and more destructive than anything Iran can match.

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Yet even when the ‘international community’ has questioned the legality of the war, it has rarely condemned the methods used to fight it. Only last week, a former Iranian foreign minister’s house in Tehran was bombed, by a strike that killed his wife. It’s difficult to imagine that such acts would be regarded with the same equanimity, if Iran assassinated Trump or carried out a double tap strike on Mar-a-Lago, or bombed Netanyahu or Israel Katz in their homes. You can predict the lexicon in advance: terrorism not war; the law of the jungle; naked gangsterism; rogue pariah state; the civilised world must come together etc, etc.

Yet when it comes to the US and Israel, nothing is forbidden. Assassinations; double tap strikes; the bombing of power plants, desalination plants and civilian infrastructure - all these acts been effortlessly swallowed or ignored by political leaders who routinely invoke rules, laws and values as the indispensable framework for international relations.

The ‘international community’ has been similarly silent or muted in regard to the unfolding devastation of Lebanon. Last month’s joint statement on the Strait of Hormuz by the UK and other governments called on ‘all states to respect international law’, but only Iran was condemned for breaking these laws and ordered to cease its attacks. Similarly, a meeting of UK and European foreign ministers addressed the humanitarian situation in Lebanon and expressed their solidarity with the ‘civilian population impacted by this war both in Lebanon and Israel’ while also declaring ‘The responsibility for this situation lies with Hezbollah.’

Though the signatories called on Israel to ‘avoid a further widening of the conflict including through a ground operation on Lebanese territory’, it did not address the operations that Israel has already carried out. As in Iran, the implication was clear: that everything that has happened in Lebanon - the bombings of civilian neighbourhoods, the destruction of villages, the displacement of 1.8 million people - are Hezbollah’s fault.

Once again, Hezbollah has fired rockets at civilian areas in Israel, which are war crimes. But It is not Hezbollah’s fault that Israel killed displaced people camping in tents in Beirut, massacred entire families, targeted medical facilities and assassinated journalists. Hezbollah did not drive the Shia population out of south Lebanon, and order Druze and Christians in the south to denounce any Shia still remaining in their villages.

Hezbollah did not blow up bridges, with the express aim of occupying Lebanese territory and creating a ‘buffer zone’ up to the Litani River. All this was done by Israel, because this is what Israel does. This destruction is not some unavoidable natural catastrophe. It is a consequence of the kind of war Israel has chosen to fight - the extension into Lebanon of a model already implemented in Gaza.

In Gaza, there were also expressions of ‘concern’ for ‘Palestinian suffering’, and the occasional muted call for Israel to respect civilians. None of this had the slightest impact then, and it is unlikely to have any impact now, because Israeli governments - especially this one - do not listen to polite requests to behave better. There have been some exceptions to this. Pedro Sánchez has been a rare voice in forcefully denouncing both Israel and the United States in this war. Even Georgia Meloni has criticised the US-Israeli war as a ‘dangerous trend’ that is ‘outside the scope of international law.’

But the general response in Europe has been tolerance, silence or guarded criticism. When the Knesset voted to extend the death penalty to Palestinians only, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Italy and the UK expressed their ‘deep concern’ about legislation that would ‘significantly expand the possibilities to impose the death penalty in Israel.’

In fact, these ‘possibilities’ were expanded only to Palestinians, which is why National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir celebrated the law’s passing in parliament with a glass of wine. As the Palestinian-American writer Mariam Bhargouti observed in an op ed for Al Jazeera, the bill followed months of rampant violence in the West Bank in which:

Between January and March, Israeli settlers and soldiers kidnapped children, carried out pogroms, sexually assaulted Palestinian men – even going as far as tying their genitals and parading them around their village – and point-blank executed Palestinian families.

This is what ethnonationalist supremacism looks like when it feels freed from all constraints. And the same state that allows such actions has now declared south Lebanon a Shia-free zone, and is ordering Druze and Christians to ‘force out’ Shia Muslims living in their communities.

None of this is legal or moral, yet few European governments dare question or condemn it. In the case of the US, the reasons are clear. Europe has been living under the American security umbrella for a long time. It relies on American military aid to support Ukraine. And its leaders still hope that Trump may just be a temporary aberration, and that afterwards, everything can return to the ‘predictability’ that Macron spoke of in Japan.

But the EU does not depend on Israel. It has levers of power that it can pull and pressures that it can bring to bear. By not doing any of this, it has invited Israel to become the worst it could possibly be, and Israel has happily accepted the invitation.

The US has also become its worst self, without any invitation. And the failure of its allies to condemn the crimes carried out by either country is not diplomacy, but moral cowardice and collusion. It suggests that these countries have no concerns outside their own economic interests, no principles they are not prepared to put aside in pursuit of these interests, and that their concern for international law and humanitarian values is entirely fraudulent and self-serving.

Such cowardice will not bring this war to an end. It will not reopen the Strait of Hormuz. If the ‘international community’ wants to protect the ‘rules-based order’, it cannot remain silent while the US and Israel break the rules, and then demand that Iran observes them. Israel may like to see Iran destroyed as a viable state, but that outcome is not in anybody else’s interest.

At a time when the US, Israel and Iran are all blowing up or threatening to blow up bridges, it is worth remembering the words of the Bosnian writer Ivo Andrić:

From everything that man erects and builds in his urge for living nothing is in my eyes better and more valuable than bridges. They are more important than houses, more sacred than shrines. Belonging to everyone and being equal to everyone, useful, always built with a sense, on the spot where most human needs are crossing, they are more durable than other buildings and they do not serve anything secret or bad.

The ability of our species to build bridges once helped isolated human societies find their way out of the Stone Age to which the most dangerous man on earth now threatens to ‘return’ Iran. Israel is reportedly waiting on the order from Trump to begin bombing Iran’s electricity generators. Yesterday, the Mad Emperor tweeted that ‘all hell will reign [sic)]down on them. Glory be to GOD’ if Iran fails to open the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours and ‘make a deal.’

Iran has shown no sign of complying. Responding to Trump’s message on X, Mohamed el-Bareidi, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) pleaded with the Gulf states to ‘do everything in your power before this madman turns the region into a ball of fire.’

This is not only the responsibility of the GCC governments. Too many of America’s nominal allies have refused to call out the madman who now threatens to send 90 million people back to the Stone Age. One day Trump will be gone, but his stench will linger. And the statesmen and stateswomen who dared not condemn the US and its equally out-of-control sidekick will find themselves in a world that is likely to be more lawless, more dangerous and more violent as a result of their silence.

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It's hard to keep track of you falling through the sky
We're half awake in a fake empire
We're half awake in a fake empire

The National

I recently came across a MAGA post on Facebook praising Trump, which went on about how marvellous the Mad Emperor’s second presidency was, and how it was giving his followers everything they could have hoped for. There was no detail about what had actually been achieved, apart from a celebratory quote from Gladiator: ‘Are you not entertained?’

Whoever wrote that post did not seem to realise that this line was not intended to be celebratory. When Russell Crowe’s Maximus hurls it contemptuously at the baying spectators in the Colosseum who have made him a hero, he is actually expressing contempt at their voyeuristic bloodlust. But Trump’s anonymous fan nevertheless summed up a hideous truth at the heart of his hideous movement: that many of those who voted for him have no real interest in policy or even politics per se - they are here to be entertained.

This is not family entertainment. It’s a theatre of cruelty based on sadism and thuggish displays of (white) American power. It expresses itself through big and small things: videos of ICE goon squads terrorising neighbourhoods and dragging weeping immigrants away from their children; performative bullying of allies and weaker countries; insults directed at female journalists; clips of unarmed Venezuelan ‘drug dealers’ being murdered on the high seas, ajd the more recent mash-up videos showing the US military blowing up Iranian targets to a rock n’ roll soundtrack.

It’s the kind of entertainment that the Emperor Commodus might once provided, if he had had Twitter and Instagram at his disposal, and some coked-up teenager in a basement to assemble the footage and count the likes and retweets. The sneering brutishness and contempt that oozes from Trump, Vance, Hegseth, Bovino, Noem et al are all part of the performance.

This is how tough we are, they proclaim. Look how America does what it likes. Look at us demanding Greenland. Look at these prisoners behind bars. Look at those narcos clinging to their boats as we destroy them. Look at Elon Musk’s incel edgelords terrorising unelected bureaucrats. Look at our bombs. This is who we are. This is Team America.

Sit back, get out the popcorn and watch our allies cringe, and our enemies crying and dying.

Of course there must be voters who didn’t sign up for this, who genuinely hoped that Trump would bring jobs back to America, revitalise their towns and communities, get ‘big government’ off their backs, and keep America out of forever wars. Maybe some of them actually read Project 2025 and agreed with it. But millions of Americans voted for Trump not in spite of his manifold defects, but because of them, and they did this because they embraced the toxic vision of greatness that he promised them, not as policy, but as spectacle.

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In doing so, these voters, like the Republican Party, embraced the madness, narcissism, and stupidity of a man who made politics fun again by hurting the people they wanted to hurt: liberals, civil servants, leftists, Muslims, minorities, immigrants and any foreigners who got in the way of whatever America wanted to do.

Rejecting the tedious routines of politics-as-usual, they voted for a corrupt, incompetent criminal who is dragging the world towards disaster even as he covers their country in corruption, shame and dishonour. This jaw-dropping embrace of depravity is an expression of political decadence and political nihilism, and a failure of civic education.

It requires not only the wilful abandonment of any notion of democratic politics as an instrument for the common good, but the fervent embrace of fakery, lies and make believe, and the suspension of critical faculties. Consider this three-way conversation, which took place in Memphis, last week, between Trump, his sinister incubus Stephen Miller, and ‘FBI director’ Kash Patel:

MILLER: What President Trump has done on border security and public safety is a national miracle that will be studied not only for generations, but for centuries to come.

TRUMP: So, Kash, see if you can top that. I don’t know, that is tough, Kash.

PATEL: You know Mr. President as I look around this venue... I’m reminded again why we have the greatest warriors on God’s green Earth — the men and women serving in uniform, the men and women serving and wearing the badge and law enforcement, our police, our sheriffs around the state of Tennessee…But what we didn’t have was you. We didn’t have a commander in chief who backed the blue, who resourced the blue, who funded the military, who did whatever it takes to safeguard every single life.

So while we’re out there fighting for the dreams of our children, just know Mr. President how many millions of dreams like mine are going to be lived thanks to your brilliant leadership.

There was a time when a tyrant would have needed the threat of gulags, death or imprisonment to elicit such gross displays of self-abasement. But in MAGA’s would-be dictatorship, ludicrous paeans to the leader are just another expression of the fantasy of greatness on which the entire movement is based.

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This is a movement that oozes fakery; where fake-pastors pray with the Trump fake-Jesus and fake-spiritual advisors speak in fake-tongues; where spandex-clad widows perform public displays of fake-grief while selling merch; where the fake-first lady is paid $30 million to make a fake-documentary glorifying her fake-life; where tens of thousands fall in love with the fake-America First Soldier ‘Jessica Foster’ photographed with Trump, who turns out to be just another product of AI slop.

All this fakery requires a credulous audience that wants to believe the fantasy of power and dominance that Trump is offering them, and it also requires spineless minions and sycophants who are willing to help him disseminate the fantasy. Step up House Speaker Mike Johnson, one of the Republican Party’s many moral midgets, who has just created a new ‘América First’ award, which he has awarded to…drum roll…Donald J. Trump!

‘The president has done so much for the American people and we want to honour him, in a small way, some token of our appreciation for his leadership,’ gushed Johnson, without even the hint of shame at his self-abasement. The award consisted of an eagle statuette, or as Johnson put it, ‘this beautiful golden statue here - appropriate for the new golden era in America’, which can now take its place alongside his FIFA peace prize.

This is the kind of behaviour that might have made Stalin or Kim Jong Un blush, but Trump’s cohorts have long since abandoned any notions of dignity, honour or self-respect. When the Mad Emperor tells the US hockey team that America is ‘winning so much that we really don’t know what to do with it,’ they will nod their servile heads like toy dogs in a car.

The problem that Trump, his minions and his cult have - and it’s a problem that is likely to increase in the coming years - is that their fake world is part of a real world that cannot be changed by golden statues, fake peace prizes, Instagram snuff videos, and capitalised tweets on Truth Social - it can only be concealed, at least for a while.

