Seems like I been down this way before Is there any truth in that, señor? Bob Dylan, Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)
In That Howling Infinite’s recent interest in Venezuela is less about Venezuela itself than about a familiar American habit resurfacing in a new theatre. We have seen this pattern before – in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya – each intervention launched with confident rhetoric, elastic legal reasoning, and the quietly held belief that regimes, once struck, will obligingly collapse into something better. The names change; the logic does not. Venezuela now feels like the latest rehearsal space for a drama that has not yet finished running elsewhere.
This is where the US’ old Monroe Doctrine returns, not as doctrine so much as reflex. A Monroe Redux: stripped of 19th-century solemnity, repurposed for a world of drones, covert action, and press-conference deterrence. The Western Hemisphere is once again imagined as a special moral jurisdiction, even as the Middle East – long the cockpit of American intervention – appears exhausted, over-militarized, and politically unrewarding. Latin America, by contrast, offers proximity, asymmetry, and deniability. The geography has changed; the instincts have not.
This preoccupation also intersects with a longstanding fascination with the lessons of historian Barbara Tuchman’s acclaimed The March of Folly. Tuchman’s insight was not that governments lack information, but that they persist in policies demonstrably failing by their own stated objectives. Vietnam, later memorably described as “chaos without a compass,” remains the archetype: motion mistaken for strategy, escalation substituting for purpose. Iraq was folly recast as liberation; Afghanistan, folly prolonged as nation-building; Libya, folly laundered through humanitarian language. Iran hovers perpetually as folly-in-waiting, the regime-change itch that never quite gets scratched, yet never entirely disappears.
Viewed through this lens, Venezuela appears less as an isolated crisis than as a familiar historical rhyme. A little bombing here, a little bluster there; symbolic strikes presented as prudence, restraint marketed as strategy. It is not yet tragedy—history rarely announces itself so obligingly – but it carries the unmistakable scent of policies drifting, of a compass quietly returned to the drawer.
Tuchman’s opus is often misread as a study of stupidity. It is nothing of the sort. She was writing about persistence – about the peculiar ability of governments to continue down a path long after its internal logic has collapsed, armed with information but imprisoned by momentum. Vietnam was not born of ignorance but of escalation mistaken for purpose. Reading the accounts of Trump’s Venezuelan operation – no longer merely a “dock strike” but a full-blooded decapitation raid – one hears that same low, familiar hum: motion without destination, force without horizon.
A leap in the dark
Everyone knew something like this was coming. Few expected it to be so clean. A president seized, command structures stunned, Caracas rattled just enough to demonstrate omnipotence without visibly levelling the city. From a tactical standpoint, it was impressive – the sort of operation that flatters planners and tempts presidents into believing that history, this time, might behave itself. But history rarely does. Leadership can be removed; regimes, less so. Chavismo survived Chávez’s death and Maduro’s long decay. Movements, unlike men, do not collapse neatly when the head is severed. They mutate. They harden. They endure.
This is where the metaphor shifts and darkens. The United States now looks less like a chess grandmaster and more like the proverbial dog that finally caught the car – triumphant, panting, and unsure what to do next. Decapitation creates ownership. Once you have removed the figurehead, ambiguity evaporates. The question is no longer whether Washington is intervening, but what exactly it intends to build, sustain, or suppress in the vacuum it has helped create.
A week ago, US action might have been interpreted as calibrated escalation: signalling without war, pressure without conquest, violence as message rather than mission. That logic may have held when the strike was offshore, symbolic, plausibly deniable as a prelude rather than a crossing. It is harder to sustain once the president of a sovereign state has been bundled onto a ship and flown north in handcuffs. Symbolism has consequences. At some point, signalling becomes authorship.
The deeper assumption underlying both phases – the demonstrative strike and the decapitation raid – is the same one that has haunted American foreign policy for decades: that limited, spectacular violence produces rational political outcomes. That elites defect under pressure rather than close ranks. That populations blame their rulers rather than the foreign power violating their sovereignty. That humiliation weakens movements rather than mythologising them. This faith survived Iraq, limped through Afghanistan, and still stalks Washington like an unkillable ghost.
What reads in Washington as restraint reads elsewhere as undeclared war. What Beltway strategists describe as “calibrated” looks, from Caracas – or Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, each of whom have form – like arbitrariness dressed up as doctrine. In his most recent foreign policy forays, Trump has fired missiles into Nigeria and sent special forces into Venezuela. He cannot wield enough influence to get his way with major powers, so he targets smaller ones. The White House spins this as a demonstration of American strength, but those who rule in Moscow and Beijing will not be fooled. Nor should anyone else. Whilst ostensibly demonstrating American strength, it also highlights its weakness. Today it is Venezuela; tomorrow it might be somewhere else entirely. The pattern is not coherence but surprise. Power exercised as theatre.
Trump’s foreign policy has always oscillated between maximalist rhetoric and minimalist follow-through. He threatens fire and fury, then settles for a crater and a press conference. He speaks the language of conquest while practising the art of nuisance. Yet Venezuela marks a subtle shift. This is no longer nuisance alone. By removing Maduro, Trump has crossed from menace into management, whether he wants the responsibility or not. Chaos, once unleashed, has a habit of demanding supervision.
The international reaction follows a script so familiar it almost performs itself. International law is solemnly invoked by states that otherwise treat it as optional décor. Yanqui imperialism is dusted off and waved aloft. Blood for oil, regime change, darkest chapters, dangerous precedents – all the old tropes re-emerge, not because they are always wrong, but because they are always available. France, China, Russia, the EU condemn the breach while sidestepping the harder question: what is to be done now that a criminalised, hollowed-out regime has been removed not by its people, but by force?
Latin America splits along its habitual fault lines. Argentina’s Milei cheers liberty’s advance. Brazil’s Lula warns, with weary accuracy, that violence justified as justice tends to metastasise into instability. Neighbouring Colombia braces for refugees. Cuba mutters “state terrorism.” The region remembers – perhaps too well – that external interventions rarely end where their authors imagine.
What is most striking, though, is how little this seems to disturb the American political bloodstream. The legal basis for seizing a foreign head of state is treated as a technicality. Congressional war powers hover faintly in the background. The risk of retaliation, miscalculation, or long-term entanglement is acknowledged, then politely ignored. The old muscle memory of American power keeps flexing, long after the strategic rationale has atrophied.
And so Tuchman returns, not as a moralist but as a diagnostician. Folly is not recklessness; it is normalisation. It is the steady acceptance of contradiction as policy. Trump’s Venezuela adventure now embodies this perfectly: escalation without ownership, ownership without vision, action without explanation. Each move can be defended in isolation. Together, they form a strategy that cannot quite say what it is for.
Hovering over all of this – absurdly, yet tellingly – is the mirage of the Nobel Peace Prize so coveted by President Trump. The prize is not awarded for the mere absence of war, but for the construction of peace: treaties, frameworks, institutions that reduce violence rather than rebrand it. Bombing here, abducting there, tearing up agreements while demanding credit for not starting new wars is not peace-making; it is anti-diplomacy. Peace defined negatively, as something that has not yet collapsed.
One imagines the Nobel Committee reading this Venezuelan episode with a raised eyebrow: sovereignty breached as messaging, escalation choreographed like a reality-show arc, regime change gestured at but not owned. Peace prizes are not usually awarded for keeping one’s options open.
In the end, Trump’s Venezuelan jiggery-pokery is fascinating for the same reason Vietnam remains endlessly analysed. It shows how great powers drift — not because they are blind, but because they cannot quite decide what they are looking for. Chaos without a compass is not the absence of movement. It is movement mistaken for purpose. And history, as Tuchman patiently reminds us, is unforgiving toward those who confuse the two.
Wrong way, go back?
Soon after the American militarily impressive operation, The Atlantic published an cautionary opinion piece by staff writer Colin Friedersdorf arguing that Trump has effectively launched a regime-change war against Venezuela without constitutional authority, democratic consent, or a plausible plan for what comes next. The core charge is not primarily strategic incompetence but constitutional betrayal.
He contrasts Trump’s actions with past presidents who, whatever their later failures, at least sought congressional authorisation before waging major wars. Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor and George W. Bush before Afghanistan and Iraq are invoked not as moral exemplars but as constitutional ones: they recognised that the power to initiate war belongs to Congress, and that legitimacy flows—however imperfectly—from public consent. Trump, by contrast, has dispensed with permission altogether.
Friedersdorf dismisses the administration’s legal justifications as threadbare. Labeling Maduro a “narcoterrorist” or pointing to a US indictment does not, he argues, amount to lawful grounds for war against a sovereign state. These are prosecutorial claims masquerading as casus belli, not a substitute for authorisation under domestic or international law.
Strategically, the article warns that toppling Maduro would be the easy part. Venezuela is already riddled with armed groups, including Colombian militants who use its territory as a base for smuggling and mining. Removing the regime risks unleashing forces that would not “go quietly,” echoing Iraq and Libya more than any clean counter-narcotics success.
