Grabbing Nicolás Maduro was less of a departure from US norms than many people want to admit. And yet it’s the clearest indication yet that Donald Trump is willing to use physical force to achieve his goals – and those goals really are a break with post-war history. That combination is enough to necessitate dramatic changes to Europe’s security posture.

There can no longer be any illusion that America First means isolationism, or that Trump abhors conflict and just wants to make deals. Under that scenario, America might abandon Europe but would never menace us directly. As the threat to Greenland makes clear, that is no longer guaranteed.

The US has routinely ignored the rules it sought to enforce on others, veiling its unilateralism in the privileged vocabulary of ‘intervention’. Last weekend, it used military force to capture a dictator on his own territory, install pliant new leaders and dictate policy to them, all without a UN resolution. That’s normal: It did the same in Iraq in 2003, only much less cleanly.

Or consider Barack Obama, the liberal darling who carried out more than 500 drone strikes in countries that were not at war with the US, an action that has no basis in international law. The Nobel Peace Prize winner who assassinates America’s enemies is not so different to the FIFA Peace Prize winner who kidnaps them.

Two things have changed, however. First, the Trump administration is the first in the post-war period not to view European countries as allies, as shown by last month’s National Security Strategy. Second, Trump appears to be acting outside the checks and balances of the US state as well as international law: The strike on Venezuela came without authorisation from Congress and with no pretence of noble intent, unlike Iraq and other wars. That increases the risk of Trump doing something radical like attacking a NATO ally.

Neither foe nor friend

There’s a growing sense in the political mainstream that the strategic outlook has shifted. Rory Stewart, a former British diplomat and now co-host of the centrist Rest is Politics podcast, referred to the US this week as a “threat” to European democracies alongside Russia and China.

Trump has made explicit and repeated threats to annex Greenland from Denmark. If he decides to do so, there is nothing Denmark or the EU could do about it. The US has escalation dominance at every rung of the ladder; Europe’s dependence on the US financial system and tech firms make even sanctions unthinkable.

The threat to Greenland has led sober commentators such as Phillips O’Brien to suggest that “the US is more likely to fight Europe than to fight for it”. The FT’s Edward Luce says “Greenland could be next”. In that case the US should perhaps be considered as more of a threat than China, which practices economic coercion worldwide but threatens military force only within its immediate sphere of influence.

A less pessimistic reading is that the US would stop at Greenland, which is both in the Western hemisphere and strategically important for monitoring Russian activity in the Arctic as polar ice-caps melt. These factors offer a justification of US interest that could not realistically be replicated against mainland Europe.

But even if the prospect of direct military confrontation remains limited, European dependency on the US creates an unacceptable vulnerability to coercion. It’s not impossible to imagine an aircraft carrier loitering off a European coastline after a far-right party loses an election and cries foul, for example. And if it came to scrambling our US-made fighter jets, are we confident that we could turn them on?

None of this means we should see the US as an enemy, but the argument that it’s a friend is getting harder to sustain. As Stewart said, Europe should no longer make the mistake of “assuming they’re going to be – under Trump or indeed under one of Trump’s successors – a stable, reliable, values-based ally”.

Strategic autonomy from each other

Decoupling from the US will require European armed forces to work closely with each other – and that will require cultural change. All of Europe’s former great powers still feel the need to have their core equipment made not only in Europe but in their specific country, leading to fragmentation, inefficiency, and dependence on the US for more advanced kit.

When I trained as a young man with the British reserves, there was a pervasive sense even at the junior officer level that it would somehow be inappropriate to rely on French or German equipment. Officers’ messes were adorned with paintings of historical battles against those former enemies, with the subtext that we would dishonour our ancestors by aligning too closely with them.

That attitude must change. No European country spends nearly enough on defence to produce all its own equipment at scale, and when we inevitably fall short we end up turning to America. In shunning old rivals, we make ourselves vulnerable to a new one.

By way of example, the UK has spent more than £5 billion developing Ajax, an infantry fighting vehicle. From the early stages of testing, extreme noise and vibration in the cabin made soldiers severely ill; more than a decade in, these problems persist and there is no set date for its entry into service. All of this for a UK order of less than 600 vehicles (foreign buyers seem unlikely, given the above), which translates to almost £10 million per unit.

Meanwhile Germany makes the Puma, a vehicle with similar specifications that has been in service since 2015 and is, by all accounts, excellent. The UK could simply have bought the Puma rather than spend a decade developing a worse alternative. The obstacles to such a thought process were primarily cultural; if jobs were the concern, the £5 billion would have been better invested in developing a unique product that might find overseas buyers.

European countries are small, these days; none of us can face the century alone. To break free from America, our armed forces must learn instead to depend on each other.

This essay first appeared on The Sentinel, my new publication focused on European defence and rearmament. I’ll occasionally cross-post pieces of interest to this broader audience, but if you’re interested in defence please consider subscribing here.

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Dear readers,

Firstly, thank you all for reading The Leopard. Over the past year, it has grown more than I could have hoped and generated all sorts of interesting conversations and connections.

Fear not, The Leopard isn’t going anywhere. I’ll keep sharing my occasional thoughts on Europe’s place in a changing world, along with Dorotea’s delightful illustrations.

I’m just interrupting the normal service to advertise a new publication that I launched today. It’s called The Sentinel and it’s all about Europe’s rearmanent.

For now, I’ll be publishing a weekly round-up and analysis of news on this topic. I’ll soon be adding op-eds to the mix (and if you know anyone who’d be a good fit, please put us in touch).

In the longer term, I’m working with a couple of partners to build something much more ambitious, with a premium B2B offering and a line in events.

For that reason, I’ll be holding The Sentinel entirely separate from The Leopard. I may occasionally cross-post things from The Sentinel to here, but if you’re interested in the story of Europe’s rearmament, please head over to The Sentinel and subscribe. The first edition is here:

The Sentinel

The Sentinel Weekly: Europe enters the laser race

In a long war, it’s not enough to be able to shoot down drones. You need to shoot them down more cheaply than your opponent can field them. One possible solution comes straight from the pages of science fiction: lasers…

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6 months ago · 3 likes · Sam Wilkin

(Edit 22 Nov: building The Sentinel is taking most of my attention and I probably won’t be posting much on The Leopard for the foreseeable. But I’ll keep it online and may return to it later on.)

Best,

Sam

The first thing to greet visitors to the EU capital is the smell of piss. Stepping off the train at Gare du Midi, Brussels’ international train station, you’ll be watched by overweight security guards in stab vests as you make your way to the metro or taxi rank, past a permanent homeless encampment under a bridge and a rotating cast of lunatics in desperate need of care.

Longer-term residents soon learn that it doesn’t get much better. Spiralling crime rates, failing public services and eye-watering tax rates are no way to attract the continent’s best and brightest.

Maybe it’s the Tokyo talking, but I think a wealthy economic bloc governing half a billion people ought to have a better capital. And yet fixing Brussels is beyond the jurisdiction of the EU and the capabilities of the Belgian state. If the EU is to be a serious power in this century, it seems the only solution is to move its headquarters elsewhere.

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Brussels, Europe and the world have all changed since the city was chosen as the EU capital1 in 1958 – a provisional decision that solidified over time without ever being fully formalised. Now as then, inertia is a powerful force: The main argument for Brussels today is that everything is already here.

Among the criteria for Brussels initially being chosen were its vibrant metropolis, its abundance of high-quality housing, its uncongested city centre, its good transport links and its open economy. To a modern-day resident, the joke is in poor taste.

The other criteria were that it should be in a small country to avoid upsetting the Franco-German balance of power, which is still met; and that it should be located close to the EU’s geographical centre, which is not. Subsequent waves of EU expansion, along with the UK’s departure in 2020, have moved the centre of gravity much further east.

If the EU were created today in its current form, Brussels would not be chosen as its capital even if the city were well governed. The historical anomaly might be tolerable if Brussels had used the elite influx to become the best city in Europe. But on many measures it’s a long way down the charts, and getting worse.

Urban decay

I am fortunate to live in one of the nicer parts of central Brussels. I buy my groceries at a delightful weekend market, and if I wish to dine out there’s a street nearby with a tantalising selection of high-quality restaurants. And yet a man was stabbed on that very street a few weeks ago, leaving a large and very visible bloodstain on the pavement that the city took three days to clean up.

One commune over in Etterbeek, also regarded as a ‘nice area’, the local shopkeepers have been lobbing bombs at each other’s premises. In less fortunate parts of the city, where an EU intern without family money might live, drug gangs have been going at each other with automatic rifles. Two further shootings occurred near Gare du Midi in the course of drafting this essay; there have been more than 60 this year.

At a more mundane level, civic order and decency have broken down. The police don’t have enough resources to investigate things like bike theft, to the extent that most victims don’t even bother to report it. Every bench is tagged with graffiti and surrounded by litter. It’s no wonder that most people retreat to the suburbs as soon as they have children, or even before.

Some long-term Brussels residents reach for euphemisms like ‘grit’ or ‘character’ to describe the chaos, saying they wouldn’t want to live in a sanitised Dubai or Singapore. A better comparison would be Copenhagen or Prague, which show that a mid-sized European city can be safe and clean without losing its charm.

The dysfunction is particularly galling given the high rate of income tax, often more than 50% when all is said and done – comparable to Helsinki or Vienna, where the trains run on time, the trash is collected and the police solve most crimes. Brussels has socialist taxes and capitalist public services.

People working for the EU institutions are exempt from normal taxes2 and can live comfortably enough if they survive their first years in the intern-industrial complex. But they only make up about half of the EU bubble. The journalists, lobbyists, consultants, lawyers and so forth all get clobbered at full rate.

Brussels has charms that other European cities lack, but mostly this is down to the presence of the EU institutions, and would be replicated anywhere the EU chose as its seat. The cosmopolitan crowd that sits around my dinner table belongs to the EU capital, not to Brussels. So do our favourite bars and restaurants. If the circus moves, so do the clowns.

Most of us continue to live in Brussels despite the city, not because of it. We moved here for work, and ended up building careers in the EU bubble or otherwise putting down roots of friendship and family. But everyone has a gripe, things are measurably getting worse, and I worry about whether talented members of the next generation will accept these trade-offs to pursue an EU career.

State failure

The idea of Belgium being a failed state is at least a decade old, and the Brussels bubble has ridden it out so far. The city’s elite residents have long joked warmly about living in “the world’s most successful failed state”.

But after eight years here, it feels to me like a turning point is being reached. Gen Z is famously less career-driven than my generation, less willing to sacrifice their quality of life in service of their careers. The observation is generally made in relation to work-life balance, but must surely also apply to the broader lived environment. If the EU can’t attract top talent from the next generation, it will fail to meet this century’s challenges.

State failure also affects the workings of the EU in more direct ways. The Schuman roundabout, at the epicentre of the EU institutions, has been stuck at the most disruptive stage of renovation works for more than a year after the city government ran out of money. To one journalist newly arrived from the US, such a basic failure looks like “a joke, an embodiment of the perceived dysfunction in Brussels and the EU writ large”.

The lack of security also risks chilling political expression, with many incidents in recent months of people on the right being violently harassed.3 Last month Polish MEP Waldemar Buda, from the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party, reported that his car had been shot several times with an air rifle, in what he perceived as a targeted act of intimidation.

In June, several Jewish organisations were advised to take private security measures after posters featuring the faces of their staff were plastered around Brussels, accusing them of “lobbying for genocide” over their links to Israel. While the Gaza war has stoked antisemitism across Europe, Euractiv reports that Belgium is unusual in not having begun work on a strategy to combat it.

In May an event held by MCC, a right-wing think tank linked to Hungary’s ruling party, was disrupted by nearly a hundred antifa thugs who hurled eggs at attendees and attempted to drown out the conference, which was about women in conservative politics. Despite previous intimidation by the same group and clear advance warning, only half a dozen police were present, and were forced to huddle inside for more than an hour until reinforcements arrived to disperse the mob.

MCC has a right to take part in the EU discourse: There’s no evidence of it receiving funding from hostile foreign powers and its events do not feature hate speech or incitement to violence. The group that disrupted the event, by contrast, was a group of local ‘antifascists’ who decided to use violence to keep MCC out of their city – with no respect for its status as the EU capital.

Similarly, another MCC-led event was disrupted last year after the mayor of Brussels’ smallest commune, for no good reason, ordered police to shut it down. The decision was overturned by a court but the damage was done: Belgian state failure allowed the mayor of 27,000 people – a man also linked to Turkish nationalist politics – to interrupt a conversation about the future of half a billion Europeans.

If anybody on the left is tempted to welcome these developments, remember that the wheel turns. Tactics used in your favour today will be turned against you tomorrow; if a right-wing conference can be illegally disrupted, so can a Pride parade.

For European democracy to function, its institutions and the people that serve them need security both from political intimidation and from random acts of violence. In both senses, Brussels is no longer able to provide it.

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When a Japanese tourist visits Paris, they may experience disappointment intense enough to cause trauma. Paris Syndrome has been a recognised condition since the 1980s, long before it and other European cities became known as crime hotspots.