War has a particular ability to unravel delusions of grandeur, and the current conflict is no exception. When Trump launched this one on bleary-eyed whim, he clearly believed that it would be a Venezuela-style triumph. Just knock off the Supreme Leader, a few days of bombing, and the ragheads would come begging for a ‘deal’ with him. Maybe they would make him Shah.

Instead, Iran defied expectations and pursued a strategy of ‘horizontal escalation’ that has drawn the US to bring of yet another ‘quagmire’, whilst also setting the Middle East on fire, tanking the world economy, and prising apart the geopolitical architecture on which 21st century capitalism is based. Supply chains, movements of essential commodities, petrodollars, stocks, shares and financial markets - all of it has been knocked sideways by Trump’s failure to turn his fantasy vision of American power into decisive victory.

Wiser statesmen might have anticipated these outcomes, but Trump and his minions are neither wise nor statesmanlike: they are yes-men and yes-women bound, like the crew of the Pequod, to the Mad Emperor’s whims, even as he harpoons himself. No point in going to the State Department in search of advice and expertise - these imbeciles gutted it. And don’t property moguls know more about foreign policy than diplomats or nuclear experts, anyway? Aren’t they the smartest guys in any room?

Faced with outcomes that they had not planned for or even considered, they have alternately bragged, threatened, engaged in bloodthirsty celebrations of death and destruction, blamed and alienated American allies, and gaped at the catastrophe they unleashed, with the stupefied excitement of children who set fire to their parents shed only to discover it contained kerosene and camping gas.

In the last week alone, Trump backed off his threat to ‘obliterate’ Iran’s energy infrastructure, while also allowing time for anonymous insiders to make millions betting on oil shares before he made that announcement. Trump then claimed that Iran was desperate to make a ‘deal’, even though Iran insisted that it was not negotiating with the US. He then practically begged the wider world to open the Strait of Hormuz and solve a crisis he was entirely responsible for, while also insulting NATO and other allies for not joining his war.

He also suggested that he might co-govern Iran along with whoever the Supreme Leader is. Otherwise, he promised, America would continue to ‘bomb our little hearts out.’ Meanwhile, Trump publicly blamed Pete Hegseth for convincing for him to go to war, having previously blamed his son-in-law.

According to Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Trump’s hapless envoys, Kushner and Witkoff ignored the genuine concessions that Iran had made during last month’s negotiations, because they ‘didn’t understand what they were being offered…they ignored it and decided to go ahead and strike anyway.’

Let’s pause it there for a moment: two negotiators representing the world’s only superpower in the most delicate and dangerous matters of war and peace had failed to understand the proposals in front of them. Whatever else can be said about such an outcome, one thing is clear: nations do not become great again in the hands of men like these. On the contrary, watching this cascade of geopolitical gibberish and outright lies is like watching foreign policy put together with crayons and playdough in a primary school project.

It may that Trump’s base find these antics as entertaining as one of Hegseth’s rock n’ roll snuff videos. But there are millions of people across the world who even before this latest calamity, have watched the last thirteen months unfold with amazement, horror, dismay, alarm and disbelief. The MAGA movement may not care what the world thinks about America, but the bombs, the bluster, and the pseudo-victories cannot conceal the unmistakable stench of a flailing superpower that is rotting from the head down.

Of course, America is still the world’s dominant military power. It can still blow things up anywhere in the world. But this power is not much use, if it cannot be translated into long term strategic dominance. And fantasies of American greatness cannot conceal the chasm that is opening up beneath this administration’s feet as the war spins out of control.

Because even superpowers can make mistakes that are so egregious and so damaging that they that cannot be undone by hubris, propaganda and personality cults. Sooner or later the consequences of those mistakes will make themselves clear, and even the most willing fantasists are forced to consider the horror they have unleashed, if only out of self-interest.

Millions of people are already paying the price for the colossal folly that is now unfolding, and not just in Iran and Lebanon. As countries across the world struggle to cope with the economic fallout of the war, and with rising food, fuel and energy costs, they will not look fondly on the countries that caused the conflict, and they will not want to honour America’s leaders with golden statues.

Some politicians will continue to grovel, like the ridiculous NATO General Secretary Mark Rutte, who went to Washington last week and claimed that Trump was at war with Iran ‘to make the whole world safer’ - self-delusion is not unique to Trump’s American followers.

But even politicians who once bragged about their closeness to Trump have fallen silent. And there is evidence - not yet conclusive - to suggest that proximity to Trump may not help his admirers and would-be emulators win elections. It also remains to be seen how America’s allies across the world react in future when the war comes to an end, and they seek to come to terms with the disastrous consequences of a conflict that was forced upon them.

Last week, it was reported that Trump was demanding $5 trillion from the Gulf States to continue the war, and $2.5 trillion to stop it. He also took time to boast that Muhammad bin Salman was now ‘kissing my ass.’

How will these states respond to this shakedown? Why would they look for security to a country that has made them insecure, and also harmed their financial and economic interests? Who would trust the country that pretended to negotiate and then attacked the country it was negotiating with? Can Europe really look to America’s ‘moral leadership’ after these multiple failures? It seems far more likely that the war will reduce America’s political influence, rather than strengthen it.

All this is a steep price to pay, just to be entertained. And many of Trump’s voters may now be paying it out of their own wallets - the only thing many of them seem to care about - instead of gloating over other people’s suffering on X or Instagram.

The hope - insofar as there is any right now - is that millions of Americans are not entertained, and that they will find a way to take this disgusting movement and its Mad Emperor down, and build a better country from the moral ruins of America’s fake empire.

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Until 28 February this year, not many people outside Iran had heard of the city of Minab, the capital of Hormozgan province in southern Iran. Located just 15 miles from the Gulf of Oman near the Strait of Hormuz, the city had a population of just over 70,000, according to the 2016 Iranian census. It has a warm, humid climate with above average rainfall, which once made it a cooler summer retreat for merchants from the nearby port-city of Bandar Abbas, Iran’s main maritime outlet in the Persian Gulf.

Minab is famous for its dates, mangoes, bananas and lemons. One nineteenth century British visitor called it ‘the sylvan retreat of the merchants of the Bandar’ which ‘during the date harvest draws to itself all the able-bodied men of the country for a hundred miles around.’ On Thursdays, agricultural produce is sold at Minab’s famous market, along with handicrafts and embroidery.

Amongst Minab’s other attractions, Trip Advisor lists the Museum and Gallery established by the Iranian environmental artist Dr Ahmad Nadalian on Qeshm Island, where Nadalian transformed a derelict house into a museum. In addition to a permanent exhibition of his own collection, Nadalian also runs a project teaching local women to paint, in order to help them make a living and become artists themselves.

There isn’t much information about Dr Nadalian available on the web right now, because of Iran’s Internet shutdown, but there are many photos here of his museum and also of Hormuz and Qeshm Islands.

These photos depict a lost world - at least for now - of painting, food, markets, beauty and colour, of real human communities, each with their own histories, local traditions, and interactions with the world. For Minab, that world came to an end on 28 February, when a missile hit the city’s Shajareh Taybeh (‘the good tree’ in Arabic) elementary school, at 10.45 in the morning, while classes were in session. The strike collapsed the roof of the building. When the survivors - children and teaching staff - stumbled out into the courtyard, another missile struck them - as ‘double tap’ strikes are intended to.

Five more missiles landed in and around the school and the neighbouring buildings belonging to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). By mid-morning, the first reports had begun to appear on social media, accusing the US of carrying out these attacks.

These accusations were immediately denied, as they always are. Pete ‘death and destruction’ Hegseth managed to stop smirking for long enough to deny that the US ‘targeted civilians.’ Trump claimed that Iran’s ‘inaccurate’ weapons were responsible. When evidence emerged that the school had in fact been hit with an American Tomahawk missile, Trump then claimed that Iran has Tomahawks, which it doesn’t.

There was no explanation as to why Iran would have fired a missile at an Iranian school, but photographs left no doubt about the result:

Casualty figures in these strikes have varied, from the low hundreds to the most recent figure of at least 175 children and staff. Though no one has accepted responsibility, the most likely explanation for the attack is that it was a targeting mistake by the US military, directed at what was believed to be IRGC Naval facilities. The school was originally opened in 2004 for the children of IRGC personnel, before it was transferred to the Ministry of Education in 2013 and opened to local children.

Images on Google Earth show the school (now listed as ‘temporarily closed’), its playgrounds and sports field, clearly separated from the IRGC compound by a perimeter wall. According to a preliminary military investigation reported by the New York Times (paywalled), US Central Command created target coordinates using outdated data provided by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which resulted in what the Times called ‘one of the most devastating single military errors in recent decades.’

These targets are, at least in theory, subject to a vetting process, which includes satellite imagery provided by the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (GIA). It has yet to be determined why this process failed in this case, and whether the vetting was less rigorous than it should have been.

If the targets were based on outdated information, it is fair to assume that there would still have been some record that the building had once been a school, and there certainly wouldn’t have been any information to the contrary. And if there was any suspicion that it had been a school at some point, then it is equally logical to expect that the GIA would have attempted to determine whether it still was.

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Given the number of sites that were struck that day, it may be that the military was in such a hurry to blow up as many things as possible that it simply cut corners in its choice of targets. It might even be that these targets were chosen by AI. Of course no one in authority is ever likely to admit to such sloppiness, and the truth will almost certainly vanish into the fog of war, and join the long list of ‘collateral damage’ tragedies in American wars, in which responsibility and accountability become so amorphous that it produces only a collective institutional ‘war is hell’ shrug.

But to call it a tragedy of war does not do justice to the victims, or to the magnitude of this gratuitous slaughter. Because the fact remains that even if the military did not deliberately intend to kill schoolchildren, those children would have been alive had the US not launched a war without any warning that might have given schools and other civilian institutions within the potential line of fire, time to close down and get out of harm’s way.

No such warning was given, because Operation Epic Fury was built on surprise and deception, much like the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, which Trump moronically joked about to the unamused Japanese prime minister last week. In other words, on or off target, the destruction of the Shajareh Taybeh school was a direct consequence of that aggression.

Some commentators - no surprises to find Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton among them - have suggested that Iran was at fault for placing a school so close to a naval facility. But according to one IRGC source interviewed by the excellent Slow News:

The IRGC Navy facility was an administrative office. It was not a place where troops gathered in large numbers, It was not a storage site for weapons or equipment. The school building was used as a school from the day it opened. Ownership changed hands, but its purpose never did. It was never used for any military function. There was absolutely nothing anywhere that school worth striking with a missile.

The local sources quoted by Slow News suggest that the Iranian authorities set to maximise the tragedy for political effect, by claiming that it was a girls school, when it appears to have been a mixed school, with boys on the ground floor and girls on the second. The Telegraph (paywalled, but actually doing journalism for once) has also shown how Iran tried to transform the funerals of these children into a spectacle of martyrdom and a display of support for the regime, while producing scenes like these:

Whatever use the regime sought to make of these deaths, the massacre was not invented, nor is the trauma visited on the families. And this was done with one of the most emblematic weapons in America’s high-tech arsenal. The Tomahawk is a long-range, all-weather subsonic cruise missile - the kind you often see being fired from a ship in those ‘shock and awe’ news clips with which US wars often begin. Its latest Block IV/V iterations can fly distances of up to 1,000 to 1,500 miles and change targets in-flight, and they can land within five meters of their intended targets.

The US Navy describes the Tomahawk as a ‘subsonic cruise missile designed for precision strikes against high-value or heavily-defended targets.’ Each of these missiles costs $2.5 million to make, and 160 of them were fired in the first 100 hours of the war. This is a very big investment in death and destruction, and the beauty of these weapons, from the point of view of those who make them, is that the government is always willing to pay for more of them.

Tomahawks are made by Raytheon (RTX), which has already signed a procurement contract with the US government. So as soon as these weapons were used, the replenishment and procurement architecture clicks into gear and production is scaled up.

In February this year, RTX signed a seven-year agreement with Pentagon to increase Tomahawk production to over 1,000 units annually - a ten-fold increase from previous contracts. This production process also involves sub-tier companies that make specific parts for the missiles, such as turbofan engines, warheads, software and guidance and navigation systems.