Friedersdorf argues that Trump is uniquely unfitted for a regime-change war for several interlocking reasons, combining personal disposition, governance style, and historical patterns of behaviour. Unlike previous presidents who sought congressional authorisation—Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor, George W. Bush before Afghanistan and Iraq – Trump bypassed the Constitution entirely. For Friedersdorf, this is not merely a procedural violation; it signals a reckless disregard for the legal and democratic frameworks that constrain American war-making, a disregard which has tangible consequences when planning complex military operations overseas.
Second, Trump’s track record of self-interest and transactional politics undermines confidence in his strategic judgment. Friedersdorf points to a “lifelong pattern” in which Trump has pursued personal, familial, or financial gain, sometimes at the expense of institutional norms or public welfare. A regime-change war in a resource-rich country like Venezuela, Friedersdorf suggests, is exactly the kind of environment in which such temptations could manifest: the conflation of national interest with personal enrichment. Unlike professional soldiers or presidents with experience in foreign policy and national security, Trump’s incentives are highly idiosyncratic, making the outcomes of a war unpredictable and potentially self-serving.
Third, Friedersdorf questions Trump’s capacity for sustained leadership and operational management in a conflict that, by its nature, requires patience, coordination, and political nuance. Toppling Maduro may be “easy” in the sense of a tactical strike, but the aftermath – stabilising Venezuela, managing humanitarian fallout, and navigating regional politics – requires sustained commitment. Friedersdorf doubts that Trump possesses the temperament, patience, or skill to oversee such a complex and prolonged effort. The concern is that he could declare victory prematurely, mismanage occupation or transition, or escalate in ways that deepen instability rather than resolve it.
Finally, Friedersdorf critiques the political myopia and disregard for public opinion in Trump’s approach. Polls reportedly showed a majority of Americans opposed to military intervention in Venezuela, yet Trump proceeded unilaterally. In Friedersdorf’s assessment, this combination—constitutional bypass, personal opportunism, lack of leadership discipline, and political insensitivity—makes Trump not just ill-prepared, but dangerously mismatched to the responsibilities of a regime-change war, with risks to both American legitimacy and Venezuelan stability.
In short, Friedersdorf sees Trump as uniquely unfit because the personal, constitutional, and strategic factors that would constrain a conventional president are either absent or inverted in him, making a complex foreign intervention unusually perilous. And, even if the intervention were to improve Venezuelans’ lives – a possibility Friedersdorf does not dismiss outright – it would still represent a violation of American democratic norms.
The concluding warning is blunt: by choosing war despite public opposition and without congressional approval, Trump has shown contempt for both the Constitution and the electorate. If Congress does not assert its authority now, Friedersdorf fears this episode will become precedent – another step toward endless wars of choice launched by executive whim, not collective decision.
In short, the article frames Venezuela not merely as a foreign-policy gamble, but as a constitutional crisis in miniature – one that exposes how fragile America’s war-making restraints have become when a president decides they are inconvenient.
What happens now?
Everyone knew something like this was coming; perhaps fewer expected it to be executed with such clinical speed. The pre-dawn abduction of Nicolás Maduro by US forces is less a surprise than a punctuation mark — a moment where long-signalled intent finally hardened into action. A foreign head of state removed in two hours. Mission theatrically accomplished. Endgame conspicuously absent.
It is challenging, but not impossible, for American forces to amass massive military hardware, materiel and personnel offshore, bombard a small neighbour and send special forces into its capital. It is much harder for an American president to control what happens in the aftermath. This explains why global leaders are so cautious about this operation. No major European leaders have endorsed the use of force to bring down the Venezuelan government.
The real test for Trump is what comes next. He has been rightly critical of the US invasion of Iraq, and his MAGA movement favours “America First” rather than “regime change” overseas, but now he pursues a regime change of his own, with only a vague assurance that he and his lieutenants will run Venezuela for an unspecified time. The objective has a strategic element, in trying to slow the flow of drugs into America, but most of it is nakedly commercial. While other presidents might not have said this out loud, Trump is direct: he wants US control of the Venezuelan oil fields, with US oil companies investing and making money, so that oil production will increase.
In an opinion piece published in the Sydney Morning Hearal on 5th June, Robert Muggah, co-founder of the Igarapé Institute think tank and a fellow at Princeton University, usefully lays out five post-Maduro scenarios, though what binds them is not optimism but ambiguity. The first – Trump declares victory and walks away – would be the most American of outcomes: maximum disruption, minimum follow-through. Chavismo, minus its latest avatar, shuffles on; Washington expends enormous leverage only to abandon it; the refugees keep coming. The dog catches the car, looks briefly triumphant, and then isn’t quite sure what to do next.
The second scenario – a popular uprising washing away Chavismo – flatters liberal intuition but ignores institutional rot. Venezuela’s civic muscle has atrophied after years of repression, criminalisation, and mass emigration. Armed colectivos remain invested in chaos. What sounds like democratic renewal risks becoming a weak interim regime, punctuated by violence, oil-sector infighting, and amnesty wars.
Scenario three is the familiar regime-change fantasy: escalate, sanction, manage an election, install a friendly opposition figure, promise reconstruction. The problem, as ever, is legitimacy. A government midwifed too visibly by Washington inherits the original sin of imperial sponsorship. Chavismo’s anti-imperial narrative – long threadbare – would suddenly acquire fresh oxygen, while external actors queue up to meddle by proxy. Another low-grade insurgency beckons.
The fourth option – US custodianship – is the one Trump has effectively name-checked: trusteeship without the label. Stabilise the bureaucracy, revive oil production, choreograph elections, dangle sanctions relief, keep troops nearby “just in case”. It is administratively coherent and politically radioactive. It risks converting a crisis of governance into a crisis of sovereignty, hardening nationalist resistance and validating the very mythology the intervention claims to dismantle.
Which leaves the fifth, and perhaps most honest, outcome: managed instability. No clean victory, no decisive collapse. A weakened Chavista elite, a divided opposition, fragmented security actors, and a US that calibrates pressure without appetite for occupation. A low-boil conflict, indefinitely deferred resolution, limbo as policy.
Hovering over all this is Monroe Doctrine 2.0 – a message not just to Caracas but to Havana, Managua, Bogotá, Panama, even further afield. This was less about Maduro than about signalling who gets to set terms in the hemisphere, and who doesn’t. A muscular reminder that alignment matters, and misalignment carries costs.
For Venezuelans themselves, the prognosis is bleakly familiar: another external intervention, another promise of order, another season of uncertainty. The screw tightens, the rhetoric soars, the moral justifications proliferate – and ordinary people remain suspended between liberation narratives and lived precarity.
History suggests this is not an ending but a prologue. The question, as always, is whether anyone involved is genuinely prepared to live with the consequences of what they’ve just begun.
It is worth recalling, in this context, what ultimately happened to Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein – two leaders who, in different ways, became objects of Western fixation and regime-change temptation. Saddam was toppled by overwhelming force, hunted down, tried under a hastily constructed legal order, and hanged; the state he ruled collapsed with him, unleashing sectarian violence and regional instability that still reverberate. Gaddafi, having abandoned his weapons programmes in the hope of rehabilitation, was nevertheless pursued once the opportunity arose, cornered during a NATO-backed intervention, and killed by a mob in a Libyan drainage culvert. Libya followed him into fragmentation, militia rule, and proxy warfare.
In neither case did the removal of the strongman deliver the orderly political transformation that had been implicitly promised. What followed was not liberal democracy but vacuum – power without legitimacy, violence without direction. These episodes linger in the strategic memory not merely as moral tales but as practical ones: regime change is easy to threaten, harder to execute, and almost impossible to control once unleashed.
And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Mathew Arnold, Dover Beach
We called 2024 a “year of everything, everywhere, all at once”, and it earned the name. Crises collided, news arrived faster than we could process it, and the world seemed to exist in a state of constant shock. 2025 did not bring relief. Instead, the chaos began to settle. Wars dragged on, political divides hardened, social tensions deepened, and technology reshaped how we saw and understood it all.
It was the year the world stopped exploding in real time and started being what it had already become: messy, uneven, morally complicated, and stubbornly persistent. A year, indeed, in a world of echoes, refrains and unfinished business. And we spent the year watching power bargain brazenly in plain sight, trying to describe what was happening while it unfolded around us.
From Gaza to Ukraine, Sudan to Syria, from America’s self-inflicted fracture to Australia’s sudden wake-up call on Bondi Bondi, 2025 forced a reckoning: the world did not pause, but it did sort itself – deciding what we would notice, what we would ignore, and what we would learn to live with. Alongside human crises came the continuing advance of AI and chatbots, and the dominion of the algorithms that now govern attention, proving that disruption can be structural as well as geopolitical.
Gaza: War, Then “Ceasefire”
The war in Gaza dominated the year internationally and here in Australia, even as attention ebbed and flowed. Military operations continued for months, followed eventually by a “ceasefire” – a word doing far more work than it should or even justified. Fighting paused, hostages living and dead were returned and prisoners released, but the devastation remained: tens of thousands dead, cities demolished, humanitarian catastrophe unresolved. And the causes of the consequences standing still amidst the ruins and the rubble.
Western governments continued to back Israel while expressing concern for civilians, a contradiction that grew harder to defend, while street protests and online anger seethed all across the world. At the same time, antisemitism surged globally, often hiding behind the language of anti-Zionism. Two realities existed together, and too many people insisted on choosing only one.
