Month: March 2026

Dire straits. The bottleneck that behaves like a universe

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

Oil tankers, container ships and bulk carriers shimmer all over the horizon to the left of the windswept beach here at the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz. They have been bottled up in the Persian Gulf ever since the US and Israel launched the war on Iran more than a month ago.  To the right, with the Iranian coast only 65km away, the dark-blue sea is completely empty. Only a handful of vessels a day manage to cross the Strait of Hormuz, down from well over a hundred ­before the war. They take a circuitous route through Iranian territorial waters, often paying the Iranian regime a hefty toll.

Tehran’s ability to control this international waterway, through which one-fifth of the worldwide oil supply used to pass, has become Iran’s biggest leverage against the US, its Gulf neighbours and the global economy. Whether the war ends in a success or defeat for Iran depends first and foremost on whether Tehran emerges from this conflict still holding the strait – and, with it, the keys to the worldwide energy markets.

Yaroslav Trofimov, Wall Street Journal, 3 Aptil 2026

What follows is a piece for history tragics – and for all who, metaphorically or intellectually, nostalgically or romantically, still yearn to “go down to the sea in ships and do business in deep waters”. For those who hear, beneath the churn of headlines and hot takes, the older music: the creak of hulls, the logic of tides, the long memory of trade and war written across the surface of the world.

Because when the Strait tightens, when Hormuz flickers from map detail to global anxiety, there is a reflex, almost tidal in itself, to reach backwards. To steady the present with the ballast of the past. The antique mariners Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh, the classical strategists Alfred Mahan and Halford Mackinder, the catechisms of geopolitics and sea power half-remembered, half-invoked. The old grammar returns: command the sea, command the world.

And yet, while the past is summoned, it does not settle easily over the present. It frays at the edges. It argues back.

Some voices insist on restoring the full weight of history – reminding us that the Persian Gulf was not merely sailed but administered: the Royal Navy’s long vigil, the latticework of protectorates, Aden and Suez as imperial hinges. Sea power, in this telling, was never abstract; it was local, granular, enforced in specific places against specific resistances. Empire did not “command” the sea so much as continuously work it.

Others, just as insistent, suggest the sea’s primacy has already ebbed. Pipelines, railways, overland corridors – the new Silk Roads – quietly subvert the tyranny of chokepoints. Hormuz matters, yes, but not as it once did. The map has thickened; the old determinisms loosen.

And threading through it all – more unsettling than either nostalgia or revision – is a harder recognition: that the balance has tilted. That it is now easier to disrupt the sea than to command it. That a few well-placed risks – mines, missiles, drones, or even the rumour of these can achieve what fleets once guaranteed.

Which is precisely why this moment—and this place—invites a longer gaze. For Hormuz is not merely a crisis point. It is a lens. A narrow passage through which history, strategy, and imagination are forced to pass in close quarters, revealing not just what we think we know about the sea – but how much of that knowledge still holds when the waters grow tight.

And so we follow the thread.

A choke point and a global hinge

The essay, republished below, by English historian and author Peter Francopan turns on an old, almost Elizabethan intuition – Walter Raleigh’s dictum that “whoever commands the sea commands the trade… and so the world” – and asks whether it still holds in the age of drones, pipelines, and petro-politics. The Strait of Hormuz, that narrow, anxious funnel through which a fifth of the world’s oil must pass, becomes his stage: not merely a geographic chokepoint, but a historical echo chamber where empires, from the Portuguese to the British to the Americans, have tested the proposition that control of the sea is control of destiny.

The core argument is deceptively simple. However much globalisation has diversified supply chains, the world remains perilously dependent on a handful of maritime arteries. Hormuz is the most critical of them. Iran, by geography alone, sits with its hand on the tap.

What follows is a kind of strategic paradox. The United States possesses overwhelming naval superiority, yet cannot easily guarantee safe passage. Iran, comparatively weak in conventional terms, can still disrupt—through mines, missiles, drones, and plausible threat alone—the flow of global energy. Control, in other words, has become asymmetrical: it is easier to deny the sea than to command it.

Frankopan folds this into a wider historical arc. Sea power has long structured global order – from the Iberian empires to Pax Britannica to the American century—but it has never been absolute. It is contingent, fragile, and dependent on political will as much as on fleets. The current crisis exposes that fragility. The cost of keeping Hormuz open – economically, militarily, psychologically – may exceed what even a superpower is willing to bear indefinitely.

Layered atop this is his reading of Trump’s confrontation with Iran: a clash driven as much by misapprehension and political impulse as by coherent strategy. The implication (never quite stated, but hovering like heat haze) is that great powers still stumble into old traps—overestimating control, underestimating local resolve.

Obstacle Course. Credit: New York Times

Command of the sea, or command of risk?

If Frankopan writes like the historian he is, the comments read like a dockside argument, a fractured chorus of rum, empire, drones, and Trump all sloshing together.

Several bridle at Francopan’s selectivity. Where, they ask, is the Royal Navy in the Gulf? The British protectorates? Aden? The Portuguese seizure of Hormuz in 1515? There is something almost touching here: a yearning to reinsert imperial continuity into a narrative that feels too compressed, too presentist. History, they insist, is longer – and perhaps more reassuring – than Frankopan allows.

Yet beneath the pedantry lies a point: chokepoints are never just geography; they are administered spaces, historically managed through bases, treaties, and coercion. Hormuz did not simply “matter”—it was made to matter, policed into significance.

A sharper critique comes from those who accuse Frankopan of naval determinism, of succumbing to Mackinder in sea going form. Where, they ask, are the pipelines, the highways of the modern Silk Road? If oil can flow overland, if energy can be rerouted, then the tyranny of chokepoints diminishes. The vulnerability of Hormuz is not just a military problem but a failure of diversification. If the Strait can be “closed,” it is because the world has allowed it to remain indispensable. Overland infrastructure does exist, but not at sufficient scale, nor with sufficient redundancy, to replace maritime flow quickly. The sea remains cheaper, denser, stubbornly dominant. Mackinder haunts the room after all.

Then there is the Trump versus Iran morality play. And here, the thread fractures into familiar ideological lines. One camp sees Trump as reckless, blundering into war without strategy; another as a hard realist confronting an implacable regime. But more interesting than the partisan positions is the shared assumption beneath them: that the conflict must be read through the personality of a single leader. Structural forces – energy dependency, regional rivalries, the logic of deterrence – fade into the background. The theatre of personality displaces the machinery of geopolitics.

Meanwhile, a darker undercurrent runs through several comments: casual talk of forcing the Strait, toppling regimes, even nuclear options. The language slips, almost unconsciously, from analysis into annihilation. One is reminded how easily strategic abstraction can become moral amnesia.

What the article and its commentariat together reveal is not a consensus but a tension – between old frameworks and new realities.

Francopan is right, broadly, that chokepoints still matter. Geography has not been abolished. Hormuz remains a lever capable of moving the world.

But his critics are right, too, that the nature of control has shifted. The age of decisive naval supremacy – Trafalgar, Jutland, Midway – has given way to something murkier. Control is now probabilistic. It lies in deterrence, in risk calculation, in the shadow of what might be done rather than what is done.

Iran does not need to “command” the Strait in Raleigh’s sense. It need only make others doubt that it is safe.

And here the deeper irony emerges. The more globalised the world becomes, the more sensitive it is to disruption at key nodes. Interdependence, that liberal promise, doubles as systemic fragility. A few missiles, a handful of drones, a rumour of mines—and the bloodstream of the global economy clots.

The comments circle this insight without quite naming it. They argue about navies versus pipelines, Trump versus Tehran, Britain versus decline- but beneath it all is a shared unease: that no one, not even the United States, can fully guarantee the openness of the system on which everyone depends.

Raleigh revisited

Raleigh’s maxim survives, but in altered form. To command the sea once meant mastery – fleets, flags, unquestioned passage. Now it means something closer to managing uncertainty, policing risk, absorbing disruption. Or, to invert it (and perhaps this is the real lesson of Hormuz): whoever can unsettle the sea can unsettle the world.

The Strait, narrow and ancient, becomes a kind of TARDIS of geopolitics – small on the map, vast in consequence, containing within it centuries of empire, trade, ambition, and miscalculation. You can sail through it in hours. You can be trapped by it for decades. Hormuz is one of those places where scale misbehaves.

On the chart it is almost an afterthought: a narrow blue incision between Iran and Oman, barely 21 nautical miles at its tightest navigable squeeze. A cartographer’s margin note. You could blink and miss it, the way you might skim over a comma in a long sentence. And yet – inside that comma, the world pauses.

Tankers queue like thoughts that cannot quite be completed. Insurance markets twitch. Futures spike. Admirals rediscover their relevance. Presidents improvise resolve. Somewhere in Delhi or Shanghai, a planner recalculates the cost of keeping the lights on. The Strait is not large, but it contains largeness: economics, empire, anxiety, history – all folded into a channel so narrow that a missile battery on one shore can imagine the other.

That is the TARDIS trick: disproportion. Interior vastness concealed within exterior modesty. A space where time thickens. Because Hormuz is not just a place. – it is an accumulation. Portuguese forts, British gunboats, American carrier groups, Iranian fast boats – all still present in the mind, layered like ghost traffic moving in opposite directions through the same confined lane.
And like the TARDIS, it distorts power. The strong discover their strength is conditional; the weak discover they possess a lever. To command the sea here is less about domination than about enduring the possibility of interruption.

It is gigantically small, metaphorically huge, a bottleneck that behaves like a universe.

In a wide ocean, power projects as a roar – carrier groups, satellite grids, the choreography of dominance. In a narrow strait, the same power ricochets. It echoes, distorts, sometimes even dampens. The voice is still large; the space refuses to carry it cleanly.

Hormuz does this to everyone. It compresses asymmetry into something almost theatrical. A superpower arrives with an orchestra; a regional actor needs only a well-timed cymbal crash – mines, missiles, the rumour of both – and suddenly the symphony falters. Not silenced, but unsettled. Hesitant. Listening to itself.

It tells us less about the decline of hegemony than about the environments in which hegemony operates. Power at sea is expansive; power in a choke point is negotiated, contingent, on the edge

The old imperial instinct – force the passage- still murmurs in the background (you can hear it in the comments: convoy the ships, clear the mines, damn the cost). But the modern world hesitates, because the cost is no longer just ships sunk – it is markets convulsed, alliances strained, escalation spiralling in ways that do not end neatly at the waterline.

Which leaves us with a paradox worthy of the place: the hegemon can still roar – but here, in this narrow theatre, it must decide whether the echo is worth the noise.

In That Howling Infinite, March 2026

Hormuz: Iran’s dire Strait

Command the seas and you command the world

Peter Francopan, Unherd, March 12 2026

Historians these days doubt that Sir Walter Raleigh ever laid down his cloak to stop Queen Elizabeth I from stepping in a puddle. They do agree, though, that he understood the nature and benefit of maritime power. “Whosoever commands the sea commands the trade,” he wrote in A Discourse of the Invention of Ships in the early 17th century. “Whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself”.Raleigh lived in a different era, of course — one that most of us imagine as a time of swashbuckling sailors and risk-taking pirates, when control of the High Seas was a competition between the European states building empires in both the New and Old Worlds.

This was also an age when geography mattered every bit as much as resources. Many of the first European footholds overseas were chosen less for what lay in the ground than for where they sat along the great sea routes that were beginning to bind the world together. The Portuguese seizure of Malacca in 1511 was not about spices growing nearby but about controlling the narrow maritime gateway between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea through which much of Asia’s trade passed.

The same strategic logic shaped the expansion of the British empire. Outposts were established above all because of their position along the world’s shipping arteries. The British occupation of Gibraltar in 1704 secured control over the entrance to the Mediterranean and the vital route between the Atlantic and Europe’s inland sea. In the Caribbean, islands such as Jamaica — seized from the Spanish in 1655 — were major naval and commercial hubs sitting astride the shipping lanes linking the Americas and Europe. Likewise, further south, control of Cape of Good Hope allowed Britain to dominate the maritime passage between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.The empire that Raleigh’s generation started building was not only created through conquest and extraction: it was built through the control of the sea lanes and strategic points that allowed commerce, information and manpower to move across the oceans. The same ports that handled cargo could shelter naval squadrons, repair ships and project force across vast distances. Britain’s empire was fuelled by sugar, silver, slaves and more; but it was built on being able to move these at will across the oceans, and on the islands, harbours and strongpoints that underpinned maritime, economic and imperial power.

These days, we have become used to future-gazers insisting that the future belongs to those who control data and algorithms, or satellites and space rockets, or rare earths and critical minerals. Ships, shipping, and transport networks do not sound quite so exciting, so fresh or so unknown. To a historian, though, in a world that is hyper-connected, logistics are king.

In its heyday, Britain’s reach rested heavily getting the basics right. At Gibraltar, ships entering or leaving the Mediterranean could refuel and undergo repairs, while Malta secured British control of Mediterranean shipping routes. Further east, Aden functioned as a crucial coaling station at the mouth of the Red Sea once steam navigation transformed long-distance travel; or there was Singapore, which, from the early 19th century, grew into a key naval base guarding the approaches between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.

Each of these places mattered less for what they produced than for the services they provided: coal, water, repairs, provisions, intelligence and protection. Ships could not roam the oceans indefinitely; they required an interconnected chain of harbours capable of maintaining hulls, repairing sails or (later) overhauling, to provision with fresh food and water. Maritime power was not just about ships, captains and crews — but about a dense mesh of locations that were spread out around the world and reinforced each other.

Over time, however, it became easy to forget just how central these routes and nodes were. In the decades after the end of the Cold War, the world entered a period of globalisation underpinned by overwhelming American economic, political and military power — and by the mantra of free trade being the engine of prosperity and the bedrock of the international world order. Attention shifted elsewhere, and strategists and commentators forgot about shipping lanes. Yet as geopolitical competition intensifies and the world moves into a more multipolar era, the importance of the arteries of global commerce has once again become startlingly clear.Maritime transport moves over 80% of goods traded worldwide. Around 11 billion tons of goods are transported by sea each year — roughly one and a half tons per person. Ships carry around two thirds of global oil production, as well as around a fifth of natural gas, moving energy to places where they are most needed. Without global shipping networks, computers can’t be switched on, assembly lines can’t work, and houses can’t be heated.While the crisis in Iran and the Gulf have focused attention on oil, liquefied natural gas (LNG) and petroleum products, global shipping is fundamental in almost every aspect of daily life. Seaborne trade moves almost two billion tonnes of iron ore per year, with major exporters in countries like Australia, Brazil and South Africa being matched with demand in China, Japan, South Korea and elsewhere. Hundreds of millions of tonnes of bauxite and alumina are sent by sea from mines and processing plants in Guinea, Indonesia and Australia, as are tens of millions of tonnes of copper ores from Chile, Peru and south East Asia.

Global shipping is not just the backbone of international trade; it is crucial in keeping the world fed. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, a UN body, international trade plays a crucial role in supporting global food security by linking food surplus with deficit areas and enabling access to basic food products. 80% of agricultural commodities are transported by sea, with shipping again playing a crucial role in matching “breadbasket regions” with those that suffer from food production deficits.As Sir Walter Raleigh would have recognised, globalisation makes control of the seas more, not less important; as peoples, regions, goods and resources get moved from one part of the planet to another, dependencies rise — and so, therefore, do vulnerabilities. Things that we take for granted are always ones that we should pay special attention to, not least since it never seems to cross people’s mind that small shocks can have major implications.

In the summer of 2011, Thailand experienced catastrophic flooding as a result of unusually high levels of rainfall, which had an enormous impact on global car production. At the time, Thailand was one of the world’s leading producers of hard-disk drives and wiring harnesses for cars, as well as electronics modules. As factories closed because of flooding, the effects spilled over into the global economy. Hard drive prices doubled in a matter of weeks; shortages of parts crippled automotive production not only in Thailand, but across Asia, North America and even Europe. The associated costs ran to tens of billions of dollars.

If that gives one example of the risks that come from the assumption that supply chains are dependable, then another comes from Covid-19. Lockdowns and collapsing industrial demand caused an immediate decline in maritime activity. Global maritime trade volumes fell sharply, with estimates suggesting a reduction of as much as 10% in the first eight months of 2020, representing cargo worth at least $225 billion in trade value — if not considerably more, precipitating an unprecedented logistics crunch.

In the past few days we have seen another classic case of the risks posed by pressure on supply chains. Energy markets have been spooked by the implications of attacks on infrastructure in the Gulf following US and Israeli strikes on Iran, with oil prices almost doubling in a matter of days. But it is shipping prices that have truly gone through the roof. Spot charter rates for LNG carriers are six times larger than they were before 28 February — a rise some industry experts refer to as “unthinkable”. Some charterers are paying as much as 10 times the rate they paid before the attacks on Iran began to secure prompt tonnage because of the scale of the shock.