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According to the Gov Facts website, the replacement of 500 Tomahawks translates into a $1.25 billion order, which is filled by Raytheon at its Tucson headquarters, and an array of sub-tier companies that provide different components. Given the maniacal ambitions of America’s current commander-in-chief and the speed with which weapons are being used up, this war is phenomenally good business.

The more missiles that get used, the more money these companies make, and the more money their shareholders make. The Anadolu news agency has estimated the cost of the first 24 hours of Operation Epic Fury at $779 million and the cost of the first week of war at $5 billion. In 2023, the annual US AID budget was $63 billion - $4 billion of which was earmarked for children’s programs around the world.

Thanks to the Trump/DOGE cuts, all that has gone. Yet the US government was still able to spend more than $4 million to fire the missiles that killed 175 children and blew up a few offices in less than five minutes.

Netanyahu and others have called Operation Epic Fury a ‘war of civilisation’, in order to elevate to some higher moral plane. But it is worth asking who the barbarians are, when the richest country in the world fires missiles from halfway across the world at targets it knows nothing about, because its sleazy, ignorant president wants some positive headlines.

When we think of barbarians, we tend to imagine people who look like extras from Vikings or Gladiator, or, in this case, as bearded ‘mullahs’ supposedly intent on religiously-driven collective suicide. But the destruction of the Sharjareh Taybeh school is a product of a different kind of barbarism. There are no uncouth chieftains and bearded warriors in bear skins, brandishing swords and spears in some Romanian forest. The men and women who operate America’s military machine may wear suits or uniforms, sit at boardroom meetings or turn up each day to work their shifts.

They may be ripped - the way grotesque monstrosity Pete Hegseth insists American ‘warriors’ should be. Or they may be a little flabby and in need of the gym, as they stare at computer screens and push a button or manipulate a joystick, to send a missile flying through space toward a target they know and care nothing about.

The dictionary defines barbarism as ‘the condition of having no civilising influences or refined culture; ignorance or crudity. Savage violence or cruelty.’ There is no civilising influence or refined culture in this administration, but a great deal of ignorance, crudity, savage violence and cruelty.

And barbarism is built into this push-button, software-generated, first person shooter war-from-a-distance, where death and destruction maximise shareholder value for the corporations that make such destruction possible. No sooner have the missiles have hit their targets - boom! - than procurement architecture is set in motion - kerching! - and the whole process is rinsed and repeated, until America gets whatever it has set out to get.

But now this military machine is in the hands of the most incompetent, sadistic and strategically vacant leaders America has ever seen, who have chosen to fight a war they did not need to fight. And as much as Trump and his depraved minions lie about the imminent threat Iran posed to the United States, the destruction of the Shajareh Taybeh elementary school tells a different story: of a country that, regardless of its awful regime or its asymmetric gains, is at the mercy of the world’s only military superpower and its murderous accomplice.

They may not be Tamburlaine or Attila the Hun, but those who unleash war for no good reason, and prefer to pay for bombs that kill children, rather than programs and projects that might save them, have lost the right to call themselves civilised.

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It seems a long time ago now, but it’s little more than four months since drought-stricken Tehran was in danger of running out of water. In October, the Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian announced a proposal to re-locate the entire population of Tehran to the south of the country - an impossible logistical task in a water-stressed country.

At the beginning of December, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists warned that a combination of negative environmental factors had brought the Iranian capital to the brink of ‘Day Zero’ when the water taps would run dry. That month, the autumn rains brought the city some relief. But now the US-Israeli airstrikes are pushing the Iranian capital closer to the brink of a catastrophe it may not be able to come back from.

Last Sunday, in one of the most shocking acts of this atrocious war, Israel bombed fuel depots and oil refineries in and around Tehran, creating a toxic cloud of ‘black rain’ that stained cars, balconies and pavements with acidic slime. Oil and petroleum also found its way into the city’s gutters, igniting rivulets of burning fuel.

As a result, an urban population of just under 10 million people was exposed to a cocktail of hydrocarbons and carcinogenic toxic pollutants that the World Health Organization (WHO) warned has the potential to cause chemical burns and lung damage. The WHO told residents to stay indoors, to avoid rain contacting skin, but many people don’t have that choice, such as the school teacher who told Time:

Today I was in the car for just 15 minutes, breathing this air. I don’t even know what it is, and now I have a headache. The skin on my face, especially my lips, is sore and raw. It burns and feels like diluted tear gas is in the air. It irritates my eyes, and I keep needing to clear my throat.

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This acidic rain also has the potential to leach into waterways, reservoirs and aquifers, creating a health and environmental crisis that will linger long after this war ends. Whoever ordered these strikes must have known what their consequences would be, yet they believed that poisoning the population of a city almost as large as London, and potentially destroying its water supply, was a price worth paying..

On 10 March Netanyahu had the temerity to tell the ‘People of Iran’ on X that ‘we are fighting a historic war for liberty.’ Netanyahu described the war as a ‘once in a lifetime opportunity to overthrow the Ayatollah regime and gain your freedom’, and boasted that Israeli and the United States were ‘hitting the tyrants of Tehran harder than ever.’

Beyond the propaganda, it is by no means clear that the US-Israeli strikes are making any distinctions between the regime and the population. On Friday, the Guardian quoted a 66-year-old retired professor in Tehran who described how:

The buildings are shaking … There’s rubble everywhere and people are still risking their lives to go to work. Please stop this. I am begging the world to act now before the entire city is destroyed. I can’t leave the city, and have sick family members. Even those who want to flee, can’t. They are not giving us enough petrol to even drive far enough. We are trapped.

In a powerful piece written for the Ajam Media Collective, Nazanin Shahrokni, Associate Professor of International Studies at Canada’s Simon Fraser UniversIy, evoked the city of her youth, in which her friends and family were trapped:

The city that some members of the diaspora had long called ‘a ruin already’ …was never rubble. It was suffocating at times, chaotic, uneven, but stubbornly alive—restless, inventive, full of motion and possibility. War has a way of fulfilling fantasies of destruction that language alone never could. The bombs are doing what rhetoric once claimed. Turning neighborhoods into the ruins others had already imagined.

Writing for the New York Times on 2 March, Farnaz Fassihi described how these ruins were being created:

Rows of apartments near collapse. Block after block littered with mangled metal, shards of glass and shreds of paper. A hospital room with its windows blown out, bricks and debris covering the bed.

Last Monday, three mid-rise apartment buildings in Resalat Square in eastern Tehran were bombed in successive strikes. Dropsite News described the aftermath:

The building facades had been blown away. Balconies had collapsed. Windows shattered. Rubble was everywhere. Inside, where families lay buried under the broken concrete, screams began to fill the air. At least 40 people were killed, according to official reports. Most of the victims were civilians who had been inside their homes when strike hit.

The same is happening all over Iran, in more than 15,000 strikes whose targets include schools, hospitals, shops, businesses, sports stadiums and historic buildings. At least 1,348 Iranian civilians have been killed, over 17,000 injured, and 3.2 million people have been internally displaced. UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Tehran, Khorramabad, and Isfahan have also been damaged by the defenders of civilization.

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In Lebanon, the destruction has been equally apocalyptic. More than 800 Lebanese have been killed, including entire generations. Towns and urban neighbourhoods have been obliterated, and an astounding 800,000 displaced. On Wednesday, Israel carried out a double tap strike, which killed eight displaced people who had been sleeping in tents on the seafront. On Friday night, Israel killed 12 medical staff in southern Lebanon. For the umpteenth time, Israel has reduced whole swathes of southern Beirut to rubble:

The Lebanese Health Minister Rakam Nassereddine accompanied a request to the international community to send surgical kits and and first aid kits, whilst adding:

The main call is to stop attacking civilians and to stop attacking the medical services, medical sector and ambulances.

Such appeals are likely to fall on deaf ears, just as they did when Gazans made them. Iran and Hezbollah have also attacked civilian targets in the Gulf and in Israel - there are no good guys here. But there are aggressors. Israel and the United States launched this war of choice, and both countries are able and willing to inflict levels of devastation beyond anything Iran’s asymmetrical warfare can match.

Both countries have air superiority, and they also have well-established tactics and strategies for using it, and this is why the destruction we are witnessing in Iran and Lebanon seems horribly familiar. If you think that we have been here before, it’s because we have, many times.

Urbicide

In 1996 the writer and political Marshall Berman coined the term ‘urbicide’ to describe the urban development strategies that wrecked the South Bronx in the 1960s and 70s. In military terms, the concept of ‘killing cities’ can be traced back to the Old Testament, to the devastation of Carthage in the Third Punic War, to medieval sieges, to the destruction of cities during World War II, where US bombing strategists in Utah prepared for the bombing of German cities by recreating mock-urban targets in which even the precise curtains and toys used in German homes were chosen to see how quickly incendiary devices could burn them.

More recently, geographers such as Stephen Graham and Derek Gregory have analysed the ways in which cities became the paradigmatic battlefields of the ‘war on terror’. This ‘new military urbanism’, as Graham called it, envisioned the ‘systematic devastation of technology and infrastructure’, as a ‘form of demodernization’ in which bombs and missiles reduced entire cities to an earlier stage of economic and technological development.

Beginning in the 1999 Kosovo war, cities were targeted in successive conflicts in order to bring about or at least threaten this outcome. Attacks on vital urban systems such as transportation networks, medical facilities, water treatment plants and the electrical grid, effectively presented adversaries with a choice: surrender or be bombed back into the ‘Stone Age.’

During the two US sieges of Fallujah in 2004, soldiers fired on ambulances and hospitals and burned insurgents to death with white phosphorus, in order to conquer the city. In December that year, the New York Times Erik Eckholm visited Fallujah and found ‘a desolate world of skeletal buildings, tank-blasted homes, weeping power lines and some palm trees.’ For years doctors in Falkujah have reported high numbers of malformed babies, which they claim are due to the weapons used by the US military in the battles of 2004.

Similar methods were used during the assault on Ramadi in 2006, where US forces demolished eight city blocks and bombed the power station, water treatment facilities and water pipes. Israel has also targeted urban infrastructure and vital life support systems in its wars in Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank.

Once again, such devastation is not unique to Israel or the United States. The Russian assault on Grozny; the Syrian-Russian bombings of Aleppo and other rebel-held cities during the Syrian civil wars; the ongoing Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities - in all these cases, armies have employed their own destructive variants on ‘military urbanism.’

Nevertheless, the US military is unique, in its global focus on the city as the key strategic challenge of the twenty-first century and the most likely obstacle to its megalomaniacal goal of ‘Full Spectrum Dominance.’ This was a departure from the Cold War, when American military planning oscillated between mutual assured destruction scenarios of nuclear warfare and rural counterinsurgency.

With the advent of the ‘war on terror’, and the Iraq insurgency, US military planners returned repeatedly to the idea of the city - particularly the ‘feral cities’ of the Third World and Middle East - as decisive battlegrounds in the wars they imagined fighting. From drug cartels in Mexico City to terrorist-held neighbourhoods in Iraq, the Pentagon has repeatedy depicted the world’s cities as the worst places on earth, and rehearsed how to use air power to dismantle them, and how to fight inside them.

To some extent, these objectives were shared by the Israeli military, which has its own traditions of urban war fighting in successive wars in Gaza and Lebanon. In 2008, General Gadi Eizenkot articulated what became known as the Dahiyeh Doctrine, following the Israel devastation of Beirut’s Dahiyeh neighbourhood during the 2006 Lebanon war. Eizenkot saw Dahiyeh as a template for future operations, in which Israel would ‘wield disproportionate power and cause immense damage and destruction’ in response to any Shi’ite village from which shots were fired at Israeli troops.

This doctrine was not entirely new. Collective punishment - including the destruction of homes, towns and villages - had been built into the Israeli counterinsurgency model for decades. Artillery and aerial bombardment has long been seen by the IDF as a strategic weapon, to turn civilian populations against the armed organisations in their midst.

The Dahiyeh Doctrine differed from its previous incarnations its explicit embrace of limitless destruction as an instrument of persuasion and dissuasion, with the aim of ‘inflicting damage and meting out punishment to an extent that will demand long and expensive reconstruction processes.’