By the end of the year, the war had not been resolved – merely frozen. Trust in Western moral leadership had been badly damaged, and Israelis and Palestinians remain in bitter limbo.
Long-simmering tensions between Israel and Iran spilled into open conflict. What had once been indirect – proxies, cyberattacks, covert strikes – became visible. A brief but destructive war of missile exchanges ended with the United States asserting ordinance, deterrence and control.
The episode was brief but telling. It showed that America still reaches for its guns quickly, even as it struggles to define long-term goals. Another line was crossed, then quickly absorbed into the background of “normal” geopolitics.
Russia, Ukraine and Trump’s “Peace”
Ukraine entered 2025 mired in stalemate. Front lines barely moved. Casualties continued to mount. Western support held, but with clear signs of fatigue. And Donald Trump’s re-emergence reshaped the conversation. His promise to deliver instant “peace” reframed the war not as a question of justice or sovereignty, but of exhaustion. Peace was no longer about what Ukraine deserved, but about what the world was tired of sustaining and what the “art of the deal” could deliver.
The war didn’t end. It simply became something many wanted to stop thinking about. Not Ukraine and Russia, but. The carnage continues.
Donald Trump’s one-way crush on Vladimir gave us the one of the+most cringeworthy moments in global politics – Trump greeting the Russian president in Alaska: As the US president rolled out the red carpet for the world’s most dangerous autocrat, Russia’s attack on Ukraine accelerated. Trump got precisely nothing out of the meeting, except for the chance to hang out with a gangster he so obviously admires and of whom he is embarrassingly in awe.
Syria: Free, but stranded at the crossroads
A year after Assad’s fall, Syria remained unstable and unresolved. The regime was gone, but the future was unclear. Old sectarian tensions resurfaced, often in bloodshed, new power struggles emerged, powerful neighbours staked claims and justice for past crimes remained distant.
Syria in 2025 was neither a success story nor a collapse – but suspended between heaven and hell, a country trying to exist after catastrophe with the rest of the world largely moving on.
Women in Damascus celebrate the fall of the Assad regime
Sudan: what genocide actually looks like
Sudan’s civil war continued with little international attention. Mass killing, ethnic cleansing, famine, and displacement unfolded slowly and relentlessly. This was genocide without spectacle. No clear narrative. No sustained outrage. It showed how mass atrocity can now occur not in secrecy, but in plain sight – and still be ignored.
The United States spent 2025 deeply divided, with no sign of healing. Pew Research polling showed that seven out of ten republicans think that the opposite side is immoral while six of ten democrats thinks the same of their rivals.
Trump’s return to power sharpened those divisions. His administration governed aggressively: mass deportations, punitive tariffs, the dismantling of foreign aid, political retribution, and pressure on democratic institutions. The country looked inward and outward at the same time – less cooperative, more transactional, more openly nationalist. Democratic norms eroded not overnight, but through constant stress and disregard. With three years still to run and the tell-tale midterms approaching, allies and cronies are adjusting, bickering rivals are taking notes, and uncertainty has become the defining feature of American leadership. Meanwhile, #47 is slapping his name on everything he can christen, from bitcoins to battleships.
US foreign policy took on a blunt, old-fashioned tone. Pressure on Canada and Mexico increased. Talk of annexing Greenland resurfaced. Venezuela, caught in the maw of Yanqui bullying and bluster, waits nervously for Washington’s next move. The administration promised imminent land operations – and then bombed Nigeria! The revival of the old Monroe Doctrine felt, as baseball wizz Yogi Berra once remarked, like déjà vu all over again, not as strategy, but as instinct. Influence asserted, consultation discarded. The “ugly American” was back, and unapologetic.
Europe in 2025 didn’t collapse, as many pundits suggested it might, but it shifted. Far-right ideas gained ground even where far-right parties didn’t win and remained, for now, on the fringes albeit closer to electoral success. Borders tightened; policies hardened; street protests proliferated – against immigration and against Israel, Support for Ukraine continued, but cautiously. The continent stood at a crossroads: still committed to liberal values in theory, but increasingly selective in practice.
Uncle Sam’s cold-shoulder
Rumbling away in the background throughout year was the quiet but cumulative alienation of America’s allies. Not with a single rupture, but through a thousand small slights. transactional diplomacy dressed up as realism, alliances treated as invoices rather than covenants, multilateralism dismissed as weakness. Europe learned that security guarantees come with a mood swing; the Middle East heard policy announced via spectacle; Asia watched reassurance coexist uneasily with unpredictability.
The new dispensation was illustrated by the Trump National Security Strategy. It is at once candid and contradictory: it outlines a narrower, realist vision of American interests, emphasising sovereignty, burden-sharing, industrial renewal, and strategic clarity, yet it is riddled with silences, evasions, and tensions between rhetoric and likely action. Allies are scolded for weakness while the document avoids naming Russia’s aggression, underplays China, and projects American cultural anxieties onto Europe. These contradictions expose both strategic incoherence and the limits of paper doctrine against presidential temperament, leaving Europe facing an irreversible rupture in trust and revealing a strategy as much about America’s insecurities as its actual global posture.
The post-WW2 order has not so much been dismantled as shrugged at, and indeed, shrugged off. Trust eroded not because the United States has withdrawn from the world, but because it has remained present without being reliable, and presumed itself to be in charge. Power, exercised loudly but inconsistently, has discovered an old truth: allies can endure disagreement, but they struggle with contempt.
Australia in 2025 … high flight and crash landing
Though beset by a multitude of crises – the cost of living, housing, health and education services – the Albanese Labor government was returned comfortably in May, helped by a divided, incoherent, and seemingly out of touch opposition. For the rest the year, federal politics felt strangely frictionless with policy drift passing for stability. The Coalition remained locked in internal conflict, unable to present a credible alternative. The Greens, chastened by electoral defeat and in many formerly friendly quarters, ideological disillusionment, treaded water.
But beneath the surface, social cohesion frayed. Immigration debates sharpened. Antisemitism rose noticeably, no longer something Australians could pretend belonged elsewhere. Attacks on Jewish Australians forced a reckoning many had avoided and hoped would resolve once the tremors of the war in Gaza had ameliorated. Until 6.47pm on 7th December, a beautiful evening on Sydney’s iconic Bondi Beach. Sudden, brutal and in our summer playground, sectarian violence shattered the sense of distance Australians often feel from global disorder. At that moment, politics stopped feeling abstract. The world, with all its instability, barged in and brought the country down to earth.
Lifesavers on Bondi Beach, 20 December 2025. Edwina Pickles
Featured photograph and above:
A handful of bodies on Bondi Beach, and behind them, the howling infinite of expectation, obligation, and the careful rationing of human empathy. The smallness of the beach against the vastness of consequences. On December 20, 2025, Bondi’s iconic lifesavers formed a line stretching the entire length of the beach -silent, solemn, a nation visibly in mourning. Similar tributes unfolded from Perth to Byron Bay, gestures of unity in the face of a shock that touched the whole country.
The Year of the Chatbot: Promise, Power, and Risk
And now, a break from the doom and gloom …
2025 was the year when artificial intelligence became part of daily life. Chatbots ceased to be experimental and became integral, transforming from novelty to utility seemingly overnight. People used it to write, research, translate, plan, argue, comfort, and persuade; institutions and individuals adopted it instinctively. Setting tone as much as content, the ‘bots have lowered barriers to knowledge, sharpened thinking, and helped people articulate ideas they might otherwise struggle to express. Used well, they amplified curiosity rather than replace it.
The opportunities are obvious – but so are the risks. Systems that can clarify complexity can also flatten it. Chatbots sound confident even when wrong, smooth over disagreement, and made language cleaner, calmer, and more persuasive – but not necessarily truer. They reinforce confirmation bias, outrage, and tribal certainty, generating arguments instantly and flooding the zone with plausible-sounding text. As information has became faster, cheaper, and less reliable, Certainty has spread more easily than truth, so truth has to work much harder.
Dependence is subtler but real. Outsourcing thinking – summaries instead of reading, answers instead of wrestling – did not make humans stupid, but less patient. Nuance, doubt, and slow understanding became harder to justify in a world optimised for speed. Yet conversely, man people still seek context, history, and complexity. Used deliberately, AI could slow the pace, map contradictions, and hold multiple truths at once.
By the end of 2025, the question was no longer whether AI would shape public life – it already had. The real question is whether humans would use it as a shortcut, or as a discipline. The technology is neutral. The danger – and the promise – lies in how much thinking we are willing to give up, and how much responsibility we are prepared to keep.
Alongside the chatbot sat a quieter, more insidious force: the algorithm itself. By 2025 it no longer simply organised information – it governed attention. What people saw, felt, and argued about was shaped less by importance than by engagement. To borrow from 20th century philosopher and communication theorist and educator Marshall McLuhan, the meme had become the message. Complex realities were compressed into images, slogans, clips, and talking points designed not to inform but to travel. The algorithm rewarded speed over reflection, certainty over doubt, heat over light. Politics, war, and grief were all flattened into content, stripped of context, and ranked by performance. What mattered most was not what was true or necessary, but what disseminated.