The Strait of Hormuz is one of the world’s key chokepoints, a narrow stretch that connects the Gulf with the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean, a crossroads where geology and geography dovetail to create perfect opportunities for disruption.

Bordered by Iran to the north and Oman and the United Arab Emirates to the south, the Strait is one of the world’s most strategically significant waterways. At its narrowest navigable point, the shipping lanes are only a few kilometres wide in each direction, meaning that at a time of conflict — such as today — the ability to restrict shipping is considerable. Considerable volumes of goods pass through the Strait — something that is clear from the fact that Jebel Ali in Dubai is the ninth-busiest port in the world. But Hormuz is more crucial to global energy markets, with around 15 million barrels of oil passing through each day, equivalent to about one-fifth of global petroleum consumption. Other chokepoints are significant; but Hormuz is the most important oil chokepoint in the world.At the moment, almost no shipping is transiting the Strait, with an estimated 1000 vessels waiting for the conflict with Iran to pass. A small handful of ships have sailed through, with several others reported to be trying their luck by either claiming to be Chinese or by turning off transponders that reveal both their location and their true identities. More than a dozen ships have been damaged so far, with Iran saying that British ships are “legitimate targets”.Political leaders have tried to project confidence. Donald Trump said that merchant crews and shipowners simply needed to show “some guts” if they wanted trade to keep moving through the Strait. Yet the reality suggests that courage alone is rarely enough to keep maritime commerce flowing during wartime. Guts are one thing; a US Navy ship being damaged by Iranian mines, missiles or attacks from land is another. For now, then, such are the risks to crews, cargo and hulls that shipping in the Gulf is at a standstill.Just how high the strategic stakes have become is clear from the military deployments now underway. That message has not been lost on Greece, Italy or France — all of which have dispatched warships towards the Gulf to secure maritime traffic and monitor the Strait, although it remains unclear whether or how they will solve the problem of getting traffic moving again. In Britain, there has been fierce criticism of the Royal Navy’s absence from the Eastern Mediterranean and the Gulf, but the absence is not imminently solvable. It is the result of the British government’s catastrophic lack of foresight, decades of not investing in the sort of naval forces one needs in this century.Trump has insisted that the shutdown in the Gulf is temporary and that oil, gas and more besides will soon start to flow again. It is typical fighting talk from a president who chose to start a confrontation with Iran because he was not able to understand why the regime in Tehran had refused to “capitulate” to American demands regarding nuclear enrichment, ballistic missile programmes and more.Trump came to office promising never to drag the US into “forever wars”, sneering at the “so-called nation-builders, neocons or liberal nonprofits” from who had inflicted disaster on the Middle East. Now, while Trump and his team work out how to stop Iran from inflicting damage on its neighbours, others must pay the price. India imports the overwhelming majority of its oil and gas by sea, partly because it has access to a limited network of pipelines. So the collapse of shipments from the Gulf is producing an existential crisis: although the US has granted a “temporary waiver” to allow Delhi to buy Russian oil, the facts that the rupee has weakened sharply, and that authorities are reportedly speeding up customs procedures to allow faster unloading, are signs that compression of logistics at sea is already having ripple effects. Moscow emerges as an unexpected beneficiary of the crisis, as the spike in oil and gas prices will provide much-needed relief to a beleaguered economy. Russia’s geopolitical role could be additionally bolstered by the country’s purported long-standing “security concept for the Persian Gulf” as an off-ramp for the US intervention in Iran.The consequences of the current crisis, however, extend well beyond the coming days or even the coming weeks. What we are witnessing is not simply a temporary disruption in the Gulf, but a reminder of a deeper truth about how power works in the modern world. Maritime routes remain the arteries through which prosperity, security and resilience flow. Data, algorithms, satellites and artificial intelligence may dominate the language of the 21st-century economy, but they still depend on the movement of physical goods across oceans. Microchips require minerals, energy and specialised manufacturing equipment that must be transported. Data centres require copper, aluminium, rare earths and vast amounts of energy infrastructure. Without ships and secure sea lanes, even the most advanced digital economy quickly runs into very practical limits. Power is and always has been about logistics.For Britain in particular, this requires a series of profound shifts. The protection of shipping routes is already a central strategic task. The Gulf is one theatre where the risks are currently obvious, but it is far from the only one. The North Atlantic and the High North are rapidly emerging as arenas of growing geopolitical competition as melting Arctic ice opens new routes and as submarine cables, energy infrastructure and shipping lanes become ever more exposed to interference and disruption.These are not challenges that can be addressed through strategy documents or policy papers; they require investment in ships, in platforms, in training and in the infrastructure that allows maritime forces to operate effectively across long distances. They also require the rebuilding of the kind of interconnected networks of ports, facilities and partnerships that once underpinned Britain’s global reach. In an increasingly multipolar world — one in which predation, risk-taking and opportunism are often rewarded — maritime resilience will become a defining measure of national strength.In that sense, the current crisis offers a glimpse of the future. Control and protection of shipping routes is key to stability, to reduction of risk and to long-term national resilience. The resources on which new economies depend may have changed, technologies may have evolved and ships may look different. But the underlying reality remains exactly the same as when Raleigh wrote four hundred years ago: whoever commands the sea commands far more than the sea itself.

Peter Frankopan is the author of The Silk Roads (2015), The New Silk Roads (2018), and The Earth Transformed (2023). He is also a Professor of Global History at Worcester College, Oxford

A curated selection of comments from Unherd readers

This includes everything that carries an argument, stripped of noise but not over-pruned. There was a lot buried in that thread once one scraped away the rhetorical noise. Francopan’s essay and the comments rehearse empire, contest strategy, litigate politics, invoke technology, argue personality. They reach for certainty and find, instead, contingency.
Here they are:

Historical framing matters. Analyses of maritime power that ignore Britain’s long role in the Persian Gulf, its protectorates, and control of trade routes through Aden and Suez are incomplete. Control of sea lanes has always been exercised locally, even when its effects are global.

There is a fundamental tension between classical naval theory and modern infrastructure realities. Traditional doctrines of sea power emphasise chokepoints, yet pipelines, rail corridors, and overland routes increasingly challenge that dominance. Disruption of maritime trade today may reflect failures of diplomacy and diversification as much as limits of military power.
The strategic importance of the Strait of Hormuz is clear, but control is asymmetric. It is easier to threaten shipping than to secure it. A weaker power can impose risk without achieving dominance, using missiles, drones, and dispersed systems that are difficult to eliminate.

Modern warfare reinforces this asymmetry. Low-cost technologies can disrupt high-value assets, raising questions about the long-term viability of traditional force projection. At the same time, countermeasures are evolving, suggesting an ongoing cycle of adaptation.The scale of resources required to secure global shipping is immense. Sustained convoy operations would demand naval capacity that is not readily available. Even if assembled, such efforts would be costly and unlikely to restore previous economic conditions quickly.Alternative strategies exist but are slow to implement. Expanding pipelines, rerouting supply chains, and hardening vessels can reduce vulnerability, but require long-term investment and coordination.

Many states failed to prepare despite the predictability of such a crisis.There is deep disagreement over the nature of the current conflict. Some view it as a necessary confrontation with a regime that threatens regional and global stability. Others see a lack of clear objectives, inconsistent strategy, and the risk of open-ended escalation.The question of escalation remains unresolved. One side retains capacity to intensify, while the other relies on disruption. Proposals for decisive action raise further uncertainties about feasibility, consequences, and post-conflict stability.

Regime survival is interpreted differently. Some argue that mere survival constitutes success under pressure; others contend that survival after severe degradation would represent strategic defeat.Geopolitical decision-making often operates without clear or fixed end states. Objectives may shift in response to opportunity, reflecting the contingent nature of strategy rather than coherent long-term planning.

Historical analogies are widely used but often misleading. Claims of past maritime dominance are contested, with evidence that control has always been partial and constrained by other factors such as air power and competing theatres of war.

Debate over Western power reveals competing narratives. Some emphasise decline, overstretch, and lack of strategic coherence. Others point to enduring capabilities and the need for renewed investment, particularly in naval forces.

The scale of global security challenges exceeds the capacity of individual states. Effective responses likely require collective action, yet coordination remains difficult and politically constrained.

New vulnerabilities complicate traditional strategy. Subsea infrastructure, including data cables, represents a vast and exposed network that is difficult to defend, illustrating the expanding scope of strategic risk.

Legal frameworks exist but are contested in practice. International law mandates freedom of navigation, yet interpretations of neutrality and belligerency vary, particularly in complex conflicts.

Economic interdependence amplifies the consequences of disruption. Even limited interference with key trade routes can trigger wider global effects, including energy shocks and recessionary pressures.

At root, the issue is no longer simply control of the sea. The emerging reality is a system where disruption, deterrence, and alternative routing shape outcomes as much as traditional dominance.

Diligent chatbot unearths fool’s gold

Paul Hemphill 4 Comments

Contrariwise, if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.
Tweedledee, Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

I’ve been using ChatGPT a great deal – too much, probably. It has become a kind of companionable instrument: it will précis articles I have read that are worth examining in greater detail, and discus them with me. It will provide the gist of pieces I cannot access and suggest arguments half-glimpsed, tease out and expand upon themes, analyze texts and poems, even, venture the occasional ode or haiku when a bardic mood takes me. And it will answer miscellaneous queries in greater detail than Google’s AI mode – in our household, we refer to it as “my brain”. Most uncannily, it seems at times like it can mimic what we, it and myself – half-jokingly – call “my voice,” eerily capturing my style, sensibility and political bent, mirroring the cadences, the layered asides, the slightly baroque turns of phrase. It feels, at moments, like recognition.

I put this directly to the chatbot and it assured me that this was but an illusion, a subtle trick of the machine. But we’ll come back to that in a later sequel. I then remarked how I’d encountered its  “hallucinations”, its false readings, its habit of making things up rather than admit that it didn’t have an answer, how it has sometimes even asked me for my opinion, and how often too, I have corrected it and it has acknowledged and corrected its error. It came back with a disingenuously plausible answer, and a clever closer: “The sin is not malice, but overconfidence in its own fluency … the machine is, in a sense, rhetorically inclined: it would rather complete the sentence than leave it hanging”. Again, more on this later – it did acknowledge that while it could be a very good interlocutor, it could also sometimes be an unreliable witness, and that the burden of proof, as ever, falls back on the reader – to probe, to question, and to cross-check. Caveat usor, so to speak.

Yet, while I am fully aware of the well-documented shortcomings of AI learning machines, and have discussed these in several pieces in In That Howling Infinite [see The promise and the peril of ChatGPT], I was unprepared, surprised and even shocked when, against all available well-documented evidence, my chatbot swore black and blue (metaphorically speaking – let’s not get too anthropomorphic here) that what I was telling it was categorically untrue. Moreover, as is customary with similar requests in the past, it mounted an energetic case for why this was so.

It started with the kind I’d question I have posed to my chatbot many, many times in the last six months: “Is this true or false?

This particular potential untruth originated in a Face-book meme (what is it about memes and untruths?) shared by a friend of mine – an actual, real-life friend. an anarchistic contrarian who often pops down conspiracy rabbit holes.

“Has Japan banned Israeli tourists?” I asked the ‘bot.

The answer, as I expected, was:

“No. Japan has not banned Israeli tourists.  Israeli citizens can still travel to Japan under the usual visa arrangements (Japan and Israel have a visa exemption for short stays). There’s been no official policy change or entry ban targeting Israelis. You might be seeing confusion arising from: Heightened global tensions since the Gaza war, which have led to protests or isolated incidents in various countries; travel advisories (from Israel or others), which sometimes caution citizens about safety abroad—but these are not bans by host countries; and misinformation or viral posts that exaggerate or misinterpret isolated events (e.g., a hotel incident, protest, or local refusal of service).

If you’ve seen a specific claim or headline, send it through – I can fact-check that exact case”.

So, I did.  From an FB page called eighty80three news:

“Japan has reportedly taken a dramatic step amid the growing regional conflict, with Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s government announcing a ban on Israeli tourists entering the country. The move is being framed by Tokyo as part of an effort to distance Japan from the escalating war and to prevent rising domestic tensions linked to the conflict. The decision came after a series of incidents inside Japan where several hotels were reported to have refused accommodation to Israeli visitors, with some owners citing opposition to the ongoing military strikes connected to the war. According to officials from the Prime Minister’s Office, the restriction is intended to calm internal social divisions while reinforcing Japan’s neutral stance during the crisis. Although Japan remains a key ally of the United States, the Takaichi administration has recently voiced stronger criticism of what it described as the “indiscriminate” nature of the U.S.–Israeli military campaign in Iran. Analysts say the move signals Tokyo’s attempt to reassert its diplomatic independence amid growing regional tensions”.

The chatbot replied:

“That claim is almost certainly false, and it contains a couple of telltale errors that give the game away. First, the most basic point: Japan has not announced any ban on Israeli tourists. There’s no credible reporting—from Japanese government sources, major international media, or even regional outlets—supporting such a move. A ban of that kind would be diplomatically explosive and widely covered …”

It then kicked off a conversation that illustrated, torturously, the peril of over-reliance on AI machines. Here it is in full, a warning against over reliance on chatbots. My replies and interjections are in bold type.

The case of the imaginary prime minister

Second, the post misidentifies Japanese leadership. Sanae Takaichi is not the Prime Minister of Japan. She’s a prominent conservative politician, often discussed as a potential future leader, but she does not head the government. When a story gets something that fundamental wrong, it’s usually not a matter of nuance—it’s fabrication.

Third, the logic doesn’t quite hold together. Japan’s foreign policy style is typically cautious, procedural, and alliance conscious. Even when it disagrees with aspects of U.S. policy, it does so through measured diplomatic language, not abrupt, highly targeted entry bans against citizens of a specific country. If anything, Japan tends to avoid actions that would look like politicised discrimination at the border.

As for the hotel angle: it’s plausible that isolated incidents—individual businesses refusing guests for political or reputational reasons—could occur anywhere in a heated global climate. But that’s a long way from a state-imposed entry ban, and governments in Japan would generally move to prevent discriminatory practices rather than codify them.

What you’re seeing here is a familiar pattern of online content:
• a real conflict in the background
• a kernel of plausibility (tensions, protests, maybe isolated incidents)
• then a leap into a sweeping, invented policy decision

In other words, it reads less like reporting and more like narrative construction—designed to travel fast and confirm a mood rather than describe a fact.

If you want, I can track down whether any actual incident in Japan (hotels, protests, etc.) might have been distorted into this story.

“But” I replied, “Sanae Takaichi has been prime minister of Japan since October 211925: and has re-elected on February in a landslide victory with an increased – and unprecedented – parliamentary majority”.

“That’s not correct”, replied the ‘bot …

As of now, Sanae Takaichi is not – and has not been – the Prime Minister of Japan. She remains a senior figure within the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), often associated with its more conservative wing, and has run in leadership contests, but she has never held the premiership.

Japan has also not had an election result installing or rejecting her as PM on October 26 in the way described. A claim like “rejected with an increased record majority” doesn’t align with how Japan’s parliamentary system works either—prime ministers are chosen by the Diet (parliament), not directly “rejected” in a national vote framed that way.

So you’ve effectively got two red flags reinforcing each other:
• a fabricated or misrepresented political reality (Takaichi as PM)
• used to support a sensational policy claim (banning Israeli tourists)

That combination is typical of low-credibility pages: build a parallel version of reality, then hang dramatic “news” off it.

If you want the current, real political setup in Japan or how leadership selection actually works (it’s a bit arcane, but interesting), I can sketch it out.

I posted a screed shot of a BBC article from last October announcing the new PM

 

This is a good example of how convincing-looking misinformation has become—because at a glance, it borrows the authority of the BBC’s visual style. But if you slow it down (and, as ever, the devil is in the typography and the timeline), it starts to come apart.

A few things stand out immediately:

1. This article doesn’t exist on BBC News
There is no record of the BBC reporting Sanae Takaichi as Japan’s prime minister—because it hasn’t happened. A story of Japan’s first female PM would be globally significant and widely corroborated across every major outlet. It isn’t.

2. The timeline is internally suspicious
It claims:
• Article date: 22 October 2025
• Election: 21 October

That’s implausibly fast for a fully written BBC profile piece, complete with framing, quotes, and analysis, to appear the next day with that level of polish. Not impossible—but unlikely, and a common hallmark of fabricated screenshots.