There was also another dimension to this devastation. According to the Israeli sociologist Yagil Levy - a former IDF officer who has studied the evolution of the Israeli armed forces - the IDF prioritised a new military model following its withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, based on the ‘transfer of risk from soldiers to enemy civilians.’ This ‘transfer’ entailed tactics such as:

an aggressive fire policy that includes aerial strikes authorizing collateral damage—namely, the killing of civilians—on an unprecedented scale; extensive use of artillery fire and the systematic demolition of buildings at the entry points to populated areas; the creation of ‘sterile killing zones’ in which any man entering a defined space is deemed a legitimate target; rules of engagement that leave little room for doubt or discretion…. The result has been an extremely heavy civilian death toll in Gaza.

If this war continues, there will be an extremely heavy civilian toll in Iran and in Lebanon. And it is this kind of thinking, not the depraved and flippant bloodlust of Pete Deathshead (no typo) or his mad, stupid emperor, that now threatens to destroy Beirut and Tehran. As Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz warned last week:

The Lebanese government, which misled and did not fulfill its commitment to disarm Hezbollah, will pay increasing prices through damage to infrastructure and the loss of territory, until the central commitment of disarming Hezbollah is fulfilled.

This is not just a threat of destruction and territorial conquest; it is incitement to civil war, and there are clearly those in Israel and the United States who would like to see either outcome in Iran. Surprised by the resilience of the leadership they thought they had decapitated, there are no limits to what these ‘liberators’ are prepared to do.

What is astonishing is how normalised this has become. Many commentators have criticised the ‘chaos’ of Trump’s war, its lack of strategy and an ‘off-ramp’, while tempering their mild criticisms with headshaking condemnations of Iran and its ‘loathsome’, ‘terrorist’ regime, and reminders that it cannot be allowed to threaten Israel’s right to exist etc, etc.

Few point out that it is Israel, not Iran, that has nuclear weapons, as does the United States, and that Iran would be annihilated within minutes if it had a nuclear bomb and dared to use it. Few ask why Trump wrecked the agreement that was already in place in 2018.

A number of governments have criticised Iran’s ‘reckless’ attacks on its neighbours. Few have commented on the recklessness of blowing up oil refineries and desalination plants in Iran. Or the destruction of homes and entire communities in Lebanon. It’s easy to be revolted when the likes of Deathshead and Lindsey Graham exult in America’s capacity for death and destruction, or when Trump promises to blow up Kharg Island ‘just for fun.’

Such men are the scrapings of humanity. But the sickness of America’s current crop of leaders does not explain why Iranians are trapped between a regime that kills them if they protest and two countries that will continue to bomb them if they don’t. Gordon Brown wrote last week that the US strikes on an elementary school in Minad had ‘shaken the conscience of the world.’

The truth is that ‘the world’ - or at least most of the governments who run the world - has no conscience, as far as Israel and the United States are concerned. And this is why every US-Israeli war feels like Groundhog Day. As Gaza has already shown, only the level of devastation changes, and even when it turns toward total annihilation, too many governments are more alarmed by those who protest such devastation than they are by the destruction itself.

This is why black rain fell on Tehran last week. It is why Lebanon is being torn to pieces. And until ‘the world’ calls out this violence for the horror that it is, and treats its perpetrators with the same indignation normally reserved for ‘rogue states’, the bombs will continue to fall, regardless of who is in the White House.

Because as long as we live in a world in which a handful of powerful states who happen to be ‘our’ allies are allowed to reserve for themselves the right to destroy cities in order to save them, as one US officer said of Hue during the Vietnam war, there will be no peace and no justice.

And cities - even cities of 10 million people - will continue to be bombed into the Stone Age by those who, to paraphrase Tacitus, would make a wasteland and call it liberation.

The United States has a long tradition of photographing presidents with their cabinets on the eve of war or military escalation. FDR at his desk, surrounded by his ministers on 8 December 1941, the day after Pearl Harbour; Lyndon Johnson with his foreign policy advisors in the Oval Office on 27 July 1965, weighing up whether to increase troop numbers from 75,000 to 125,000; George W Bush and his cabinet on 19 March, 2003, the day before military operations began against Iraq - all these pictures are part of the historical record, aimed at future generations.

At the same time, the photographic record is often intended to convey a certain image of American power to their contemporaries: in which decisions of national security and war and peace are taken through careful deliberation and consensus by wise, thoughtful officials with knowledge, experience and expertise. Often there is a uniformed general around to bolster the impression of competence and consultation. None of this applies to the photos released by the White House that accompanied the US-Israeli strikes against Iran on 28 February.

These photos were not taken in the White House, but in a curtained-off ‘situation room’ in Mar-a-Lago, presumably so that Trump could fit in the meetings between rounds of golf. The setting looks as improvised and provisional as the war itself. One of the photos shows Trump, Marco Rubio, chief of staff Susie Wiles and CIA director John Radcliffe sitting round a table. Behind them, a large map of the Middle East marked Operation Epic Fury that looks like a Risk board is festooned with battleship markers and diamond-shaped targets in Iran.

Trump is wearing a USA baseball cap, and looks like a cobra struggling to stay awake while sucking on its own venom. His advisors - assuming that’s what they were doing - seem simultaneously resigned, blank, and entirely nonplussed. Through the gap in the curtain, you can see the gilded trashiness of Trump’s pleasure dome - the same building where the FBI found thousands of top secret classified documents in 2020.

There is not the faintest trace of competence, knowledge or expertise in this grim ramshackle tableau. This is an image of indolence, craven submission and fundamental unseriousness, all of which makes it the perfect historical marker of a war unleashed on impulse and capriciousness, with a barely-disguised yawn, by men and women without the slightest concern for its consequences.

It is likely that posterity will regard this photograph as a terrifying reminder of how the most powerful country in the world abased itself before the dim-witted, malignant, maggot-brained creature who now commands the most destructive military machine in human history.

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The decision to go to war is always the most serious decision a government can take, and there are times - at least to those who are not pacifists - when war is necessary. But the horrific conflict now unfolding is not one of them. This was a war of choice, and wars of choice are always wars of aggression. Indeed the prevention of such wars is one of the primary aims of the ‘international rules-based order’ constructed in the aftermath of World War II.

It was for this reason that the 1945 Nuremberg International Military Tribunal designated the plotting and waging of aggressive war as the ‘supreme international crime’ which ‘contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.’ It’s why the United Nations includes ‘the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace’ in its foundational charter. It’s why the 1974 General Assembly Resolution XXIX defined wars of aggression as a ‘crime against international peace.’

Of course, there have been many breaches of these principles, and powerful countries - not least the United States - have found ways to circumvent them. But no government since World War II has ignored them with the brazen contempt and disdain that the Trump administration has shown, in the ludicrous and vaingloriously-named Operation Epic Fury.

Few governments in the history of human conflict have ever waged war with so little understanding of the enemy they are fighting, and with such a complete absence of any coherent strategic vision, beyond the performative display of destructive military power that Trump and his equally-depraved minions regard as strength.

This is a war that Israel has wanted to fight for decades, and which it has been repeatedly trying to drag the American colossus into. It’s the war that American neocons once dreamed of, when the slogan ‘real men go to Tehran’ accompanied the build up to the invasion of Iraq. It’s a war that has its roots in Trump’s 2018 decision to wreck the nuclear agreement achieved under Obama, and impose sanctions on Iran.

Now Israel has its wish, and America is once again at war, led by a fascistic administration that you would not trust to run a crack den, and whose members act as if they have just stumbled out of one. In the final scene of Scarface, a coked-up Tony Montana staggers out of his Florida mansion, with an M16-turned grenade launcher, zonked on his own stash.

At least Montana was fighting for his life. The same cannot be said of the vicious clowns who inflicted this calamity on the world from another Florida mansion, for no good reason whatsoever. In doing so, they have unleashed a cascade of killing and destruction that threatens to destabilise the Middle East once again, and deal a final blow to the withered carcass of rules, treaties and obligations that the architects of the post-World War II international order constructed to prevent precisely this kind of outcome.

In The Godfather - the gangster references write themselves with this shower of bastards - Michael Corleone attends his nephew’s baptism, while his hitmen massacre the rival Barzini and the Tataglia families, who the Corleones had lured into a negotiated peace. The Witkoff/Kushner team played the same game with the Iranians who they were pretending to negotiate with. Only the day before the strikes, the Omani Foreign Minister Badr Albusadi reported that negotiators had made ‘substantial progress’, and that Iran had agreed to blend its supplies of enriched uranium to the ‘lowest level possible.’

Contrary to the lies that have been told since, it was probably for precisely this reason that Israel and the US launched the strikes 24 hours later that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini and begun bombing Tehran. In a single stroke, Trump wiped out hundreds of years of diplomatic practice, whilst also violating international customary law prohibiting the killing of heads of state.

Such actions are also a breach of US federal law, not that Trump cares. Executive Order 12333 - enacted in the wake of the Church Committee’s investigations into the CIA’s covert ops and signed by Ronald Reagan in 1981, expressly prohibits US personnel from engaging in or colluding in the assassination of foreign leaders.

You may not like Khameini or the regime he headed - I certainly don’t - but assassination is the stuff of political nightmares. It ushers in a world in which any country can decide to kill any leader it wants. But Trump has done this because he sits at the helm of the one country on the planet that looks at every other country - and certain countries in particular - through a gunsight or a bombsight.

So when the White House posts gleeful Call of Duty-style videos of missile strikes on Iran, and gleeful TikTok reels alternating crude Hollywood-mashups with real attacks, it is not just demonstrating the depravity of its current occupants. In presenting carnage and death as entertainment, these videos also reflect how America views much of the world - in which certain countries are bombable targets.

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It makes no difference who its leaders are. They might be Harry Truman, Kennedy, McNamara and the ‘brightest and the best.’ Or Ronald Reagan sending Contras to slaughter teachers or shooting up harbours in Nicaragua with an ‘aw shucks’ folksy grin. It could be George Bush warning that the smoking gun cannot become a mushroom before blitzing Iraq. Or Barack ‘I’m really good at killing people’ signing off Predator drone ‘double tap’ strikes in Waziristan. America is always locked and loaded, and very few presidents can resist the urge to pull the trigger.

Sooner or later, every American leader follows the pattern defined by the sinister neocon spook Michael Ledeen in 1992 that: ‘Every 10 years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.’

Now the Trump gangsters are applying this rule to a ‘crappy’ country of 93 million people for no good reason whatsoever. We know why Israel wants this war. Unconstrained and by its devastation of Gaza, by a succession of tactical victories, and by the carte blanche it has received from successive American administrations and the ‘international community’, the Netanyahu government believes that it can eliminate Iran as a military threat and transform it into a failed state.

Some commentators have worried likely that Iran might slip into chaos and civil war as a result of this assault. It is highly likely that Israel is seeking precisely this outcome. Because if Iran follows Iraq and Syria, then Israeli military domination of the Middle East will be entirely unopposed, and Israel will be free to complete its destruction of the Palestinian people, annex the West Bank, and expand its borders into Syria and Lebanon.

The motivation of the Trump mafia is less clear. The administration does not even seem to know itself why it has done this. It has not tried to explain its motives or aims to Congress, as the Constitution requires. Instead, succession Trump and his lackeys have given a series of half-baked, implausible and downright dishonest statements to the media, which frequently contradict each other.

Before the strikes began, Trump’s disreputable envoy Steve Witkoff claimed that Iran was only a ‘week away’ from acquiring material to make a bomb. Then Trump himself - borrowing a leaf from George Bush’s playbook - claimed that Iran had restarted its nuclear program and was developing missiles that could ‘threaten our very good friends and allies in Europe’ and would soon be able to ‘reach the American homeland.’

Trump then called on the Iranian people to rise up against their own government, suggesting that regime change was the goal. But little more than a day later, Pete Hegseth - the Secretary of War who makes Conan the Barbarian sound like Bertrand Russell, claimed that regime change was not the goal, though the regime had to change.

Don’t try to figure this out, because Trump then claimed -falsely - that the US was in talks with Iran, and that he would be willing to accept a Venezuela-style arrangement with a new Iranian government, suggesting that popular uprisings and regime change might not be the goal, after all.