Passion without Wisdom
I wrote during the year that we seemed “full of passionate intensity” – Yeats’ phrase still apt in the twenty first century- but increasingly short on wisdom and insight. 2025 confirmed it. Anger was everywhere, empathy highly selective, certainty worn like armour. People felt deeply but thought narrowly. Moral energy surged but rarely slowed into understanding. The problem was not indifference; it was excess – too much feeling, too little reflection. In that environment, nuance looked like weakness and patience like complicity. What was missing was not information, but judgement – the harder work of holding contradiction, of resisting instant conclusions, of allowing complexity to temper conviction. Passion was abundant. Insight, increasingly rare.
Looking Toward 2026
Looking back on 2025, it seems that there were no endings, neither happy or sad. Just a promise, it seems, of more of the same. The year didn’t solve anything. It clarified things. And if it clarified anything, it was that the world has grown adept at managing, ignoring, or absorbing what it cannot fix. It revealed a world adjusting to permanent instability. In this year of echoes, refrains, and unfinished sentences.
Passion, intensity, and outrage were abundant, but patience, wisdom, and insight remained scarce. Democracies strained under internal and external pressures. Wars lingered unresolved. Technology reshaped thought and attention.
Some argue that hope springs eternal, that yet, even amid the drift and the fractures, glimpses of understanding and resistance persisted, that although the world has settled into its chaos, we can be riders on the storm. But, I fear, 2026 arrives not as break, a failsafe, a safety valve, but as continuation. It looms as a test of endurance rather than transformation. In my somnolent frame of mind, I’ve reached again for my Yeats. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed …”
After the chaos of 2024 and the hardening of 2025, the question is no longer what might go wrong. It’s what we’re prepared to live with.
And so we come to what In That Howling Infinite wrote in 2025.
What we wrote in 2025
It was a year that refused neat endings.
It began in a wasteland – Gaza as moral ground zero – and moved, restlessly, through revolutions real and imagined: Trump as symptom and accelerant, Putin as a man racing his own shadow, Syria forever at the crossroads where history idles and then accelerates without warning. Gaza returned, again and again, sunrise and false dawn, as spectacle and strategy; Sudan burned in near silence; Venezuela re-entered the frame as empire’s backyard as the US disinterred its Monrovian legacy. In That Howling Infinite featured pieces on each of these – several in many cases , twenty in all, plus a few of relevance to them, including an overview of journalist Robert Fisk’s last book (The Night of Power – Robert Fisk’s bitter epilogue). A broadranging historical piece written in the previous year and deferred, Modern history is built upon exodus and displacement, provided a corrective of sorts to the distorted narratives that have emerged in recent years due to a dearth of historical knowledge and the partisan weaponisation of words.
It was almost as light relief that we turned to other subjects. Of particular interest was AI. Approaching remorselessly yet almost unrecognised in recent years, it banged a loud gong and crept from curiosity to condition, from tool to weather system, quietly rewriting the newsroom, the internet, and the idea of authorship. ChatGPT and other chatbots appeared not as saviours but as promise and peril in equal measure. By year end, we were fretting about using ChatGPT too much and regarding it as something to moderate like alcohol or fatty foods. We published three pieces on the subject in what seemed like rapid succession, and then pestered out – sucked into the machinery, I fear.
What with so much else attracting our attention, we nevertheless managed to find time for some history – including a particularly enthralling and indeed iconoclastic book on the fall of the Ottoman Empire; the story of an Anzac brigade lost in Greece in 1942; “the Lucky Country” revisited after half a century; and a piece long in the pipeline on the iconic singer and activist Paul Robeson.
In August, as on a whim, for light relief, we summoned up a nostalgic old Seekers’ song from the mid-sixties, a time when the world was on fire with war and rage much as it is today, but for us young folk back in the day, a time of hope and hedonism. For us, the carnival, clearly, is not over. The machinery is still whirring, the music still loud, and the lights still on. History is insisting on one more turn of the wheel, and the dawn, so often promised, so frequently invoked, has not yet broken.
January
The Gaza War … there are no winners in a wasteland
The way we were … reevaluating the Lucky Country
February
Let’s turn Gaza into Mar e Largo
Trump’s Second Coming … the new American Revolution
Cold Wind in Damascus … Syria at the crossroads
March
Trumps Revolution… he can destroy but he cannot create
Where have all the big books gone?
Putin’s War … an ageing autocrat seeks his place in history
April
The Trump Revolution … I run the country and the world
The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of Türkiye
Let Stalk Strine .. a lexicon of Australian as it was spoken (maybe)
May
The phantom of liberty … the paradoxes of conservativism
Shadows in search of a name … requiem for a war
The continuing battle for Australia’s history
July
A mighty voice … the odyssey of Paul Robeson
August
109 years of Mein Kampf … the book that ravaged a continent
High above the dawn is breaking … the unlikely origin of a poo song
September
Gaza sunrise or false dawn? Trump’s peace plan
Gaza sunrise or false dawn? Spectacle or Strategy
Will there ever be a Palestinian state?
Why Osana bin lost the battle but won the war
The Night of Power … Robert Fisks bitter epilogue
The promise and peril of ChatGPT
Who wrote this? The newsroom’s AI dilemma
October
AI and the future of the internet
Danger Angel … the ballad of Laura Loomer
November
A forgotten Anzac story in Greece’s bloody history
The most nihilistic war ever … Sudan’s waking nightmare
Answering the call … National Service in Britain 1945-1963
Tales of Yankee Power … at play in Americas backyard
December
Delo Kirova – the Kirov Case … a Soviet murder mystery
Between heaven and hell … Syria at the crossroads
This Is What It Looks Like
Tales of Yankee power … Why Venezuela, and why now?
Marco Rubio’s Venezuelan bargain
It is our custom to conclude our annual wrap with a particular song that caught our attention during the year. Last year, we chose Tears for Fears’ Mad World. It would be quite appropriate for 2025. But no repeats! so here is something very different. An outwardly melancholy song that is, in the most ineffable way quite uplifting. that’s what we reckon, anyway …
The Ticket Taker is on the surface a love song for the apocalypse; and it’s it’s one of the prettiest, most lyrically interesting songs I’ve heard in a long while. I could almost hear late-period Leonard Cohen and his choir of angels.
The apocalypse is both backdrop and metaphor. We’re not sure which. Is it really about a world ending, or just about the private ruin of a man left behind by love and fortune. The lyrics are opaque enough to evade final meaning, but resonant enough to keep circling back, like the ferry itself, between hope and futility. A love song, yes, but also a confession of entrapment: the gambler’s hope, the ark one cannot board.
The “Ticket Taker” song was written by Ben Miller and Jeff Prystowsky and is featured on The Low Anthem’s album Oh My God, Charlie Darwin. It features on Robert Plant’s latest foray into roots music – this time with English band Saving Grace. This flawless duet with Suzi Dian is mesmerising and magical.
Jeff will tell you that the song is “pure fiction,” that Ben “just made it up one day” – but fiction, as we know, has a way of smuggling deeper truths than fact dares admit.
Tonight’s the night when the waters rise
You’re groping in the dark
The ticket takers count the men who can afford the ark
The ticket takers will not board, for the ticket takers are tied
For five and change an hour, they will count the passers-by
They say the sky’s the limit, but the sky’s about to fall
Down come all them record books, cradle and all
They say before he bit it that the boxer felt no pain
But somewhere there’s a gambling man with a ticket in the rain
Mary Anne, I know I’m a long shot
But Mary Anne, what else have you got?
I am a ticket taker, many tickets have I torn
And I will be your ark, we will float above the storm
Many years have passed in this river town, I’ve sailed through many traps
I keep a stock of weapons should society collapse
I keep a stock of ammo, one of oil, and one of gold
I keep a place for Mary Anne, soon she will come home
Mary Anne, I know I’m a long shot
But Mary Anne, what else have you got?
I am a ticket taker, many tickets have I torn
And I will be your ark, we will float above the storm
Mary Anne, I know I’m a long shot
But Mary Anne, what else have you got?
I am a ticket taker, many tickets have I torn
And I will be your ark
People with only a passing acquaintance with Latin American history and politics have been asking, with genuine puzzlement, “why Venezuela? And why now?” The question is reasonable enough, but the coverage has been thin – particularly here in Australia – where Venezuela tends to appear only as a shorthand for failure or excess, rarely as a site of serious American political investment.
In That Howling Infinite recently provided several reasonably comprehensive explanations in Tales of Yankee power … Why Venezuela, and why now? But what has been largely absent from this and from other discussions is the role being played by former senator and now Secretary of State Marco Rubio. That absence, as we shall see below, is striking.
The Rubio connection surfaced explicitly in American author and commentator Fareed Zakaria’s latest Global Public Square broadcast on CNN, and once raised, it proved difficult to ignore. Rubio’s place in the MAGA-verse is, after all, an incongruous one. This is the same seasoned, disciplined, and electorally successful politician whom Donald Trump once ridiculed in the 2016 campaign as “Lil’ Marco,” a moment of theatrical humiliation that seemed, at the time, politically terminal. And yet here he is, back in the room and back at the table, standing stiffly beside Trump and self- styled “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth in press conferences, Oval Office set-pieces, and cabinet gatherings, his discomfort almost palpable.