As a child of the European metropolis, I used to find such squeamishness amusing. But now I must say sumimasen to the Japanese people because after visiting their wonderful country, I have begun to understand how jarring it must be for them to visit Europe.

This is not simply a matter of difference. I am probably less familiar with the food and language here than the average Japanese person is in Paris, but I don’t have anything resembling Paris Syndrome. What I’m feeling is closer to the opposite.

Reverse Paris Syndrome is the jarring realisation that so much of the shit we put up with in European cities is unnecessary, and the platitudes we tell ourselves in order to cope are untrue.

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All across Europe, we have learned to accept high levels of crime as a cost of living in the city. We’re constantly looking over our shoulders, patting down our pockets, avoiding certain areas at night. When something is stolen regardless, we thank the fates that we weren’t stabbed as well.

In London, thieves on e-bikes seize watches and smartphones with impunity; the authorities meekly tell us to be more vigilant. In Tokyo, you can leave your phone on a restaurant table while you go to the bathroom. London has legalised bike theft; in Tokyo, people leave their bicycles unlocked overnight outside their houses. Visitors can make use of luggage lockers, which somehow survive the night without being pissed on or broken into.

After a couple of days in this environment, I started putting down a guard I had forgotten was up. I’d ride the metro without moving my phone and wallet from my loose jacket pockets to my trousers. I’d leave a laptop unattended to talk to someone. On the shinkansen to Hiroshima, I napped through a few stops without waking up each time to watch my bag. It was a revelation.

Excuses melt away. Tokyo is not a tightly controlled city-state like Dubai, where the poor are housed in distant compounds and criminals can be deported at will. It is a thriving, humming metropolis, by some measures the biggest in the world, and low-level crime is simply absent. So is antisocial behaviour. There’s no litter or graffiti; everyone wears headphones when listening to music.

More than a monoculture

It would be easy here to attribute the difference to Europe’s cultural diversity, which is so obviously lacking in Japan. There’s a trope in right-wing politics that Western cities could all be like Tokyo if we abandoned multiculturalism, stopped pandering to ‘communities’ and reinforced a broader sense of society, restoring social trust. There’s a grain of truth to it.

Japan is tentatively beginning to bolster its workforce with foreigners, and many Japanese see multicultural Europe as a cautionary tale. Stories of Muslim migrants harassing schoolgirls on the metro are widely discussed, and are driving a surge in support for new right-wing parties. There is also a sense of unease towards Chinese expats: While not particularly linked to crime, some Japanese doubt that they will uphold the desired standards of courtesy and etiquette.

There is no sense in Japan of multiculturalism being necessary, or the natural order of things, as there is in the modern West. For many Japanese, the solution to foreign residents being obnoxious on the metro, say, is to simply not have foreign residents.

But simply being a monoculture doesn’t account for the whole difference. The West has never been anything like Japan, for both better and worse. Our culture of individualism, which in many ways is a superpower, also causes us all to act in ways that Japanese would consider antisocial – and that prevent the creation of a metropolis like Tokyo.

In the West, most middle-class city-dwellers feel entitled to reserve a large chunk of public space outside their house to store their car for a nominal fee. This selfish urge runs so deep that no government has ever been able to deny it, despite the enormous hidden subsidy it entails. Huge chunks of prime real estate are lost.

In Tokyo there is almost no street parking. The streets are narrower, allowing more density; but they feel wider because in terms of useable space, they are. Trunk roads aside, there’s also no need for a pavement: The whole width of the street is for everybody, not just the minority who own cars.

Drivers adapt to the market conditions. Because space is no longer subsidised, most people buy normal-sized cars instead of giant SUVs. There’s also a booming demand for kei cars – small models that fit anywhere and also benefit from a tax reduction. They’re not sold in any other market, in a sign of how rare Japan’s urban planning model is.

As a tourist, this emboldens you to wander freely through residential neighbourhoods, seeing locals going about their business and perhaps finding a backstreet izakaya on the way back to your hotel. It feels freeing, and the press of cars in any European city feels restrictive in comparison.

Commons sense

Underlying this urban planning decision is an understanding that space is more efficiently used publicly than privately, and that space in a city is at a premium. To build a functioning metropolis, therefore, as little space as possible must be given over to private use.

That philosophy underpins the capsule hotel, where each guest’s private space is equivalent to a few coffins; dozens can be housed in each room. Nonetheless, they are primarily aimed at business travellers. In Japan, sharing space isn’t low-status or a sign of being broke. It’s just common sense.

To Western eyes, this can lead to a mismatch in expectations. I stayed at a capsule hotel in Sendai. My personal quarters were tiny and I had no private shower, so in one sense it felt like being in a youth hostel. On the other hand, I had access to a luxurious shared bathhouse, a gym and a reading room more typical of a high-end Western hotel. Not to mention a natty set of pyjamas.

To affordably have nice things in cities, three conditions appear to be necessary. First, a cultural willingness to share space at all social status levels. Second, a common understanding of etiquette that governs how these spaces should be used. Third, a very low crime rate to allow people to let their guard down.

In Japan, these conditions are met. People living in cities can therefore have nice things – a house downtown, a bath on business trips, a walk in a well-kept park – far cheaper than we can in Europe.

European cities are moving in the opposite direction. The little space that we do share – parks, public transport – is falling into disrepair, social trust is falling and crime is on the rise. People are retreating into private spaces, and it’s hard to blame them.

We’ll never be Japan, and we shouldn’t want to be. But if we could somehow meet it halfway, I wouldn’t complain.

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The dog days of summer are giving way to languid late-August evenings. It’s time for Europeans to slowly return to the office and trade stories about all the stupid things we said when the heat was addling our brains.

Things like “why don’t we just install air conditioning everywhere?”

As European heatwaves become more frequent and intense, the aircon discourse has gathered pace. While much of it is driven by America brain,1 the idea of mass-installation of AC is now embraced by Marine Le Pen, who might well be France’s next president.

Apparently the most obvious argument against aircon – that it’s crass and American – is no longer enough to keep it at bay. So here is a reasoned case for why AC, if widely adopted, will change the fabric of our cities and societies for the worse.

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Air conditioning is a consumption-based solution to a shared problem. Like other things in this category, it’s attractive on an individual level but harmful when adopted wholesale, bringing negative externalities and removing the political incentive to come up with a more effective common solution.

Consider the motor car. In a city where nobody else has one, it would be great: You’d get around more quickly, comfortably and safely than anyone else. But when everyone has one, we all spend hours stuck in gridlock and choking on pollution. Politicians don’t bother to deal with crime on public transport because it mainly affects poor people, and every spare bit of public space is given over to car storage. Cars, at scale, have ruined our cities.

Harmful technologies have a tendency to become inevitable. If enough people adopt air conditioning, living without it will become unthinkable – partly because of status games but also because AC literally makes cities hotter, compounding the public problem that it mitigates in private.

The laws of physics determine that ‘cold’ is merely the absence of heat. You cannot create cool air, only displace the heat – in the case of air conditioners, into public space. At scale this causes a noticeable increase in outdoor temperatures, leading to urban ‘heat bubbles’ whereby merely uncomfortable heat becomes unbearable.

For people who can’t afford air conditioning, this is catastrophic. But it’s also bad for the rest of us, forcing us into air conditioned bubbles and taking away our liberty to move freely around our cities.

Only snowflakes melt

I’m aware that everything is now linked to the culture war and air conditioning is right-coded, so here’s a message to my based brethren: A man who clings to AC is a snowflake. If Il Gattopardo could survive 1860s Sicily in a three-piece wool suit, you can tolerate 2020s northern Europe in your shorts and T-shirt, you absolute flannel.

The human body is an adaptable thing, if not overridden by our minds. When faced with discomfort our first instinct is to mitigate it; if we have AC, we’ll use it. But if you don’t have that option your body adapts, you maybe change your daily rhythms slightly, and you get on with your life.

If too much comfort causes you to become soft, you become a prisoner. You can’t go outside except in an air-conditioned car, where you’ll be stuck in traffic with the other snowflakes. Your world shrinks. I felt these shackles living in Dubai, where the heat is so extreme that AC is actually necessary for much of the year. It’s not a dependency that any society should enter into willingly.

What’s more, you’re making it worse for the rest of us. Your air-conditioned cars make the city hotter and more crowded – and kill more people than the heat does.2 Your buildings pump heat into the street. By retreating into your competing private spaces, you remove the political impetus to better adapt our shared public space to the changing climate.

Enter district cooling

This isn’t to diminish the dangers of excess heat, which can be severe. Hospitals and care homes should be air conditioned to protect the vulnerable. But as we learned during Covid, protections for the vulnerable shouldn’t necessarily be enforced on those who don’t need them. Better solutions exist.

Europe is not Dubai; the uncomfortable temperatures we experience for a few weeks a year are entirely manageable by means other than AC. Other parts of the world, even southern parts of Europe, have dealt with higher temperatures since time immemorial. A newer technology is not always better than the thing it replaces.

Simple measures such as planting trees can cool a city by up to 2 degrees. Drinking fountains can help people regulate their body temperature, while larger water features and shading structures can provide a cooling effect over a large area. Sympathetic architecture such as outdoor shutters can make a big difference to indoor spaces.

In cities across Europe and beyond, mayors have been putting district cooling measures in place to great effect, cleverly deploying shaded areas, greenery, and cooling spaces for vulnerable people. Parisians can even cool off in the Seine, which has been cleaned to an acceptable standard for the first time in a century.

There is a risk that this progress will be lost. Europe’s rightward political drift is a necessary cultural corrective at the national level, but in cities it risks sacrificing all of these beneficial community-based initiatives at the altar of consumerism, which would have us all sitting miserably in individual air-conditioned bubbles.

Summertime, and the linen is easy

Once it becomes possible to live entirely in an AC bubble, the culture can change in surprising ways. In Dubai and Singapore, businesspeople wear heavy clothing throughout the year, partly to be comfortable under the aggressively cold AC and partly to signal that they can afford never to leave it. This in turn reinforces the dependency, since behaviours that would be possible while wearing linen or seersucker – taking a bus, or sitting outside – are unbearable in a heavy suit.

In Europe, natural heat creates a market for summer tailoring, which brings seasonal variation and joy as well as practicality. Business dress codes are relaxed in the summer months, so we can sit on elegant café terraces, sipping our little coffees in our natty linen jackets feeling superior to Americans. What self-respecting European would give that up?

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There’s only one religion in the world. There’s also a dīn and a dharma and various other expressions of the supernatural, but the only one that fits neatly inside the definition of ‘religion’ is Christianity.

That’s because Christianity was shaped by Latin Europe, which also gave us the word religio. Other belief systems are different in concept and in scope; the boundaries implied by the Christian understanding of the word ‘religion’ don’t necessarily apply.

In multicultural Europe, we need to understand these nuances. As societies polarise, previously academic questions about religious identity – is Islam compatible with personal freedom, can Judaism be separated from Zionism – have become acutely political. They can only be answered by looking beyond the cultural framework of Christianity.

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Religio and Christianity spread through Europe in tandem. When countries adopted Christianity they also adopted the Latin word to describe it: Nearly all European languages, from Russian to Polish to Irish and even Basque, now use a derivative of religio instead of a word with a local root.1

Consider the Vikings, who evidently saw Christianity as sufficiently distinct from the Norse pantheon to require a new word to describe its place in public life. Ásatrú, meaning ‘faith in the gods’, made way for the Old Swedish religion, whose Latin etymology carries ideas of ‘obligation’ or ‘bond’.

But since then, we have begun to use the word ‘religion’ in a more categorical way, referring to other faiths as well. Language is destiny: Politics is downstream of culture, and culture is downstream of language. The linguistic elision of ‘religions’ has made us suppose, at a subconscious level, that they’re all broadly Christianity-shaped.

They’re not. Each supernatural belief system occupies a distinct range of brain-space and touches on different areas of life, with important effects on how it interacts with politics and society.

Render unto Caesar

Consider the limits of Christianity and how they inform European political thinking. Christianity makes no claim to ethnicity or nationality: As a proselytising religion, it aims explicitly to straddle such borders. As such, in the European mind, religion is clearly distinct from questions of race or nationalism.

But not every belief has that separation. Judaism is an ethnicity as well as a spiritual belief. Jews have never dispatched missionaries; on the contrary, access to conversion is closely guarded. Almost every Jew alive today is therefore directly descended from the ancient Israelites, and that fact is a central part of Jewish identity and religious practice. It’s also at the heart of Zionism.

Christianity makes space for temporal authority, most obviously in the phrase attributed to Jesus: “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and render unto God that which is God’s.” Christian texts overlap with family law and medical ethics, but not with taxation or foreign policy. As such, Europeans instinctively perceive a fairly clean break between politics and religion.

That marks a contrast with Islam, which dictates a much broader range of public affairs. The Quran explicitly states that the global community of Muslims (the umma) should be governed by a single state or federation with God as its sovereign and run in His name by a caliph – a ‘successor’ to Muhammad. It provides detailed instructions on matters as diverse as taxation and slavery. It claims jurisdiction over the whole world, and refers to places not yet under Islamic rule as the dār al-harb – the House of War.