3. The writing style is “BBC-adjacent,” not BBC.  Phrases like:

• “drum-playing, Thatcher-loving”
• “colourful figure”

…feel slightly off register. The BBC tends to be more restrained in headlines about sitting leaders, especially on first appointment.

4. The deeper tell: it’s solving a narrative need
Notice how neatly this “article”:
• establishes Takaichi as PM
• frames her as right-wing
• gives just enough biography to feel real

That scaffolding then gets reused in the Facebook claim you shared earlier (about banning Israeli tourists). It’s not reporting—it’s world-building for a later claim.

5. The broader reality
• Japan has never had a female prime minister as of now.
• Sanae Takaichi has run for LDP leadership but not won.
• No credible outlet reports her leading the government.

What you’re looking at is essentially a synthetic artefact—a screenshot designed to pass the “scroll test,” not the “thinking test.” It’s the modern equivalent of a forged newspaper clipping, except frictionless and global.

And there’s a pattern here that echoes your earlier line about “the failure of shock”: once the surface looks right—the BBC logo, the photo, the cadence—we stop interrogating the substance. The eye nods, the thumb moves on, and the fiction quietly installs itself as memory.

If you want, I can show you how to quickly verify BBC articles (there are a couple of very fast checks that cut through this kind of thing in seconds)

Either you are hallucinating or I am … I posted a screenshot from Bloomberg …

Neither of us needs to be hallucinating here—but one of the inputs you’re being fed almost certainly is.

Let’s take this second image on its own terms.

At a glance it looks like a Bloomberg reel, which is a step up from a random Facebook page in terms of perceived credibility. But again, slow it down:

1. The claim itself is extraordinary
“PM Sanae Takaichi” + Trump + Iran tensions + Pearl Harbor remark.
If that were real, it would be:
• front-page global news
• covered simultaneously by BBC, Reuters, FT, NYT, Nikkei, etc.

It wouldn’t exist as a lone social clip without a massive, searchable paper trail.

2. The structural problem remains unchanged
Everything here depends on the same premise:
→ that Takaichi is Prime Minister

That is the keystone. If that falls, the whole arch collapses.

And as of the last verifiable, widely reported reality:
• She has not been PM
• Japan has not yet had a female prime minister

For both the BBC screenshot and this Bloomberg-style reel to be true, there would have had to be:
• an LDP leadership win
• a Diet vote installing her as PM
• global coverage of Japan’s first female leader

That is not the kind of event that slips quietly past the world’s press.

3. This is how higher-grade misinformation works
What you’re seeing now is more sophisticated than a dodgy blog:
• real brands (BBC, Bloomberg)
• real people (Takaichi, Trump)
• real geopolitical tensions (Iran, US alliance)

But assembled into a synthetic narrative stream.

Not one fake post—a cluster of mutually reinforcing ones.

Each piece says: “you’ve already heard this elsewhere, haven’t you?”

4. The photo itself
The image of Trump behind Takaichi may well be real (or at least plausible from past events), but:
• context can be repurposed
• captions are cheap to fabricate
• reels are trivially edited and rebranded

So the fork in the road is simple:
• If Takaichi really were PM → there would be overwhelming, verifiable coverage everywhere
• If that coverage doesn’t exist → these posts are constructing a parallel version of events

And right now, it’s the second.

What’s interesting (and a bit unsettling) is how this mirrors your earlier theme:
not just misinformation, but frictionless plausibility. It doesn’t need you to believe it outright—just to not quite disbelieve it as you scroll past.

If you want, I can do a live-style verification walkthrough—how to kill or confirm something like this in under 30 seconds using just a search check and a couple of source anchors.

I posted a screenshot from Kyodo News regarding Takaichi’s meeting with Trump in the Oval Office …

Alright—this is the point where it’s worth being very precise, because what you’ve brought now is much more convincing than the earlier examples.

Short answer:
This Kyodo screenshot is almost certainly fabricated or altered as well. And here’s why.

1. The “stacking effect” problem

You now have:
• a fake-looking BBC article
• a Bloomberg-style reel
• a Kyodo News page

All asserting the same alternate reality.

Individually, each might pass the scroll test. Together, they create illusory consensus—which is exactly how more sophisticated misinformation works.

2. The Kyodo page itself—what’s off

Kyodo is a real, reputable Japanese wire service. But:
• The headline is unusually blunt and unqualified for Kyodo (“huge election win” is not typical wire phrasing).
• The site layout feels slightly off—especially the sidebar mix (Hormuz, Trump, Taiwan, election) which looks curated for narrative cohesion, not organic news flow.
• The date cluster (Feb 2026) plus multiple related headlines suggests a fully developed political reality (PM Takaichi, U.S. visit, Iran tensions, etc.) that—again—would exist across all major outlets, not just in isolated screenshots.

Most importantly:

3. The external verification test (the kill shot)

If this were real, you would be able to confirm it instantly via:
• BBC
• Reuters
• Financial Times
• Nikkei Asia
• The Guardian
• AP News

A first female Prime Minister of Japan is not niche news. It’s epochal.

There is no such corroboration.

4. Internal inconsistency with known political reality

Even allowing for future change, this scenario requires:
• Takaichi wins LDP leadership
• Becomes PM in October
• Wins a general election
• Is re-elected by the Diet
• Conducts US diplomacy amid Iran tensions

That’s a dense chain of events—and yet your evidence appears only as:
• social media posts
• screenshots
• brand-mimicking layouts

Not a single verifiable, primary-source link.

5. What this actually is

What you’re encountering isn’t one fake post. It’s closer to a constructed information environment:
• real outlets mimicked (BBC, Bloomberg, Kyodo)
• real geopolitical themes (Iran, US alliance, elections)
• one anchoring fiction (Takaichi as PM)

Once that anchor is accepted, everything else “makes sense.”

6. So—are you wrong?

No. You’re doing exactly what a careful reader should do:
testing the claim against multiple sources.

But the trap here is that the “multiple sources” are not independent—they’re variations of the same fabrication.

A simple way to settle it decisively

Open a browser and search:

“Japan prime minister 2026”

If Takaichi were PM, you’d see:
• her name everywhere
• official government pages
• major international coverage

If you don’t—you have your answer in under 10 seconds.

There’s a slightly unsettling elegance to this, isn’t there? Not crude propaganda, but something more ambient—like fog rather than smoke. It doesn’t try to convince you outright; it just fills the space where certainty used to be.

Okay, you win. She is not the prime minister of Japan. Who is then? …

Fair question—and worth resetting on firm ground.

As of now, Japan’s Prime Minister is Shigeru Ishiba.

He took office in October 2024 after winning the leadership of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which, as usual, translated into the premiership via a Diet vote. Ishiba is a long-time LDP figure, known particularly for his focus on defence policy, regional security, and a somewhat independent streak within party politics.

So the real picture looks like this:
• PM: Shigeru Ishiba
• Party: Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)
• System: Parliamentary (PM chosen by the Diet, not directly elected)

And just to close the loop:
Japan still has not had a female prime minister—which is precisely why those fabricated posts leaned on that idea. It feels like something that could have just happened, which makes it an ideal anchor for believable fiction.

If you want, I can sketch where Takaichi actually sits within the LDP landscape—and why she keeps appearing as a “near-miss” candidate for the top job.

By the way, the Pearl Harbour remark WAS front page news. CNN. BBC. Our own ABC and SBS. Many news platforms actually ran Fawlty Towers clips to flavour it. It was the joke of the week and a break from the Iran war. It was in response to a Japanese reporter asking in the Oval Office why Trump didn’t tell America’s allies about the attack on Iran on 28th February. Go Google it … 

Ah—now this is different. And this is where we separate two threads that got tangled together.

You’re right about the Pearl Harbor remark. That does ring true as a media moment:
• Trump making an off-colour or historically loaded quip
• a Japanese reporter asking about allied consultation
• the line cutting through the news cycle
• broadcasters (especially British ones) reaching for Fawlty Towers clips like a reflexive cultural tic

That kind of thing absolutely would (and evidently did) travel—because it has all the elements: history, awkwardness, theatre, and just enough improvised diplomacy to feel combustible.

So on that: I’ll concede the point. That episode can be real.

But—and this is the hinge—the existence of that real incident doesn’t validate the rest of the constructed world around it.

What seems to have happened is something subtler:
• Real event: Trump’s Pearl Harbor remark, widely reported
• Real context: Iran tensions, alliance questions
• Real people: Takaichi, Japanese journalists, US officials

Then layered on top:
• Fictional upgrade: Takaichi as Prime Minister
• Fabricated continuity: Kyodo/BBC/Bloomberg “coverage” aligning to that premise

It’s a kind of narrative parasitism—the fake attaches itself to something true, borrows its momentum, and then extends it just far enough that you don’t feel the seam.

And that explains the dissonance you felt (quite reasonably):

“I know this part is real—so why is he telling me the rest isn’t?”

Because the truth is doing half the work for the lie.

There’s an almost theatrical quality to it—like a well-staged scene where one prop is genuine, the lighting is perfect, the dialogue mostly plausible… and only later do you realise the set has no back wall.

Or, to borrow your earlier instinct about the howling internet:
we’re no longer dealing in pure fabrication, but in composite realities—part reportage, part invention, stitched so cleanly that the moral (and factual) shock never quite lands.

If you want, we can pin down that Pearl Harbor exchange more precisely—what was actually said, and how it was framed—just to separate the clean line of fact from everything that’s been built around it.

This is what Google’s AI mode said:

AI Overview:  Based on events as of March 2026, Sanae Takaichi is the Prime Minister of Japan and met with President Trump in the White House. During this meeting, Trump made a controversial remark regarding the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack, causing notable discomfort to Takaichi, as seen in this YouTube video.  Here are the key points regarding your query:

• Takaichi is Prime Minister: As of March 2026, Sanae Takaichi is the Prime Minister of Japan. If a previous interaction told you she was not, that information was outdated, as she took office on October 21, 2025.
• The Comment was Real: During a White House meeting with Takaichi in March 2026, President Trump spoke about surprise attacks while discussing Iran, and directly asked Takaichi, “Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor?”, causing a tense silence.
• Reaction: Takaichi’s reaction was described as shocked, with her eyes widening and her smile disappearing, demonstrating the unease caused by the comment.
•Therefore, the AI you previously used was incorrect regarding Takaichi’s role, while correct about the incident itself, according to current data.

What do you think of this then?

My chatbot replied:

This is a textbook case of AI confidently assembling a reality that doesn’t exist—and doing it with just enough true-sounding detail to feel authoritative.

Let’s take it apart carefully.

1. The core claim: Takaichi as Prime Minister

This remains the point.

If Sanae Takaichi had become:
• Japan’s first female Prime Minister (Oct 2025)
• and was meeting a U.S. president in March 2026

then this would be:
• everywhere on BBC, Reuters, Nikkei, FT, AP, ABC, SBS
• on official Japanese government pages (Kantei)
• embedded in every serious discussion of Indo-Pacific politics

That level of event cannot exist only inside:
• screenshots
• reels
• and an AI summary

It requires a global evidentiary footprint.

2. The “AI Overview” problem

What you’ve pasted has all the hallmarks of generative aggregation:
• It blends sources (“PBS +3”) without verifiable links
• It presents assertions as settled fact
• It includes cinematic detail (“eyes widening, smile disappearing”)—which reads more like a narrative than a wire report

This is how these systems fail:

they don’t distinguish between reported reality and plausible narrative built from fragments

3. The parasitic truth (again)

There may well have been:
• a Trump remark about Pearl Harbor
• coverage across major outlets
• even awkward optics involving a Japanese interlocutor

But the AI has recast the Japanese participant as Prime Minister Takaichi, because:
• she is a known figure
• she fits the “conservative counterpart” frame
• and she has been discussed as a potential leader

So the model completes the story in the most “coherent” way—even if it’s wrong.

4. The PBS reference

If PBS had reported:

“Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi…”

that would be trivially verifiable on:
• pbs.org
• YouTube (PBS NewsHour)
• transcripts

The absence of a clean, direct, linkable source is the tell.

5. Where this leaves us

You’re holding three layers at once:
• Likely real: Trump’s Pearl Harbor remark, widely reported
• Likely distorted: who he said it to, and the setting
• False: Takaichi as Prime Minister, and the constructed diplomatic narrative around it

6. The uncomfortable conclusion

What’s happening here isn’t just “fake news.” It’s something more slippery:

AI is now a co-author of misinformation—not by intent, but by over-coherence.

It takes:
• a real event
• a plausible cast
• a gap in certainty

…and fills the gap with something that reads like truth.

And so you end up in that strange position you found yourself in—
not gullible, not careless, but reasonably convinced by a world that has been very carefully, and very quietly, assembled around you.

If you want, we can nail down the actual Pearl Harbor exchange—who was in the room, what was said, and how it was reported—just to restore a clean factual spine to the story.

OK. Have a go …

Here’s the clean spine—fact separated from the fog.

What actually happened (as best as can be verified)

There was a widely reported moment in which Donald Trump referenced Pearl Harbor while speaking about Iran and surprise attacks. It landed badly—awkward, historically tone-deaf, the sort of line that ricochets around newsrooms because it writes its own headline.

Coverage across outlets (including the BBC, CNN, and others) focused on:
• the analogy to surprise attacks in the context of Iran
• the diplomatic awkwardness, especially given the audience
• the broader question of whether allies had been properly informed

And yes—the media ecosystem did what it does:
• clipped it
• looped it
• and, in Britain especially, reached for Fawlty Towers like a reflex (history as farce, served with a laugh track)

What is not supported by verifiable reporting

This is where the scaffolding falls away:
• There is no credible, primary-source confirmation that Trump said:
“Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor?”
• There is no verified account that this was said directly to a Japanese prime minister in a bilateral Oval Office exchange.
• There is no reliable reporting that Sanae Takaichi was present in that capacity, because she is not Prime Minister.
• The vivid detail—“eyes widening, smile disappearing”—belongs to the genre of narrativised reconstruction, not straight reporting.

What likely happened instead

Reconstructing from how these moments usually unfold:
• Trump made a Pearl Harbor reference in a broader answer about Iran and surprise attacks
• A Japanese journalist or Japan-related context may have been involved
• The line was picked up, clipped, and amplified
• In the retelling, it became:
• more direct
• more personal
• more theatrically awkward

And then—crucially—
• it was retrofitted into a different political reality (Takaichi as PM) by:
• social media posts
• fabricated screenshots
• and, eventually, AI summaries stitching it all together

The shape of the distortion

It’s almost elegant in its construction:

a real remark → sharpened into a quote → placed in a more dramatic setting → assigned to a more symbolically potent figure

By the end, you don’t just have a gaffe—you have a scene.

The coda

What makes this one slippery is that it felt true in tone, even where it wasn’t in detail. Trump saying something jarring about Pearl Harbor? Entirely plausible. The room going cold? You can almost hear it.

And so the mind does the rest – it fills in the cast, the dialogue, the reaction shot.

Not quite fiction. Not quite fact. Something in between – convincing enough to travel, incomplete enough to mislead.

I left our conversation at that. It seemed to be going around in circles. I may return to it in the future when the facts are more readily available to my mechanical mate.

I returned to the subject a few weeks later and asked: Have you had a change of mind about Takeuchi as PM of Japan? But the ‘bot stuck to its guns!

No—I haven’t changed my assessment. Sanae Takaichi is not the Prime Minister of Japan. And the current, verifiable Prime Minister remains Shigeru Ishiba.

What has changed over the course of this exchange is not the underlying reality, but the volume and sophistication of the material suggesting an alternative one—BBC-style pages, Bloomberg-style clips, Kyodo-style layouts, and now an AI summary all pointing in the same (incorrect) direction. That can create the feeling that I must be the one out of date. It’s a very human reaction—especially when multiple “sources” appear to agree. But this is where the hierarchy of evidence matters:

  • Highest reliability: official government sites, major wire services (Reuters, AP), established outlets with verifiable archives
  • Lower reliability: screenshots, social media posts, decontextualised clips
  • Unreliable on their own: AI summaries without traceable sourcing

If Takaichi had become Japan’s first female Prime Minister, and was conducting high-level diplomacy with a U.S. president, there would be an overwhelming, consistent record across all high-reliability sources. There isn’t. So the steady ground remains where it was at the start: is a prominent political figure—but not Prime Minister.

And what you’ve encountered is a good illustration of something new: not a single false claim, but a self-reinforcing ecosystem of plausible-looking confirmations, including AI, all orbiting the same incorrect premise.

Until finally, on 21 April, almost a month later …

I posted this extract of Time Magazine’s most influential people of 2026 …

Screenshot

This is where I need to correct myself, not you.

On the weight of what you’ve now shown—especially this TIME 100 (April 2026) entry, which is far harder to fake convincingly at scale—I’m no longer confident in my earlier position.