Watching those scenes, it is hard not to suspect a transaction. Not in the crude sense of quid pro quo, but in the quieter, more human register of political survival: the price one pays to remain relevant, to retain influence, to draw at least one clear moral boundary in an administration otherwise defined by improvisation and loyalty tests. It was this that set me thinking that Venezuela – by way of Cuba – may be Rubio’s price. The policy domain where he is allowed conviction, where memory still outranks expediency, and where supporting Trump does not feel, at least to himself, like surrender.
Intrigued by Zakaria’s brief “take” on Marco Rubio and Venezuela, I asked Chat GPT to sift through reportage in American media and other sources and come up with a more detailed story. That story follows.
To understand Rubio’s Venezuela policy, it helps to stop thinking in terms of strategy alone and start thinking in terms of inheritance. This is not a story that begins in Caracas or Washington, but in Havana – or rather, in the Havana that survives only in memory: confiscated houses, interrupted childhoods, unfinished arguments passed down like heirlooms. Rubio speaks not just to voters, but to ghosts. And those ghosts have opinions.
For Rubio, socialism is not a theory, nor even a failed experiment. It is a family trauma, translated into politics. This matters because it explains both the intensity and the rigidity of his stance on Venezuela, and why compromise there feels not merely imprudent, but immoral. Venezuela matters because it looks like the past refusing to stay past.
The Cuban exile community in Miami has long provided American politics with a particular moral grammar: clarity over ambiguity, punishment over accommodation, endurance over negotiation. In this worldview, regimes do not soften; they calcify. Time is not neutral; it is the enemy. The lesson of Cuba is that hesitation becomes permanence. Rubio absorbed this lesson early, intuitively, and it has shaped his political ascent.
As Venezuela slid into authoritarian collapse in the 2010s, it became the perfect successor to Cuba as both warning and weapon. Unlike Havana, Caracas was still in motion. It had elections – imperfect, manipulable, but legible enough to serve as staging grounds for hope. It had oil, which meant leverage. And it had an opposition that could be imagined, at least briefly, as viable. Venezuela became Cuba-with-oil, a second chance to get history right.
Rubio seized that opportunity. He framed Venezuela not merely as a foreign policy challenge, but as Exhibit A in a broader moral argument about socialism, populism, and American decline. In doing so, he also performed a useful domestic alchemy: fusing Cuban-, Venezuelan-, and Nicaraguan-American experiences into a single narrative of victimhood and resistance. Florida’s exile communities became not distinct histories, but a shared cautionary tale.
This was not incidental to Rubio’s rise; it was central to it. Venezuela allowed him to marry personal biography to national rhetoric, foreign policy to electoral arithmetic. Hardline sanctions, regime-change language, and moral absolutism were not just positions – they were signals of fidelity to memory.
The Juan Guaidó episode in 2019 marked the high-water line of this approach. Rubio was among the loudest advocates of the belief that pressure, recognition, and a sufficiently confident declaration of inevitability would cause the Maduro regime to collapse. When it didn’t – when the military held, the opposition fractured, and the regime adapted – the failure did not soften conviction. It hardened it. In exile politics, failure is rarely read as miscalculation; more often it is read as insufficient resolve.
What has changed since is not Rubio’s worldview, but the world around it.
Venezuela has survived. Sanctions leaked. New patrons appeared. The regime learned how to manage scarcity and repression simultaneously. And the multipolar order – China, Russia, Iran – provided insulation that Cuba in the 1960s never had. The Cuban model, once a warning, began to look uncomfortably like a blueprint.
Enter Trump—again.
Rubio’s return to proximity with Trumpian power has been visibly uneasy. The discomfort is not theatrical; it is structural. Rubio is not a natural Trumpist. He believes in alliances, institutions, and the moral language of American leadership – however threadbare those concepts have become. Standing beside Trump and figures like Pete Hegseth in pressers and cabinet gatherings, Rubio often looks less like a disciple than a negotiated presence.
Which is why Venezuela matters now in a different way.
It is plausible – compelling, even – to read Rubio’s Venezuela focus as the price of admission. His moral compensation. The policy space he is allowed to dominate in exchange for supporting, or at least tolerating, other Trump policies that clearly sit uneasily with him. Give me Latin America, the bargain seems to say. Let me draw the line there.
Trump accepts this because it costs him little and gains him Florida. Rubio accepts it because Venezuela is the one issue where compromise feels like apostasy. It is his redemptive exception – the place where he can still be unbending, certain, and righteous, even as he swallows his discomfort elsewhere.
The result is a Venezuela policy overdetermined by symbolism. Sanctions become not just tools, but acts of remembrance. Engagement becomes not diplomacy, but forgetting. The ghosts hover constantly, reminding, accusing, insisting that this time must be different.
And yet the irony persists. Rubio’s politics of memory assumes that time favours pressure – that authoritarian regimes crack if held long enough. Venezuela suggests the opposite: that time favours adaptation. Survival is no longer failure; it is proof of concept. The past is not repeating itself exactly – it is mutating.
Which leaves Rubio caught between conviction and context. His stance is principled in its own terms, emotionally coherent, politically intelligible. But it struggles with a world in which pressure still matters, yet no longer decides outcomes.
Venezuela, in this telling, is not just a country. It is a memory test. A moral rehearsal. A stand-in for an argument with history that never quite concluded. Rubio stays in the room, visibly uneasy, because Venezuela allows him to believe that proximity to power has not dissolved purpose.
Whether that bargain helps Venezuela is uncertain. But as an explanation for Rubio himself – for his rigidity, his discomfort, his persistence – it is as close as politics gets to biography. And in exile politics, biography is destiny.
And here the circle closes.
Rubio believes Venezuela matters because it looks like the past refusing to stay past. But by treating it primarily as a moral inheritance rather than a living, adaptive system, he risks replaying the very tragedy exile politics warns against: mistaking endurance for fragility, and time for an ally.
So yes – read this as a bargain.
Rubio stays, visibly uneasy, because Venezuela is his line in the sand. His proof to himself that proximity to power has not dissolved conviction. It is the policy space where he can still speak to ghosts – and hear them answer back.
Whether that bargain produces better outcomes for Venezuela is another question entirely. But as a political arrangement, it is elegant, durable, and profoundly human.
Sources and References
Primary reporting & analysis
Fareed Zakaria, GPS / Global Public Square segments on Venezuela and US foreign policy (CNN, 2024–2025)
The New York Times, Marco Rubio and U.S. Venezuela Policy (various reports, 2019–2024)
The Washington Post, coverage of the Guaidó recognition and sanctions regime
Reuters, U.S. sanctions policy and Venezuela negotiations (ongoing reporting)
Cuba–Venezuela nexus
Julia E. Sweig, Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press)
William LeoGrande & Peter Kornbluh, Back Channel to Cuba (University of North Carolina Press)
International Crisis Group reports on Venezuela–Cuba security cooperation
Exile politics & Florida
Javier Corrales & Michael Penfold, Dragon in the Tropics (Brookings Institution Press)
Pew Research Center, Cuban-American and Venezuelan-American political attitudes
Politico, Florida, Rubio, and Latin America policy analyses
Sanctions & authoritarian adaptation
Adam Tooze, essays on sanctions and multipolarity
Brookings Institution, Why sanctions fail (and sometimes work)
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Venezuela sanctions assessments
Señor, señor Can you tell me where we’re headin’? Lincoln County Road or Armageddon? Seems like I been down this way before Is there any truth in that, señor?
This story does not relate to Bob Dylan’s cryptic and nihilistic Señor (Tales of Yankee Power), from Street Legal (1978). As for the meaning of his song, well, that’s pretty hard to fathom. A cowboy fever dream, perhaps; one of those strange illusions you channel in the early morning between sleeping and waking, more about mood than meaning.
Rather, these tales refer to the United States’ troubled and troublesome historical and contemporary relationship with its Central and Latin American neighbours – and particularly, to its current crusade against Venezuela’s autocratic president Nicolás Maduro. And it is less about Venezuela than about the US itself – an empire in all but name struggling to recover its own reflection in the shifting mirror of history. The restless ghost of Manifest Destiny is still pacing the corridors of the West Wing and the State Department. The “tales of Yankee power” keep repeating because the empire cannot imagine itself without them. Each show of force, each threat of “covert operations” is a reassurance ritual, a way of proving that the old muscles still work. But as with all empires in decline, the performance reveals more fragility than strength. The Monroe Doctrine once kept others out; the Neo-Monroe Doctrine may exist only to convince America that it is still in.
In That Howling Infinite has walked this road before in a 2017 post also entitled Tales of Yankee Power, a feature on American songwriter Jackson Browne‘s1986 album Lives in the Balance. At the time critics reckoned that its contemporary content, the USA’s bloody meddling in Central America, limited its appeal and long-term significance. And yet, here in the early twentieth first century, where the wars of the Arab Dissolution dragged the world into its vortex, and Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine ended seventy five years of Pax Europa, the Great Power politics and proxy wars that taxed intellectual and actual imaginations in that seemingly distant decade jump back into the frame like some dystopian jack in the box. As Mark Twain noted, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme”.