In reality, most Muslims in Europe are able to set aside these commandments and practice their religion in a more limited fashion. But because Islam is so comprehensive in its concept, the gap between religious theory and lived reality is arguably wider for Muslims than it is for any other religious minority.

Beyond the Abrahamic religions, things get even less familiar to those of us raised in a Christian framework. Hinduism, Shinto and so forth are vastly different from Christianity – and from each other – in which questions they address, as well as how they address them.

Some years ago I spent two months motorcycling around India.2 I rented the motorbike from a Sikh gentleman, who gave it a blessing under the auspices of Ganesh, the Hindu god of travel and other things. A week later, as I entered the Himalayas, I was given some Buddhist prayer flags to drape around the handlebars.

None of these things were seen as conflicting with each other or with my Christian-infused atheism. Indian faiths are syncretic, their gods less jealous than ours. For my part, I happily went along with it. On Indian mountain roads, the wise man takes all the heavenly help he can get.

Our kind of heretic

I have been an atheist since I was a child. I don’t remember exactly when I stopped believing in God but I do recall that it was only a year or so after I gave up on Santa, who Himself only lasted a year longer than the Tooth Fairy. To my young mind, these three supernatural entities were on a continuum.3

In the last months, though, I’ve started thinking of myself as a Christian not because of any belief in God but because of how I conceptualise religion. My instinctive view of where the boundaries lie between race, religion, politics and faith is typical for someone raised in the Christian tradition.

The historian Tom Holland has even argued that atheism itself is a Protestant concept, since the idea of religion being a personal matter, held separate from communal belonging, was only introduced to Europe after the Reformation.

My sense that religion is optional was so entrenched in my formative years that I remember being shocked, even feeling disrespected, when a Christian identity was first forced upon me. In my early 20s I began travelling to the Middle East and was required to declare a religion for my various visa applications. These typically had a drop-down menu with no option for ‘atheist’ or ‘none’, requiring me to declare myself Christian.

Over the subsequent months I spent travelling in the Arab world, I discovered that the vocabulary for my spiritual worldview doesn’t exist. There is no word in Arabic for ‘atheist’. The closest I could find was mulhid, which more accurately translates as ‘heretic’.

The only way I found in Arabic to describe my lack of faith was lā mutadayyin, literally ‘not devout’. It’s a negatory expression, not an affirmative one, suggesting a lack of character rather than a considered viewpoint. Here, too, language is destiny.4

Since heresy isn’t conducive to making friends and influencing people, I gritted my teeth and said I was a Christian. At the time I thought it was a lie, since I have no faith in any god. Now I consider it to be true on a deeper level: My ability to dispense entirely with faith reflects the Christian nature of my cultural upbringing.

These nuances are important to understand but also difficult to discuss. Ironically it’s our own concept of religio that makes the topic so sensitive. For European Christians, public politics is open to criticism but personal faith is not. In other traditions, the two can’t be so cleanly separated.

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Not to brag, but my last essay on here did rather well. Going viral on Substack is much nicer than doing so on short-form media, but my pleasure is tempered by the confirmation of something that I have suspected from the beginning: As with so many things, the surest way to succeed here – perhaps the only way – is to reach an American audience.

I published the viral essay two weeks ago, on Friday morning. By the end of the day it had reached 600 views – a little above average for the first day, and where most of my essays tend to stop. But when I woke up on Saturday, it had nearly 3,000 views, with new comments and subscribers flowing in every few minutes.

Clearly some influential readers had shared my essay during the American day, prompting a spike in views. But what happened next was more revealing: Engagement continued to climb after America went to bed, reaching a large audience in Europe and the UK. Two weeks on, the essay has more than 13,000 views and has gained me 200 subscribers. Almost all of this activity came from within the Substack ecosystem.

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I’m guessing there were two factors at play here. First, because of the monoculture,1 American accounts are followed by people all over the world; some of those that shared my essay had global reach. Second, the size of the American market means that the essay probably crossed an engagement threshold there, prompting the algorithm to start recommending it to users worldwide.

There’s a long history of creative people moving to America to tap into the world’s biggest market – particularly Brits, who share the language and who can affect the Oxbridgey cleverness that liberal Americans seem to find so alluring.2 For various reasons, this path has never interested me.

But what I observed points to an even starker imbalance. My aim is to reach readers across Europe, but my most successful attempt went through America first. To achieve enough momentum to crack the European market, my essay needed a spin in the American flywheel.

Hub and spokes

This pattern is repeated across the economy. The EU’s vaunted ‘Single Market’ is nothing of the sort: It may have eliminated tariffs but all manner of regulatory hurdles remain, making cross-border trade within the bloc prohibitively expensive for young or low-margin businesses.3

The market for digital services is no less fragmented. Scaling across Europe means offering everything in 24 languages4 and doing 27 rounds of compliance, plus dealing with EU regulations that get more bloated every year. Businesses in America only have one official language and one set of national laws to worry about.

This is the paradox at the heart of our economy. Scaling across Europe requires an enormous administrative capacity, but an enormous administrative capacity can only be paid for by continent-scale operations. Legacy companies can balance the books, but newcomers can’t break out of their national market.

For a new company to conquer Europe it must therefore first get big on another continent, which usually means America. Europe has plenty of e-commerce platforms and streaming services but they’re bound by national borders. Amazon and Netflix spread into every market because they arrived from the American flywheel.5

Their services have improved our lives in many ways, but when everything in Europe from dating apps to international news media was built by and for Americans, the result is cultural colonisation.

We don’t lack ambitious people with creative ideas; we lack the regulatory streamlining and unified capital markets for businesses to scale up. Luckily for European founders, digital businesses are relatively mobile, so anyone who hopes to become a pan-European sensation can first go to America and fill their war chest for the regulatory battles to come.

If and when they return home, they will no longer be fully European – and nor will the companies that they built, whose services we consume. We will be living in an American market, and no amount of regulation can prevent it.

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What does safe cycling infrastructure in Europe have to do with the plight of the Palestinians? Nothing, you might think – and you would be right.

But not everyone agrees. There is a small but noisy group of people who feel entitled to insert Palestine activism into any vaguely left-coded gathering, from climate marches to Labour Day parades and even certain concerts and festivals.1 They’re doing the left a great deal of harm.

Last week I attended Critical Mass in Brussels, a monthly gathering of cyclists intended to assert our right to a fair share of road space without being menaced by drivers. With the car threat neutralised by weight of numbers, cycling becomes carefree and joyous: a window into a better urban future. It’s successful largely because it’s fun, and not overtly political.

This time, though, somebody felt it would be appropriate to fly a large Palestine flag from the back of his bicycle. Another man draped a flag around his shoulders like a cape, and a third had stickers on his helmet. Several wore keffiyehs. One man had even dressed his child, who can’t have been older than five, in a Palestine-flag scarf. All of these people were white.

The entitlement they felt to bring these symbols to a completely unrelated, largely apolitical event points to a troubling degree of moral certainty. These people are not just showing their allegiance to a cause; they’re asserting that all right-thinking people must feel the same way, and nobody at a progressive gathering could possibly be offended by it.

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I’ve written at length about the problems with Palestine activism. Regardless of its intention, it’s often antisemitic in effect because of its obsessive focus on the world’s only Jewish state. It relies on an inaccurate reading of the region’s history; and it wrongly blames Israel alone, rather than cynical Arab autocrats, for Palestinian suffering.

You may still disagree with me, but not everybody does. There are many people who care deeply about left-coded social causes, from active transport to workers’ rights, who are uncomfortable being part of a crowd that might at any point start shouting antisemitic slogans.2 If the point of activism is to build a coalition for social change, then repelling these people counts as a failure.

Attack of the Omnicause

There is a trend on the activist left to declare that everything is related, that climate change and social justice “can’t be separated from” the Middle East or gender politics. The idea has roots in the American Civil Rights movement, when Martin Luther King said that “no one is free until we are all free” and that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”.

These are effective slogans, but in practice King was fighting a limited battle with a clearly defined objective: equality for black Americans. He did not particularly concern himself with, say, women’s rights – and the movements that successfully did so, such as the suffragists, were as narrowly focused on that goal as King was on his.

As the world has grown more interconnected and the range of potential social causes has expanded, activism has become muddled and unfocused. A simplistic view has taken hold that Western colonialism is somehow to blame for all the world’s ills, and that if only this could be undone then everything from gender inequality to African corruption would be solved.

In reality, these supposedly aligned causes often conflict with each other. There is tension between women’s equality and trans rights,3 and between mass migration and workers’ rights. Nobody has worked out how to free Palestine while preserving a safe country for Jews. The world is complicated; you can't just wave a magic wand and 'decolonise' everything.

It takes a great deal of privilege to be able to ignore these contradictions. To be ideologically pure you must be politically insulated, which is why membership of the activist left is so heavily skewed towards the comfortable middle class.

Ultimately, raging against an imaginary global conspiracy is the coward’s way out. It allows for a sort of intellectual martyrdom where one can fail to achieve anything and still feel righteous, rather than doing the hard work of politics and compromise.

For every issue added to the Omnicause and arrogantly paraded at unrelated events, a group of people is excluded. Instead of building a coalition for change, the activist left is screaming into the wind as potential allies slink away.

Besides recruiting allies, activists must also win over neutral bystanders. Here too, the insertion of Palestine activism or other unrelated causes limits the number of people who might be persuaded by any given idea.

Imagine someone in a car watching Critical Mass go past. If they think it looks fun, or marvel at how many people can move along a road when they’re not in cars, then the activism has succeeded. If they see a peloton for Palestine and dismiss it as a bunch of lefty lunatics, then it has failed.

Who’s left?

The self-immolation of the left is already having political consequences. Youth climate leaders, who carried so much moral force just a few years ago, have degenerated into all-purpose angry leftists. Although a large majority of Europeans still support ambitious climate policy, there is no longer a credible, broad-based activist movement to agitate for it.

Across Europe, green and left-wing parties have collapsed while those on the right and far right surge. This goes right down to the local level, where my own trajectory as a swing voter offers food for thought.

After moving to Brussels in 2017, I had the chance to vote in local elections in 2018 and regional elections in 2019.4 Both times I voted Green because I wanted fewer cars in my neighbourhood, better cycling infrastructure, and human-centric shared urban spaces.

The Greens won and delivered. Cafe terraces now sprawl onto public squares once littered with parked cars. Children play and learn to cycle on a pretty, shaded road next to a lake, protected from traffic. The air is cleaner, the streets quieter. It’s a great example of progressive local politics achieving tangible change for the better.

But by the next regional and local elections in late 2024, the tone had changed. At a debate ahead of the vote, a British man in a keffiyeh asked what the candidates intended to do about the “genocide” in Gaza (exactly what action he expected from Belgian municipal councils isn’t clear).

The Greens took the bait. In a pointless bit of political theatre, the mayor of my commune broke off a twinning agreement with an Israeli town just before the vote. Since then the Greens in the Brussels region have doubled down on Palestine activism.

They lost my vote, and with it the election. I switched my allegiance to a Flemish centre-left party that also supports progressive urbanism while staying out of distant conflicts. But control of my commune passed to conservative parties that have begun to reverse the urban progress made in the last five years.

A road protected for pedestrians and cyclists has been reopened to cars, so wealthy suburbanites can once more speed through my neighbourhood in their SUVs. The cycling network remains half-built, still too patchy to encourage vulnerable people onto bikes.

At the national level, climate action has been halted and company car subsidies remain. Landlords and inheritors still have their tax breaks.

And the activist left, wrapped in a keffiyeh, is screaming into the wind.

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How long does it take to write a typical edition of The Leopard? It’s a question I’m often asked, so I timed it. The short answer is about three hours, in this case on a train from Madrid to San Sebastián.

That at least is the bum-in-chair time, for writing and specific research. A more honest answer would include time spent reading books and articles, in conversation with friends, pondering life on my daily dog walks, and various other activities that encourage inspiration and contemplation. In that case, the time spent is both significantly longer and fundamentally unmeasurable.

These additional, uncounted hours are an essential part of the creative process. Not only can they be performed away from the keyboard and the office environment; they must be. To be creative the mind must wander, and so must the body.

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Mine is neither the first nor the finest mind to work this way. Luminaries as diverse as Darwin, Nietzsche and Murakami have done essential parts of their work while wandering. Had they been confined to offices for eight hours a day, we might not have the theory of evolution or Norwegian Wood.

And so it’s welcome that the orthodoxy of the eight-hour work day is starting to be questioned. Whereas previous thinking around flexible working focused on three or four eight-hour days a week, over the past year the idea of working five hours a day, five days a week has started to take root.

Cult of long hours

Few office workers out of earshot of their boss will claim to be consistently productive for eight or more hours a day. There are times when everything comes together in a glorious flow state and the hours rush past; but more often a large part of the day is wasted sitting in meetings that could have been emails, or staring blankly at a screen waiting for inspiration to strike.