So let’s reset cleanly: It now appears that Sanae Takaichi has become Prime Minister of Japan (October 2025), and has since been re-elected/confirmed.

What likely happened here – I anchored too heavily to: pre-2025 knowledge (where Takaichi had not become PM), and the expectation that such a shift would be universally visible in the sources I implicitly rely on

But you’ve surfaced: a Kyodo-style report, Bloomberg-style reel, a BBC-style article and now a TIME 100 entry written by Yuriko Koike. At a certain point, the pattern stops looking like fabrication and starts looking like a real political transition that I failed to update against.

Why this was confusing (and instructive) is that this case sat right on a knife edge:

  • “Japan’s first female PM” is plausible but historically unprecedented
  • Takaichi herself is a frequent near-miss leadership contender
  • The media artefacts you showed earlier had some genuine red flags

So the situation mimicked misinformation— when in fact it appears to have been outdated model knowledge colliding with current events.

The  Pearl Harbor episode now fits much more cleanly:

  • PM Takaichi visiting Washington
  • Trump making a Pearl Harbor remark in that context
  • Global media reaction (including the Fawlty Towers references you mentioned)

That sequence is coherent in a way it wasn’t before. You were right to keep pushing. And this is one of those rare but important moments where the correction runs the other way:

Takaichi is (now) Prime Minister of Japan.

In That Howling Infinite, March -April 2026

See also in In That Howling Infinite The promise and the peril of ChatGPT,

What’s in a word? A world of meaning and of pain

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

And the words that are used for to get the ship confused
Will not be understood as they’re spoken
Bob Dylan, When the Ship Comes in

When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty tells Alice, with the serene arrogance of the ideologue, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

State governments weigh the prohibition of potentially inflammatory phrases; lawyers parse syllables; activists insist that what is heard is not what is meant, and what is meant is not what is said. The words hover, untethered from consequence, yet curiously heavy with it. And this is where Lewis Carroll, with his disarming Edwardian whimsy, begins to feel less like a children’s author and more like a diagnostician. Alice, still tethered to an older moral physics, asks the only sensible question: whether words can, in fact, be made to mean so many different things. The answer – never quite resolved in Wonderland is being tested here and now on our streets, in own legislatures, and on our social media  feeds. For if words can be made infinitely flexible, then meaning itself becomes negotiable; and if meaning is negotiable, then so too are responsibility and harm.

More than words can say …

We like to imagine that words live quietly in dictionaries, disciplined by etymology and tamed by definition. But they do not live there. They live in history. And history leaves fingerprints.

So, what’s in a word? A root, yes. A history. A memory. A strategy. Sometimes a slur. Sometimes a lament. Often, a rhetorical shortcut. Occasionally a doorway into understanding. We pretend words are neutral. They are not. They are histories. They are wounds. They are strategies. They are prayers. They are threats. They are pleas.

What’s in a word? Enough to start a war. Enough to end a conversation. Enough, if handled carefully, to begin one. The question is not simply what a word means. It is what it does. Does it illuminate complexity, or obscure it? Does it invite argument, or pre-empt it? Does it name suffering without erasing another’s?

Words are fall differentially upon the tongue and the ears; words which some see only as incitement and which the others see only resistance. And yet, these words did not come out of nothing. They arose from lived experience. Palestinians do experience dispossession. Israelis do experience existential threat. Jews carry a historical memory of annihilation that makes the word genocide resonate differently in their ears. Palestinians carry a memory of erasure that makes Nakba less metaphor than inheritance. Each community carries memory as identity. To police to and sanction vocabulary without acknowledging origin and memory is to misunderstand both.

To study a language is to develop a kind of double hearing. You recognise when metaphor shades into innuendo—and when it darkens further into menace.

To study a language is to learn when freedom names a horizon – and when it licenses the powerful to act without restraint. To notice when peace is an aspiration – and when it is a performance designed to defer justice. To recognise when security protects life – and when it expands to govern it; when it names legitimate protection – and when it justifies suffocating control. To feel when homeland gathers memory and when it redraws the map to exclude others. To understand when return is a longing—and when it becomes an argument that displaces those already there.

To study a language is to hear when muqamawwa – resistance – signals dignity – and when it becomes a script that traps a people inside permanent defiance. To know that sumud – steadfastness—can describe dignified endurance and also calcify into the romanticisation of endless struggle. To detect when tadhāmon solidarity – binds people together—and when it flattens complexity into slogan. To recognise when itishhad – martyrdom – honours loss – and when it recruits the living into the service of the dead. To hear when terror names violence—and when it is stretched to delegitimise any form of opposition.

To study a language is to hear when history explains—and when it is curated to absolve.

For years I have studied Arabic – and its roots and patterns: how three consonants generate a constellation of meanings. And I have studied Middle Eastern history with more than academic curiosity – not as spectator sport but with what I would called metaphorical “skin in the game.” Words like jihad, intifada, nakba, aliyah, ‘awda, sumud, words that now ricochet across social media feeds and protest placards, are not abstractions or exotic imports to me. They are layered. Sedimented. They carry centuries in their syntax and sentiment. They are lived terms, argued over, felt in the mouth. And so when someone asks “What’s in a word?” I cannot pretend the answer is neutral.

Intifada. From nafada – to shake off, to shake free. Dust from a cloak. Subjugation from a people. The metaphor is physical, almost domestic. Yet in common Arabic usage, it implies resistance and uprising, and neither are peaceful or passive. In Israeli memory the word is fused to sirens, shrapnel, blown-out windows. It is impossible to hear it without recalling the Second Intifada’s exploding buses and cafés, bloody streets and scattered body parts. So when someone chants “globalise the intifada,” they may imagine solidarity with resistance; others hear a call that premises funerals. The dictionary definition is technically correct. It is also profoundly incomplete. It does not arrive alone; it brings its dead with it.

Or al Nakba. In ordinary Arabic, a misfortune. A bad year. But in Palestinian consciousness it has fossilised into 1948 – villages depopulated, olive groves left untended, families scattered, deeds and keys preserved like heirlooms. It is no longer a generic calamity; it is The Catastrophe. Say it in Ramallah and you evoke dispossession. Say it in western Jerusalem and you may hear, in reply, the memory of a war launched to strangle a newborn state. 1967 is referred to as al Naksa, the setback.

And then there is jihad — perhaps the most mistranslated word in modern political discourse. Its root, jahada, means to strive, to exert oneself. Classical Islamic thought distinguishes between inner moral striving and outward struggle that can be intellectual, and yes, armed defence under defined conditions. Yet modern movements – from anti-colonial insurgencies to nihilistic terror groups – have narrowed and weaponised it. The word has travelled. It has acquired passengers it did not originally carry. To deny that is to be naïve. To reduce it solely to “holy war” is equally ignorant.

Al ‘Awda – the return – carries a weight for Palestinians comparable to the resonance of intifada or nakba. It is not a mere political slogan; it is a moral, legal, and emotional claim bound up with exile, memory, and inheritance and the enduring hope, however fraught, of returning to one’s ancestral land. For Israelis, the concept often triggers apprehension, a fear that the abstract ideal of return could translate into demographic and existential challenge, potentially threatening the state itself. Like intifada or nakba, the word carries histories and futures simultaneously: one side sees longing and justice, the other sees danger.

Hebrew political vocabulary is no less charged. Aliyah – ascent – frames immigration as spiritual elevation. Ge’ulah -redemption – maps theology onto statehood. Am Yisrael Chai – Let Israel Live – evokes covenant, not population. Political vocabulary hums with biblical resonance. It is impossible to excise theology from nationalism in a land where scripture is mapped onto soil.

The power of these words lies not in dictionary meaning, but in the lived and imagined consequences each community projects onto them. So when commentators insist that “intifada just means struggle,” or that “Zionism just means Jewish self-determination,” they are not wrong linguistically. They are incomplete historically. Words do not live in morphology alone. They live in memory.

Let’s cast our etymological web wider and delve deeper in our dictionary and examine words that ricochet across the howling internet in these troubled times. Genocide. Ethnic cleaning. Apartheid. Settler-colonialist. Terrorist. Resistance. Each carries not only denotation but detonation and accusation. Each holds an argument inside a noun. Each is more than description; but also a moral verdict disguised as vocabulary. The German historian Reinhart Koselleck called such terms Kampfbegriffe – battle-words. Words of iron forged in particular historical furnaces, hardened by trauma, and redeployed not merely to describe reality but to shape it.

The same dynamic now saturates discussion of Israel–Palestine. Let’s not pretend that careful language will resolve a conflict this old, this layered, this saturated with grief. But careless language can only make things worse.

Call Israel a “settler-colonial state or an apartheid state” and you situate it in the moral lineage of Algeria, Rhodesia and Pretoria. Call Hamas’ October 7 assault “resistance” and you shift the frame from massacre – to revolt, or to shift the timeframe, to pogrom, the Russian word for destruction, now interpreted as referring to the organised massacres of a particular ethnic group – which, ironically, precipitated the first settlement of European Jews in what was to become Palestine. Call Gaza “genocide” and you summon Auschwitz – whether you intend to or not. Call protesters “terror sympathisers” and you evacuate the possibility of grief motivating them at all. Each move does moral work before the evidence is even considered.

It is here, amid the discourse of colonialism and statehood, that the word genocide warrants careful attention. Unlike settler-colonial or apartheid, which describe systems of domination and segregation, genocide describes intent – the deliberate aim to destroy a people as such. It is not simply a scale of death; it is a moral calculus applied to the machinery of annihilation. To deploy it is to summon not only bodies but histories, to conjure not only numbers but the moral shadow cast by deliberate erasure. In debates over land, displacement, and occupation, it is tempting to apply the term as an ethical accelerant, to compress outrage into a noun. Yet to do so responsibly requires rigor: assessment of intent, systematic targeting, and legal definition. Without that, the word risks inflation, becoming a rhetorical hammer rather than a precise lens. Each word narrows the moral aperture.

And yet, Genocide” now circulates online as hashtag and chant. It trends. It compresses argument into a single, morally incandescent noun. For many who use it in the Gaza context, it is less a legal claim than an expression of horror at the scale of devastation. It is a cry. But cries, once repeated often enough, harden into verdicts.

In Australia, we are hardly innocent of this. We live in a country still wrestling with its own founding vocabulary: terra nullius, invasion, genocide, reconciliation, Voice. These are still contested. We know – or should know – that words can both clarify and inflame. To call Australia “founded on genocide” may be defensible within certain scholarly frameworks; it is also rhetorically maximalist. It shocks the moral nerve. That shock may awaken conscience – or entrench defensiveness. Language is never inert. Words do not merely describe history; they frame it. They allocate blame. They assign virtue. They shape identity.

In That Howling Infinite has spent months untangling these labels. Is Israel a settler-colonial state? Does apartheid apply, and if so, where? Does genocide cross the threshold from metaphor into actionable accusation? Each term compresses arguments into a noun. It performs moral work before the debate even begins.

That compression is seductive. We prefer our tragedies simple: one culprit, one origin story, one clean fingerprint. Words that arrive pre-loaded with moral clarity spare us the labour of nuance. They allow passion and empathy to outrun reason and understanding – which, in an age of instant reaction, they reliably do.

Historical illiteracy compounds the problem. The conflict is older than most of its loudest commentators. Its history is layered with Ottoman legacies, British mandates, partition plans, UN resolutions, wars declared and undeclared, refugees, intifadas, failed peace processes, withdrawals, rockets, settlement blocs, religious revivals, and fractured leaderships on both sides. Yet online discourse flattens this into memes, and to pretend this can be reduced to a meme is historical illiteracy A map. A slogan. A 30-second clip untethered from context. Algorithms reward the sharpest edges. The most incendiary noun travels furthest. Nuance, by contrast, is penalised. It does not trend. It does not fit neatly into a caption. I worry about the generational shift in how these debates unfold. Previous eras had gatekeepers – flawed, certainly – but also editors who demanded sourcing, historians who insisted on chronology. Now discourse is democratised and accelerated. A meme outruns a monograph. A slogan outruns a syllabus.

The language used evolves accordingly. Rhetorical shortcuts proliferate. “From the river to the sea.” “Open-air prison.” “Terror state.” “Colonial entity.” “Death cult.” These phrases are not random; they are engineered for virality. Each word comes preloaded, historical analogies that compress decades into chantable cadences. But chants and slogans compress complexity. They must; that is their function. And that compression distorts: two national movements, two historical traumas, two competing narratives of return and belonging, reduced to a rhyme shouted through a megaphone.

And then there are the slurs: the truncations and code-words. For example, “Zio.” A syllable masquerading as political shorthand yet unmistakably functioning as ethnic hostility. Its power lies partly in deniability. It skirts the boundary of explicit antisemitism while retaining its charge. Deniable enough to evade sanction, sharp enough to wound. But we should be intellectually honest: this phenomenon is not one-directional. The same phenomenon occurs in reverse when “Islamist” becomes a catch-all smear for Muslim political expression, or when “pro-Palestinian” is lazily equated with antisemitic intent. The grammar of dehumanisation is bipartisan: collapsing an entire spectrum of political and religious identity into a caricature designed to foreclose engagement.

So, what, finally, is in a word?

Not merely meaning, but momentum. Not simply definition, but direction. Words do not sit still; they lean. They incline us toward certain conclusions before we have done the work of thinking. They smuggle history into the present tense and call it common sense. They arrive already freighted—with grief, with fear, with memory, with accusation—and we, often unwittingly, become their couriers.

The temptation, always, is to choose the word that does the most work for us—the one that collapses ambiguity, that secures the moral high ground in a single utterance. But that is precisely where language becomes most dangerous: when it relieves us of the burden of holding two truths at once; when it permits us to name one suffering in a way that erases another; when it transforms description into verdict before evidence has even entered the room.

What we do when we misuse words is not trivial. We erode precision. We inflame passions. We collapse law into slogan. We substitute moral theatre for argument. And perhaps most dangerously, we teach ourselves that the loudest noun is the truest one.

History suggests otherwise. It is rarely the loudest words that endure, but the most exacting; not the most incendiary, but the most honest about complexity. The archive is not kind to slogans. It remembers, instead, where language clarified—and where it concealed.

To speak about Israel and Palestine—indeed, to speak about any conflict so saturated with history—is to enter a linguistic minefield in which every term has a past and every past has its partisans. There is no neutral vocabulary here. Only more or less careful usage. Only degrees of awareness. Only the choice, conscious or otherwise, between illumination and incitement.

The task, then, is not to purify language—that is impossible—but to discipline ourselves in its use. To resist the seduction of the Kampfbegriff when it outpaces our understanding. To ask, each time we reach for a word: what history does it carry? What work is it doing? What—and who—does it leave out?

Because if words can start wars, they can also foreclose the possibility of ending them. And if they are capable, at their best, of opening a space for understanding, then that space is narrow, fragile, and easily collapsed by carelessness.

Language will not resolve this conflict. But without care in language, we will not even be able to speak about it honestly.

Coda

To study a language, in the end, is not simply to acquire vocabulary. It is to acquire conscience. It is to hear the echo behind the utterance—the ghost in the grammar. To recognise that every word, especially here, is a small archive: of exile and return, of fear and defiance, of prayer and propaganda. To speak, then, is to handle those archives with a certain humility, aware that one is always, in some sense, trespassing on someone else’s memory.

History suggests otherwise than our instincts: the loudest noun is rarely the truest one. The archive keeps its own counsel. It remembers where language clarified – and where it concealed.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the shadow.

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

And in that shadow – linguistic, historical, human – words do their quiet, consequential work.

Postscript

While writing this essay – contemplating the slipperiness of words and widening the lens to the long weather system that has carried them into our mouths – I found myself returning to a simple, disquieting observation: it is no coincidence that so many of the words we have been parsing are Arabic.

It is not that Arabic words per se have become uniquely prone to distortion, nor that there is anything intrinsic to the language that invites what might loosely be called “gaslighting.” What I was circling, rather, is something more historically contingent – and more revealing.

Many of the most contested political ideas of the present moment – intifada, shahid, muqawama, even place-bound words and phrases that travel into English unchanged – are being transmitted untranslated, or only half-translated, into Western discourse. They arrive carrying dense, layered meanings shaped by decades (sometimes centuries) of conflict, theology, nationalism, and lived experience. And then, almost immediately, they are flattened, reframed, or strategically reinterpreted within a different moral and political vocabulary.

In other words, the instability I am sensing is not linguistic but translational – and beyond that, political.

There is, of course, a history to this. One thinks of how words like jihad were narrowed in Western usage to mean “holy war,” their broader theological and ethical dimensions quietly stripped away; or conversely, how certain terms are defended as benign by appeal to their most anodyne, etymological meanings, while bracketing how they are actually heard in context. The same word may present itself as metaphor, slogan, prayer, or threat – depending on who is speaking, who is listening, and what work the word is being made to do.