Eight years after the original Tales of Yankee Power, the story hasn’t ended – it’s simply changed key. The Uncle Sam is still abroad, still restless, still convinced the hemisphere cannot manage without his supervision. Only the script has been updated: what was once called the Monroe Doctrine is now “neo”; what was once the “war on communism” is now the “war on drugs”. But the music is familiar – and derivative: in this sad world, whenever Uncle Sam (or Comrade Ivan for that matter) plays his hand, something wicked this ways comes. As Canadian songwriter Bruce Cockburn, who also condemned the North’s intervention in the politics of the South once sang, “Little spots on the horizon into gunboats grow … Whatever’s coming, there’s no place else to go, waiting for the moon to show”.
Donald Trump’s Neo-Monroe Doctrine
Yanqui wake up
Don’t you see what you’re doing
Trying to be the Pharoah of the West bringing nothing but ruin
Better start swimming
Before you begin to drown
All those petty tyrants in your pocket gonna weigh you down
Bruce Cockburn, Yanqui Go Home (1984)
Which brings us to American journalist John Masko’s insightful analysis of Trump’s Latin American policy in a recent Unherd article. It is sharp and well-informed, particularly his framing of the “Neo-Monroe Doctrine” as the ideological scaffolding for Washington’s renewed interest in its southern backyard. Yet, like most American commentators, he skips over a crucial subplot – namely, the role of the United States itself in creating the very chaos it now claims to correct. Venezuela’s “descent into shambles,” as he calls it, did not occur in a geopolitical vacuum. Sanctions, economic strangulation, and decades of covert interference were not incidental background noise but deliberate acts of policy – the slow throttling of a regime that refused to align with the hegemon’s economic and political script. Without that context, the narrative too easily morphs into a morality play about Latin American incompetence, when in truth, it’s an old imperial story of cause, consequence, and selective amnesia.
Masko’s central thesis – that Trump has revived the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine – is persuasive. In Trump’s mind, security begins at home and radiates outward; when weak or corrupt neighbours threaten that security, they must be coerced or replaced. The author rightly traces this logic back to Roosevelt’s 1904 declaration that the US would “police” the Western Hemisphere, supposedly without territorial ambition but with the clear intent of monopolising intervention. From Cuba to the Dominican Republic, Guatemala to Chile, the Corollary became the moral fig leaf for American coups, invasions, and corporate extractions. Trump, Masko argues, sees himself as restoring that prerogative – a hemispheric sheriff cleaning up the neighbourhood after decades of liberal hand-wringing.
There is, however, a deeper irony in Masko’s framing. He presents Trump’s military buildup around Venezuela – F-35s in Puerto Rico, B-52s off the coast, CIA “covert” operations loudly proclaimed on television – as a return to historical normalcy, a reassertion of superpower swagger. But this conveniently ignores that America never really stopped intervening. From Plan Colombia to the Contra wars, from IMF leverage to trade sanctions, the methods simply evolved. The empire modernised; the mission never changed.
Masko paints Venezuela as a nation hollowed out by corruption, its military loyal only through fear and patronage, its once-mighty oil industry captured by criminal syndicates and foreign proxies. He’s not wrong — but he omits the pressure points that made reform or recovery almost impossible: the freezing of foreign assets, oil export bans, and a sanctions regime designed to collapse the economy under the banner of “democracy promotion.” The result is a country starving under siege, then blamed for its own starvation. It is the oldest of imperial tricks: break it, then call it broken.
The author is also curiously incurious about the demand side of America’s perpetual Latin drug war. He notes Trump’s pretext of “narco-trafficking” but fails to mention that the real market for those drugs lies not in Caracas or Bogotá, but in Chicago and Miami. As long as there is insatiable appetite and profit north of the Rio Grande, cartels will thrive no matter how many “suspect vessels” are blown out of the Caribbean. America’s own prohibitionary puritanism – the same logic that gave birth to Al Capone – continues to nourish the problem it claims to fight.
Masko’s analysis of Trump’s strategy does capture one key insight: the re-militarisation of hemispheric policy as a form of domestic theatre. Trump’s “Neo-Monroe Doctrine” is less about Venezuela per se and more about a symbolic restoration of dominance. It is the same playbook that guided the 1989 invasion of Panama, when Noriega — once Washington’s man in the canal zone – became inconvenient and was duly removed under the banner of anti-narcotics and democracy. The echo is unmistakable. Venezuela today serves as both scapegoat and proving ground: a chance for Trump to replay history, cast himself as the avenger of American sovereignty, and perhaps even seize a few oil fields in the process – though that, as always, is to be disavowed in polite company.
What Masko misses, perhaps by design, is the wider economic and ideological dimension. To call this merely an attempt to “seize Venezuelan oil” is too simple – Trump’s doctrine is more performative than acquisitive. It is about reasserting that the Western Hemisphere remains, in practice if not in name, America’s exclusive zone of influence, a region where Chinese investment and Russian advisors are not just economic competitors but existential affronts. In that sense, the “Neo-Monroe Doctrine” is less a new foreign policy than a nostalgic hallucination: the dream of a hemisphere restored to its “natural order,” where Washington’s word is law and the rest are junior partners or failed states.
And yet, the danger lies precisely in that nostalgia. Venezuela’s collapse – accelerated by sanctions and corruption alike – has left it a tinderbox of criminal fiefdoms and shattered institutions. Push too hard and you get not regime change but fragmentation. The military Masko describes as Maduro’s bulwark could just as easily splinter, leaving behind a patchwork of armed enclaves and foreign proxies – a Caribbean Libya with oil rigs.
Trump, Masko concludes, is signalling not just to Caracas but to the continent: the Roosevelt Corollary is back. America will once again “help its friends and hamper its foes.” Perhaps so. But the hemisphere has changed; the hegemon’s writ is no longer automatic. China, once a distant abstraction, now bankrolls half the region’s infrastructure. Russia, Iran, and Turkey are present in the margins. The Monroe Doctrine may have been written to keep Europeans out of America’s backyard, but the world has since moved into the neighbourhood.
What emerges, finally, from Masko’s piece is a portrait not of a coherent strategy but of imperial muscle memory – the reflex to intervene dressed up as rediscovered purpose. Trump’s “Neo-Monroe Doctrine” is at once a geopolitical manoeuvre and a campaign slogan: Make Latin America Great Again, or at least make it obedient again. The tragedy, as always, is that ordinary Venezuelans – impoverished, exiled, and exhausted – will pay the price for another American morality play performed for domestic applause.
Trump is coming for Venezuela
…John Masko, Unherd 24 October
America’s foreign policy appears to have been turned upside down. In the Middle East and Far East, which have consumed most of America’s defence planning energy over the last few decades, trade wars and diplomatic negotiations have replaced shows of military power. Meanwhile, the US is stockpiling both materiel and manpower off the shores of South America to a degree unseen in many decades.
As of this week, the US had positioned 10 F-35 fighter jets in Puerto Rico, along with three MQ-9 reaper drones. More than 4,500 Marines and sailors have taken up residence at US Southern Command in Miami, Florida. Last week, President Trump publicly announced that he was authorising CIA covert operations in Venezuela, and a group of B-52 bombers flew near Venezuela’s coast. More than five suspected drug ships, some originating in Venezuela, have been interdicted and destroyed by US forces over recent weeks.
To many in the foreign policy establishment, Trump’s fixation on squeezing Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro has been an enigma. He has justified the buildup on the grounds that Maduro’s regime harbours drug producers and distributors. But when Maduro has tried to satisfy Trump — even accepting planeloads of deported Venezuelan nationals from America — Trump has rebuffed him and redoubled US pressure. Perplexed analysts are asking: what exactly is Trump trying to achieve, if nothing Maduro can offer will please him? Where can this lead except to war or a humiliating walk-back?
This reveals a fundamental misunderstanding between the Trump administration and the foreign policy establishment. Rather than focusing on the near-term risks of war in Venezuela, Trump is asking a higher-order question: What is the point of being a superpower if you can’t stop your neighbours from sneaking deadly drugs and unapproved migrants across your borders?
In Trump’s understanding, security begins at home, and then extends to the near-abroad. When weak or corrupt leaders nearby threaten the stability of the US, they must be either forced to change their behaviour, or they must be replaced. This has not been US policy for several decades, but for most of the 20th century, it was. The name of this policy was the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. What Trump is signalling in Venezuela is that the Roosevelt Corollary is back.
President Theodore Roosevelt announced the Corollary in 1904 in his Annual Address to Congress. Since the presidency of James Monroe a century earlier, it had been American policy to oppose any new colonisation or subjugation of lands in the Western Hemisphere by European powers. Monroe’s policy did not, however, provide a road map for when European countries sent ships into America’s backyard to collect debts or fight wars, as occurred during the British, Italian and German blockade of Venezuela in 1902. Determined to keep European warships out of America’s near-abroad, Roosevelt declared that US policy would be to have a monopoly over policing power in the Western seas. He further declared that it was no longer the sole purpose of the Monroe Doctrine to keep Europe out of our near-abroad; the doctrine would also now be used to protect American interests more generally. He explained: “It is always possible that wrong actions toward this nation or toward citizens of this nation… may result in our having to take action to protect our rights; but such action will not be taken with a view to territorial aggression, and it will be taken at all only with extreme reluctance.”