Meanwhile, his dead-eyed hapless consigliere Marco Rubio told reporters that the US had decided to strike Iran because it knew that Israel was going to do so, and that US forces would therefore be attacked, and so it decided to strike first. Could the world’s only military superpower not have have stopped Israel from carrying out its attack? Shouldn’t the US have taken steps to protect its bases - not to mention American citizens who were in the line of fire?

None of this happened, and Trump then contradicted Rubio and said that, on the contrary, he had ordered the strikes, and Israel had followed his lead . And his propagandist-in-chief, Comical Karoline Leavitt then claimed that Trump had gone to war ‘on a feeling based on fact.’

What was this ‘fact’? That Iran poses ‘an imminent and direct threat to the United States of America’ - another whopping lie dismissed by most experts, but which will be entirely familiar to anyone who remembers the Iraq war.

All this suggests that this is a war in search of a meaning, or that simply acquires meanings makes it up as it goes along. It may indeed be that this war was intended to knock the Epstein Files off the front pages, in which case it has succeeded. And even though most Americans do not support it, and Trump started it without Congressional approval, wars can easily create an internal dynamic of crisis and emergency that a docile opposition will readily succumb to, and that can give a government all sorts of emergency powers that it didn’t have before.

Whatever its reasons for starting the war, it is not at all clear if the US knows how to finish it. Does the US intend to dismember Iran, by inciting separatist rebellions and civil war? Or does it seek to control its central government, the way it has sought to control Venezuela?

US talks with Kurdish forces in Iraq suggest that the former may be an option. But Trump’s megalomaniacal insistence that he must be allowed to choose Iran’s leader suggests that he wants to rule Iran by proxy through a central government approved and appointed by the US That statement is one more indication of how little Trump and his minions understand Iranian history or the kind of regime they are dealing with.

Last week, Trump’s brutish Secretary of War denounced ‘Crazy regimes like Iran, hellbent on prophetic Islamist delusions’. This image of a country hellbent on collective martyrdom has been so widely disseminated that it has almost become established fact in Washington and other Western capitals. But the Islamic Republic is no crazier than the government currently running the United States. Its leaders are as capable of taking geopolitical decisions in what they perceive as the national interest - and their own - as any other country, which doesn’t necessarily mean that these decisions are good ones.

Trump and his minions seemed to have assumed that the Islamic Republic would fold after killing its figurehead. Instead, Iran has unleashed multiple attacks on US bases and allies that has dragged 14 countries so far into the theatre of war.

These capabilities have clearly been developed over some years, in preparation for an event like this. Iran cannot match Israel or the United States in terms of conventional firepower, but it can force the US to disperse its forces; it can increase the political and economic cost of the war both regionally and internationally. It can drag the war out, testing the will of its enemies and their domestic constituencies.

Iran’s strategy of attacking almost all its neighbours may backfire, but this is a regime that is fighting for its survival, and in such circumstances, mistakes can and will be made - particularly when Israel and the United States are killing leaders who might have been able to curb the regime’s worst instincts. Iran apologised to neighbouring states yesterday and promised to limit its attacks to countries from which it was attacked, suggesting that its leadership has exerted some control over its military leaders.

In the case of the United States and Israel, no one is curbing anyone, as Trump and his officials revel in killing, death and destruction, like psychotic boys pulling the wings of flies. Every day, Trump, Hegseth, Miller and their fascistic supporters exult in a war unconstrained by what Hegseth called ‘stupid rules of engagement’.

Reacting to news that more than 165 Iranian schoolgirls had been killed in a ‘double tap’ strike on a primary school, conservative lobbyist Matt Schlapp told Piers Morgan, these girls are better off dead than being ‘alive in a burqa.’ Hegseth bragged that a US submarine had torpedoed an unarmed Iranian frigate sailing home naval exercises with the Indian nary, killing more than 60 men in what he called a ‘silent death’. Dozens of others were left to drown, and would have drowned, had the Sri Lankan navy not rescued them.

Last Sunday, a US or Israeli ‘double tap’ strike hit Tehran’s Niloofar Square. A witness interviewed by Dropsite News described what happened:

One hit and it wasn’t that bad but when the second one hit, suddenly everything exploded. The windows all shattered. Whoever had hookahs were thrown to the floor…One of my friends whom I don’t know that well he was sitting here. His hookah was in his hands until the last moment. He was severed in half. Half of him was thrown to the side. I put him back together and placed him where he was. A piece of his brain was thrown here on the floor.

This is gangster-imperialism in practice. This is one more reason why Operation Epic Fury should be called Operation Epic Depravity: a rampant display of lawless violence, unconstrained by any humanitarian or legalistic considerations or any pretensions to nation building and democracy building.

It’s a war in which fundamentalist Christian officers are telling their soldiers that Trump was ‘anointed by Jesus’ to bring about Armageddon in the Middle East and bring back the Messiah; in which six anonymous gamblers can make $1.2 million betting on the bombardment of Iran on the cryptocurrency prediction site Polymarket - to which Donald Trump Junior is an investor and advisor; in which the freakish ghoul Melania Trump can chair a United Nations Security Council meeting on ‘children in conflict’ only days after her husband’s war has massacred Iranian children in an elementary school.

All this could not be more dystopian, dangerous or disgusting. Thousands of Iranians have been killed and wounded. Tehran’s oil refineries are now burning. Israel has attacked a desalination plant and Iran has responded in kind in Bahrain. It now seems that Gaza, rather than a savage aberration, has become a model for both Israel and the United States.

It is painful and horrific to watch such carnage unfold. It is a legal and moral obscenity that the United States and its bloodthirsty sidekick should be able to bomb cities with impunity and displace tens of thousands of people, dragging the region and the world into a new era of lawless brute force. And yet all this has been done with very little opposition or condemnation from the upholders of the ‘rules-based order.’

No one can be at all surprised that rightwing ‘populist’ leaders across the world, from Milei, to Farage, and Abascal have loudly approved of the war. These are little men who will always wade happily through any political sewers, and who will approve of anything Trump does, because they think it will benefit them. Nor can anyone be surprised to find the likes of Boris Johnson, Andrew Neil or Stephen Pollard applauding the American-Israeli assault as if were some kind of righteous crusade.

Surprisingly, there have been some criticisms of the war from unlikely sources within MAGA itself. But the general response from the ‘international community’ has been silent or muted. This silence has been particularly striking amongst some of the defenders of the ‘rules-based order’. If the notion of international ‘order’ means anything, it must surely be related to the ability to prevent and condemn aggressive war, regardless of the perpetrator.

Yet barely had the strikes begun last weekend than Mark Carney - the eloquent defender of that order at Davos - declared Canada’s ‘full support’ for the US-Israeli assault, in order to ‘prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon’ - regardless of the lack of evidence to suggest that Iran had any such intention or capability.

Carney later rowed back slightly, claiming that he only supported the strikes ‘with regret’ because ‘the current conflict is another example of the failure of the international order.’

Russia and China were more forthright in condemning the strikes as a ‘cynical violation of law’, and called for an immediate halt to military operations. But Russia is not the country to pontificate on such matters. The Brazilian government also condemned the attacks and pointed out they ‘occurred amid a negotiation process between the parties.’

The European Union did not support the strikes, but its response to them has been weak and subdued. European commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa called the conflict ‘greatly concerning’ and exhorted all parties to ‘exercise maximum restraint’ to protect to civilians, and to fully respect international law’ - regardless of the fact that the US-Israeli assault was as much a breach of international law as the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

In an initial joint statement, the UK, Germany and France condemned ‘Iranian attacks in the region in the strongest terms’ and called on Iran to ‘refrain from indiscriminate military strikes’ and resume negotiations. There was no mention of the US-Israeli strikes that had brought these negotiations to an end.

In a visit to the White House last Tuesday, the German Chancellor Friedrich Merz shamefully told Trump that Germany was ‘on the same page in terms of getting this terrible regime in Iran away, and we will talk about the day after,’ while also allowing German bases to be used to carry out further attacks.

Not surprisingly, this abasement pleased the orange emperor, who called Merz an ‘excellent leader.’ Trump was less pleased with Keir Starmer, who was as cautious and timid as we have come to expect him to be on almost everything. Such caution might seem welcome, in comparison with the mindless gung ho calls from the likes of Badenoch and Farage, for the UK to join offensive operations. But this is a low bar, and it doesn’t take much to rise above it.

Some commentators have cited Starmer’s refusal to allow US planes to use British bases as an indication of his skilful diplomatic tightrope walking, but a cabinet meeting leak suggests that Starmer would have allowed these bases to be used, had it not been for opposition from his own ministers. Instead, he reached a compromise: that British bases can be used for ‘defensive’ purposes by taking out Iranian missile silos. Leaving aside the question of how these distinctions would actually be monitored, the notion of ‘defensive’ strikes is objectively meaningless in an illegal war in which every US bomb or missile has an offensive purpose.

Even this sleight-of-hand could not pacify the rabidly rightwing British press, nor did it satisfy Trump. It is also unlikely to be permanent. Though Starmer has insisted that he would not join a war without a ‘lawful basis’, he has not explicitly not ruled out the possibility that Britain may join in the US-Israeli assault in future. Given that Starmer responded to last Israel’s attacks on Iran last year by immediately offering the RAF to ‘defend Israel’, no one should assume that his ‘standoff’ with Trump will last long.

This is how international ‘order’ collapses - not just when powerful countries break the rules, but because the countries that proclaim to represent these rules do not condemn or oppose those who break them, or do so only selectively. Amid this timidity and discount store realpolitik, only the Spanish president Pedro Sánchez has denounced the perpetrators with the outrage they deserve, declaring unequivocally:

Spain’s position is the same as in Ukraine or Gaza. No to the breakdown of international law that protects us all. No to resolving conflicts with bombs. No to war

Sánchez is no less politically vulnerable than Starmer or Macron. Like Labour, his government is fragile, and he faces a conservative-far right bloc without decency or scruples that is looking for any opportunity to destroy him. Yet he refused to allow the US to use Spanish bases, and made arguments that shame Trump’s would-be appeasers:

Some will say that this is naive. What is naive is to think that violence is the solution. Or to think that blind and servile obedience is leadership. We are not going to be complicit in something that is bad for the world for fear of reprisals from someone

Exactly that. And Sánchez has even managed to coax some lukewarm gestures of solidarity from Macron and von der Leyen, in addition to some mild criticisms of the illegality of the war. But as the European Council on Foreign Relations argues, this is not enough. Even from the point of its own interests, the European Union needs to defend Spain against Trump’s threats and distance itself from a deranged war that may well usher in the defeat of Ukraine.

We cannot have a world in which the United States is able invade and bomb any country it likes without opposition or condemnation, merely because it is powerful. We cannot have a Middle East in which Israel is allowed to destroy and devastate its neighbours, with complete impunity.

There is no way that a better Middle East and a better world will come out of this. It is more likely that it will be made much worse. And to those who say that Iran cannot be allowed to have a nuclear bomb, the US-Israeli war of aggression has just given every country in the region the best possible reason to acquire one.

We need leaders who will call, loudly, clearly and without any equivocation, for the strikes to cease, who will uphold the authority of the United Nations that Trump and Netanyahu are trampling on, and stand up for the values that supposedly uphold the European Union ‘peace project.’ With the exception of Sánchez, we don’t have them. Instead we have only silence, cowardice and collusion with the violent American Behemoth, a narrow focus on the national interest, and the occasional polite tepid criticism.

The fact that this is not happening is not entirely surprising. Too many governments had already found a way to live with genocide in Gaza. Just as they emphasized with the ‘suffering’ of Palestinians while nothing to prevent that suffering, they may well find a way to support or at least acquiesce in Trump’s war of stupid, with the usual headshaking pieties about sparing civilians.

This weakness and de facto obeisance is almost as dismaying as the brazen gangsterism that we are now witnessing. In the aftermath of World War I, William Butler Yeats famously wrote ‘the blood-dimmed tide is loosed/and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned/The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.’

Those words could almost have been written for our own perilous times, as ‘mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’ by some of the worst examples of humanity this planet currently has to offer, with the tacit complicity of leaders who believe themselves to the best, or at least better, but too often lack the courage of their convictions.