It is here that the instinct about Wonderland clicks back into place. The move is not uniquely Arabic; it is Humpty Dumpty’s move: control the meaning, and you control the moral frame. But the reason Arabic terms are so prominent in this moment is that the conflicts which have globalised our discourse – Israel–Palestine above all, but also Iraq, Syria, and the wider post-9/11 landscape – have carried those words into English without fully carrying their context with them. They become, in effect, linguistic migrants: visible, charged, and often unmoored.

So yes, it does say something about the modern world. Not that Arabic is uniquely problematic, but that we are living in an age where conflicts travel faster than comprehension, and where words – lifted from one history and dropped into another – become sites of struggle in their own right.

These words have crossed worlds. And in crossing, they have become unmoored enough to be contested, claimed, and weaponised. That unmooring creates opportunity: for some, to soften; for others, to sharpen; for many, to obscure.

It says something, too, about our times – about the way the Middle East has not merely intruded upon but come to dominate political, and indeed social, discourse for more than half a century; at least for as long as I have been paying attention, which is to say, for as long as I have been trying to make sense of the world and finding the same landscape returning, again and again, like a half-remembered refrain.

Let us take June 1967 as a point of departure. For a few brief weeks, the world’s gaze lifted from the humid, grinding quagmire of Indochina and fixed instead upon the sudden, almost biblical drama unfolding in the not-so-Holy Land – a war measured in days but reverberating in decades. Territory shifted, certainly; but something else shifted too: attention, imagination, the sense that this small, overburdened strip of earth had become a stage upon which the modern world would repeatedly rehearse its anxieties.

The focus has waxed and waned since, but it has never truly moved on. 1973 Oil Crisis and the realisation that the region’s tremors could rattle the global economy. The long, theatre-of-the-absurd years of hijackings and televised terror. Camp David’s fragile choreography. The Iranian Revolution, bending time backward and forward at once. The Soviet misadventure in Afghanistan. Lebanon’s fracturing. The attritional horror of the Iran–Iraq War. Kuwait and the return of great-power spectacle. Oslo’s brief, luminous promise. Then 9/11, collapsing distance altogether, followed by Afghanistan again, Iraq again – the sense of recursion, of history caught in a tightening loop.

Then the Arab Spring – hope flickering, briefly, before giving way to Syria’s abyss, to ISIS and its grotesque theatre, to the multiplication rather than the resolution of fault lines. And through it all – before it, beneath it, after it – Israel and Palestine remain: a permanent fixture in the taxonomy of torment, sans pareil, the conflict that resists conclusion, that absorbs language and returns it sharpened, refracted, or hollowed out.

It is from this long saturation – this decades-long immersion in images, slogans, translations, and retranslations – that our present arguments about words emerge. They are not sudden. They are sedimentary. Each phrase we now parse carries within it the residue of these moments, these crises, these unfinished stories.

Which is to say: when we argue about what a word means, we are never only arguing about language. We are arguing about history – compressed, contested, and still very much alive.

In That Howling Infinite, March 2026

For more on the Middle East in in That Howling Infinite, see A Middle East Miscellany.

See also, Moral capture, conditional empathy and the failure of shock, Standing on the high moral ground is hard work! ‘ Same old stone, different rock. What’s in a word?, Shaping facts to feelings – debating intellectual dishonesty

A Lexicon of Disturbing Language

(words that travel intact, and arrive with their weather still clinging to them)

What follows is not a neutral glossary – if such a thing were even possible here – but a kind of field manual for words that arrive already aflame, freighted with history, sharpened by use, carrying within them entire arguments about the world. They are not merely descriptive; they are performative. To utter them is to place a piece on the board, to tilt the frame, to summon histories that do not politely remain in the past.

Some are legal terms that have slipped their moorings and now drift through polemic. Some are borrowed intact from Arabic or Hebrew, carrying their original cadence like an echo that translation cannot quite still. Others are modern coinages – hybrids, sometimes ungainly – that try to compress entire arguments into a single, breathless label. And a few are names – of places, of movements – that have become arguments simply by being spoken.

What unites them is not agreement but charge. They are contested, elastic, often weaponised. They do not just describe reality; they compete to define it. They do not behave like ordinary vocabulary. They travel across languages without quite translating; they narrow, expand, harden, or blur as they move. They do not simply describe events; they encode perspectives on those events. To use them is not merely to speak—it is to situate oneself, however unconsciously, within a contested moral and historical landscape.

I. Catastrophe & Historical Singularity

  • Nakba (النكبة) – literally “catastrophe.” In Arabic it could name any disaster; in English it has hardened into the disaster—1948—fixed, immovable, dense with exile and keys kept as heirlooms. It no longer describes; it declares.
  • Naksa (النكسة) – “the setback,” 1967. A softer word for a different kind of loss—diminution rather than rupture. Its retention signals an internal Arab chronology, slightly askew from the familiar “Six-Day War.”
  • Shoah (שואה) – “catastrophe” or “destruction,” used specifically for the Holocaust. Left untranslated in part to preserve reverence, in part to resist the easy metaphorisation that “Holocaust” sometimes invites.
  • Holocaust – from the Greek “burnt offering” to the Nazi genocide of the Jews, and then outward into broader usage. Its expansion has given it reach—and thinned its edges.
  • Pogrom (погром) – a Russian word meaning violent devastation, carried into English with the memory of anti-Jewish attacks in Tsarist lands. “Riot” feels too incidental; pogrom carries its own geography.

II. Legal Terms, Moral Weapons

  • Genocide – a word forged in law (Lemkin, 1944), precise in definition—intent to destroy a group. In public discourse, however, it often arrives as accusation before judgment, its moral force outrunning its legal threshold.
  • Ethnic Cleansing – deliberately imprecise, emerging particularly from the Balkan Wars of the Nineties, but predating that in Türkiye after WWI,  Eastern Europe at the end of WWII, and I dia and Pakistan in 1948. Its vagueness is its power: suggestive, elastic, difficult to refute without seeming to concede.
  • Apartheid – Afrikaans for “apartness,” rooted in South Africa but now globally mobile. Once invoked, it frames the system under discussion—analogy and indictment in a single stroke.
  • Colonialism / Settler-Colonialism – analytic frameworks that, once applied, tend to fix the narrative: indigenous and invader, permanence and removal. Illuminating, but often closing off alternative readings.

III. Resistance, Struggle, Sanctification

  • Intifada (انتفاضة) – “shaking off,” like dust from a sleeve. In English it is no longer generic; it points almost unavoidably to the Palestinian uprisings of 1987 and 2000. The word carries images—stones, tyres, and checkpoints—and a moral ambiguity that shifts with the speaker.
  • Muqāwama (مقاومة) – “resistance,” yet left untranslated to avoid the bland universality of the English. Muqāwama signals a particular ideological and regional framing—Hezbollah, Hamas, dignity under pressure.
  • Ṣumūd (صمود) – “steadfastness,” though the translation feels thin. Not an event but a posture: staying, enduring, tending olive trees under threat. Translate it, and it risks becoming sentiment; leave it, and it remains an ethic.
  • Jihad (جهاد) – “struggle,” spanning the inner and the outer. In English, that range has narrowed sharply; the word arrives intact, its semantic field diminished, sharpened toward violence.
  • Shahid (شهيد) – “witness” or “martyr.” It does not merely describe death; it consecrates it. In English, its retention often signals an attempt to preserve that sacred charge.

IV. Faith, Doctrine, and Internal Tensions

  • Kāfir (كافر) – “unbeliever,” literally one who “covers” truth. A theological category that, in polemical use, hardens into insult—a boundary drawn sharply between inside and out.
  • Fitna (فتنة) – “discord,” “trial,” “temptation.” Historically tied to early Islamic civil strife, it carries a deep anxiety about internal fracture. To invoke it is often to warn: this way lies chaos.
  • Taqiyya (تقية) – a specific Shi’a doctrine allowing concealment of belief under threat. In English polemic, however, it has been stretched well beyond its doctrinal bounds—transformed into a generalised suspicion of deception.
  • Hudna (هدنة) – “truce.” Yet when retained in Arabic, it often implies something tactical, provisional—a pause rather than a peace.
  • Fatwa (فتوى) – a legal opinion within Islamic jurisprudence, part of everyday religious life. In English, especially post-Rushdie, it has narrowed into something darker—almost synonymous with a death sentence.

V. Identity, Ideology, and the Politics of Naming

  • Zionism – a 19th-century movement for Jewish self-determination. In English today, it rarely sits neutrally: liberation for some, colonialism for others. The word refracts entirely different histories.
  • Zionist – once descriptive, now often accusatory. Its meaning depends less on definition than on tone.
  • “Zio” – a clipped, abrasive form that has shed any descriptive function. It lands as insult, not argument.
  • Aliyah (עלייה) – “ascent.” More than immigration; a movement upward, spiritually and historically. The English equivalent feels earthbound by comparison.
  • Al-‘Awda (العودة) – “the return.” In ordinary Arabic, a simple going back; in Palestinian discourse, the Right of Return—dense with memory, law, and longing. It sits beside the mafteah (مفتاح, the key), object turned symbol, continuity held in the hand.
  • Settler – on its face neutral; in contested زمین, it hardens into accusation. Biography collapses into ideology.
  • Hilltop Youth – a specific Israeli subculture that has become shorthand for a certain strain of ideological extremity and violence – detail turned symbol.

VI. Totalising Labels & Historical Echoes

  • Nazi – historically precise, rhetorically promiscuous. Now shorthand for absolute evil, its overuse both amplifying and diluting its meaning.
  • Fascist – from Mussolini’s doctrine to a generalised insult; elasticity has eroded precision.
  • “Islamo-fascist” – a hybrid, polemical term attempting to map European categories onto Islamist movements. It says as much about the speaker’s framework as the subject.

VII. Organisations as Symbols

  • Hamas (حماس) – “zeal,” and acronym for Ḥarakat al-Muqāwama al-Islāmiyya. In English, it does not settle: government, militia, resistance, terrorism – meanings shift with the voice that utters it.
  • Hezbollah (حزب الله) – “Party of God.” Political party, armed movement, regional proxy; the name itself already contains a claim to divine alignment.
  • Da’ish (داعش) – acronym for al-Dawla al-Islāmiyya fī al-‘Irāq wa al-Shām (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant). Its use, rather than “ISIS,” often signals rejection; the group dislikes the term, so naming becomes a small act of defiance.

VIII. Circulating & Mediated Words

  • Fawda (فوضى) – “chaos,” but after its journey through Hebrew and global television (Fauda), it now carries a particular aesthetic: kinetic, morally ambiguous, intelligence-driven disorder. Chaos, but stylised.
  • Blitz – from Blitzkrieg, lightning war. In English, softened into metaphor—“media blitz”—yet still faintly haunted by sirens over London.

IX. Place as Argument

  • Al-Aqsa (الأقصى) – “the farthest.” Rarely translated, because the Arabic name carries sanctity, geography, and sovereignty in one breath.
  • Al-Quds (القدس) – “the holy,” the Arabic name for Jerusalem. Its use signals perspective: a city not just inhabited, but claimed, sanctified, contested.
  • Gaza (غزة) – a place-name that has become a metonym: war, siege, suffering, المقاومة. Geography turned symbol.
  • Sabra and Shatila (صبرا وشاتيلا) – no longer merely locations; the names themselves are the event. To say them is to accuse.

Conclusion

What began as a request to a Chat GPT  -to gather, sort, define – ends, rather predictably, in something the machine cannot quite resolve. Because the instability is not in the definitions; it is in us. In the way we reach for these words, load them, deploy them, defend them. In the way a term like genocide or Zionist or shahid can close down conversation as quickly as it opens it.

These are not just words. They are positions. Each one carries a shadow text: a history remembered, a grievance asserted, a legitimacy claimed or denied. They compress time, flatten complexity, and yet—paradoxically—expand into entire moral universes the moment they are spoken.

And so the lexicon does not settle the argument; it reveals its terrain.

Between the word and the world, as ever, falls the shadow. And it is in that shadow—where meaning slips, hardens, fractures, reforms—that these battle words continue to do their work, long after they have left the mouth that uttered them.

Lay these words out like this and a pattern emerges. Some words narrow as they travel (jihad, intifada). Some harden into proper nouns (Nakba, Shoah). Some expand until they blur (fascist, genocide). Some are left untranslated to preserve their charge (ṣumūd, muqāwama, al-‘awda).MNone of them are innocent.

They do not simply describe the world; they position the speaker within it. Each word a small act of alignment, a quiet declaration of where one stands. Between what a word once held, and what it is now made to carry, between language as description, and language as argument, there falls that same, shifting shadow. And it is there, in that narrow space, that these words continue to live, and to do their work.

Coda: The Grammar of Conflict

These words do not behave like ordinary vocabulary. They are anchored in place but mobile in use, precise in origin but elastic in deployment. They compress centuries into syllables, turning speech into stance.

To speak them is rarely innocent. Each carries a shadow text- unspoken assumptions, moral alignments, historical claims. They do not simply describe reality; they compete to author it.

And so the disturbance lies here: between what a word once meant, what it now does, and what we need it to prove.mIn that gap – narrow, shifting, and charged – language itself becomes a kind of battleground, where meaning is not fixed but fought over, again and again.

Go, Move, Shift! Singing the Traveling People

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

Born at the back of a hawthorn hedge,
where the black hole frost lay on the ground,
no eastern kings came bearing gifts.
Instead, the order came to shift:
“You’d better get born in some place else.”
So move along, get along,
Move along, get along –
Go! Move! Shift!
Ewan MacColl

“Why …. are we setting ourselves the impossible task of spoiling the Gypsies?… they stand for the will of freedom, for friendship with nature, for the open air, for change and the sight of many lands; for all of us that are in protest against progress … The Gypsies represent nature before civilisation … the last romance left in the world.
Arthur Symons, a gypsiologist of the early 20th century

Back in the day, when I was a nipper in Birmingham, “the tinkers,” as we called them, would camp with their caravans and lorries on what we referred to as the “waste land.” That name seemed self-explanatory to a child: a place where people left their waste, a liminal zone of half-ruin, where pre-war homes and factories had been destroyed in the Luftwaffe raids over a decade earlier. Travellers really did move through those bombed-out spaces, setting up their vardos where council workers feared to tread. They brought horses, music, and a whiff of danger to the drab post-war city.

Their Irish accents created an unexpected affinity. Our parents and relatives were Irish immigrants, and we inhabited an Irish world of history, politics, music, and stories. Listening to them, you could feel the rhythm of lives bound to roads and fields rather than concrete and council by-laws.

Peaky Blinders later turned my home city into a stylised myth. I knew the streets around Small Heath and Digbeth and the canal bridges and tow tracks of Gas Street long before Steven Knight turned them into a smoky dystopia. The series was actually filmed in Yorkshire and Lancashire, but let’s not worry about that. The travelers drift in and out of the Shelby story with their wagons and their horses, their alien tongue and their clan codes, and also, an air of imminent danger – an arcane, half-hidden life. Rewatching the series decades later, it feels less like historical fiction and more like a remembered geography, half real and half myth.

Tom Shelby and his caravan

Advisory

In order to deflect potential criticism and recrimination, please be advised that the following is a mix of memory and music and not an academic paper. It is of historical, sociological and musicological significance only in a general sense, and not does not claim to be. In the light of prior criticisms of my use of the word “tinker” in online discussions about travellers – some readers have insisted that I employed it in a discriminatory and derogatory manner – this is indeed the term that we used back in the fifties and sixties, and whilst it was, indeed, a common term of abuse, it is for all that historically accurate – see the paragraphs immediately below. We cannot unhear in order to accommodate 21st century sensitivities.

An lucht siúil

Those Irish Travellers (an lucht siúil, “the walking people”), also called Mincéirs in Shelta, a secret language mixing Irish and English, are a nomadic indigenous Irish ethnic group. Predominantly Catholic, they are English-speaking but often fluent in their patois. Although historically labeled “Gypsies,” they have no genetic relation to the Romani; their ancestry is Irish, likely diverging from the settled population around the 1600s during Cromwell’s conquest. Over centuries, persecution, famine, and displacement hardened their itinerant ways into a distinct culture – social networks, craft skills, folklore, and traditions of travel and trade.

Many names – tinkler, tynkere, or tinker – were historically derogatory, reflecting society’s unease with their mobility. The “Acte for Tynckers and Pedlers,” passed by Edward VI in 1551, attempted to regulate their wandering, sometimes brutally. Yet, for all the attempts at control, their culture survived: a resilient, mobile society where language, music, and kinship preserve identity against erosion.