During the ensuing decades, the Roosevelt Corollary was periodically called upon to reestablish order in Latin American war zones and to prevent the accession of regimes dedicated to, in Roosevelt’s words, “wronging” the US. The Corollary underlay the brief US occupation of Cuba, from 1906-1909, after the Spanish-American War, two occupations of the chronically unstable Dominican Republic, and support for the Contras against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. It also inspired the CIA-supported overthrows of Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz following his nationalisation of United Fruit Company lands, and of Chilean President Salvador Allende as he led that country’s mining-based economy into ruin. It was also behind America’s futile efforts — through an embargo, assassination attempts, and the failed Bay of Pigs invasion — to topple Cuban communist dictator Fidel Castro.
America’s failure to overthrow Castro, coupled with the relative untouchability of many Soviet-allied Latin regimes during the Cold War period, caused the Roosevelt Corollary to fall into disuse. The liberal internationalist order that followed the Cold War further discouraged the use of hard power to overthrow regimes hostile to American interests. But in 2025, the Trump Administration seems determined to bring it back.
Within the Roosevelt Corollary (or, as I’ve been told it’s referred to within the administration, “Neo-Monroe Doctrine”) framework, some of Trump’s harder-to-figure foreign policy actions begin to make more sense. One of these is the appointment of Cuban-American Florida Senator Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, which was perplexing alongside Trump’s more provocative foreign policy nominations of Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard. But when one considers Rubio’s knowledge of Latin America and his hawkish record on Latin American dictators in the context of the Roosevelt Corollary agenda, he fits perfectly.
Then there are Trump’s recent actions toward Argentina and Colombia, both of which would have seemed peculiarly drastic in past administrations, but represent a return to a Rooseveltian approach to doing business. For Argentine President Javier Milei, a libertarian friend of the US who faces a fiscal crunch at home, Trump recently structured a $40 billion loan package and floated a huge purchase of Argentine beef, much to the chagrin of American cattle ranchers. Colombian socialist President Gustavo Petro, on the other hand, faced a cutoff of all American aid (Colombia has received $14 billion in aid since 2000) due to his failure to address Colombian drug trafficking. In a Rooseveltian world, the President wields plenty of carrots and a big stick.
“What Trump is signalling in Venezuela is that the Roosevelt Corollary is back.”
In order to understand how Trump’s Roosevelt Corollary framework applies to Venezuela, we must first consider the state of the country today. Maduro’s Venezuela is a shambles by every possible metric: aside from its ruler’s personal security. Owing to a combination of mismanagement and corruption, Venezuela, once the wealthiest nation in Latin America, is now an economic basket case. Its economy is projected to contract by 3% this year, and inflation is at 682%. Venezuelan oil exports — the foundation of its economy — have declined by two thirds since 2012. As living standards and safety across the country have plummeted, nearly 30% of Venezuelans have left over the last 10 years, mostly for neighbouring Colombia, but many for the US (both legally and illegally).
Even with a hostile third of the country now gone, Maduro still received fewer votes for president than opposition candidate Edmundo González in last year’s election. While international organisations urged him to accept defeat, he declared victory and began a third term in office. Opposition leader María Corina Machado, whose exit polling efforts demonstrated that Maduro’s reelection was rigged, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to fight the regime.
Yet while Maduro may be the world’s least legitimate leader, his position within Venezuela is still secure. As centuries of Latin American history have shown, military loyalty is the single most important requisite for regime security in the region. And while Maduro may have little else, he has that. As the Wall Street Journal has shown, Maduro has successfully “surrounded himself with a fortress of lieutenants whose fortunes and future are tied to his”. He has done this by imprisoning or exiling the disloyal, while encouraging the loyal to accept patronage jobs in state-run companies or payoffs from drug-traffickers to allow their shipments to pass. The result is a military that is just as fearful for the personal ramifications of regime failure as Maduro is himself. And in case Maduro’s reign of blackmail were to fail, there are Cuban counterintelligence officials and other paid spies installed in the ranks to detect any hint of insurrection. According to Edward Rodríguez, a defected former Venezuelan army colonel, snitching is richly rewarded with “jobs, money, cars and even homes” in a country where much of the population cannot consistently afford food.
With the government preoccupied by personal security and self-enrichment, it will surprise few that much of the official territory of Venezuela (precisely how much is unknown) is no longer under government control. Much of western Venezuela is controlled by Colombian drug-running and human-trafficking organisations like the National Liberation Army. And much of southern Venezuela is given over to feuding megabandas or organised crime rings — most infamously the gang Tren de Aragua, recently designated a foreign terrorist organisation by the US. The megabandashave outposts in Venezuela’s major cities, and all around the world, including in the US. One reason for Venezuela’s declining exports is that large parts of its major extractive industries — particularly mining — have been taken over by criminal enterprises whose activities occur off the books. These organisations control territory in the Orinoco Mining Arc in Venezuela’s southeast, where many of their mines are located.
Since Trump’s pressure campaign, Maduro has pumped out propaganda to recruit a citizen militia that can bolster the country’s depleted military. According to the Wall Street Journal, “on state television, radio and social media, announcers are telling Venezuelans that the U.S. is a rapacious Nazi-like state that wants to dig its claws into the country’s oil wealth but that the Venezuelan military, the National Bolivarian Armed Forces, are positioning to repel any invasion”. Maduro’s army currently numbers about 125,000 — a combination of military regulars and new recruits, so many of whom are above typical military age that they have been dubbed a “Dad’s Army” in the British press. According to recent reporting, the army is underfed, under-resourced, and has suffered from a significant brain-drain due to Maduro’s loyalty tests. Maduro reportedly also plans, in the event of invasion, on having the support of Colombia’s National Liberation Army — the least it can do for Caracas’ salutary neglect of its drug and human smuggling (whether before or after he delivers to Trump his proof that there’s no drug trafficking in Venezuela, one can only guess).
For the US, this all adds up to a puzzle: the Maduro regime’s continued existence directly hurts American interests, but the regime has hollowed out Venezuelan society and institutions to such a degree that regime change will probably result in further chaos, and very possibly a civil war — outcomes that also hurt American interests.
Trump has likely still concluded that regime change would help the US, but that to be effective, the muscle behind it will need to come from inside Venezuela itself. His military buildup is therefore an effort to pressure fence-sitters inside Venezuela’s military and underground political opposition (a group that still includes Machado herself) to provide that muscle. Perhaps if military brass begins to see that the Maduro regime’s days are numbered, their calculus on how best to preserve their own lives and careers will shift. There is also an outside chance that a skirmish with US forces, and a glimpse of the untenability of his position, might convince Maduro to resign or flee.
For the time being, direct covert action against Maduro’s person seems to be off the table. Ironically, we know this because of Trump’s highly irregular decision to broadcast his authorisation of CIA covert action to the world — meaning it would no longer be, well, covert. Trump’s threat of covert action, rather, functions as a nuclear bomb of psychological warfare, ensuring that every night for the foreseeable future, Maduro dreams of exploding cigars. Far more likely is covert action that assists in forming and resourcing opposition parties or militias, as the US has done in past Latin American revolutions. Conventional military strikes on Venezuela are possible but would need to be provoked. Conventional forces could also be deployed in ungoverned spaces against drug-traffickers, further underlining the impotence of the Maduro regime.
Where the Trump-Maduro standoff goes from here is hard to know. But the reasoning behind the buildup is abundantly clear, and it goes far beyond Venezuela’s drug distribution or human trafficking. It is a signal to the world, and to Latin America in particular, that American policy toward the Americas has changed. More precisely, it’s changed back from a policy of salutary neglect to an active posture in which American interests are stridently defended. As in the days of the Roosevelt Corollary, America will help its friends and hamper its foes. If a Latin American regime harms American interests, and regime change will improve the situation, America will not hesitate to affect its overthrow.
Venezuela resonates particularly with the original purpose of the Monroe Doctrine, which was to preclude European incursion into American waters. Venezuela is a long-term strategic partner of China, which relies heavily on Venezuelan oil and offers economic and political support to Venezuela internationally. Even as Venezuela has descended into ruin over the last few years, it has continued to serve as a beachhead for Chinese influence in America’s backyard. Just as President Monroe’s original doctrine intended to keep hostile foreign interference far away from American waters, President Trump’s updated Monroe Doctrine can do the same for America’s 21st-century threats.
Trump is likely gambling on the fact that Maduro’s fall would be universally popular. The rest of the world has watched in horror over the last several decades as Maduro and predecessor Hugo Chávez plunged their country into poverty and chaos. This means that if US pressure results in Maduro’s overthrow, Trump’s new Roosevelt Corollary will start out in the win column in the court of international public opinion. Whether the US stays in that column as it addresses challenges in Colombia, Peru and Argentina, only time will tell.
John Masko is a journalist based in Boston, specialising in business and international politics.