Perhaps they never really had any to begin with. Or perhaps they have also been looking at certain countries through a gunsight for so long that they no longer care who pulls the trigger, or how many people are killed, or how many cities are bombed and destroyed by the gangsters who have just set the world on fire for no good reason.

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I’m away from home at the moment, but I thought, given recent developments, that readers might be interested in this post from my old blog, dated 13 January 2013, when Peter Mandelson was still in his pomp. Readers may not remember that Steven Spielberg once recruited His Lordship to help promote his film Lincoln in the UK. Given what we now know, and even what we knew then, the promotion video is well worth the price of admission.

At the time the video was made, Mandelson had already committed the offences that the Epstein files now reveal, and here he is, presenting himself as a paragon of ‘moral certitude’ and selflessness in politics, while suggesting that he is some kind of ideological heir to Abraham Lincoln, because an environmental protester covered him with green slime.

Chutzpah doesn’t even begin to describe a politician proclaiming how willingness to endure the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune for the sake of his party - the party, as we now know, that he had already betrayed.

All this is accompanied by the kind of rousing music you would expect to find in a cinematic recreation of Gettysburg. I liked the film Lincoln, but Spielberg made a huge mistake choosing this charlatan to promote it in the UK. I wonder if he realises that now?

Of course, many other people also gave this self-regarding chancer privileges he didn’t deserve. Now, to paraphrase Sir Thomas Wyatt, they flee from him who one time did him seek. I’ve left this piece unedited, because this is how I saw things at the time. It’s worth mentioning that oil-rich Guyana is no longer as poor as it was.

But the man who bullied Guyana and colluded with Jeffrey Epstein against his own government, remains exactly what he has always been: the grovelling courtier for whom only the wishes of the wealthy ever mattered. And the foolish reverence in which he was once held - and which he clearly believed the world should feel - does explain how this grasping political operator was able to make what will hopefully be his last political comeback. It also speaks volumes about our grubby, disreputable political times, and the moral collapse of the Labour Party.

Those who pay attention to such things will not be entirely surprised to hear that Peter ‘Lord’ Mandelson has been recruited by Steven Spielberg to help run the PR campaign for his film Lincoln in the UK. After all, presentation is what Baron Mandelson of Foy has always excelled at. But the astonishing spectacle of Mandelson comparing himself to Lincoln in a ridiculous promo video to help launch the film is a truly WTF beyond parody moment that is likely to send numerous jaws hurtling toward the floor.

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In it, Mandelson talks movingly about his convictions and the ‘price’ he has had to pay for them, and compares himself to Abraham Lincoln, declaring:

When I look back at Lincoln’s presidency and what he had to struggle through, I see a man who had a great sense of conviction, of moral certitude, that he was right and changes that needed to be made were absolutely necessary for the U.S. at the time. He was somebody who was also prepared to use pragmatic means to arrive at his goal. Recruiting his rivals and his adversaries to the cause he was pursuing … This is the art and skill of politics.

Well maybe it is. But the cause that Lincoln pursued, at least from April 1863 onwards, was the end of chattel slavery in the United States. Lincoln pursued this objective in the midst of a bloody conflict that was ripping his country to pieces, and his commitment to it eventually cost him his life. Mandelson, by contrast, was one of the architects of New Labour, a political operator whose ’cause’, as far as it is possible to identify one at all, was to swing his party rightwards and continue the ‘reform’ programme begun by Margaret Thatcher through more surreptitious means.

Mandelson famously declared that ‘New Labour is intensely relaxed about people becoming filthy rich.’ Throughout his career, this essential principle has informed his actions both as a cabinet minister and as EU Trade Commissioner, where he has assiduously courted oligarchs and plutocrats, and done his best to promote their interests whenever possible.

In 2008, shortly before leaving the post to return to UK politics, he threatened Guyana, one of the poorest countries in the world, with financial penalties that could amount to £70m a year because the Guyanese government refused to join an Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) between the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and the European Union.

As for principle – in his 2010 memoirs Mandelson criticized Blair for having ‘tunnel vision’ in taking the country to war, and wrote of his concerns about the post-war outcome in discussion with his boss in 2002. Unlike Robin Cook, these concerns were not made public at the time. And in June 2009, according to the journalist John Kampfner, Mandelson was instrumental in urging Gordon Brown to set down specific conditions for the Iraq war inquiry, in order to make it more ‘manageable’.

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Mandelson had played a similar role in narrowing the remit of the Hutton Inquiry, and he wanted to ensure a similar outcome in the committee headed by Sir John Chilcot. In Kampfner’s account: ‘ Brown was instructed to ensure that the members of the inquiry would, in the words of one official, ‘not stir the horses. Brown readily acquiesced.’

I bet. So here we have a politician who sought to limit full disclosure about a war that he himself had not supported – and not once, but twice. With convictions like that, who needs to be amoral? As for the ‘price’ that Mandelson has paid for his ‘convictions’ – his two resignations were not the result of his commitment to any ’cause’, but the consequence of his own dodgy financial arrangements and improper dealings with yet another plutocrat.

All this does not exactly bear out Mandelson’s account of himself as a conviction politician in the Lincoln mould, but suggests instead a consummate careerist and manipulator, whose melodramatic monicker the ‘Prince of Darkness’ hints at non-existent depths and absent complexities.

None of this has stopped Lord ‘filthy rich’ from following in Blair’s footsteps and acquiring a great deal of the lucre that he admired so much in others.

Today, Mandelson’s income is estimated at £1 million a year or more. It isn’t true that he has paid no price for his convictions, however. In 2011 a woman whacked him in the face with a custard pie – an incident that is included in the Spielberg promo video to support his self-serving comparisons.

But that still doesn’t make her the equivalent of John Wilkes Booth, and it sure as hell doesn’t make Lord Mandelson of Foy into Abraham Lincoln.

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Breaking up is hard to do, but when it comes to America’s headlong descent into authoritarian white nationalist gangsterism, Europe’s leaders just can’t bring themselves to leave their abusive partner. Too many seem to believe that praising the ally-turned-bully might protect them from his wrath, or even return America to the path of virtue. Too many cling onto the country they used to know, desperately seek new beginnings where none exist.

Or perhaps the long habit of military dependency is just too ingrained to kick. Whatever the reason, it’s difficult not to feel a certain revulsion at the standing ovation given to ‘Little Marco’ Rubio, following the Secretary of State’s cunning, malignant speech in Munich last week.

It’s true that Rubio offered something more substantial and coherent than the half-baked meandering rants of his political master - not a difficult feat. And his tone - we Europeans love a nice tone - was very different from the contemptuous arrogance that JD Vance brought to the table last year. Compared to the Hillbilly Faust, Rubio was positively emollient. He spoke warmly of the European-American alliance, and our shared ‘spiritual traditions.’ He waxed lyrical about our churches and cathedrals, about Mozart and Beethoven, Dante and Shakespeare, Michelangelo and Da Vinci, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

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You can almost hear the sigh of relief from Rubio’s audience. Look! MAGA loves our churches and cathedrals! MAGA listens to Mozart and the Rolling Stones! Maybe we won’t have to move back in with our parents, after all. Because Rubio made it clear that, despite words, deeds and appearances, Trump’s America still loves Europe. If anything it loves it too much, and that’s why it’s leaders come off as ‘a little direct and urgent in our counsel’ at times.

To prove it, Little Marco took his audience down memory lane, revisiting historical moments that now seem cast in the rosy glow of a bygone era, when Americans and Europeans were united in a common cause. Two world wars; the Berlin Wall, the Cold War - all this was proof that:

We are part of one civilization -- Western civilization. We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir:

Civilization…faith…bonds…heritage…forefathers. It’s enough to bring Charlemagne back from the dead, to dance a tango with Melania Trump when the White House ballroom opens. But the real buzzword here was ‘civilization’ - a word that Rubio liked so much that he used it various times.

‘Civilization’ is a word with various definitions, but it is generally associated with social and technological advancement, and cultural and artistic achievement. It does not usually have much to do with deporting toddlers, murdering unarmed protesters or killing alleged drug traffickers in boats - 11 killed in the same week that Rubio was celebrating our cathedrals. Civilization is not best represented by a corrupt rapist, whose government is frantically trying to conceal his involvement with the paedophile sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes - crimes that the UN now believe may constitute ‘crimes against humanity.’

This is not advancement, but regression. And say what you like about the Borgias, but at least they helped give the world Raphael and da Vinci. With Trump, cultural achievement doesn’t much higher than Ted Nugent or Kid Rock. And yet Rubio insisted that his boss is dedicated to the defence of a ‘great civilization that has every reason to be proud of its history’ and to ‘a vision of a future as proud, as sovereign, and as vital as our civilization’s past.’

But Little Marco also delivered a warning: Civilization is in peril. Multilateral institutions, deindustrialisation, outsourced sovereignty, overinvestment in ‘massive welfare,’ China - not mentioned by name but a phantom presence in the rhetorical background - free trade, the ‘climate cult’ - all of these outcomes had brought our civilization to its knees and paved the way for the barbarian invasions:

in a pursuit of a world without borders, we opened our doors to an unprecedented wave of mass migration that threatens the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture, and the future of our people. We made these mistakes together, and now, together, we owe it to our people to face those facts and to move forward, to rebuild.

The EU border policies that have turned the Mediterranean and the Sahara into migrant graveyards tell a very different story about how open these ‘doors’ have been. But that was not the story the Walmart Churchill had come to tell. Rubio’s evocations of Mozart, the Sistine Chapel and - more improbably - the Rolling Stones, are a well-established trope in far-right narratives: a civilized Europe defiled by by Third World - usually Muslim - immigration.

These warnings of European civilizational decline have been largely confined to racist novels like The Camp of the Saints, to neoconservative writers, fringe websites and bloggers, or the ‘manifestos’ of white nationalist terrorists like Anders Breivik. But last year, they made it into the mainstream, when the US National Security Strategy predicted that Europe faced ‘the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure’:

The larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.

This depiction of a doomed Europe is a barely concealed iteration of the ‘Great Replacement Theory’ - the idea that Western - particularly European - political and cultural elites are ‘replacing’ their white majority populations through a form of ‘reverse colonization.’ For centuries, the image of Europe as a civilized core in a world of barbarians and culturally inferior peoples was used as a rationale for imperial conquest and the settler-colonial usurpation of Indigenous territory.

This recurring theme of superiority and inferiority has been variously imagined in terms of religion, culture and race, and has sometimes drawn on all three components. During the high-water mark of ‘scientific racism’ in the second half of the nineteenth century, European cultural superiority was often depicted as a consequence of skin colour, skull size and other biological traits.

This was an era in which anthropologists and natural scientists saw the often catastrophic impact of colonialism on Indigenous peoples across the world as an inevitable consequence of their racial or cultural ‘unfitness’. To those who depicted human history as an ongoing racial struggle, the destruction and disappearance of the world’s ‘inferior’ races was an inevitable consequence of their contact with the ‘superior’ white race,

The corollary of this ‘doomed race theory’ was the idea that the ‘white races’ or white nations, might themselves be weakened or lose this struggle without a constant process of racial reinvigoration. In Europe and America, politicians, writers, generals and scientists warned of a decline in the quality of the national ‘stock’ as result of unchecked population growth amongst the urban poor or other ‘defectives’, or through an influx of the wrong kind of immigrant.

In the aftermath of World War II and decolonisation, this kind of ‘biological’ or ‘blood’ racism fell into disrepute, and ethnonationalism increasingly looked to culture or religion as markers of superiority and difference. More recently, ‘culture’ and ‘race’ have become increasing intertwined in declinist narratives such as the ‘white replacement theory’, which depicts immigration as a deliberate conspiracy to dilute and destroy white nations/races. .

This is where the Trump administration’s concept of ‘civilizational erasure’ comes from, and this is why his emissary was hailing Mozart and the Sistine Chapel in Munich:

Rubio’s speech departed from his master’s frothy belligerence, only in its relative eloquence and more measured tone. Instead of gloating over Europe’s downfall, he suggested that Europe and the United States might fight this ‘erasure’ and build a ‘new Western century’ together. He told his audience that America wanted allies who were not ‘shackled by guilt and shame,’ who are ‘proud of their culture and of their heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilization’.