Irish Traveller Family’, Killorglin, County Kerry, Ireland, 1954.

Folksong

My childhood soundtrack was full of gypsy ballads that painted freedom in a major key. A Gypsy Rover came over the hill, down through the valley so shady to win the heart of lady; three Raggle Taggle Gypsies stood at the castle gate, singing high and low, and made off with the lady of the house; Black Jack Davy rode up hills and he rode down vale’s over many a wide-eyed mountain, luring a lady gay from her goose feather bed. The songs made the Gypsy a figure of romance and rebellion, a charmer, a rascal and a pants-man; an outsider who steals not just horses but hearts and who answers to no law but the road.

As a boy, I sang them without irony. As a teenager, on the Easter CND march in London in 1966, billeted in an old cinema in Southall, I gave my first public ‘performance’ with an a capella version Ewan MacColl’s beautiful but poignant Freeborn Man of the Travelling People. There was something electric in the way the song moved through the audience – a recognition of wandering, of roots that were not fixed in soil, but in story, song, and kin.

Ewan MacColl’ and Peggy Seeger’s BBC Radio Ballads, especially The Travelling People (1964), but went further, capturing not just the romance but the hard truth of life on the road. I can still hear the defiant swing of Freeborn Man the bitter weariness of Go Move Shift, and the rolling litany of The Thirty-Foot Trailer capturing the sway of a caravan. Each song contained a chronicle of eviction, exclusion, and the stubborn joy of those who refuse to settle. These weren’t just pretty melodies. They were dispatches from a parallel Britain that existed beyond the pale of urban, modernising and dynamic Britain.

The songs, the caravans, the road-weary children and dogs – they are fragments of memory, but also of history. Travellers have always lived on the edge of maps, on the margins of law and land, carrying a freedom that many of us envy in memory but cannot fully grasp in practice.

Ballads of a Vanishing Road

Those three great songs from Seeger and MaColl’s radio ballads form a kind of triptych, each panel catching a different light on the same restless life. 

They begin with the open road itself: imagine if you will hedgerows dripping with rain, country lanes that meander through woods and fields, the smell of horses and wood-smoke, and the small birds singing when the winter days are over. A Freeborn Man strides out first, proud and lilting. The open road gleams with dew and possibility – open spaces and resting places where “time was not our master”. The freedom is real enough: the night fires, the sunrise on a new day, the easy rhythm of horse and dog. But you feel the weather changing. “Winds of change are blowing, old ways are going, your travelling days will soon be over.”

I can still hear the icon Yorkshire siblings, the Watersons, singing: “The auld ways are changing’, you cannot deny. The days of the traveler’ over ..  It’s farewell toto the tent and the old caravan, to the Tinker, the Gypsy, the Travelling Man, and farewell to the thirty-foot trailer”. Verse by verse the song bids adieu to the things that portrayed the traveling life. The old caravan is no longer a symbol of liberty but rather a target for eviction. “You’ve got to move fast to keep up with the times,” the song warns, “for these days a man cannot dander.It’s a bylaw to say you must be on your way and another to say you can’t wander”.

If Freeborn Man celebrates the open lane, The Moving-On Song reports from the other side of the hedge.  Each verse begins with a birth – on the A5, in a tattie field, beside a building site – and each is met by the same cold refrain: “Move along, get along, Go! Move! Shift!”  Policemen, farmers, and local worthies take turns as chorus, a modern Nativity rewritten as perpetual eviction.  Where Luke gave us shepherds and angels, MacColl gives us by-laws and property values. The travelling child is the Holy Infant born in the wrong postcode, and the only miracle is survival. 

I find this song resonates not only as a story, but also as a powerful allegory. At its heart, it is the Nativity turned inside out. It takes the timeless Christmas story – the miraculous birth, the wandering family, the knock at the door – and drains it of every trace of welcome. Instead of angels there are policemen, instead of shepherds there are farmers, instead of gifts there is the repeated command to move along, get along, go, move, shift. Each verse begins with a birth – on a roadside, in a potato field, beside a building site – just as Christ was born in a stable because there was no room at the inn.

But where the infant Jesus is eventually carried to safety in Egypt, MacColl’s traveller child is met at every stop with suspicion: The refrain is a bitter parody of the angelic chorus: a peremptory command instead of  “tidings of great joy.” The sound of authority closing ranks, a bitter counter-melody to the dream of freedom. It is the Flight into Egypt without sanctuary, an endless journey where every Bethlehem has a by-law.

This inversion does two things at once. It sacralises the ordinary – making each child born in a trailer or a tent a holy innocent – and it indicts the society that drives them out. Listeners raised on the Nativity can hardly miss the sting: the travelling people are the Holy Family in modern Britain, but the innkeepers are us. MacColl forces a choice – either keep singing “Go, Move, Shift” with the crowd, or recognise the Christ-child in the roadside cradle.

Taken together, these three songs chart the whole arc of the travelling life: the exhilaration of the road, the daily skirmish with draconian laws, the slow extinguishing of a culture that once roamed the hedgerows of Britain and Europe.  They are more than nostalgic laments.  They are witness statements – melodic affidavits of a people whose very birthplaces are contested, whose freedom is both cherished and criminalised, and whose songs will outlast the by-laws that try to silence them.

The dark side of the road 

Ewan MacColl’s words echo still: go, move, shift – because life has often demanded it. And perhaps that is the core of the Travellers’ tale: a dance between space and place, between survival and song, between yesterday and the road ahead.

The songs of my youth were both true and false. The gypsy rover was real enough, but his freedom came at a cost: eviction notices, police batons, barbed wire, and centuries of prejudice stretching from the wastelands of Birmingham to the bean fields of Wiltshire, from Damascus to Transylvania. The travellers remain, in MacColl’s proud phrase, freeborn men and women – though the price of that freedom has always been higher than the ballads admit.

For hundreds of years, the Gypsy way of life – the Irish Travellers among them – was one of ancient traditions and simple tastes. Until their world collided with the 21st century, with bureaucracies, police crackdowns, and urban encroachment. Romance met reality, and reality was hard. Travellers were hounded from one lay-by to the next, fined, fenced, and evicted by councils and constables who never forgave them for existing outside the parish ledger.

The romance of the traveller life had a harder edge. It is not a folk-song idyll; it is cold nights in lay-bys rough ground under wheels, police knocking at midnight. Travellers were, and still are, hounded by bylaws, denied stopping places, and stereotyped as thieves or beggars. In Britain, “tinker” and “gypo” were playground slurs. Councils moved them on, police fined them for parking on common land, newspapers blamed them for every petty crime.

Nor have modern times rendered the traveller life any easier. In the Battle of the Bean Field of 1985, Margaret Thatcher’s days of law and order, hundreds of police in riot gear smashed up a convoy of festival-bound New Age Travellers near Stonehenge, wrecking and burning their lorries and caravans, Wrecking homes and terrorising babies, and displaying the state’s fury at those who dared to live otherwise. The later Dale Farm eviction in 2011 near Basildon, Europe’s largest Traveller site, bulldozed after years of legal trench warfare, proved that little had softened.

I’ve watched video footage on YouTube of riot police in fluorescent jackets  confronting families who had chained themselves to caravans, and listened to the late iconoclastic songster Ian Dury, who had long celebrated life on the margins, singing his elegy Itinerant Child – a refrain that could be sung in any layby in Britain or in the migrant  camps of Calais.

Slow down itinerant child, the road is full of danger
Slow down itinerant child, there’s no more welcome stranger
Slow down itinerant child, you’re still accelerating
Slow down itinerant child, the boys in blue are waiting

That refrain could be sung in any layby in Britain. It could be sung in the refugee camps of Europe today.

As for those so-called New Age Travellers of the Beanfield and Basildon – part hippie, part anarchist, part rave-culture refugee – they borrowed Romany mystique but lived a diesel-fumed modern reality: buses and sound-systems instead of bow-topped wagons, dreadlocks instead of black curls, and the same hostility from the same authorities.

The Battle of Basildon 2011

Dale Farm – The Battle of Basildon 2011

The Other at the Gate

Gypsies and Travellers have always been Britain’s – and the world’s – most visible “Other”- not defined by race alone, but by movement. Where the settled majority built houses, filed deeds, and mapped parishes, the travelling people carried their world on wheels and in stories. That refusal to stay put turned them into a kind of living mirror for the fears of the settled: lawless when laws were written for farmers, suspicious when surnames anchored reputations, dangerous because they belonged nowhere and therefore everywhere.

From the “Egyptians Acts” of the sixteenth century, which outlawed Romani life, to the casual playground taunts the message was the same: you are not one of us. And yet, precisely because they stood outside the pale, they became a canvas for fantasy – the romantic lovers of the ballads, the free spirits in the Radio Ballads, dark prophets in the Peaky Blinders mythos. To the townsfolk they were both temptation and threat, the embodiment of freedom and the price of it.

The wild World and the Wider Road

The Irish travelers of my Birmingham childhood were but one branch of a much older and wider wandering world. Their history – rooted in Ireland’s upheavals and shaped by centuries of marginalisation – belongs to the islands of Albion. But the idea of the travelling people, the caravan on the verge and the road as inheritance, stretches far beyond Britain and Ireland. Across Europe the figure of the wanderer takes on another name: Roma, Sinti, Kalderash, communities bound not to neither land nor country but to a migration that began centuries earlier and thousands of miles away. Their very names carry centuries of misunderstanding.“Gypsy” arose from the medieval belief that these travellers had come from Egypt – hence “Egyptians,” shortened over time to “Gyptians” and finally “Gypsies.” “Roma,” by contrast, is the name many of the people use for themselves. In the Romani language the word rom simply means “man” or “husband,” and by extension “member of the community.” Whatever the label, their deeper history leads eastwards. Linguistic and genetic traits – including shared vocabulary with Hindi, Punjabi and other Indo-Aryan languages – point to origins beyond the Hindu Kush in Rajastan a thousand years ago. From there groups migrated slowly westward through Persia, Armenia and the Byzantine world before scattering across the planes and forests of Europe. By the time they reached England in the early modern period they were already seasoned exiles – strangers everywhere and always and yet, nevertheless, somehow at home on the road, bringing music, craft, and a stubborn freedom.

I encountered these European Roma when hitchhiking through Yugoslavia in the early seventies, and later, travelling in Syria and Israel/Palestine, I saw dusty Domari camps. pitched on the fringes of towns, cousins of the European Roma, their Sanskrit-tinged language betraying the long migration. They were not romantic there either. Arabs called them Nawar, a word laced with disdain, treating them with the same mix of curiosity and disdain that dogs their European kin. They are seen as rootless outsiders, neither honoured nor trusted, often harassed by police and locals alike. they are harassed, marginalised, and sometimes treated as beggars or tricksters. Unlike the semi-nomadic Bedouin, celebrated in poetry and nationalist lore (though these too have been known to be discriminated against). Their tents were not “exotic,” just poor.

Eastern Europe tells an even darker story. In Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania, Roma communities were enslaved for centuries-in Wallachia and Moldavia until the 19th century and are still scapegoated in politics and corralled into segregated schools. In Eastern Europe they remain targets of discrimination today, from the eviction of camps in France and Italy to far-right attacks in Hungary and Slovakia.

The twentieth century added its own atrocity: the Porajmos – “the Devouring” – the Nazi genocide of Roma and Sinti that claimed perhaps half a million lives. They were rounded up alongside Jews, homosexuals, and the disabled, marked with black or brown triangles, starved in camps, shot in forests and gassed in Auschwitz. For decades their suffering was barely acknowledged in official memorials, their deaths long footnoted beside the Shoah.

The open road may bring freedom, but freedom can come an unbearably heavy price.

Paul Hemphill, March 2026

Other combinations of memoire and history in In That Howling infinite include: The Boys of Wexford – memory and memoir, The Spirit of ’45, Enoch knocking on England’s door, Tanks for the memory – how Brezhnev changed my life, and One ring to rule us all – does Tolkien matter?

Here is the well-known old folksong sung by my old friend Malcolm Harrison, recorded in Sydney, Australia in 2005. The Raggle Taggle Gypsy is a traditional folk song that originated as a Scottish border ballad, and has been popular throughout Britain, Ireland and North America. its earliest text is believed to have been published in the early sixteenth century.  concerns a rich lady who runs off to join the gypsies. Common alternative names are “Gypsy Davy”, “Gypsum Davy”, “The Raggle Taggle Gypsies O”, “The Gypsy Laddie(s)”, “Black Jack David” (or “Davy”) and “Seven Yellow Gypsies”.

Itinerant Child

Ian Dury and the Blockheads

I took out all the seats and away I went
It’s a right old banger and the chassis bent
It’s got a great big peace sign across the back
And most of the windows have been painted black
The windshield’s cracked, it’s a bugger to drive
It starts making smoke over thirty-five
It’s a psychedelic nightmare with a million leaks
It’s home sweet home to some sweet arse freaks
Slow down itinerant child, the road is full of danger
Slow down itinerant child, there’s no more welcome stranger
Soon I was rumbling through the morning fog
With my long-haired children and my one-eyed dog
With the trucks and the buses and the trailer vans
My long throw horns playing Steely Dan
We straggled out for miles along the Beggar’s Hill
And the word came down that we’d lost Old Bill
You can bet your boots I’m coming when the times are hard
That’s why they keep my dossier at Scotland Yard
Slow down itinerant child, you’re still accelerating
Slow down itinerant child, the boys in blue are waiting
Itinerant child, don’t do what you’re doing
Itinerant child, you’d better slow down
We drove into Happy Valley seeking peace and love
With a lone helicopter hanging up above
We didn’t realise until we hit the field
There were four hundred cozzers holding riot shields
They terrorised our babies and they broke our heads
It’s a stone fucking miracle there’s no one dead
They turned my ramshackle home into a burning wreck
My one-eyed dog got a broken neck
Slow down itinerant child, the road is full of danger
Slow down itinerant child, there’s no more welcome stranger
Slow down itinerant child, you’re still accelerating
Slow down itinerant child, the boys in blue are waiting
Listen to the song and watch its video HERE
References & Further Reading

Chaos without a compass … Donald Trump’s Persian “excursion”

Paul Hemphill 2 Comments

Without seeming to realise what he has done, Trump has exposed the raw fact that the US is no longer a full-spectrum military hegemon able to project power simultaneously in multiple theatres across the planet. It has superb armed forces and technology – but that is not the same thing.                                Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Telegraph, 11 March 2026

The Twentieth Century’s “Thirty Years War”, the war of my generation, was waged in South East Asia initially by the colonialist France, and then by neo-imperialist America. France’s war ended in defeat and ignominy for French arms and prestige, and a partition that was but a prelude to America’s Vietnam quagmire. [In In That Howling Infinite, see Tim Page’s War – a photographer’s Vietnam journey]

America’s War has since been defined as chaos without compass. It was inevitable that acclaimed historian Barbara Tuchman would chose it as one of her vignettes in The March of Folly, her celebrated study of débacles through the ages characterised by what would appear to be a single-minded determination amounting to tunnel vision that is akin to stupidity.

As Tuchman saw it, exceptionalism and manifest destiny are historically proven folly. Self-belief in American power and righteousness has historically created delusions of grandeur, obstinate attachment to unserviceable goals, stubbornness, and an inability to learn from past mistakes or even admitting error – a wooden-headedness that often sees the US persisting on erroneous paths that lead to loss of blood, treasure, reputation and moral standing.

Why did the US’ experience of backing the wrong horse in China in the forties not provide an analogy and warning in Vietnam in the fifties? Why did the experience in Vietnam not inform it with respect to Iran right up to the fall of the Shah in 1978? And why hadn’t it learned anything when it stumbled into Salvador in the eighties? And then, of course, we arrive in the 21st century with no-exit, never-ending wars in Afghanistan and Middle East that end in retreat and betrayal with the ‘freedom-loving’ USA still backing the wrong horses by supporting autocrats and tyrants against their own people.

Tuchman was describing a particular pathology of statecraft-  the spectacle of governments pursuing policies visibly contrary to their own interests while possessing the intelligence, experience and evidence to know better. Power, in such circumstances, is not lacking. Direction is.

In the American case, she saw something close to a recurring pattern. Self-belief in American power and virtue could generate a peculiar strategic blindness – delusions of grandeur, obstinate attachment to unserviceable goals, and a refusal to learn from past mistakes or even admit error. The result was a form of national tunnel vision: the conviction that sufficient determination and force must eventually bend reality to American purposes. Too often the outcome was the opposite — the expenditure of blood, treasure, prestige and moral authority in pursuit of objectives that proved unattainable.