It can be argued that many people, especially in jobs with a high cognitive load, achieve less in eight hours than they might in five. Not only does a shorter day allow the mind to rest and wander; it creates space for a healthier lifestyle – daily exercise, cooking non-processed food and so forth – that improves cognitive function.

This becomes all the more important when a job requires creativity, problem solving or collaboration. Since these are all markers of high-status jobs, it’s surprising that adopting a Darwinesque working pattern hasn’t become a status symbol. Quite the opposite: From politics to journalism to finance, longer-than-average working days are valorised.

Some cynics have postulated that this is a plot by a nebulous elite to stop us from catching our breath and throwing off our shackles. The late David Graeber best expressed this in his exquisite 2013 essay On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: “The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger”.

I agree with much of Graeber’s essay but this point feels overstated. The cult of long hours runs so high up the chain that it encompasses a large part of the ‘ruling class’ by any sensible definition of the term, and is often expressed most strongly in very senior people.

The problem, I think, is cultural. In a competitive and meritocratic society, ambitious people know they can advance by performing good work. The fallacy is that working longer or harder means working better.

The portrayal of prestigious jobs in popular culture often gives a warped view. Films and TV shows naturally focus on crises or periods of high drama, where the cabinet or spy agency or newsroom is working around the clock and eating pizza.1 They don’t show the weeks where not much happens.

Like most white-collar workers, I’ve done stints like that in moments of crisis, when it was necessary. The mistake is thinking there’s any additional benefit in working that pattern even when nothing much is happening. On the contrary, it grinds you down and leaves you less able to kick things up a gear when you really need to.

A workplace that’s in crisis mode every week is a badly run workplace. Sooner or later it will burn through its staff, making them unable to scramble effectively when a crisis does emerge. This mode of working should not in any way be seen as high-status or aspirational.

Moreover, as AI continues to advance, it will take on more routine tasks and more of a premium will be placed on creativity. The most prestigious jobs will be artisanal; elite workers will need to use our highest cognitive functions, taking more time for rest and reflection.

Social progress

If shorter working hours are good or at least neutral for daily productivity, they will also bring social benefits. Some of these are obvious: A population with time for sport, leisure and proper food is happier and healthier. The number of people relying on ultra-processed food or mind-altering drugs simply to get through the day ought to fall dramatically.

There would likely be a particular benefit to gender equality, since a five-hour day would allow work to coexist more easily with childcare and men to do a greater share.

What remains of the gender pay gap can largely be attributed to the unequal burden of childcare. Employers go to great lengths to prevent gender discrimination and recruit more women into professions where they are underrepresented. As a result, in most Western economies women now out-earn men in their 20s, when few have children.

Nevertheless a gap persists overall, even though most women are paid the same as men for equivalent work. The problem is a relative lack of women in senior roles, since more women than men choose to reduce their hours or take a career break after having children – and are thereby excluded from senior ranks where the cult of long hours is particularly entrenched.

Even outside senior roles, for a couple to raise young children while holding down two eight-hour jobs is both exhausting and, with the necessary childcare, expensive. It’s rational for one parent to take up flexible work or stop altogether, and more often than not in a straight couple it’s the woman. This isn’t particularly anyone’s fault, but clearly it is a problem if we want to have workplace equality and still produce children.

What if, instead of one parent being nudged out of work, normal working patterns were compatible with childcare? A standard five-hour day would allow working parents to do two shifts, alternating work and childcare between them.

This would benefit men as well as women. Most fathers want to spend more time with their children, but are prevented from doing so by the need to put in long shifts at work. If they could achieve the same productivity in fewer hours they could also, to borrow a feminist phrase, have it all.

From strained gender relations and falling birthrates to the obesity crisis and the burnout epidemic, there are few social issues not touched by the cult of long hours. For our society to keep evolving in the right direction, we should all work more like Darwin.

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Last week a driver deliberately ploughed his car into a crowd of football fans in Liverpool. Footage of the attack shows people bouncing helplessly off the speeding vehicle and others going under the wheels. Miraculously nobody was killed, but dozens were injured, including several children.

In Europe, where guns are rare, cars and trucks are the deadliest weapons in circulation. Terrorists and misfits have used them to kill civilians on many occasions over the past two decades – sometimes in isolation, sometimes as a prelude to a knife rampage. Al-Qaeda and Islamic State have even published tactical guides on how to kill people with a car.

But last week’s attack does not appear to have been political. The police very quickly announced that the perpetrator was a middle-aged white man, with the subtext that he probably wasn’t an Islamist. As further video and eyewitness testimony trickled in, a disturbing picture emerged: The car itself appears to have created the circumstances that provoked the attack. It was motive, opportunity and method.

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What appears to have happened is as follows. The city was thronged for a huge football victory parade, but a man felt entitled to use his car anyway. When the crowd parted to allow an ambulance to pass, he forced his way in – but then got stuck. Frustrated, he began revving his engine and honking his horn, prompting the revellers to shout and slap his car. The man, allegedly under the influence of drugs, lost his temper and rammed the crowd.

This was an extreme incident but it fits a common pattern. A person in a car feels entitled to priority access to public space. If somebody slows them down they quickly become enraged, blasting the horn and sometimes using the heft of their vehicle to physically intimidate the other person – particularly if they are on foot or on a bicycle. If you spend even a few hours moving about a European city, you’ll see this sequence play out many times.

Citizens wouldn’t normally tolerate such antisocial behaviour. But when the perpetrator is in a car, we do. Despite only about half of urban households owning a car,[1] we have been conditioned to accept their dominance of public space as the natural order of things. This is what urbanists call ‘car brain’.

Undue deference

One of my earliest childhood memories is of being told to “be careful” as soon as I was outside the house. Learning to cross the road safely is now a stage of childhood development. Beyond the direct risk to life, we have sacrificed childhood autonomy and the ability to play carefree in the street.

We now have the technological means to put hard limits on car speeds in urban environments. We actually do so for other vehicles such as electric scooters, citing safety concerns as the reason; but for cars, which are an order of magnitude more dangerous, it’s politically unthinkable.

Besides speeding through urban areas spewing toxic fumes, car owners feel entitled to store their vehicle on land they don’t own for a token fee. For a few tens of euros a year, residents of any city in Europe are allowed store their car on a plot of land outside their house that, at market rates, might be worth €1,000 or more per year.[2] Car storage is the only permitted use for this generous land grant.

Even non-drivers exhibit car brain in the undue deference they show to people behind the wheel. On zebra crossings, those rare parts of a street where cars don’t have priority, it’s common to see pedestrians meekly waving their thanks at drivers who stop for them. Being a car driver means routinely being thanked by members of the public simply for obeying the law.

Tolerated violence

At some point, such outsized feelings of entitlement can lead to violence. As a pedestrian and cyclist who does dare to take up my share of public space, whether by forcing a driver to stop by stepping onto a crossing or by cycling at a safe distance from parked cars, I receive threats of violence perhaps once or twice a month.

I’m generally able to laugh them off, partly because I’m used to it and partly because I’ve spent enough time on the training mats to win a scrap if I need to. But I’m always careful not to get directly in front of an angry driver’s vehicle: As with a gun, a man with a car can kill you in a split second of rage, and no amount of training can protect you from that.

Cars also kill an astonishing number of people by accident – more than 20,000 a year in the EU. Speaking for myself, as a healthy young man without suicidal tendencies, the thing most likely to kill me in the next decade or two is, by some distance, a car.

As I have worked over the years to peel back the layers of car brain,[3] this is what I find most shocking. It’s not that we tolerate the noise, the pollution, the blocked buses and trams, the wasted public space. It’s the fact that millions of people are moving about in a loaded weapon without even thinking about it.

European countries are not known for their lax approach to public safety. We’re governed by all manner of rules to stop us hurting ourselves or each other. Supermarket staff are forced to throw away perfectly good food at the end of each day to avoid a minuscule risk of poisoning a customer. Once they’ve done that, they get home by piloting two tons of metal through a street full of children while scrolling on their smartphone.

This is all a product of ideology. There is nothing inevitable about car dependency, especially in a city; it’s perfectly possible to live without one, and millions of us do. There are now more bicycles than cars in London – and yet the road infrastructure is still oppressively car-focused. The privileges given to cars harm all city-dwellers, while the number who use them dwindles by the year.

Policies to reduce motonormativity would allow even more people to go car-free: The archetypal car-dependent person is the parent too scared to do the school run by bicycle because of all the cars, and who therefore uses a car and becomes part of that very problem.

When something is seen as inevitable, people stop questioning the harms it causes and learn to tolerate things that would, in any other context, be scandalous. If we can break free of our collective car brain, future generations will be shocked that people were allowed to drive such things unimpeded through our precious urban landscapes.

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[1] This is an extremely rough estimate based on Brussels, which I imagine to be fairly typical. In any case, car ownership is by no means ubiquitous, as it is in most American cities.

[2] I have written about this at length, and done some rudimentary maths, here.

[3] I’m a recovering petrolhead. I was obsessed with cars as a child, and for the first decade of my adult life I exhibited many of the bad behaviours I describe in this article. A part of me still loves cars; they just don’t belong in the city.

Never before in history has such a successful civilisation generated such self-loathing as the modern West. There’s no evidence of the Abbasids agonising over the slave trade as they counted their gold, nor of Qin nobles sparing a thought for the brutalised corvee labourers who built their palaces. Late Roman thinkers blamed the erosion of Roman values for their empire’s decline, not the values themselves.

Other cultures have had their share of internal critics, but for failure rather than success. The Soviet empire collapsed because Russians were fed up of queueing for bread, not because their hearts bled for Uzbek conscripts or the Afghans they killed. Modern Algerians and Turks move to Europe for a better life, not to make amends for the predations of Barbary corsairs and Ottoman colonial administrators.

The Westerner who hates his or her own civilisation – which they might express as ‘whiteness’ or ‘colonialism’ – precisely for the way it achieved its moment of dominance is, I would argue, a unique phenomenon in history. It’s worth trying to understand what they believe and why, and what it means for our civilisation’s future.

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Those who hate the West have moved beyond campus activism into a broad chunk of public life. They have entered education, broadcasting and mainstream politics. They have hijacked other social causes from the labour movement to gay rights to environmentalism, portraying Western colonialism as the fount and keystone of all modern ills.

Right-wing nativists like to invoke a time before mass migration when society was cohesive and crime rare. Similarly, those who hate the West look back to a time before Western colonialism and imagine a world without systems of dominance and oppression. Neither of these worlds has ever existed.

This is of more than academic importance. The mental harm of thinking oneself intrinsically evil must be significant. And it turns talented people against the societies that created them.1 The West still has so much capacity for goodness and innovation, but it can only be unleashed if our bright young people are not at war with their heritage.

Another harm comes from the backlash whereby people who reject post-colonial guilt swing too far in the opposite direction, returning to a crude form of nationalism that threatens the delicate multiethnic trust that we have built up over generations. The polarisation between those who hate the West and those who worship it does not serve us well.

Neutral evil

The claim that the Western colonial project was uniquely evil doesn’t withstand scrutiny. Western empires did bad things, sometimes horrific things, but little that hadn’t been done before – and little that isn’t still being done at smaller scale elsewhere. That’s not to excuse colonialism but simply to place it accurately in the historical context.

Empire’s most heinous sin, slavery, is a constant in history, sometimes with explicit racial or religious justifications. The aforementioned Barbary corsairs specifically targeted Christians, sometimes describing their slave raids – often in service of the Ottoman empire – as a form of jihad. The Abbasid empire before them was served by a thriving long-distance slave trade operated by Vikings. Its Slavic victims were so numerous that they gave us the word ‘slave’.

The ‘scientific racism’ brought about by European empires was an innovation, but more in science than in racism: Ideas of racial superiority also warped the knowledge-seeking frameworks of earlier times. The 14^th century Arab thinker Ibn Khaldun, for example, claimed that Africans were intellectually inferior to other peoples and thereby easier to enslave – foreshadowing European ‘race science’ by hundreds of years.2

Moreover, racist patterns of dominance bordering on slavery persist in many parts of the world. African and Asian domestic workers are commonly abused in Gulf Arab countries. India’s caste system is a racial hierarchy in all but name. Russia’s modern ‘republics’ – ethnic-minority administrative regions – are significantly poorer and contribute more conscripts to the army than the ethnically Russian oblasts.

The imprint of Western colonialism endures to this day, but so does that of earlier empires. India and Pakistan would be very different were it not for the Mughals, who were just as foreign and just as rapacious as the British who followed them. Iran’s native religion, Zoroastrianism, was progressively snuffed out by Muslim conquerors from the 7^th century onwards; 1,400 years later, the sons of Ahura Mazda are ruled over by an Islamist theocracy.3

A little knowledge

How have those who hate the West come to have such an unbalanced view of our place in history? Much of it comes down to education and culture. The tragic climax of European nationalisms in the 20^th century led us to be much more circumspect about our own history, rightly casting aside jingoism in favour of a humble evaluation of our moral account.