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He celebrated the European settlers who built America and described America as a ‘child of Europe’:

Our story began with an Italian explorer whose adventure into the great unknown to discover a new world brought Christianity to the Americas -- and became the legend that defined the imagination of an our pioneer nation.

Slavery; genocide; pillage; settler-colonial violence - all this was ‘whitewashed’, so to speak, from Rubio’s Little House on the Prairie rendition of American history and the benign legacies of Christianity. Rubin’s rendition of world history was similarly cut-and-paste:

For five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding -- its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe.

But then something went wrong:

The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come.

You see what happens? One minute your Christian forefathers are building cathedrals and listening to Mozart. The next thing, the godless communists are draping the map with the hammer and sickle. It would be understating it considerably to point out that this is a less-than-comprehensive account of decolonisation

Rubio’s geopolitical analysis of the present moment was equally dishonest and self-serving. At one point, he bragged of American military achievements under Trump, in order to highlight the weaknesses and inadequacies of the EU and the United Nations. The United Nations ‘could not solve the war in Gaza,’ he claimed. ‘Instead, it was American leadership that freed captives from barbarians and brought about a fragile truce.’

Rubio did not point out American military aid also enabled Israel to kill more than 70,000 ‘barbarians’ in Gaza, in one of the most merciless military onslaughts in modern times. He did not mention that hundreds of Palestinian have been killed since the ‘fragile truce’ began, nor did he go into much detail about the grotesque schemes to rebuilt Gaza in the interests of the Trump mafia, with the help of some of some of the worst leaders.

No one raised these points in the question and answer session afterwards, because all many of the leaders and diplomats who listened to Rubio’s speech, are entirely complicit in the devastation of ‘barbarian’ Gaza. And as for Rubio’s disingenuous support for the United Nations, the US has actively undermined and side-lined the UN in Gaza, through its ‘Board of Peace’ - a development that will have repercussions beyond Gaza.

Rubio also had the temerity to boast that Trump has brought Russia and Ukraine to the negotiating table, leaving aside his administration’s persistent recycling of Russian talking points, its bullying of Ukraine, and its cuts to military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine.

All this was ignored in Rubio’s sinister vision of a joint US-European alliance that will build a ‘new Western century’ based on MAGA principles, and restore ‘supply chain sovereignty’. This call for a new 21st century imperialism, based on ‘Christian’ ethnonationalist lines is not, as far as we know, what the European Union was created for. Yet following Rubio’s speech, a number of European leaders praised Rubio for extolling their shared ‘values’. The German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul hailed a speech ‘which still assured us that we stand together in this partnership between Europe and the United States.’

Wolfgang Ischinger, the Munich Security Conference president, breathed ‘a sigh of relief.’ The European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen also declared herself ‘very much reassured by [Rubio]. We know him, he’s a good friend, a strong ally.’ Von der Leyen praised Rubio’s call for a stronger Europe, on the grounds that ‘an independent Europe is a strong Europe. And a stronger Europe makes for a stronger trans-Atlantic alliance.’

The best that can be said about these responses, is that diplomacy requires them, or perhaps Europe’s diplomats simply heard what they wanted to hear. There was some pushback. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas rejected the idea that ‘woke, decadent Europe is not facing civilizational erasure’, whilst also hailing Rubio’s speech as a recognition that America and Europe ‘are and will remain intertwined.’

Even Keir ‘island of strangers’ Starmer called on Europe to defend ‘the vibrant, free and diverse societies that we represent, showing that people who look different to each other can live peacefully together.’ That is not what is happening in MAGA America, and it is not what Little Marco was proposing in Munich.

No sooner had he made his points, than Rubio rushed off to Hungary to visit Viktor Orbán - now in electoral campaign mode - to assure him that ‘your success is our success.’ The love is entirely reciprocated. Orbán recently praised Trump for rebelling against the liberal ‘ global-scale business, media and political network’. In the same speech, Orbán denounced the ‘fearmongering against Putin’ as ‘primitive and unserious’, and called on his audience to ‘get used to the idea that those who love freedom should not fear the East, but Brussels.’

It is Orbán’s Hungary, not the EU, that represents the Europe that MAGA wants. In a a drought, even a muddy pool can seem drinkable, but Europe’s leaders should not be fooled by Little Marco’s good cop routine into drinking from this one. Because contrary to Von der Leyen’s assessment, Little Marco is not a friend of the Europe that she represents.

Sooner or later, this Europe will have to recognize that its American friend is no longer on its side, that the old world has gone, and no amount of dishonest history and hollow rhetoric will bring it back.

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In Luis Buñuel’s classic film, The Exterminating Angel, a group of wealthy guests are invited to dinner party by a friend. As the evening unfolds, the servants slip away one by one, leaving only the majordomo. This is strange enough, but then the guests discover for some inexplicable reason, that they can’t leave. They try to, but whenever they reach the door, they find themselves turning back.

As the days and nights pass, the carapace of bourgeois civility crumbles, and chaos ensues. The guests revert to savagery. A couple kill themselves. Some sheep enter the house, which are quickly roasted and eaten. A cupboard is used for a toilet. Outside, police surround the house to hold back the curious crowd, but the guests can’t leave.

Is it fear that traps them? Conformity? Bourgeois guilt or a magical spell? This is a surrealist film, so no rational explanations are offered for what appears to be an outbreak of mass psychosis. Whatever the reason, the predicament of Buñuel’s guests is not that different to the surreal political situation in which the United Kingdom finds itself, nearly ten years after the 2016 referendum on EU membership.

Think of Brexit as a (dog’s) dinner party, which millions of voters chose to attend and millions were dragged to against their will. All of us remain equally trapped in the house that Brexit built, even though most of us are not enjoying the dinner. A YouGov poll last June found that 56 percent of voters now believe that leaving the EU was a mistake, and that 61 percent believe that Brexit has been ‘more of a failure than a success.’

The same poll found that 56 percent of voters favoured ‘Brejoining’ the EU at some point in the future. Yet despite some tentative attempts by the government to ‘reset’ UK/EU relations, there has been no serious momentum to achieve this outcome, and it is unlikely, in the short term at least, that there will be.

This is partly because the rightwing media in the UK (the majority), and the increasingly interchangeable Reform/Conservative bloc, still seize on even the most innocuous attempts to modify EU/UK relations as a ‘betrayal of Brexit’. Others, such as the ever-toxic Daily Express - the mad dog of the British press - continue to campaign for a ‘proper Brexit’, whatever that is.

No one can be surprised by this. Cargo cults don’t give up just because John Frum don’t come. But even politicians who may admit in muted tones that Brexit has been a failure, are still too frightened to say so out loud, let alone criticise those who were most responsible for it. And as for voters, for every ‘Bregret’ - regret about the exit - poll, there are other polls indicating that large swathes of the electorate are prepared to vote locally and nationally for Reform UK - a ‘party’ led by the man who did more than any single individual to make Brexit possible.

That alone, should have pushed Nigel Mosley-Farage to the margins of British politics and discounted him as a serious commentator on anything at all. Instead, this is the man currently poised to take Starmer’s place in Downing Street, regardless of the fact that there is nothing Mosley-Farage’s career or his politics, or his ideas in anything at all, to suggest that he has even the most minimal qualifications for high or even low political office.

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To elect Farage is the political equivalent of a cancer patient asking a doctor to give you more cancer. It’s like sending an internet scammer your new credit card details after he’s already drained your bank account with your old one.

Anyone who doubts this should look at the dark money flowing into Reform UK’s coffers. £9 million from Thai-based aviation fuel/cryptocurrency billionaire Christopher Harborne. £200, 000 paid by a Kazakh-Iranian billionaire family to a churchwarden from Potters Bar, channelled into Reform’s coffers via an interior design company with no assets.

As Margo Robbie would say, who would do that? And why does the anti-elitist man of the people need money from dodgy billionaires and what do they want from him? No one asks, or at least, no one who counts, because everyone knows that you don’t say things like that in the house of Brexit.

And so the leering grifter-in-chief and his cronies march gaily on, leading the country ever closer towards a political, strategic and moral failure without parallel in British history. That future is already stamped all over their manifesto’ - a stale farrago of back-of-a-fag packet unicornry, fiscal wand-waving, saloon bar bore ‘common sense’ rejections of net zero, anti-workery culture war fodder, reactionary MAGA-style paeans to national greatness, entirely unrealistic pledges to ‘re-industrialise’, promises of detention and deportation, and withdrawal from one treaty and commitment after another.

None of this shows the slightest correlation with reality, or any concern the potential consequences of its crowd-pleasing sloganry. Of course Reform wants to leave the ECHR - the Holy Grail of a ‘proper Brexit’ - because that would make it possible to deport more people. Never mind that successful challenges to deportations at the ECHR represent a tiny minority of all completed deportations for criminal offences, according to the government’s own figures.

Leaving the ECHR would nevertheless detach the UK from another treaty binding it to the liberal democratic order - as flawed as that is. And that is the game Nigel, Bannon and his backers are playing. Migrants, refugees and ‘illegals’ are merely the manufactured threat that makes this agenda possible.

The United States is still powerful enough - for now - to get away with such behaviour, and throw its arrogant weight around. The UK has no weight to throw around. Beyond its ability to terrorize migrants, it cannot bend the world to its will, and a Reform government would unleash ICE-style social devastation on a scale unseen in this country, whilst also turning and turn the country into a deregulated, libertarian dystopia from which only Nigel and his pals - and the UK’s enemies - would benefit.

Anyone who doubts how awful a Reform UK government would be has only to look at the performance of its councils, or the constant procession of racist and far right freaks who course continually through its ranks. In local government, Reform UK councillors have behaved like vicious children. DOGE-style ‘common sense’ money saving agendas against non-existent agencies; council tax raises when the opposite was promised; Trump-style press bans; reckless budgeting - imagine this played out on a national scale with flags flying from every street.

Last week, Reform threatened to defund Bangor University because its student debating society refused an offer from Reform MP Sarah Pochin to ‘debate’ them. Cue a chorus of sneering and threats from the likes of Isobel Oakeshott and Lee Anderson. ‘We’re coming for you’ growled the unbearable ofa who might even end up as Home Secretary.

No serious country would put people like this in charge of anything at all, and expect anything good to come of it. But in the house of Brexit, the unthinkable is always just around the corner. The theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing of Nazi Germany once observed:

Folly is a more dangerous enemy to the good than evil. One can protest against evil; it can be unmasked and, if need be, prevented by force. Evil always carries the seeds of its own destruction, as it makes people, at the least, uncomfortable. Against folly we have no defense. Neither protests nor force can touch it; reasoning is no use; facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved — indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions.

Politically-speaking, the UK has been locked into a trajectory of folly for some time - folly according to the historian Barbara Tuchman description of ‘wooden-headedness’, which:

consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts

Political folly does not mean stupidity, or at least not individual stupidity, though it may involve it. Folly is a collective process, a form of group-think, in which the mad and the foolish become normal because no one dares say so. Erich Fromm once wrote of the ‘folly à millons’ in which millions of people engage in pathological and delusional while still believing they are individually sane and rational.

Brexit was and is a clear example of this process. It was a collective decision based on wishful thinking, false promises and unrealistic expectations; on intellectual laziness, inadequate information , for which nobody, not the politicians, the commentators or voters have taken responsibility for.

It was folly for a middle-ranking power to cut itself off from the largest trading bloc in the world without a very good reason, and without a very clear idea of how it was going to manage the consequences. It was folly to make promises that could never be delivered and it was folly to believe those promises.

Naturally, none of this responsible for it have accepted responsibility for the poor outcomes Brexit has produced. If it didn’t turn out well, that was because they were ‘betrayed’ or because Brexit was not done well - whatever well was.

And now this initial folly has metastasised into a permanent condition, in which each stupid act is cancelled out by the next one. It was folly to elect Boris Johnson and Liz Truss as prime ministers. It was folly on the part of this Labour government to allow Mosley-Farage to set the agenda. It is folly on the part of so many media outlets that Mosley-Farage is not questioned more closely about his own and his party’s Russian connections, about where Reform’s money comes from.

It would be an act of unforgivable and irremediable folly if the British electorate puts a man who should be a national pariah in Downing Street.