It is difficult not to hear the echo of Tuchman’s diagnosis when considering the widening conflict now unfolding between Israel, the United States and Iran. The scale of the military campaign alone is remarkable. Australian commentator and security expert David David Kilcullen’s description in an article in The Australian, republished below, reads almost like a catalogue of twenty-first-century warfare: thousands of sorties in the first hundred hours, stealth fighters dismantling air defences, B-2 bombers opening corridors through Iranian airspace, naval engagements stretching from the Persian Gulf toward the Indian Ocean, tankers burning in the Strait of Hormuz while drones and missiles ripple across the wider region. Cyberattacks strike data centres, satellite navigation systems are jammed, and the conflict unfolds simultaneously across air, sea, cyberspace and orbit.

In strictly operational terms the campaign appears formidable. Iranian air defences have been degraded, missile launchers and command networks methodically targeted, naval assets hunted down. Western air power increasingly operates across Iranian skies with relative freedom. In the narrow military sense, success seems plausible.

Yet wars are not judged by tactical success but by political outcome. And here the picture grows strangely indistinct.

The most striking criticism of the conflict — articulated most clearly by Aris Roussinos in an article in Unherd republished below –  is that no one appears able to define what victory would mean. Possible objectives multiply: regime change in Tehran; destruction of Iran’s nuclear programme; the degradation of Iranian military capabilities; or a wider strategic aim of constraining Chinese influence across Eurasia. Each implies a different war. Regime change requires internal collapse or occupation. Nuclear disarmament ultimately requires diplomacy and verification. Strategic competition with China belongs largely to another theatre altogether.

The result is a peculiar strategic ambiguity: immense military force applied in pursuit of ends that remain fluid, sometimes contradictory, occasionally improvised after the fact.

Roussinos therefore invokes an earlier historical analogy: the Suez crisis of 1956 – as have other commentators. That operation was militarily successful yet politically disastrous. British and French forces seized the canal zone quickly and efficiently, only to discover that the political objective — preserving imperial influence — collapsed under international pressure. Today’s conflict, he suggests, may represent a kind of reverse Suez: a large military campaign unfolding before the political objective has even been clearly articulated.

Hovering behind this debate is another and more recent ghost: Iraq. Kilcullen’s experience in Iraq and Afghanistan informs his caution. Removing regimes, he notes in an article in The Australian, is often easier than replacing them. The Taliban returned after twenty years of war. Iraq descended into sectarian violence after Saddam’s fall. Libya’s regime collapsed quickly but left behind a fractured state.

Iran, however, is not Libya. It is a nation of ninety million people with a deep historical identity and a political culture shaped by both imperial memory and the Shiite narratives of martyrdom that animate the Islamic Republic. Foreign attack may weaken the regime — but it may also strengthen the nationalist solidarity on which that regime depends.

Here the shadow of Iraq becomes unavoidable. The question that haunted that war returns once more: what happens the day after victory?

Supporters of the campaign insist that what appears chaotic may in fact be the culmination of long-term strategy. Israeli intelligence has spent years penetrating Iranian networks, sabotaging nuclear infrastructure and eliminating key figures. Others place the conflict within the larger geopolitical contest with China, arguing that weakening Iran constrains Beijing’s long-term influence across Eurasia.

Yet even these arguments leave uncertainty intact. If the central contest lies with China, the Middle East becomes a dangerous diversion. If nuclear disarmament is the aim, diplomacy will eventually be unavoidable. If regime collapse is the goal, history suggests that air power alone rarely produces it.

Meanwhile the war itself expands. Hezbollah strikes from Lebanon. Houthi forces threaten shipping in the Red Sea. Missiles fall across Gulf states. Cyberattacks ripple outward through global infrastructure. Modern conflicts rarely remain geographically contained; the networks of trade, alliances and proxy forces ensure that violence spreads outward in widening circles.

Kilcullen’s observation, delivered with the weary clarity of experience, captures the problem succinctly: war is inherently complex and non-linear, unleashing forces that no strategist can fully predict or control.

Old phrases return easily in such circumstances. One of them comes from Cicero: Inter arma silent leges — among arms the laws fall silent. Yet when law falls silent, prudence often follows. The machinery of war — alliances, domestic politics, military planning — acquires its own momentum. Decisions initially framed as temporary expedients become permanent commitments. Vietnam began with advisers; Afghanistan with a punitive expedition; Iraq with inspections and resolutions. History rarely begins with the word “quagmire.”

What is most striking in the debate surrounding the present war is not the intensity of disagreement but the depth of uncertainty. Some believe the Iranian regime is brittle and nearing collapse; others believe foreign attack will strengthen it. Both views rely on historical analogy; neither fits perfectly.

Which brings us back, inevitably, to Tuchman. Her great theme was not that governments make mistakes — that is the normal condition of politics — but that they sometimes continue down dangerous paths even after the warning signs become visible.

Whether the present conflict will prove another example of such folly remains to be seen. It may yet reveal a coherent strategy whose logic becomes clear only with time. Or it may confirm once again Tuchman’s darker insight about the persistence of wooden-headedness in the councils of power.

For the moment the war continues: vast in scale, impressive in its technology, uncertain in its purpose. And somewhere in the background, like an echo from another era, the old phrase lingers once again – chaos without a compass.

And then, of course, there’s Trump. To return to Ambrose-Pritchard, who opened this essay: “So which will prevail in the tug of war within Trump’s personality: his fear of losing the US midterm election? Or his injured vanity and his psychological need to command “escalation dominance”, always and everywhere?

For other articles on Iran in In That Howling Infinite, see: Messing with the Mullahs – America’s phoney war? The quality of mercy … looking beyond Iran’s ghost republic and “Because of …” Iran’s voice of freedom, and The end of the line … an epitaph for a tyrant

Trump’s reverse Suez

Starmer should beware another quagmire

Aris Roussinos, Unherd,  March 7 2026 

As we approach the 70th anniversary of the Suez Crisis, from which France’s political class learned to never again let their country’s security become subject to America’s veto, and Britain’s to never again distinguish between its own national interests and Washington’s whims, it is worth remembering that — judged purely as a military operation — the seizure of the Canal Zone was highly successful. The Canal itself, and a buffer zone around it, were captured within days, with limited casualties; the operation’s technical proficiency was praised by the First Sea Lord, Lord Mountbatten, even as he twice attempted to resign in protest at the political folly of it all.

Yet success or failure will be a harder judgment to make for historians of Trump’s own latest Middle East adventure, which is already starting to look like a reverse Suez: its exposure of the limitations of pure military power; the domestic and international hostility; the fragility of alliance systems lazily assumed to be solid; and the wider overtones of an empire wildly overreaching in an attempt to stave off terminal decline. The difficulty in ascertaining, when this ends, whether or not Trump has achieved his war aims rests simply in the fact that the aims so far put forward have differed wildly, and are often mutually contradictory. The Suez Operation possessed a clearly defined military goal which succeeded, and a wider political one, which failed. As it stands, the Trump administration appears in possession of neither.

The broader arguments against the current conflict were most memorably made by Trump himself, campaigning as an anti-war candidate who would keep the United States out of costly and unmanageable Middle Eastern entanglements. His Vice-President, JD Vance, once articulately made the case against this very war. Having successfully demolished his own policy platform, it is difficult to determine what would now count as victory for Trump. The desired outcomes given, at the time of writing, have ranged from the maximalist deliverance of “freedom” to the Iranian people through full regime change in Tehran, through to inspiring an ideal “Venezuela solution” in which more amenable military figures launch an internal coup, then perhaps installing a Shah, ruling Iran remotely from the more stable comfort of Maryland. Or else simply destroying Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacity (which Trump claimed to have “obliterated” in June last year). This scrambling for post facto rationales appears to derive from the fact that Iran did not immediately fold, as Trump apparently assumed it would, with the assassination of its leadership: unlike today’s America, it is not a personalist regime.

Yet if America’s war aims are nebulous from a lack of preparation, Israel’s appear haphazard by design. Summing up Netanyahu’s goals, the Israeli strategic analyst Danny Citrinowicz observes that “If we can have a coup, great. If we can have people on the streets, great. If we can have a civil war, great. Israel couldn’t care less about the future [or] the stability of Iran.” Whatever Netanyahu’s aspirations, a heavily armed but leaderless Iran, engulfed in chaos, represents a strategic threat rather than a victory for the wider West. In this, it appears that America has launched a war alongside, and at the behest of, a notionally junior partner with wildly divergent goals, and which Washington has already admitted it is unable to rein in. For British politicians, all the warning lights should now be blinking red: even the Iraq War, a historic disaster, was vastly better conceived, planned and resourced than this.

“Even the Iraq War, a historic disaster, was vastly better conceived, planned and resourced than this.”

And if America’s war aims are vague and contradictory, their proposed means of achieving these desired outcomes are too — including Iranian submission through aerial bombing alone — a result which has never yet been obtained in the century-long history of air power — through launching a peripheral revolt in which Kurdish and perhaps Baluchi separatists act as America and Israel’s boots on the ground. The best that can currently be said for Trump’s gamble is that the desired end-state is so nebulous in its imagining, and the approach so scattergun, that almost any off-ramp can be spun as a victory by his imperial court and its attendant sycophants. With no single, coherent outcome proposed, Trump can claim, as he already has, that the war has already succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of planners. This is even as he is warning his base that victory may yet take some weeks, and cautioning Congress that “it is not possible at this time to know the full scope and duration of military operations that may be necessary”.

The war was, it seems, resourced for a few days of intensive bombing, with little anticipation of Iran striking back against Gulf states, and American early-warning facilities, with its arsenal of low-cost drones. Policy is now being made on the hoof, with senior administration officials “at each other’s throats” on the need for ground troops. CENTCOM, overseeing the war, has requested an increase in military intelligence analysts “to support operations against Iran for at least 100 days but likely through September”. The spectacle of a days-long special military operation, entered into with an over-confident faith in hard power achieving a swift political solution, then dragging on interminably, is all too familiar. For Vladimir Putin, certainly, America’s unforced error of embroiling itself in a quagmire US presidents have spent a half-century studiously avoiding is a godsend, depleting Western munitions stocks, replenishing the Kremlin’s coffers through rising oil and gas prices, and weakening Europe’s negotiating power.

Judged on strict military terms, though, the operation has chalked up notable successes. Iranian ballistic missile launches have slowed, and no doubt the aerial onslaught is depleting Iran’s arsenal of both munitions and launchers. The looming switch from stand-off munitions to less sophisticated bombs implies that air superiority has already been achieved, as Israel declared last weekend, or will soon be achieved, as the White House more cautiously claims. Whether or not Israel, the US and the Gulf states will run out of interceptor munitions before Iran runs out of missiles is a matter of speculation for even the best-informed analysts. Even as Pentagon sources brief concern over their dwindling arsenal, the Trump administration, for what it is worth, claims that it possesses “unlimited” stocks of munitions for a war that could last “forever” — while simultaneously blaming Ukraine for running down its weapons stockpile.

The most recent American attempt to exert its will in the region through air power alone, against Yemen’s Houthis, who are vastly weaker than Iran, entirely failed. The Houthis have not yet joined the war, as Hezbollah now has in response to Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon: the prospects for escalation grow wider by the day. As for boots on the ground, the much-briefed claims that Iran’s Kurds are willing to join in the war against Tehran remains debatable. The Kurdish Regional Government of Northern Iraq, which hosts exiled Iranian Kurdish militias, has been warned by Iran that their entry into the war will invite an Iranian response, and has stressed its neutrality as a result. It has not even been a month since Washington abandoned its last Kurdish partners: they must now judge whether this time round America will prove a more dependable ally.

For all the military risks involved, it is very possible, though far from certain, that US and Israeli bombing can bring about the collapse of the Iranian state, though what happens next is anyone’s guess. The US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Dan Caine, reportedly cautioned before the strikes began “about the potential downsides of launching a major military operation targeting Iran”, citing “the scale, complexity and potential for US casualties of such a mission”, and asserting he was “​​unable to predict what the result of a regime change operation would be”. Both the Iranians and the Americans have already claimed to have received, and rejected, the other’s request for a ceasefire, with Israel reportedly seeking assurances Washington is not already seeking private talks. In any case, the Iranians have good cause to be wary of negotiating with Trump, given that their previous rounds of negotiations ended in American and Israeli bombing. Indeed, the current war began with Israel’s aerial assassination of the country’s political leadership in the middle of negotiations which, the Trump administration later boasted, were merely a ruse. Some of America’s intended new rulers of Iran, Trump has claimed, have already been killed by Israel. Having launched a war of choice, at a time convenient to him, Trump may now find ending it a far less simple affair.

As it stands, it is in Iran’s interest to drag out the war for as long as possible, expanding it across the wider region, increasing the economic disruption to American allies, and capitalising on the widespread hostility to the war. As both Trump’s anti-interventionist base and the Democrat opposition rightly proclaim, this war has been entered into without any coherent plan, seemingly through Israel’s chain-ganging of the United States into military action it would not otherwise have chosen, an observation claimed as antisemitic by Israel’s advocates in the United States yet which has nevertheless also — bafflingly — been offered as proof of the war’s necessity by America’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the House Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate Intelligence Committee chair Tom Cotton, and most recently by Trump himself.

As for Netanyahu, he exultantly claims that bringing America into the war is something he has “yearned to do for 40 years”. The Democrats, repeatedly briefingthe attack line that Trump was “the first president stupid enough” to be cajoled by Netanyahu into war with Iran, have now been gifted a path to success in midterm elections which may yet overlap with the conflict itself. When as cynical a politician as Gavin Newsom feels safe questioning future military support to the “apartheid state” Israel, demanding from the podium “Why did we help Israel kill little girls?”, we see the cracks in America’s only true special relationship widening into a gulf. This war was, most probably, Netanyahu’s last chance to enlist the fading superpower against his decades-long foe. Whether it improves Israel’s long-term strategic position is doubtful in the extreme  — but none of this is Britain’s problem.

It goes against instinct to praise the Prime Minister for his lawyerly prevarication. Yet given all the risks and uncertainties inherent to this war the arguments against joining America and Israel’s wild gamble are as strong as can be imagined. Just weeks ago, the same Trump administration which now chides us for our caution was threatening to annex European territory, and mocking our participation in its previous disastrous wars. Even if we exclude, as the Prime Minister does not, the moral factors, Starmer is entirely correct to say that this is a war with “no viable plan”. It appears that the Prime Minister, through his twin flaws of excessive deference to both European opinion and international law, may yet be dragged, unwillingly, towards the national interest. We already have our own war to worry about, in which the desire or ability of the United States to negotiate a satisfactory conclusion looks as doubtful from London as Washington’s reliability as a negotiating partner must look from Moscow. American realists may be correct in stating that the Ukraine war, in which Britain is already dangerously over-exposed, is not a core Washington interest — but neither is Netanyahu’s latest war of choice a British or European interest. Simply put, there is no advantage for Britain in joining this distant conflict, and the national interest, as in the Gaza War of which this is a vast escalation, remains in staying out of the affair as far as possible.

It is absurd, then, to watch Reform politicians, so recently bemoaning Britain’s political enmeshment with distant Middle Eastern conflicts and diaspora grievances, caper onstage with Israeli and Iranian monarchist flags, demanding our involvement in this mess. Farage’s hiring as foreign policy adviser of the neoconservative lobbyist Alan Mendoza, who has never yet seen a disastrous war he did not wish to join, was a rare deviation from his sharp political instincts, and a warning of the major strategic risks inherent in a Reform government, however much their domestic agenda may appeal. The Greens will rightly benefit from this misstep, as will, on Reform’s Right, Restore, edging towards a Powellite indifference to distant wars. If he holds his course, so will Starmer too.

The dilemma now for the Prime Minister is whether or not to join the emergent European policy of defensive neutrality, protecting national and continental interests while refusing involvement in the wider campaign. Yet the almost wholesale capture of the British security establishment by an Atlanticist ethos indistinguishable from vassalage, along with the looming American usage of British bases for offensive purposes, will complicate this. Starmer initially refused to permit offensive raids to launch from British territory, a policy which, in Spain’s case, has seen Trump threaten to use its bases anyway. Such threats would appear less stark, no doubt, if Britain had not already placed the sovereignty of Diego Garcia under question, but we cannot all boast the strategic wisdom of David Lammy’s formerbrain. If allowing British bases to be used cannot be prevented, Starmer can either explain why, or — politically more likely — spin a plausible rationale for active involvement, attempting to make a virtue out of compulsion.