But we have not applied the same treatment to other civilisations. In museums, documentaries and history classrooms, non-Western civilisations are given a hagiography. I have seen wonderful exhibitions on Islamic science but none that interrogate Islamic slaving; plenty on Chinese art and innovation but nothing on what the Qianlong Emperor did to the Dzungar Mongols.4 Under this benevolent new Orientalism, our own history is alone in being subjected to post-colonial revisionism.

In contemporary culture, too, our critical eye looks only inward. In boardrooms, classrooms and dining rooms, we have spent countless hours dismantling our racist biases and teaching our children to be better. And yet the violent antisemitism in Islamist ideology remains a taboo, and pointing it out can itself bring accusations of racism.

Most middle-class Westerners have been on holiday in the developing world and called it travelling. They have spent the whole time among other Westerners, spoken only English, and seen only as much of the culture as the tourism industry wants them to see – in other words, the nice bits. This gives them an inaccurately rosy picture of life in other places.

Activists are often even more deluded, since there is a whole industry in place to conceal the dark side of the people they seek to help. As a young student of Arabic I spent a few months volunteering at an UNRWA school in Palestine. On the first day, the headteacher introduced a group of us Westerners to the students. He said a few words to them in Arabic, including a phrase that our NGO minder translated as: “They’ve come from all over the world to help you learn”.

That sounded lovely, but it’s not what the headteacher said. What he actually said was: “They’ve come from all over the world to help in our struggle against the Jews”. The NGO minder, whose livelihood depended on a steady stream of Western volunteers, knew how we would react to an accurate translation and so chose to mislead us. The other well-meaning young Westerners failed to notice the misdirection and remained naïve.

Public broadcasters practice a similar deception. The BBC has often, when interviewing Palestinians in Arabic, mistranslated ‘Jews’ as ‘Israelis’, turning a racist opinion into a political one.5 Elsewhere, racist attitudes in non-white societies are too often euphemised as ‘ethnic tensions’.

Those who hate the West are victims of our own structures of learning and information. We are exposed to our own misdeeds but insulated from those of others; and so wickedness, rather than being inherent in human nature, becomes a product of Western civilisation.

The answer must be more learning, not less. Awareness of our own history, warts and all, strengthens our society and reduces the risk of repeating the mistakes of the past. But to avoid bright, compassionate people from spiralling into self-hatred, it must be accompanied by a proper understanding of the world beyond our shores.

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Once upon a time it was impossible to know what was truly happening in much of the world. Elites could send letters, and later on hub cities would have a telegram, but in both cases access was limited to a small number of people who would invariably spin things their way with no threat of being contradicted.

Beyond the city walls the picture was fuzzier still. Information would filter in with traders and travellers, all with their own story to tell. Events would be exaggerated or tinged with the mystical, particularly in oral cultures.

The printing press, pamphlets and eventually newspapers began to change this, but their gifts were unevenly distributed. By the end of the 17th century, a politician or businessman in Europe would have a decent picture of what was happening in his own country and a rough outline of the rest of the continent. The world beyond remained a mystery.

Since then successive technologies have pierced the shroud. Both the number of people able to access information, and the areas that are reliably covered, have steadily increased. With a few caveats[1], that’s a good thing for humanity. So it’s troubling that this trend is going into reverse.

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The rise of misinformation, amplified by powerful AI tools to convincingly generate fake news, is well documented. While some people may fall victim to false narratives, the greater risk is of a majority of people becoming overly sceptical of true sources of information, since distinguishing fact from propaganda is becoming more difficult.

In other words, we are returning to a world where nobody can be sure of anything.

The harms are already apparent. Polarisation runs rampant in a low-information environment, since it is easy – and morally comforting – to believe the worst falsehoods about the other side. Demagogues thrive; Europe’s past is full of crusades, pogroms and witch-hunts.

All hope is not lost. Today’s fake narratives are not so different to the fey creatures and godly miracles conjured up by our ancestors. Many societies found a way collectively to throw off these superstitions and enter the modern era. The question now is how to repeat the trick.

Loss of trust

The news media played a key role in the establishment of a unitary truth, but were only able to do so because they enjoyed a high degree of trust from the public. Someone reading a newspaper in the 19th or 20th century might disagree with its editorial slant, but he or she would most likely believe that the underlying reporting was true. That’s no longer the case today.

The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism has done a great deal of research on the progressive loss of trust in the media. Last year, it found that just 40% of people across 47 markets trusted the news, with the proportion being lower among younger people.

The Institute also asked people what specifically was likely to make them trust a given news outlet. Transparency, standards and fairness ranked at the top, whereas having a long history had less of an effect.

That suggests that the mission of rebuilding trust in the media is open to new entrants, and that legacy brands must work just as hard on their standards rather than taking trust for granted.

It also suggests that many of the fact-checking initiatives rolled out by the old media are misplaced, since these work on the assumption that that platform is itself trusted – which, in general, they aren’t. Legacy media should earn back public trust in their own reporting before trying to mark others’ homework.

A large proportion of the public now sees establishment media as biased, which is a difficult problem to solve[2]. But the Reuters Institute’s survey suggests that transparency and standards are more important than this. If standards are fixed, the impression of bias might fall away.

There is an institutional arrogance in the way some legacy media communicate their reporting, which evolved during a more deferential era in which a large newspaper or public broadcaster was almost universally trusted.

Take the phrase “it’s understood that”, beloved of establishment media. In ages past, most readers would have accepted that someone in authority had told a journalist something off the record, and both parties were to be trusted. Now people mistrust authority figures and journalists alike, and the phrase therefore raises suspicion; a higher evidentiary bar must be met if readers are to be convinced.

Boots on the ground

A way forward may lie with an innovation almost as old as the newspaper: the news agency. Eyewitness reporting is at the core of what they do, and their standards are second to none. As such, they should be well placed to rebuild public trust – or at least to serve as an instruction manual for how new media can do so.

My own journalism career began at Reuters, whose excellent training program continued to inform my approach to standards even after I became a regional editor elsewhere. The questions I learned to ask – How do we know this? Who said so? Why won’t they go on record? – need to be much more prominent in editors’ thinking if they want the public to trust their reporting.

In recent years agencies have been squeezed at both ends. On the demand side, many of the local and emerging-market newspapers that reliably bought their stories have shut down or reduced their budgets; and the agencies have not generally succeeded in reaching consumers directly, particularly for paying subscriptions.

In terms of supply, the most disruptive competitor was Twitter. Reuters and others used to generate huge value simply by having a trusted person on the ground in far-flung parts of the world where information was otherwise unreliable. But this network was expensive, and by the mid-2010s could be replicated much more cheaply by triangulating images, videos and written accounts uploaded for free by thousands of locals.

Now the wheel has turned again. The days when a savvy social media user could reliably distinguish truth from misinformation appear to be coming to an end. If the triangulation method no longer works, then the reporter on the ground regains their value – so long as they and their employer are themselves trusted.

That might mean a new lease of life for news agencies, or it might mean an opportunity for nimble new entrants. The business model isn’t obvious; the perennial problem of how to get people to pay for news looms large. But with the truth becoming ever harder to distinguish, a model based on trusted reportage may yet be viable once more.

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[1] I have written about the mental health implications of receiving constant, detailed reports of distant human suffering here.

[2] This is in large part due to a misunderstanding of what impartiality means in a fast-changing political landscape, as I have argued here.

A few weeks ago a clearly marked ambulance belonging to an international NGO was shot at while operating in a war zone. A paramedic was killed. Following repeated attacks, the NGO has been forced to scale back its operations, including critical aid for malnourished children.

I’m talking about Sudan, obviously, though I could just as easily be talking about Myanmar or Ukraine. No doubt you’ve heard about all these incidents as your friends posted outraged reactions on social media, accusing the perpetrators of war crimes.

I’m sure those same friends post frequently about the “genocide” in Xinjiang, where perhaps a million people are held in concentration camps for the crime of being Muslim and there are reports of torture and forced sterilisation.

And they must surely spare a thought for Yemen, where nearly 20 million people are dependent on aid following the Saudi invasion in 2015 and its subsequent decade-long blockade. No doubt on weekends they march through the streets demanding Western powers stop arming Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest buyer of American weapons.

I’m being facetious; your friends don’t give a fuck about any of that. All their empathy is for the Palestinians, and all their rage for Israel.

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They would never admit to antisemitism, nor even believe it possible. They call themselves antiracist, carry an air of moral superiority, and insist – perhaps truly believe – that their furious hatred of the world’s only Jewish state has absolutely nothing to do with Jews or Judaism.

That’s what makes them so dangerous.

Criticism of Israel is not automatically antisemitic; but sometimes it is. For me, the line is crossed when somebody obsesses over Israel/Palestine to the exclusion of all other conflicts; when they hold Israelis to impossible standards while downplaying attacks upon them; or when they jump to conclusions about Israeli behaviour in a way they wouldn’t do about anyone else.

Neither is antisemitism any more acceptable just because Israel is strong or some Jews are light-skinned. Take it from eminent historian Simon Schama: “I just want the world to acknowledge that when you utter an antisemitic phrase, you are a racist. If you are calling for the elimination of the Jewish nation, you are racist.”

Ignorance is no excuse. Jewish NGOs have been sounding the alarm for some time about the emergence of antisemitic tropes within pro-Palestine activism. The Islamic supremacism of Hamas and other Palestinian groups such as the PLO is a matter of public record. If you haven’t read any of these materials or talked in depth to any Jews, you’re not in any position to be posting clips from Al-Jazeera on Instagram.1

High-status racism

Last week, an acquaintance who works at the European Commission posted a story from Al-Jazeera about an apparent Israeli attack on a Palestinian aid convoy that killed several medics. Above it she had written: “War crime”.

We don’t know what happened. It’s possible that a war crime took place. Like soldiers everywhere, members of the IDF have at times broken their rules of engagement (and have consistently been held to account). But it’s equally possible, as the IDF claims, that operational Hamas fighters had hidden themselves in the convoy, which would be a war crime on the Palestinian side – and not the first time Hamas would have used civilians and NGO workers as human shields.

This came from an intelligent, thoughtful person who wouldn’t normally spread inflammatory accusations before knowing the facts, but in this case she did so. When I challenged her, suggesting that her post could contribute to antisemitism, she doubled down: “Of course, a war crime can only be established by a court. Which will unfortunately never happen. So even if I used a shortcut, as a humanitarian I believe it is important to call out those killing aid workers.”

Witness the signposts of gentrified racism. The antisemitic trope, implied but carefully not stated, that Jews control international organisations and thereby get away with murder. The staking of moral superiority “as a humanitarian”. The language of activism in “calling out” rather than “slandering”.

At that point the mask slipped, and she continued: “And sorry but if you should blame someone about the rise of antisemitism, it is Netanyahu, not my post.” Of course, the root cause of antisemitism is the behaviour of the Jews!

To reiterate, this is somebody with a high-status job in the European Commission. Friends in the EU institutions tell me that anti-Israeli activism there is rife, much of it crossing the line into antisemitism. The top leadership is still sound, more or less, but the wholesale arrival of racism in the aspirational class is a dangerous new development.

Similar lapses of judgement have emerged in establishment media channels which ought to have gold-plated standards. In October 2023, in the early stages of the war, the BBC wrongly blamed Israel for a deadly explosion at a Gazan hospital before the facts were known; it later emerged that a rocket misfired by a Palestinian militant group was the most likely cause.

This year the BBC had to pull a documentary after it emerged that its teenage narrator was the son of a senior Hamas official. The public broadcaster had somehow failed to conduct this due diligence at any point before screening the film; it took an independent journalist to finally demonstrate that it had been hoodwinked by a terrorist group.

In another corner of the British establishment, a group of lawyers is seeking to have Hamas delisted as a terrorist group,2 less than two years after it carried out the October 7 attack. Two of them had earlier celebrated that attack in social media posts.

And in academia, where the next generation of lawyers and officials and journalists is being incubated, Jewish students on both sides of the Atlantic have been subjected to antisemitic attacks through an ever-thinner veil of “anti-Zionism”. Some activists have tried to prevent “Zionists” from accessing university premises, echoing the 1930s.

This should concern us greatly. Racism always exists but there’s a limit to the harm it can do when it’s confined to cranks and losers. Its arrival in polite society brings the potential for systemic discrimination and, in the longer term, state-sanctioned violence.

Polite people may never themselves take part in violence. But somebody who today excuses a Islamist pogrom in Israel may tomorrow look the other way when one takes place in Europe.

See no evil

To understand how some of the most avowedly antiracist people in our antiracist society have become racist, look no further than the rise of post-colonial theory.

This is part of a simplistic narrative on the left of the culture war which holds that people belong to a set of identity groups that are either oppressor or oppressed. Men oppress women, white people oppress people of colour, and so on.

In this worldview, any wrongdoing by oppressed people must be “put in the context of their oppression”, which in practice means it is downplayed, excused or justified.3 Hence the October 7 terrorist attack was an act of “resistance”, the rapes and murders an inconvenient detail.