In The Exterminating Angel, the guests finally escape when one of them remembers where the guests were sitting when they first arrived. By revisiting the past and retracing their steps, the guests finally discover that they can leave. In the UK, we are nowhere near this outcome. Nearly a decade later, a foolish and deluded country that lost contact with the real world, and that has never had the courage to revisit or reflect upon its monumental act of folly, is poised to make an even more disastrous mistake.

Millions of voters may have genuinely believed the promises that were made back in 2016. Too many have been unable or unwilling to reassess that decision, to the point when a decayed and radicalised Tory Party is now falling into the arms of the man who destroyed.

Unable or unwilling to recognise the destructive game that Mosley-Farage and his pals are playing, voters and politicians remain trapped in the world that Brexit made, a world where one folly is piled on the other. A credulous population that believed Brexit would make the country great again, is now poised to pursue the same outcome with the same man who lied to them before.

Too many refuse to see that Brexit was only the beginning of a process of state capture that is still ongoing. And until we recognise this, and have the courage required to revisit how it happened and what we might do about it, we will remain stuck where Brexit left us, condemned to repeat and compound our mistakes, at the mercy of the billionaires and predators, in a country that still has a very long way to fall.

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It’s never a good idea to reduce social hierarchies and systems of power to the sexual behaviour of their rulers. The Roman Empire cannot be explained by Caligula, and Tsarist tyranny was not invented by Rasputin. Whatever went on in Marie Antoinette’s bedroom, it does not shed much light on the treatment of the French peasantry under the ancien regime.

That said, it’s difficult to separate the criminal trajectory of the paedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein from the very particular historical moment that he was part of, and the elite circles in which he moved. Some of these crimes have become depressingly familiar: the systematic sexual abuse of women and girls; ‘massages’ and ‘sex fun’ that became sexual assaults; the trafficking and procurement of teenagers for Epstein and his pals or clients.

There are also victims’ statements and unverified victim complaints filled with depravity that might have been plucked from the pages of de Sade’s Justine, with allegations of rape, beatings, death threats, blackmail, and paedophile ‘auctions’ in which Epstein and other rich, powerful men, allegedly participated, not least, the current president of the United States.

Incredibly, only Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell have been charged in connection with any of these crimes, and a few men and women have suffered reputational damage. Yet the Department of Justice’s heavily-redacted ‘Epstein Files’ make it clear that many people enabled Epstein’s crimes, benefited from them, or simply ignored them for their own convenience.

This 3 million document dump reads like a hell-script of our dark political times, a glittering venal netherworld filled with blacked-out names, multiple repetitions, pieces of correspondence and redacted photographs that leave only the words of their authors and Epstein’s email address. Yet even after being purged and scraped by Trump’s minions, many names remain - a Venn diagram of the wealthy, the famous, the powerful and the connected that encompasses Hollywood, banking, cryptocurrency, academia, geopolitics, Brexit, Russia, Israel, the British and Norwegian royal families, Middle Eastern potentates, former presidents and prime ministers.

Like a degenerate Zelig, Epstein props up everywhere, zipping between countries, capitals and islands, always in the company of the great-and-not-so-good. Jacques Lang, Woody Allen, a Norwegian princess, Muhammad bin Sultan, Ehud Barak, Richard Dawkins, our own half-wit ex-prince and his grasping wife - all of them were caught up in Epstein’s slipstream. All of them sought him out or were sought by him, networking, pandering, pleading, arranging dinners, making deals, looking for contacts, seeking loans or financial advice.

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Here is literary agent John Brockman, boasting to Epstein in 2018 that Muhammad bin Sultan had invested $400 million in his talent agency. There is ‘wellness guru’ Deepak Chopra in 2017 engaging in cosmic locker room talk: ‘The universe is a human construct. No such thing. Cute girls are aware when they make noises.’ Here is Elon Musk, who once claimed to have refused an invitation to Epstein’s island, actually soliciting an invitation to one of his parties, whilst also taking pains to find out when the ‘wildest party’ will be taking place..

And look over there, why it’s Richard Branson, hip capitalist entrepreneur and would-be national treasure, looking forward to seeing Jeffrey and his ‘harem’, and advising Epstein on how to rebrand after his first conviction. Just say you made a mistake, Branson suggests, ‘with a 17 1/2 year old woman…and have done nothing that’s against the law since, and yes, as a single man you seem to have a penchant for women. But there’s nothing wrong with that.’

Nothing wrong with that. And there is definitely a Max Clifford sideline for Branson here, if he tires of firing himself into space.

The DoJ’s emails contain numerous examples of Epstein’s ceaseless attempts to find ‘girls’, for himself and for others, from procurement networks that included the late ‘socialite’ Annabelle Nielsen, and a woman called ‘Kira D’ who seems to have been a model or a fashion student. In one unsent email, Epstein claims that Bill Gates caught an STD from sleeping with a ‘Russian girl’ - procured by Epstein - and then sought drugs to give to his wife so that she wouldn’t find out.

Naturally, Gates denies this, and who can blame him? Elsewhere, in November 2014, a blanked-out correspondent thanks Epstein for ‘a fun night’. Your littlest girl was a little naughty?’ In another email, Epstein asks a Russian respondent for help in dealing with ‘a ‘russian woman’ who was trying to blackmail ‘a group of powerful biznessman (sic) in New York…it is bad for business for everyone concerned’?

Most of the men who appear in these emails are ‘powerful biznessman’ and the fact that their names are present in these emails does not mean that they were guilty of criminality or ‘wrongdoing.’ But nor does it mean that they were doing right. Because the only thing more sickening than Epstein’s ruthless exploitation of women and girls, is the ‘regret’, ‘shame’ and ‘embarrassment’ that so many of the people in these emails have since expressed about their association with him, only because their names appear in his correspondence.

And as for the ‘victims’ who the likes of Peter Mandelson keep citing so poignantly, they can save their crocodile tears. Because neither he nor any of Epstein’s pals paid much attention to the victims when it mattered. Very few stayed away from him, even when it was quite clear what kind of man he was. Noam Chomsky even tried to help Epstein rebrand his image following his conviction.

Whatever some may have said about Epstein’s charm, his intellectual curiosity, or his supposed interest in philanthropy and culture, money, venality is the common denominator in so many of these interactions, whether it is Sarah Ferguson - venality made flesh - looking for £20,000 (‘any ideas?’), or the models and fashion students who provided him with ‘girls’ in exchange for cash gifts or contributions towards their education.

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Money, even more than sex, is the glue that holds Epstein’s networks together, that enabled him to collect and connect people, and which also drew people towards him like flies to a dungheap. Money explains the gormless adulation that parasites like Mandelson bestowed upon him. Money explains how, in 2017, Epstein obtained pieces of cloth from the Ka’aba stone in Mecca with the help of a UAE and Saudi businessmen.

In Epstein’s world, nothing is sacred, and everything and everyone can be bought and sold. Because there is always someone who needs him for something, or hopes to get something from him, whether it is the art collector Steve Tisch inquiring about ‘Ukrainian girls’, or Mitterand’s former culture minister Jack Lang looking for Epstein’s help in selling a luxury house in Marrakesh. Lang and his daughter Caroline maintained financial relationships with Epstein long after his criminal conviction. Both of them are now being investigated by the French authorities for ‘laundering of aggravated tax-fraud proceeds’ over their ties to Epstein, and - inevitably - they now express horror at Epstein’s crimes.

The Harvard professor and economist Larry Summers is also ‘deeply ashamed’ for his connections to Epstein and the ‘pain they have caused.’ The former US treasury secretary who once sought ‘romantic advice’ from Epstein, and financial tips on getting $1 million funding for his wife’s poetry project, now wants to ‘rebuild trust’.

Summers is another ‘powerful man’ who has acquired a moral conscience in the light of negative publicity. There are also a few women who moved in Epstein’s circles who have found reasons to be publicly regretful. But Epstein’s world was basically a man’s world, a rich man’s world. In the Marquis de Sade’s novels, degenerate aristocrats take peasant women off to castles for their pleasure. In Epstein’s gilded oligarchical bubble, the women and girls who stream through his island, his various mansions and the homes of his friends and clients, are also recruited from the lower orders through coercion or financial inducements - the more powerless and vulnerable the better.

Chosen entirely for their looks and willingness to please, they are easily exploitable, easily discarded, and - or so Epstein once believed - likely to keep their mouths shut. This, you might think, is how some rich men will always behave, if they get the chance. But depravity is not the whole story that these emails tell. As the Mandelson revelations have shown, Epstein’s networking and influence-peddling also had an economic imperative, and a political and geopolitical dimension that leaves a slime trail from the bedroom and the massage parlour to the hellscape of our political times.

Consider this exchange between Epstein and ‘anti-elitist’ provocateur Steve Bannon in September, 2018:

BANNON: The right now has the working class behind them on immigration, macron collapsed tonight, merkle (sic) dead - we win 60% of euro parliament next spring, salvini calls election the following week. done, done and done

EPSTEIN: Yikes. Heaven have mercy on their soul s (sic)

BANNON: We can run the tables here.

And this one, on 17 June 2018

EPSTEIN: Jagland [Thorbjorn Jagland. Former Norwegian PM then Secretary General of the Council of Europe] meeting with Lavrov Putin coming straight to Paris on fri. Staying overnight with me

BANNON: No problem - a lot exploded yesterday

EPSTEIN: Says the bombthrower

BANNON: To the master bombmaker

What had exploded? Why was Epstein included in the first person plural who could ‘run the tables’ in Europe? Why would Jagland stay with a man he knew to be a convicted pedophile before meeting with Lavrov and Putin? What was Epstein’s interest in this meeting?

The friendship between Bannon and the liberal pseudo-philanthropist who liked to hang out with Al Gore, Bill Clinton and Richard Dawkins, might be explained by Epstein’s wealth and connections, on Bannon’s side, at least. But what did Epstein get out of it, beyond some lame media advice? And what explains the following exchange between Epstein and Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, on June 26 2016, three days after Brexit?

EPSTEIN: return to tribalism, counter to globalisation. amazing new alliances. you and I both agreed zero rates were too high, and as i said in your office. finding things on their way to collapse, was much easier than finding the next bargain

THIEL: Of what?

EPSTEIN: brexit, just the beginning

As Thiel would say, the beginning of what? Don’t hold your breath waiting for answers, and many people have no interest in asking them. It is striking how little far-right and populist movements that constantly talk about protecting women and children have had to say about Epstein’s pedophile networks.

It’s understandable that Nigel Farage - mentioned some 40 times in the emails - would not want to look too closely into Epstein, given his connection to Trump, and the fact that Steve Bannon boasted to Epstein that he was giving Farage and Johnson advice pre- and post-Brexit.

All those defenders of women and girls against the migrants hordes; the QAnon conspiracy mongers who thought Trump would ‘save the children’ from cannibalistic celebrities and politicians - they all appear to be surprisingly untroubled by evidence of a real elite paedophile conspiracy

But you might expect that governments concerned with national security would want a thorough investigation of the allegations that Epstein may have had connections to Russian and Israeli intelligence. It ought to be of at least passing interest to the UK government, that Epstein seemed to see Brexit as an opportunity, and appeared to be working with Bannon towards that end.

But some questions cannot be asked, without risking painful answers about the pervasive networks of corruption and manipulation that Epstein was part of. In the UK, our hapless prime minister is now lurching towards ignominious failure, because he was foolish enough to appoint a man he knew had been a friend of Epstein’s in order to flatter and cajole the man who has now been mentioned 38,000 times in the Epstein Files.

This is the world we have, a 21st century transnational oligarchy, based on the most extreme and unequal concentration of wealth humanity has ever seen. It’s a world dominated by men who believe themselves to be titans. Big men - in their own eyes at least- they think that they can do anything to anyone and get away with it, and that they are not constrained by the rules that govern ordinary mortals, or ‘losers’, as Lady Victoria Hervey calls those who are not in the files.

The files show how small, grubby and venal so many of them are. But as the sleaze and scandals continue to spread, we should remember that Epstein’s depravity is a symptom of our depraved times, in which the rich and the superrich look down on the world from heights they should never have been allowed to occupy, and wield a power that too many governments were willing to give them.

And the fact that the man more closely connected to Epstein’s crimes than anyone else still occupies the White House, protected by his government and his party, is a brutal demonstration of how much power they still have.

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