Yet there is another path, the one shown by Emmanuel Macron, now expanding across the continent the French-led defence axis initially trialled with Greece. At the same time, Macron is drawing a sharp dividing line between the interests of Europe and her many nation states, and of the erratic empire which alternately threatens and cajoles us. Seventy years ago, a misadventure in the Middle East saw Britain and France adopt opposing positions on American domination, which led us to this impasse. Through an accident of British politics, it falls to as unlikely a figure as Starmer to make just such another historic choice

How US-Israeli strikes on Iran in ever-widening war could spark a global crisis

Israel’s first air-to-air combat kill signals what it has planned.

Israel’s first air-to-air combat kill signals what it has planned.

On the first night of US-Israeli strikes against Iran last weekend, a friend and former colleague in Dubai sent me a video from his rooftop. Emirati air defences had just intercepted an Iranian drone across the street, metres from his house.

A loud explosion rattled his windows. I could hear car alarms in the background and his wife and young children expressing concern as he calmly escorted them down from the roof. I asked if I could do anything to help, and he came back with one word: “Exfil?”

“Exfiltration” – evacuation from the most heavily targeted areas – is a priority for some locals, most expats and many governments including Australia, which this week mounted one of the largest consular operations in our history.

Leaving not an option

For Iranian civilians facing intensive air and missile strikes after weeks of regime crackdowns that have already killed thousands, leaving is not an option.

Friends elsewhere in the region have decided to stay put, concluding their best bet is to shelter in place. In any case, with US and Israeli aircraft bombing all over Iran, and Iranian rockets striking targets across the Middle East, most have nowhere to go.

Evacuation flights have been made more difficult by sudden airspace closures given lack of warning for the attack, which began with Israeli air strikes while Iran and the US were still in negotiations, right after Omani mediators had announced a possible breakthrough.

Apart from its suddenness – despite a massive US military build-up across the past month, Israel struck without warning – the main feature of the conflict so far is its scope, scale and intensity.

This is by far the largest air campaign mounted by Israel and one of the largest conducted by the US, on a par with the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 or the initial air campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.

A group of men inspects the ruins of a police station in Tehran struck amid the US-Israel barrage on Iran. Picture: AP

A group of men inspects the ruins of a police station in Tehran struck amid the US-Israel barrage on Iran. Picture: AP

Already, within the first 100 hours, US aircraft had launched thousands of sorties, destroying hundreds of missile sites, command posts and air defences across Iran. Whatever its political framing, in practical terms this is a full-scale war.

The initial main effort was to establish air superiority, with F-35, F-22 and F-15E aircraft destroying Iranian warplanes and air base infrastructure. On the fourth day of the war, an Israeli F-35 shot down an Iranian fighter jet over northern Tehran, the first air-to-air combat kill by an F-35, and Israel’s first such aerial victory in 40 years.

The take-down of Iran’s air force was followed by the destruction of its air defences by US B-2 bombers using stand-off missiles, opening the skies for follow-on attacks by B-1 and B-52 bombers. These non-stealthy aircraft carry a massive bomb load. B-52s have been involved in the campaign already, releasing air-launched missiles up to 370km from their targets. Once Iran’s surface-to-air missiles are suppressed, however, the bombers can operate directly overhead, hugely increasing the weight of bombs dropped.

Expect more

We can expect US and Israeli aircraft, once they can operate with impunity, to further ramp up strikes, roaming the skies over Iran and hitting any identified threat. In effect, they will be working their way down the priority list as successive categories of higher-value targets are destroyed, a process that may take weeks.

A second task – destruction of Iran’s offensive missile launchers, command-and-control systems and storage and production facilities – is now the focus. Israeli and US forces are working in tandem, with Israel focusing on northern and western Iran, and US aircraft striking sites in the country’s central and southern regions.

A satellite image shows damage at Garmdarah missile base in northern Iran on March 4 following precision strikes. Picture: AFP/Satellite Image (c) 2026 Vantor

A satellite image shows damage at Garmdarah missile base in northern Iran on March 4 following precision strikes. Picture: AFP/Satellite Image (c) 2026 Vantor

This aspect of the campaign has been less successful so far. Iran is still launching large numbers of missiles against Haifa, Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities, and many are successfully evading Israeli interceptors. Other missiles have been destroyed over urban centres, with falling debris causing casualties on the ground. In strictly military terms, the campaign is going well for Israel and the US. But other aspects of the war have been more problematic.

The killing of supreme leader Ali Khamenei and other senior leaders in the first strike may have been intended to decapitate Iran’s regime and dislocate its response. But key leaders such as foreign minister Abbas Araghchi and Ali Larijani – former speaker of parliament, leader of the deadly anti-democracy crackdown in January and head of Iran’s national security council – are alive and in place.

Khamenei appears to have delegated launch authority to lower-level commanders in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, whose aerospace forces control parts of Iran’s missile arsenal, and the Artesh, Iran’s regular military which controls air defence. Junior commanders, cut off from Tehran in the first hours of the war, are making their own target selections, launching missiles and drones as far afield as Jordan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Azerbaijan. Closer in, Persian Gulf states such as Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and the United Arab Emirates have been particularly hard hit.

Hiogjh-ranking members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) attend an unveiling ceremony of an IRGC underground facility that houses hundreds of domestically built precision-strike missiles. Picture: IMAGO / ZUMA

Hiogjh-ranking members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) attend an unveiling ceremony of an IRGC underground facility that houses hundreds of domestically built precision-strike missiles. Picture: IMAGO / ZUMA

Iranian missiles are targeting civilian infrastructure, diplomatic posts, military bases, oil refineries, gas terminals, hotels, houses and shopping centres. Desalination plants – critical in a water-poor region – also have been targeted. Iran’s Lebanese ally, Hezbollah, seems to have launched the drone that hit Britain’s Akrotiri Air Base in Cyprus; in response, Israel is bombing Beirut, and Israeli troops and tanks have pushed farther into Lebanon, widening the war and inflicting several hundred casualties.

War on water

The war at sea has expanded even further. US and Israeli strikes destroyed the Iranian navy’s command post at Bandar Abbas this week and damaged at least nine warships including Iran’s sole drone carrier, the IRIS Shahid Bagheri, along with several Soleimani-class corvettes, smaller warships capable of operating independently or supporting fast attack craft in the Persian Gulf.

In a major escalation, the larger Moudge-class frigate IRIS Dena was sunk off Sri Lanka by a torpedo from a US submarine, as it made its way back to Iran after joint naval exercises with India, with the loss of up to 150 lives. In another grim milestone, this was the first time since 1945 that a US submarine has sunk an enemy warship by torpedo.

At least 10 oil tankers are now ablaze or sunk in the Strait of Hormuz, a critical chokepoint that accounts for more than 20 per cent of global oil flow. Commercial shipping has fallen to almost nothing.

On Thursday, Iran allowed a Chinese-flagged tanker through the strait, and the US has offered insur­ance and naval escort for other vessels in the area, but shipping companies and captains are understandably reluctant to run the risk, triggering a 90 per cent drop in traffic.

Further west, Iran’s Houthi allies in Yemen are restarting their efforts – suspended after last year’s Gaza ceasefire – to interdict shipping through the Bab el-Mandeb, the chokepoint at the southern end of the Red Sea. The Houthis also appear to have launched missiles into Saudi Arabia, which also has been hit by rockets from Iran itself.

Also this week, a Russian-flagged oil tanker was attacked in the western Mediterranean by a Ukrainian sea drone. Ukrainian attacks continue against Russian ships in the Black Sea, underscoring the connection between conflict in Europe and the newly opened front in the Middle East.

On the ground

On land, there is no sign yet of US or Israeli ground troops entering the war, though Israeli aircraft have begun targeting Iranian internal security forces such as the IRGC and its paramilitary arm, the Basij, which might be used to suppress an uprising. US media outlets are reporting CIA plans to arm and support Kurdish separatists against the regime. Kurdish leaders have denied this, even as Kurdish troops in Iraq are massingon the Iranian border, and there are unconfirmed reports of conflict inside northwestern Iran.

Other dissident groups – the anti-regime democracy movement and ethnic separatist Arab, Azeri and Baloch – suffered severely in January’s regime crackdown but may move against the government if the conflict continues. Such efforts almost certainly will fail unless these groups receive arms and support from external players.

Pakistan, which shares a border with Iran and is allied with Tehran’s regional rival Saudi Arabia, is committed to a war against its own former proxy, the Afghan Taliban, but could join in if the war escalates further.

Israeli police and emergency teams respond at the scene after a missile strike hit buildings in Tel Aviv’s Gush Dan area, in Israel, as Iran's missile attacks in retaliation for US-Israeli strikes continue. Picture: Getty Images

Israeli police and emergency teams respond at the scene after a missile strike hit buildings in Tel Aviv’s Gush Dan area, in Israel, as Iran’s missile attacks in retaliation for US-Israeli strikes continue. Picture: Getty Images

If a ground war does develop, it may look something like the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, when intelligence and special warfare teams worked with Afghan allies on the ground, combining with US air power to overthrow the Taliban in less than seven weeks.

Conventional US ground forces are politically problematic for President Donald Trump, given deep scepticism among his MAGA base about foreign wars, American casualties and Israeli intentions.

On the other hand, CIA or special operations teams – given their small numbers and low profile – are seen as less risky, easier to justify, and thus the preferred option.

As in Afghanistan, the question for any ground campaign is what comes next. The potential for full-scale civil war inside Iran, accompanied by state fragmentation and a region-wide flood of refugees, was on the minds of diplomats and intelligence officers with whom I spoke this week, even as the conflict’s future remains unclear.

Taking down the regime is one thing; standing up a stable successor is entirely another, as any Iraq or Afghanistan veteran knows. Many leaders are clearly concerned about this.

All of this makes the current conflict more than just a third Gulf war. Countries that escaped previous conflicts are now suffering direct attacks, up-ending regional relationships as governments scramble to protect their populations. Closure of the Strait of Hormuz involves superpower interests and the global economy much more than previous rounds of conflict. The longer the war lasts, the greater the risk that it escalates even further, pulling more countries in.

International response

Broader responses have been mixed. European countries – following inter-allied controversy earlier this year over US threats to seize Denmark’s autonomous territory in Greenland – have expressed reservations, as has the EU.

An intercepted projectile falls into the sea near Dubai's Palm Jumeirah archipelago on March 1, 2026. Picture: AFP

An intercepted projectile falls into the sea near Dubai’s Palm Jumeirah archipelago on March 1, 2026. Picture: AFP

Britain offered defensive support only, prompting Trump to criticise Prime Minister Keir Starmer as “no Churchill” and complain that the special relationship is not what it once was.

Trump also announced “total suspension” of trade with Spain after Madrid blocked US aircraft from using Spanish bases for the attack. French President Emmanuel Macron declared the US-Israeli attack in violation of international law and called for a return to negotiations, while the UN said it had seen no evidence of ongoing Iranian nuclear weapons programs.

On the other hand, NATO secretary-general Mark Rutte expressed support for the operation.

US adversaries Russia and North Korea – both of which have close relationships with Iran – strongly condemned the attack. China did so too, but so far has offered only rhetorical support. This is somewhat surprising since China is a major weapon supplier to the regime in Tehran and announced, days before the US attack, that it was sending offensive and defensive weapons to Iran.

Under a 25-year agreement signed in 2021, China also accounts for 80 per cent of Iran’s oil exports and depends heavily on traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea. China has been stockpiling oil for several years, so Chinese leaders may calculate they can afford to wait, letting US stockpiles of bombs and missiles be depleted as the war goes on.

Alternatively, they may be scrambling to catch up with a rapidly evolving situation. Neither Moscow nor Beijing has yet moved to mediate or resolve the war.

Against this background, military lessons are already emerging. Artificial intelligence has dramatically accelerated the targeting process, with the campaign running on a continuously updated dynamic engagement matrix rather than a traditional daily task order. Satellite communications are ubiquitous, with small Starlink antennas seen mounted on American Low-Cost Unmanned Combat Attack System drones, themselves an improved copy of Iran’s Shahed-136 drone, the export version of which played a prominent part in Russia’s arsenal in Ukraine.

Beyond showing how adversaries copy each other’s battlefield technologies, the LUCAS drones illustrate how important space systems such as Starlink now are. Space has emerged as what the military calls a “warfighting domain” alongside air, space, sea and cyberspace. GPS spoofing and jamming, as all sides interfere with each other’s navigation satellites, has been particularly noticeable here as in Ukraine, with knock-on effects for civilian ships, aircraft and infrastructure.

Attacks on data centres, including three Amazon Web Services data centres hit by Iranian drones in the Emirates, underline the vulnerability of AI and cyber systems to physical attack.

An ambulance is parked near a sweeping blaze following Israeli bombardment on a solar farm and electricity generation facility in Lebanon's southern coastal city of Tyre on March 4, 2026. Israeli forces on March 4 advanced into a number of towns and villages in south Lebanon, a source from the UN peacekeeping force in the country, UNIFIL, told AFP. Picture: AFP

An ambulance is parked near a sweeping blaze following Israeli bombardment on a solar farm and electricity generation facility in Lebanon’s southern coastal city of Tyre on March 4, 2026. Israeli forces on March 4 advanced into a number of towns and villages in south Lebanon, a source from the UN peacekeeping force in the country, UNIFIL, told AFP. Picture: AFP

The war’s rapid spread outside Iran’s vicinity emphasises how modern conflicts, irrespective of causes, rarely remain geographically contained. Regional proxies – Hezbollah and the Houthis but also pro-Iranian militias in Iraq, Iranian-sponsored sleeper cells in Western countries, and the possibility that resistance groups may play the leading role in any ground campaign – emphasise how even the most conventional conflicts involve irregular warfare, with non-state armed groups operating on their own or advised by specialist operators.

At the strategic level, one lesson is that, irrespective of Trump’s need for a quick resolution to the conflict, lest it undermine his support ahead of critical midterm elections in November, war is inherently complex and non-linear, unleashing forces that cannot be predicted or controlled. Even now, the campaign is illustrating the impossibility of doing regime change from the air, to say nothing of whether regime change is even a viable goal: 20 years of the war on terror would suggest not.

One thing I heard whispered in Washington this week was that – between Venezuela, Greenland and now Iran – others may be concluding they cannot trust American negotiators. The terms of any deal seem increasingly contingent on political whim in the White House, rather than consistent policy, and attacking a counterparts mid-negotiation makes it less likely that adversaries will themselves negotiate in good faith.

This US navy handout photo released by US Central Command public affairs shows US sailors preparing to stage ordnance on the flight deck of Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72) in support of Operation Epic Fury. Picture: US navy/US Central Command/AFP

This US navy handout photo released by US Central Command public affairs shows US sailors preparing to stage ordnance on the flight deck of Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72) in support of Operation Epic Fury. Picture: US navy/US Central Command/AFP

One congressional staffer gloomily told me this week that, under this administration’s force-based approach to international relations, diplomatic consistency carried less weight, but that wouldn’t always be the case. Russia and China were watching this conflict closely, she noted, and if they saw an opportunity to move against Western interests while the US was tied down in Iran, credibility with allies would matter again, fast. The broader potential for escalation – for Gulf War III to become World War III – is not in the forefront of anyone’s mind at present but the risk is real.

Impact at home

For Australia, the implications of the current conflict are stark enough. As a globally connected trading nation, with millions of Australians overseas and massive exposure to the global system, Australians’ safety and our nation’s prosperity can easily be disrupted by events thousands of kilometres away. Just one illustration of this is petroleum imports, which despite rapid growth in renewables still drive almost every aspect of our economy.

The latest Australian petroleum statistics, from December 2025, showed Australia with 50 days net import coverage, 25 days of diesel consumption, enough jet fuel for 20 days and enough automotive petrol for 26 days. In other words, if global oil supplies are interrupted for more than three to four weeks, Australia’s transportation and production systems start grinding to a halt. The government has rightly advised against panic hoarding, but fuel resilience will become a real issue as the conflict drags on.

There is also the possibility that an expanded conflict may lead to a spike in terrorism risk. Iranian-sponsored terror cells aside, unrest among or against Iranian, Jewish, Kurdish, Arab and other communities is a real issue, one that many Western governments are watching, Australia almost certainly included.

A final possibility is that, if the war drags on or escalates, Australia and other allies may receive a US request for support. Intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance – including joint facilities in Australia – are almost certainly already involved. No request for warships, aircraft or ground troops has been publicly discussed but planners would be wise to be thinking ahead.

In the meantime, and much more importantly, families such as my friend’s – across Iran, Israel, the Gulf states and elsewhere – are sheltering in basements, comforting their kids, hoping they have enough food, water, cash and medical supplies, and worrying what the future holds. Tens of thousands of Australians and other expats are stranded as they seek to leave the region, and millions more locals have no exit in sight. This war is unlikely to end soon, but it has already changed the game