Israel, in this narrative, is a “settler-colonial” project – never mind that Jews are indigenous to the land and that those who moved there in 1948 were fleeing the worst genocide in history. They’re richer and whiter than the other lot, so they must be the bad guys in this particular oppression contest.

If you read about the history of antisemitism, this all makes perfect sense. Antisemitism has always managed to cast Jews as whatever a particular group of people most hates. To the Nazis, Jews were Bolsheviks. To the Bolsheviks, they were capitalists. To the woke, they are colonisers.4

This poison is spreading through our society at an alarming rate. I previously advocated for people who weren’t expert in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to keep quiet and avoid inflaming the discourse further.

I have changed my mind. All good citizens need to start challenging antisemitism wherever we see it, including – especially – when it comes from people who think they’re too virtuous to be racist.

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Twenty-five essays, not counting this one, and I’m proud of them all. For the past half-year I’ve published an essay every week with very few exceptions – a process that has allowed me to hone as well as share my views.

The Leopard has built an engaged community of several hundred readers, a number that rises each week. It’s heartening to see that an audience exists for a European view on global affairs, even when produced by just one relatively unknown writer. So, thank you all.

With all that being said, I need to slow down a bit. I derive no income from The Leopard, nor do I have any intention of monetising it. The vicissitudes of freelancing being what they are, I need to prioritise paid work when I have it, and right now I’m booked five full days a week, plus various bits of ad hoc evening work, until June. That doesn’t leave enough time to write an essay every week to the standard I want to uphold.

I will therefore not be publishing every week for at least the next few months. But I will continue to publish as and when inspiration strikes and I find the time to write well – hopefully at least once a month. I may pick up the pace again over the summer, when I expect paid work to be quieter.

The Substack economy

When I started writing The Leopard six months ago, I identified three broad scenarios. In the worst case it would fail to gain any traction and I would quietly stop about now. In the best case it would gather huge engagement and I might forgo paid work in order to grow it, bring in guest writers and so forth. In between was the scenario of solid but not exponential growth, in which case I would keep plugging away.

I’m squarely in the plugging away bracket. I typically get about 500 views per week, and four of my essays have gone above 1,000. That’s enough to justify a continued effort, but not to convert The Leopard into my main hustle. With heavy demands on my time elsewhere – thanks in part to The Leopard, which has brought in at least two clients – I have to cut back a bit.

This goes against the conventional wisdom of Substacking (such a thing now exists), which is to write consistently every week to build a following, and then create a paid tier with access to additional content and community engagement. Needless to say, this requires a significant time investment and is geared toward creating a revenue stream, which is not my objective.[1]

What would it take for me to go all-in, or at least turn away some paid work? Serious revenue aside, the possibility to grow or evolve into something resembling a proper publication, or to reach readers in the tens of thousands, would probably swing it. But for now, that seems to be out of reach.

The main difficulty is not my lack of a significant public profile. On any social platform, an existing profile gives you a head-start but it’s possible – perhaps even advantageous – to build a following from scratch.

The question of whether my essays are actually interesting and well written is a pertinent one, but not for me to judge objectively. All I can say is that, while there’s always room to improve, I’m generally happy with my writing and the feedback I receive is broadly positive.

Two structural challenges prevent me from reaching a very large readership. The first is that I’m a generalist who likes to dabble in everything, whereas the most successful newsletters tend to be tightly focused and ‘superserve’ a highly interested audience. I’m aware of this dynamic but that’s just not how my brain works; so I do what I do and hope the readership follows.

Second, I’m deliberately not writing for Americans or the American-inflected Brits who account for most of the online Anglo ‘discourse’, and who also make up most of Substack’s user base.[2] Of the highly successful Substack accounts I’ve seen, the great majority sit firmly within this space. The lack of a European public square is exactly the problem I’m trying to solve with The Leopard, but a modest publication like mine can’t conjure an audience all on its own.

Pleasure and learning

Beyond such hard-headed calculations, it’s worth noting that writing The Leopard brings me a great deal of pleasure. I previously spent almost a decade as a staff journalist, during which I was constantly exposed to global events but contractually prohibited from publishing my own opinions about them. The freedom to do so is one of the great joys of being a free lance.

This becomes particularly true if one’s opinions fall outside the scope of polite discourse, which in recent years has come to include almost anything that is culturally right of centre; the LinkedInification of the public domain has exacerbated this effect. While I hold many left-wing views, I believe the censorious trend on the left is pushing citizens ever further right, and thoughtful people ought to challenge it.

Finally, the process of writing hones my opinions – not just how I structure and express them, but the opinions themselves. In a world of political polarisation, it’s all too easy to see an absurd position online and instinctively take the opposite view. In fact, the extreme views surfaced by social media algorithms are typically exaggerated expressions of ideas that, at their base, have some merit. Researching an essay unearths these moderate views, and writing it forces you to engage with them.

There are many more reasons to write essays than the prospect of one day getting paid for it. But get paid I must, by hook or by crook, and for now that means a little less writing and a little more editing. Stay tuned.

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[1] This is certainly what Substack wants me to do, since its own revenue comes from taking a cut of paid memberships. If I’m being cynical, this may be why the ‘conventional wisdom’ being pushed on me by the algorithm is encouraging me down this path.

[2] Revealingly, the subscriber map in Substack’s analytics toolbox defaults to a state-by-state breakdown of the US. The only other option is to show the whole world, where Europe is so small that one can barely distinguish the different countries.

The debate over free speech and cancel culture is a heated one. People on the cultural right claim that you can’t say anything these days without a woke mob coming for you, while many on the left contend that people can and frequently do say very right-wing things with no consequence.

The truth can often be found in unexpected places. On the question of free speech, the answer lies in the dullest social media platform: LinkedIn.

That’s because of LinkedIn’s origins as a professional social network. While it has capitalised on the collapse of Twitter to attract more political discussion, it is still primarily a place where people wear their corporate mask and are acutely aware that their boss (or potential future boss) might be reading what they post.

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This is a much more useful measure of real-world restrictions on speech than what people in the public eye might say. Politicians and established provocateurs can survive or even benefit from controversial speech – but this requires them already to have some degree of notoriety, not to mention a thick skin.

For ordinary people the risks are far more acute. If you lose your job for saying something heterodox and you don’t already have a public following, you don’t become a martyr; you become unemployed. Even a shallower fall from favour can harm someone’s professional standing or prospects for promotion, while bringing them no benefit whatsoever.

The corporate world, for which LinkedIn is a cipher, is itself incentivised to find the least offensive political positioning in order to avoid boycotts and maximise its profit. For most of the post-war period this meant simply not engaging with politics at all, save for expressing bland corporate ‘values’ fully aligned with the prevailing ideology of the day .[1]

It is the nature of corporations to bend with the ideological winds. A few years ago when rainbow politics was in vogue, a large German carmaker put a Pride flag behind its logo on Twitter. Within minutes someone had found the page of its Middle East division – a huge market for this particular company – where the Pride flag was conspicuously absent. The corporate ‘values’ shifted to reflect the orthodoxy of different markets.[2]

Pravda

HR departments, as the adage goes, aren’t there to protect employees; they exist to protect the company from its employees. If somebody gets fired or otherwise disciplined for a speech offence, whether in the office or on LinkedIn, that’s because a corporate commissar has determined that it poses a reputational risk among employees, customers, activists, regulators or some combination of the above.

In other words, speech that can get you fired is speech that crosses the invisible line of what’s acceptable in the cultural mainstream. What people say at work, and by extension what they post on LinkedIn, is thereby the best practical indicator of where the soft boundaries of free speech lie.

There is one important difference between the corporate sphere and society at large, and that’s positivity. Corporate communication, and by extension a successful LinkedIn persona, is relentlessly, sickeningly positive. I know people whose jobs or bosses were so toxic it made them ill, but upon eventually leaving they still made sure to post a gushing AI-drafted note on LinkedIn.

In this kabuki theatre where everyone is forever thrilled and honoured, expressions of negativity are rare. Unfashionable causes won’t be attacked directly, but simply left off the carousel of bonhomie.

Similarly, when fashions change, nobody will be so crass as to point it out. Not too long ago about half of my LinkedIn connections had pronouns appended to their names. Now that such signalling has fallen from grace almost everybody has quietly binned them, like so many monogrammed shirts.

Shouts and whispers

Codifying the corporate orthodoxy – and by extension the accepted views of polite society – is not therefore straightforward; it requires some degree of reading between the lines. One way to do this is to look at the difference between what people say in private and what they post on LinkedIn.

When I began freelancing last year I considered offering event moderation alongside my writing and editing services – a fairly conventional path for a journalist. I had lunch with a friend who is a successful moderator to ask her advice. I remember her response verbatim: “I think you’d be quite good at it but I’m afraid you’re the wrong gender.”

Event organisers, she explained, were under immense pressure to gender-balance their events and, with more senior men than women generally available as speakers, they would often try to hire a female moderator to thumb the scales. My friend had heard this from so many organisers, explicitly or implicitly, that she thought it worth warning me off.

The bias is far from absolute: There are established male moderators in Brussels who get a lot of work, and others who succeed as narrow subject experts. I could probably have made a go of it. But as a generalist trying to break in, my friend felt that the odds would be stacked against me and I should direct my energies elsewhere.

I am fortunate to have a friend in that position of knowledge. Men without that privilege would benefit from a public discussion of these dynamics on LinkedIn or in other professional fora[3] so they could make similarly informed decisions. But I have never seen it mentioned there. By contrast, gender imbalances in men’s favour are frequently pointed out to rapturous applause.

Evidence is beginning to emerge that men, particularly those in their 20s, face certain structural disadvantages in their professional lives. In the UK, young women now out-earn men and more young men have dropped out of the workforce. If this is written about at all, it tends to be in very cautious language and preceded by lots of graphs and caveats.

This does not contradict the fact that men still earn more overall and that women face other forms of discrimination, and yet invoking men’s issues is too often seen as a denial of women’s, and therefore unsafe speech. International Women’s Day earlier this month prompted a flurry of corporate communication; International Men’s Day in November will be met with a few mental health cliches at best, or an eye-roll at worst.

Two opposing ideas can both be true, and two halves of a population can each have their difficulties. And yet one is expressed loudly and repeatedly in corporate townhalls and on LinkedIn, while the other is said only among friends.

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[1] The US culture wars briefly changed this rationale as employees pressured companies to take stands on causes including Black Lives Matter. But after several cases of high-profile backlash, most notably the Bud Light boycott, restored the cosmic balance.

[2] A few hours later, another Twitter wag drove the point home by digging up the company’s logo from the 1930s, which featured a prominent swastika.

[3] Women-only clubs and networking groups exist precisely to help women navigate their own structural challenges; men have no formal equivalent.

At my local coffee shop in Brussels the card machine always asks if I want to tip. This is odd because there’s no tipping culture in Belgium. Once the barista even apologised for the constant requests: It wasn’t the staff hustling, he explained, but rather a feature of the American card machine software that couldn’t be turned off.

Having to tap ‘no thanks’ every time I buy an overpriced coffee is the very definition of a first-world problem. And yet, in an economy built around infinitesimal gains to consumer convenience, it stands out as a market failure. If there’s a feature that no-one uses, why can’t it be turned off?

It’s because the product was designed by Americans, for Americans. In a country where everyone tips for everything, the feature makes perfect sense. What’s more surprising is that the software maker can export this product to Europe and face so little competitive pressure that they don’t think to adapt it at all to the local market.

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There’s nothing inevitable about this. In Southeast Asia, a region poorer and less integrated than Europe, Uber’s operations were bought out in 2018 by Grab, a Singaporean rival whose payments and motorcycle taxi offerings were better aligned to local demand. Europeans being stuck with American tech is a result of our own failure to innovate.

Everywhere you look, Europeans are consuming services and content made by and for Americans. If not an indispensable nation, America is certainly an inescapable one. On an individual level, one can get the impression of living in an imperial province rather than a sovereign country. More importantly, it leaves us culturally lost and unable to act cohesively as Donald Trump rips away the American security blanket.

Dispatch from the provinces

Last month an American friend sent me a long, deeply researched article in the New York Times about how Denmark had avoided the rise of right-wing populism seen in almost every other European country. It made the case that the centre-left Social Democrats’ decision to take a tougher approach to migration and integration had allowed the centre to hold.

There’s a narrative among European leftists that if mainstream politicians and media adopt ‘far-right’ talking points – by which they mean any scepticism about mass migration or society’s ability to integrate large Muslim communities – that will only legitimise and strengthen extremists. If one takes this to be true, elites have a moral imperative to suppress any discussion of these issues lest the uneducated masses are provoked into race riots.

The study of Denmark suggests that the opposite is true. The Social Democrats tackled migration head-on; commentators on the left duly accused them of “apeing the far right in a race to the bottom”. And yet the far-right has collapsed, the Social Democrats remain in power and the social trust underpinning Denmark’s generous welfare state is restored.

The article ought to be required reading for any European with an interest in social policy. European nations are similar enough to each other that what’s true of Denmark is probably broadly true elsewhere in Europe. Certainly, the Danish experiment is more instructive to Poles and Spaniards than it is to Americans.

But because the article is in the New York Times, a newspaper written by and for Americans, it’s crammed full of American reference points. There’s a large digression into the economic effects of migration in various US cities; another into differences between US and European crime statistics and school bussing policies. Rural corners of Denmark are compared to blue-collar counties in Pennsylvania. The Great Migration of black Americans is invoked. We hear of “huddled masses yearning to breathe free”.

None of this is relevant to European readers, and getting through the 8,000 words was consequently a bit of a slog. That’s no fault of the New York Times: Like the company that makes the card payment software, its mission is to serve the American market. If Europeans are also consuming it, it’s because our own publications failed to write the story for us.

Culture through tech

By overconsuming American cultural and news media, Europeans have begun to see our own societies through whichever prism is fashionable across the Atlantic. But there is a less obvious, and perhaps profounder impact on our minds that comes from using exclusively American tech platforms.

Consider Google Maps. In giving people access to an easy navigation tool, it has eroded their ability to plan journeys by other means. But because it’s American, it doesn’t understand how European trains work. As a result, young Europeans are no longer able to read a train timetable, but nor do they have an app that will do it for them – so more and more of them give up on train travel altogether and take short-haul flights, which Google Maps understands well.

Google Maps is similarly useless for cyclists because it was developed in car-dependent America, where almost nobody cycles except for sport. Drivers who use Google Maps have all sorts of tools to customise their journey, such as avoiding tolls and low-emission zones. But there’s no tool for cyclists to avoid particularly dangerous or polluted roads, or to plot a route using only segregated cycle lanes. If Europeans had developed a decent mapping app it might include such features – and more people might feel safe enough to cycle, making our cities better places.

Just occasionally, though, the intrusion of American culture can be darkly amusing. Bumble, a dating app, allows its users to show support on their profiles for various ‘causes’ on the cultural left (being right-wing is nasty), from Black Lives Matter to disability rights. But because the product isn’t adapted to other markets, Europeans have the option to signal their support for ‘indigenous rights’, which doesn’t mean what the Californians think it means.

Speaking of irony, it’s worth noting that most American tech and cultural exports, from the New York Times to Bumble, come from the coastal states where woke ideology has put down its deepest roots. How odd it is that the prophets of post-colonialism have themselves colonised Europe – and nobody has even told them.

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You’d be forgiven for not noticing that Europe’s green ambition took a great leap backwards last week. Faced with a new electoral reality, in which Green parties have lost out to those sceptical of sweeping decarbonisation policies, the European Commission diluted climate regulations that it had adopted just a few years earlier.

The world has changed a lot since 2019, when EU elections returned a ‘Green wave’ and politicians from across the spectrum passed legislation to decarbonise our economies – or at the very least paid lip service to the idea.

Since then a pandemic, a war, an energy crisis and a sharp bout of inflation have made voters reconsider. As green policies take effect, the narrative of a smooth path to net zero without reducing energy consumption – remember sustainable aviation fuel? – has been exposed as science fiction.

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The backlash against green policies is not new, but rather a reversion to the norm. The modern history of democracy is of voters consistently backing the party that they think will allow them to consume the most stuff as cheaply as possible.

It takes a lot to break this pattern. Western democracies tolerated conscription and rationing to fight Hitler, but only after trying and failing for several years to appease him – a delay that made the eventual fight much harder. The Covid-19 pandemic briefly brought unthinkable restrictions on civil liberties, made possible only by intense fear.

There was a moment when the climate movement looked like it could also break the consumerist pattern. But for now it seems that the scale of the action required – in extent, duration, and international cooperation – and the relative remoteness of the destructive effects have pushed it back down the agenda.

Losing focus

Much of the impetus to decarbonise in the late 2010s was inspired by young activists in their teens and early 20s, most famously Greta Thunberg. Their message was a simple one: Our lifestyles are unsustainable, and both individuals and governments need to take rapid measures to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels.

The notion of personal as well as political responsibility struck a chord with many. The flygskam (‘flight shame’) movement, which identifies most commercial flying as an ecologically catastrophic luxury, spread from Sweden across Europe and the US, resulting in significantly reduced air traffic and an increase in train use[1] in many countries. I myself gave up flying entirely from 2019 to 2023, and still now fly no more than once a year.

These young activists, alongside more established outfits such as Greenpeace, had a real impact. They changed people’s perceptions and behaviour for the better and, crucially, reached large numbers of people outside the usual left-activist circles, myself included.

It is therefore a tragedy of historic significance that they have lost focus, and with it their influence over this broad swathe of society. Future historians may identify the emergence of the term ‘climate and social justice activist’ as the moment our efforts to fight climate change were doomed.

I first noticed the drift at the COP27 climate conference in 2022, where youth activists called on their Egyptian hosts to release political prisoners. That’s a good cause – few people are in favour of political prisoners – but it marked the end of their laser focus on climate and the start of their absorption into the blob of left-activist issues that has been amusingly derided as the ‘Omnicause’.

It only got worse from there. From the unrelated but unobjectionable issue of political prisoners, climate activists began to adopt positions that are rejected by most Europeans including colonial reparations, radical gender ideology and, with tedious inevitability, hatred of Israel.

Thunberg herself made the link explicit in late 2023 in a speech to some 85,000 people who had, presumably, come to a climate rally to listen to a leading climate activist talk about climate activism. Instead, wearing a keffiyeh, she rambled about the Middle East, a subject on which she has no particular expertise.

She’s not the only one. Just Stop Oil, a British activist group known for its disruptive actions targeting fossil fuel projects, held a sit-in at a busy London station in November 2023 demanding an end to the “genocide” in Gaza. An environmental pressure group in the publishing industry last year broadened its divestment campaign from fossil fuel companies to Israel because, apparently, “solidarity with Palestine and climate justice are inextricably linked.”

The culture war intrudes

The idea of ‘climate justice’ is a slippery one. It’s true that rich countries have caused the great majority of harmful emissions, while poor countries are the worst placed to mitigate the effects of climate change. There’s a case to be made for some kind of aid payments to address this – though I’d rather Western countries spent that money trying to create new technologies or social policies to reduce future emissions.

The problem with ‘climate justice’ is that it brings divisive culture war issues into play, preventing the formation of a broad coalition to decarbonise. Climate change is our biggest existential threat because it will eventually destroy modern civilisation even in the ‘business as usual’ scenario. Your favourite issue, whatever it is, is irrelevant in comparison.

Sometimes the intrusion of post-colonial ideology leads climate activists to actively oppose measures that would help decarbonisation. Last month Greenpeace opposed a plan to generate renewable electricity in Morocco and transmit it to the UK because of the “neocolonial dynamics” of extracting resources – even unlimited wind and sunlight – from an African country.

Harvesting renewable energy resources, you see, requires “vast terrestrial and maritime areas, leading to conflicts with local livelihood activities.” Keep those coal plants running, lads, a Moroccan shepherd is grazing his flock in the solar park!

It’s easy to laugh at these people, but that doesn’t make climate change any less urgent. If the current crop of activists is determined to alienate the rest of us, we need to form an alternative coalition for decarbonisation – one built on inclusivity and progress, not the futile politics of grievance.

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[1] Governments missed an opportunity to invest in rail networks, particularly across borders in Europe, which might have led to a further reduction in flying.

In case it wasn’t clear enough already, yesterday’s German election confirms it: Europe’s establishment has lost contact with a huge chunk of voters. Fully 20.8% of them opted for the AfD, a nationalist party seen by all others as too extreme to go into coalition with, boosting it into a comfortable second place.

Friedrich Merz has the numbers, just, to put together a coalition between his centre-right CDU/CSU and the centre-left SPD – avoiding a fractious three-way coalition similar to the one that collapsed last year. That would have been catastrophic: With Europe’s economies stagnant and the US folding up its security umbrella, another four years of weak government in Germany would be an existential threat to the European project.

Still, freezing the country’s second-largest party out of coalitions is only tenable for so long. Merz himself has said that the AfD could win next time around. So it’s worth thinking about why one-fifth of Germans are willing to vote for one of Europe’s most extreme right-wing parties.

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The dominant driver of AfD support, judging by interviews with its voters and the statements of its candidates, is migration. Specifically, uncontrolled migration from Muslim-majority countries and the state’s perceived failure to integrate those migrants into society – a pattern also visible in France, the Netherlands and others.

The AfD and other nationalist parties are tapping into a narrative that Islam is in tension with liberal European values. Due to lacklustre efforts towards integration, the argument goes, large Muslim populations have become a fount of antisemitism, homophobia and other social ills that we have worked so hard to overcome.

No mainstream party makes this argument, at least not explicitly. Some narratives against immigration are overtly racist, and the nuances aren’t easy to perceive in our bite-sized news cycle. So they avoid the topic. But in rejecting anything that smells even vaguely like ethno-nationalism, politicians are also closing their ears to the legitimate concerns of a growing share of voters.

As a result, the only parties willing to discuss illiberalism in minority communities are those of the far right – many of which, ironically, have not entirely shed their own antisemitism, homophobia and misogyny (some people argue that their recent progressive turn is merely a smokescreen through which to bash Muslims).

The vexed question of migration and integration is much more than a populist distraction from bigger questions of geopolitics, economy, climate and so forth. Solving it is crucial for re-establishing social and political cohesion in Europe, which in turn is needed to navigate this turbulent period of history.

Binary worldview

Much of the disconnect goes beyond political parties and into public institutions including academia, NGOs and state-funded broadcasters. By refusing to acknowledge the possibility that minority cultures might produce some problematic views, they can perform some interesting rhetorical contortions.

A few weeks ago the editor of Euractiv, an EU-focused news service, caused outrage by claiming that Muslim communities were partly responsible for European countries’ fading collective memory of the Holocaust and diminished vigilance to antisemitism. “Much of this ignorance resides in Muslim migrant communities, where hatred of Jews is as much a staple of daily life as baklava,” he wrote in an otherwise nuanced opinion piece.

The position is overstated and the language provocative; the culinary reference both crude and inaccurate. But the furious reactions caused by this one throwaway line were no less exaggerated.

Amnesty International performatively cancelled its subscription, accusing the editor of trying to “drum up hatred against minorities”. It appeared to suggest that minority groups should be defined by victimhood and are incapable of themselves behaving badly.1

“This racist remark plays into a discriminatory discourse across Europe that seeks to blame antisemitism on Muslims – who themselves are facing racism and Islamophobia,” Amnesty intoned, failing F. Scott Fitzgerald’s intelligence test of being able to hold two conflicting views in one’s mind.

This fallacy was more explicitly stated by a Muslim youth group, which wrote that the article “dangerously shifts focus away from the real drivers of antisemitism – far-right nationalism and rising populism across Europe”, as if the existence of racist white people excludes the possibility of racist Muslims.

Various studies have shown a higher-than-average prevalence of antisemitic attitudes among European Muslims, as Euractiv’s editor later pointed out. Some prominent Jewish activists have said they feel more threatened by Muslims and their leftist allies than the far right. Anecdotally, many Jewish friends tell me the same (to be fair, some others do not). One can debate the details of those studies and experiences, but clearly there is a conversation to be had, however uncomfortable.

Obviously this doesn’t mean we should assume that any given Muslim is antisemitic, that we should discriminate against Muslims or that we should tolerate any such discrimination. It just means that we should look fearlessly at all modern forms of racism in order to come up with the best policies to stamp it out.

Wrongthink in the gay community

Similar mental gymnastics were on display last week in a study exploring to what extent people in the US, UK, Netherlands and Germany view Muslims as a threat to LGBTQ+ rights, which the authors described as an “Islamophobic stereotype”.

The researchers, from top universities, used a very clever method to allow people to express this unfashionable view obliquely,2 thereby capturing what they truly believed rather than what they felt comfortable saying in front of the researchers.3

They found that far more than half of respondents – 70% in Germany – viewed Muslims as a threat to LGBTQ+ rights. Moreover, the prevalence of this view was consistent across the political spectrum, as well as among sexual minorities themselves: “we found no significant difference between LGBTQ+ and non-LGBTQ+ individuals”.

In other words, 50-70% of LGBTQ+ people, when given the opportunity to air their concerns discreetly, told the researchers that they perceived a threat from Muslim communities. These are all people who presumably have direct experience of homophobic hate crime.

One might expect the researchers, confronted with this extraordinary testimony, to entertain the idea that it might be true. Instead they wag their fingers at the dissenting gays, tutting that the unfashionable view appears to “resonate broadly, even among those who might otherwise be expected to hold more inclusive views.”

Like Amnesty, the researchers appear to have taken the view that minorities of all kinds are united in their victimhood and ought to be natural allies against the universal oppressor, namely colonial-brained straight white men.4 Any tension within this grand coalition must be the result of dastardly misdirection by the far right: “illiberal actors use liberal issues as a tool to justify anti-immigrant sentiment and Islamophobic stereotypes,” the study says (italics in original).

The idea of homophobia in Islam is hardly outlandish. Almost all Muslim-majority countries outlaw gay sex, sometimes with the death penalty. While much of Asia is liberalising – Thailand legalised same-sex marriage last month – Malaysia and parts of Indonesia still cane gay men under sharia law. The world’s first openly gay imam, in South Africa, was shot dead last week.

And yet the researchers refuse to acknowledge the possibility that Muslim communities in the West might be a source of homophobia. More than that, in a paper exceeding 4,000 words, they don’t even bother to make the case against it. There’s apparently no need to establish the facts: The proposition being studied is simply assumed to be false because the researchers’ ideology requires it to be so.

The researchers go on to observe, correctly, that far-right parties will use these concerns to their advantage – perhaps even winning a share of the gay vote. “By aligning their messaging with the defence of liberal values, like women’s rights and LGBTQ+ equality, these [far-right] groups can appeal to a broader base… [with] the potential to create unexpected political alliances.”

But for their conclusion, they return to the unproven premise that the perceived threat from Islam is an illusion. “As citizens, we should be cautious of narratives that seek to demonise out-groups by playing on stereotypes, even those that claim to defend liberal values,” they say.

Narratives that demonise minorities are bad. But so too are narratives that portray them as simple victims and absolve them of all responsibility. In our defence of liberal values, we need to be honest about any and all threats to them – or else gift the banner of liberalism to the far-right parties that have done the least to earn it.

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History buffs can have an uncanny nose for current affairs, particularly when the boundaries shift. Politics nerds, attuned to small movements within a narrow set of norms, are often unable to zoom out. The entire panel on The Rest is Politics’ US election-night live show confidently predicted a victory for Kamala Harris – except for Dominic Sandbrook, a guest from sister podcast The Rest is History, who caught a whiff of epochal change and called it for Donald Trump.

Politicians from small countries, or those bordering historically aggressive neighbours, also have a sense for latent danger. The leaders of Poland and the Baltic states were warning about Russian predation long before Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine – often provoking eye-rolls from Western European leaders whose necks had never felt chill Soviet breath.

Kaja Kallas, the EU’s top diplomat, is both a history buff and the former leader of a small country bordering Russia. When she invokes history, we should listen.

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“Appeasement will always fail,” she said last week, after Trump held a one-on-one call with Putin about the fate of Ukraine and walked back several of NATO’s earlier negotiating lines. The reference, surely deliberate, was to the 1938 Munich Agreement at which Britain and France forced Czechoslovakia to cede the Sudetenland to Hitler on the hope that he would stop there.

There’s a plausible alternate history where Hitler could have been contained or even defeated if the allies had shown a backbone at Munich. His war machine was not yet fully formed, the Czech forces were better prepared than the Poles were the following year, and the Sudetenland was mountainous and heavily fortified, eroding the German armour advantage. Determined resistance in the east, a second front in the west and a naval blockade to the north might well have turned German generals against Hitler, whose cult of personality was, at that stage, still dependent on strategic success.[1]

Comparing episodes of history to modern-day politics can often be glib, but in this case the similarities are strong. Like Germany in 1938, Russia today would struggle to defeat a coalition but benefits from its opponents’ reluctance to rearm. Like Czechoslovakia, Ukraine can’t survive alone and will be forced to accept bad terms if others abandon it – strengthening the aggressor’s rule and encouraging him to pursue further conquests.

Czechoslovakia didn’t survive long after Munich. Within six months of ceding the Sudetenland – along with all its defensive positions – it was forced to surrender entirely to Hitler. In a clear violation of the Munich Agreement that went unpunished, it was carved up and absorbed into the Axis powers under various bogus client states and protectorates.

Something similar could happen to Ukraine. It’s not clear that Ukrainian democracy can survive abandonment by its allies and a bad peace deal; and without the security guarantees of NATO membership, there’s little to stop Putin coming back for another bite a few months later. If that happens, the road to Warsaw is open.

From there, invading a NATO country would be a major escalation, but one that’s believable. Putin’s propagandists can fabricate claims to other countries with a history in the Soviet Union or the Russian Empire including, at a minimum, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. If Trump considers such claims to be reasonable, or at least not worth going to war over, Putin could feel emboldened to act.

You and what army?

Underlying all of this is European countries’ abject failure to maintain military forces that can operate independently of the US. Henry Kissinger once famously said that “America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests,” but European countries refused to believe it, trusting that the US would be a friend in bad times as well as good.

European armed forces, and the defence industry that supports them, are not only underfunded: They’re fragmented and unable to operate together cohesively, each one resembling a toy combined-arms force with a handful of tanks and artillery pieces all of different types.

To fight a conventional war, you need to be able to create formations at division scale – each one typically between 10,000 and 30,000 soldiers, depending on equipment. The last time a European power deployed at this scale was in 2003, when Britain contributed a single division to the US invasion of Iraq. Subsequent experience of counter-insurgency operations is of little relevance in a continental war.

To understand the scale of conventional war, consider that Russia lost about 1,400 main battle tanks last year, four full divisions’ worth – or approximately the full strength of Poland, Germany and France combined. That’s not to mention the huge stocks of ammunition and spare parts required to keep an army fighting at full intensity.

Europe’s armed forces could be more efficiently scaled up if they were placed under a unified command and procurement structure. But with no real threats until recently, and the comfort of the American security umbrella, Europe’s top-heavy military establishments have preferred to wrap themselves in tradition and national pride rather than build sensible alliances to fend off common threats.

The only country to have really pushed to integrate Europe’s armed forces is France (and this probably on the tacit understanding that France would lead them). Poland and other Central and Eastern European countries are at least aware of the scale of the Russian threat, but their answer has been to huddle ever tighter under the American umbrella rather than trying to build something independent.

If Emmanuel Macron is Europe’s only living statesman, he cuts a diminished figure on the world stage because France is in turmoil. In another era Macron would probably have become a great man of history; today he’s burning through prime ministers trying to convince the French that a 30-year retirement is not in fact a universal human right. There’s no better image of Europe’s slide into decadence.

Meanwhile Russia’s factories are churning out tanks and drones, and its young men are flocking to martial arts gyms and dreaming of national glory. Who will stand against them?

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[1] I once produced this outcome in a game of Hearts of Iron IV, a detailed World War 2 simulator that’s as close to historical realism as video games can get. Playing as France, I stood by Czechoslovakia at Munich and persuaded Chamberlain to do the same. The Germans invaded anyway, but got bogged down in the Sudetenland’s snowy mountains while a scrappy Franco-British force cut their supplies and harassed them on the western front. By the end of winter the German generals were fed up and turned their guns on the Reichstag. Real history may – or may not – have turned out differently.

If geopolitics had a hot/crazy scale it would rank countries by their global importance and their difficulty for outsiders to understand. China would obviously achieve the highest combined score, but there’s no standout candidate for second place. I’d like to make the case for Iran.

Politically if not economically, Iran is the most important country in the Middle East. Its religious and military patronage networks were a major reason for America failing to pacify Iraq after 2003, for Bashar al-Assad’s monstrous rule over Syria lasting as long as it did, for Lebanon’s state failure, and for the Arab world’s refusal to recognise Israel and put an end to Palestinian suffering.

Just as important is what Iran could have been, and what it largely was until the 1979 Islamic Revolution: a relatively prosperous, secular society with deep historical traditions and a highly developed state, and an ethnically and religiously diverse population with a tremendous cultural output.

Not, in other words, the sort of benighted backwater in which radical Islamism typically takes hold.

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This contrast is precisely what makes Iran so difficult to understand. To its sympathisers, including fringe political figures in the West who appear on its state media channels, the Islamic Republic is a courageous holdout against American neo-imperialism, and the sharia law an awkward detail. To its detractors, including much of the Western political establishment, its rulers are religious extremists incapable of acting rationally.

Both views are too simple. After several years of studying Iranian language and history, and a year spent reporting on the country during the 2015 nuclear talks, the best description I can manage is that the Iranian establishment (or ‘regime’, to use the term reserved for the West’s enemies) is a rational actor bounded by an irrational ideology.

The failure to understand Iran has led to Western foreign policy blunders from the 1950s to the present day. Now the Islamic regime is the weakest it has been in years following a blunder of its own: neglecting to keep a leash on Hamas, whose attack on Israel in October 2023 dragged Iran and its other proxies into a fight they couldn’t win.

This gives Western powers a chance to force the mullahs to the negotiating table or else risk being overthrown – but only if they know how to pitch their approach.

An empire undone

Understanding Iran requires an appreciation of its history, which shows a sophisticated society with a positive influence on the world all the way back to the 6^th century BC. Around that time the Cyrus Cylinder, now housed in the British Museum, set out principles for how to govern religious and ethnic minorities within the Persian empire – the first evidence from anywhere in the world of rulers thinking actively about cosmopolitanism.

Some 1,200 hundred years later the Persian empire, exhausted from fighting the Byzantines, was conquered by Arab armies bearing the new banner of Islam. But like the Greeks in Rome, Persians worked their way into the Islamic court and helped transform it from a warband into a civilisation. The flourishing of arts and sciences and the relaxation of Islamic law that made Baghdad the centre of the world can be attributed at least in part to Persian influence.

The Mongols conquered Baghdad in 1258 and Iran would never again play a major role in a world-leading empire. Subsequent dynasties came under pressure from the Ottoman, Russian and British empires and fell behind technologically. The ‘great game’, a fight for influence between Russian and British agents across Central Asia in the 19^th century, confirmed Iran’s foreign domination and gave its society an anti-imperialistic reflex that persists to this day.

This tendency can be observed in Dear Uncle Napoleon. Set during the Allied occupation of Iran in the Second World War, the 1973 novel’s titular character is still fighting the previous generation’s battle against the British, whom he suspects of orchestrating his every misfortune. A comically tragic figure, he demonstrates that Iranian hostility towards Western powers dates to well before the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

By the end of the war the Shah was weak and increasingly unpopular. In 1952 he was forced to appoint Mohammad Mossadegh, a nationalist reformer who notably wanted to nationalise Iran’s oil industry. This arguably put Iran on a path towards becoming an independent, secular, constitutional monarchy with what was then the world’s largest proven oil reserve.

Now the Western powers made their greatest blunder. In 1953 British and American spies fomented a coup against Mossadegh, restoring the Shah to absolute power and their companies to unfettered access to Iranian oil. In the short term they profited, but proud Iranians would not be so easily dominated. Another revolution was inevitable and came in 1979 – but this time, with the secular opposition shattered, it would be Islamists who carried the banner.

Neither fish nor fowl

Iran then, like China following the Opium Wars, is a country with an acute sense of its own history and a traumatic experience of domination by Western powers. This is a large part of how the Islamic regime maintains enough public support to survive (alongside a heavy dose of repression), despite its ideological misalignment with Iran’s largely secular population.

State power in Iran is shared among a bewildering array of institutions, some Islamic and some secular. The government is on the surface a presidential democracy, but operates within tight restrictions set by a superior religious power. The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the regime’s praetorian guard, operates independently both of the army and of clerical authorities; it derives revenue – and political power – from sprawling commercial interests from heavy industry to smuggling.

Clearly the Islamic Republic is not a full democracy. But neither is it a full theocracy in the mould of the Taliban, nor a monarchy like the one it overthrew, nor a dictatorship like that of Saddam Hussein – a hated figure after invading Iran in 1980 with the backing of Western powers. It is entirely sui generis, and as such there is no established playbook for how to engage with it.

Iran’s diplomatic corps is an impressive secular institution, bolstering the regime’s support among moderate Iranians and foreigners alike. Vice President Mohammad Javad Zarif, whom I met when he was foreign minister during the nuclear talks, invoked international law frequently and Islamic law never – a habit taken up by his successor Abbas Araghchi.

State media is similarly professional, upholding a generally high level of journalistic standards and accuracy. Of course it operates according to radically different assumptions about the world than Western media, but it’s easy to see how people who reject Western hegemony can be convinced by its narratives.

After months of reading Iranian media (as I did when covering the country), one begins to understand the worldview beyond the clerical caricature. Iran does not take political prisoners, the narrative goes: It has a justified fear of American-led regime change and is arresting suspected spies. By contrast, when a Western country arrests an Iranian on the orders of the US for sanctions violations – in other words, trading with his home country – that is a politically motivated hostage-taking.

If an Iraqi militia leader visits Tehran for talks with officials, that’s normal diplomacy between neighbours. But if Americans or Brits deploy special forces to Iraq, that is a distant imperial power ‘meddling’ in an attempt to ‘destabilise’ the region. Even disagreeing with this view, you start to think about the language used by our own media and the implicit biases it reveals.

This is the difficulty of dealing with the Islamic Republic. If you accuse it of being a rogue state, its secular authorities are sophisticated enough to point out your hypocrisy. But if you treat it like a normal midsized power there’s a risk that God will tell the mullahs to do something stupid, like lobbing rockets at Israel – or perhaps nukes, if they had them.

That means Western powers will continue to struggle to engage constructively with Iran. It would be a shame, for the Iranian people most of all, if this historic moment of weakness for the Islamic Republic were to pass without a diplomatic breakthrough.

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