Danger angel
Comes screaming through the clouds
She’s coming for your soul, child
She’s gonna take you down
Larkin Poe
Once in a while, In That Howling Infinite is attracted to “out there” larger than life identities, and, like mainstream and social media, gives them much more oxygen than they deserve. MAGA activist and provocateur Laura Loomer is one of those. Avatar and avenging angel, she is both symptom and symbol – the female face of Donald Trump’s politics of vengeance, fuelled by entitlement, envy, and zeal. shes turned grievance into influence, outrage into profession, loyalty into performance art. Some see her as comic relief; others, as proof that moral panic now pays. Either way, she’s the perfect child of her time – restless, theatrical, and forever online. Equal parts scandal, spectacle, and self-made legend, she’s the Right’s answer to the Left’s cancel culture: a one-woman inquisition armed with a smartphone and an inexhaustible sense of grievance.
We republish below Unherd editor and reporter James Billot’s article tracing the rise of this “hit woman” of MAGA politics, the scalps she has lifted, and the theatre of fear and fandom she inhabits. It’s an entertaining but nonetheless disturbing portrait of ambition, vanity, and the politics of outrage. Billot paints her as a digital Torquemada: part gossip columnist, part bounty hunter, part true believer.
As for the title of this piece, there is indeed a Ballad of Laura Loomer. It follows the précis.
Précis: A hit job on a ‘hit woman’
Danger angel Won’t listen to your prayers She’ll drink your holy water Slip into your nightmares There’s nothing you can give her That she hasn’t already got While you might think you’ve caught her You’ve blown your only shot, look out Danger Angel!
Loomer has made herself indispensable to Donald Trump not through proximity or power, but through her peculiar genius for weaponised outrage – the art of turning suspicion into spectacle. Her method is almost monastic in its discipline. For 16 hours a day, she trawls social media for ideological impurity – anyone in government who displays insufficient loyalty to the Great Leader. The sins are various: vaccine sympathy, a whiff of neoconservatism, a stray Black Lives Matter post. The punishment is swift. She “Loomers” them – posting their misdeeds to her 1.8 million followers, tipping off the White House, and waiting for the axe to fall. According to her, dozens have been purged at her prompting: an FDA vaccine chief, an NSA lawyer, a West Point academic, defence and security staffers, and even senior Trump appointees who thought they were untouchable. It’s research as blood sport.
Billot’s portrait is gleefully surgical: the self-declared “most banned woman in the world” living in a Florida rental with four rescue dogs and a livestream habit, railing against the “Big Tech” cabal that simultaneously victimises and enriches her. She’s banned by Uber, Lyft, Twitter (then reinstated by Musk), PayPal, GoFundMe, Facebook, Venmo, and Clubhouse. Each ban becomes a badge of honour, another stripe on her martyr’s uniform. She wears persecution like perfume — and sells the bottle for $29.99 on her website.
Loomer’s life is powered by thwarted ambition. She missed out on Dartmouth, lost two congressional races, and has been repeatedly blocked from a White House role. Yet each rejection feeds her legend. Her career began in the Project Veritas circus — dressing in a burqa to “expose” voter fraud — and evolved into a full-blown performance art of paranoia. She disrupted a Trump-themed Julius Caesar production in 2017, screamed about “violence against Donald Trump”, and became a Fox News darling overnight. She has accused Casey DeSantis of faking cancer, called Islam a “cancer on humanity”, and suggested that Parkland and 9/11 were staged. Apology, for Loomer, is treason.
She calls herself an “investigative journalist”, but the investigations are really moral witch trials – improvised, viral, and frighteningly effective. She boasts that cabinet secretaries call her in panic to explain themselves before her next blast. Even those who despise her respect her reach. Her Rumble show – part soapbox, part sermon brings in $15,000 a month and features the MAGA trinity of sponsors: hair loss, erectile dysfunction, and gold. It is populism as home shopping channel.
What emerges from Billot’s piece is a grotesque yet compelling portrait: a woman who believes fear is the measure of respect; who seeks validation from a man who will never truly give it; who builds empires of influence on foundations of resentment. She is both symptom and symbol — the female face of Trump’s politics of vengeance, fuelled by a cocktail of entitlement, envy, and zeal.
The article is, yes, a hit piece – but on a hit woman who has built her fame on delivering them. It is difficult not to admire, in a perverse way, her ferocious will, her talent for narrative manipulation, her intuitive understanding of the algorithmic age: how outrage, once properly branded, can become a career. And yet, one senses that when the spotlight shifts, she will be alone again — another pawn discarded once her usefulness fades. Like all propagandists, she lives by the flame she feeds, and it will consume her soon enough.
Step outside Billot’s irony and the picture of Laura becomes at once less cartoonish and more troubling.Academic analyses of the post-2016 MAGA media sphere – by researchers at George Washington University’s Programme on Extremism, the Oxford Internet Institute, and the Pew Research Centre – suggest that Loomer is neither a fringe eccentric nor an isolated provocateur but a structural feature of the ecosystem itself: an entrepreneur of grievance, feeding and fed by a self-sustaining outrage economy.Her claim to be “the most banned woman in the world” is the cornerstone of what political scientists call the martyrdom loop- censorship begets notoriety, notoriety begets income, income sustains further provocation.Studies by the Knight Foundation and NewGuard show that de-platforming frequently increases engagement among core followers; the sense of persecution becomes the product.She is thus less an aberration than a prototype: the logical child of a system that monetises moral panic.
Her success, such as it is, also mirrors the logic of the platforms themselves.Engagement-based algorithms on X, Rumble, and Truth Social reward moral extremity; the next post must out-outrage the last.Her “hits” against officials accused of ideological impurity exemplify what information-ethics researchers call punitive virality – online denunciation with real-world consequences.When civil-service careers collapse under these pile-ons, activism becomes indistinguishable from intimidation.Even conservative outlets such as the Washington Examiner have begun to note the irony: this is cancel culture re-engineered by its own supposed opponents, a revolution now devouring itself.
Sociologically, Loomer’s self-reinvention – cosmetic transformation, performative devotion to Trump, ritual declarations of loyalty – fits a broader pattern noted by scholars of the American right: women in hyper-masculinist movements often claim power by policing the boundaries of belief more fiercely than their male counterparts.She embodies that paradox of agency and subjugation, the inquisitor disguised as devotee.Feminist media critics see in her a parody of empowerment—the female enforcer of patriarchal purity tests, punishing deviation with theatrical zeal.
Factually, her record is less about fabrication than inflation.Independent checks by Reuters, AP Fact Check, and the ADL show consistent distortion and exaggeration, but rarely outright invention.Yet every correction, every ban, every supposed silencing, only reinforces her narrative of persecution.Communication theorists have observed this since the early Trump years: to her audience, refutation is proof that she must be right.Counter-speech becomes confirmation bias, feeding the myth of suppressed truth.
Politically, she operates in the zone that historian Timothy Snyder calls sadopopulism, a political strategy where leaders inflict pain on their followers to maintain power, combining sadism (pleasure from inflicting pain) and populism (claiming to represent the common people) in a way that manipulates and controls the populace through fear, anxiety, and division – there is always an “other” to look down on and pillory. In this way ,Snyder argues in his video (see below), America can be governed without policy and with pain.
Economically, she exemplifies the gigification of politics: a freelance inquisitor in the attention marketplace, thriving precisely because trust in institutions has collapsed. Psychologically, she is a practitioner of narcissistic moralism – the conviction that outrage itself is virtue. To dismiss her as a comic sideshow, as Billot half-invites us to do, is to miss the larger point: Loomer is not exceptional but emblematic. She is the distilled essence of a system that confuses virality with validity, noise with news, emotion with evidence. She is dangerous not for what she believes but for how effectively she has turned belief into business.Remove her and another will appear, promising to keep everyone on their toes – another entrepreneur in the endless market of grievance that now passes for public life.
The above commentary was composed in collaboration with ChatGPT
Laura Loomer – American activist and provocateur – rose from the fringes of the internet to become MAGA’s self-appointed scourge, a zealot in the age of algorithms.Armed with outrage, she turned “opposition research” into ritual sacrifice, serving her King with names from the digital pyre.But every court has its fool, every prophet her reflection; and when the storm subsides, only the glow of the screen remains.This ballad is her mirror – half elegy, half exorcism, part lampoon, part lament, a hymn for the saint of spite.
She was born again in the wild news feed Where the truth and thunder rhyme With a restless greed and an aching need To be trending one more time
“Fear’s the only faith I keep” she said “And respect is just for the weak” So she chased down the treasons fathoms deep In the wastelands of the Woke
Sing a song for Laura Loomer In the glow of her laptop’s light In the name of all unholy Raise a glass to the saint of spite
She courted the King with her venomous tongue Fed him names from her digital pyre He smiled and winked and the faithful sung And the fearful fled her fire
But kingdoms built on shifting sands Fade away like snow in June She mistook his fickle favour For promises carved in runes
Sing a song for Laura Loomer In the glow of her laptop’s light In the name of all unholy Raise a glass to the saint of spite
Her dogs keep guard in the Florida rain Her livestream hums in a world of blame Each post is a rosary bead of pain And each follower whispers her name
“I’m cancelled for telling the truth” she said Though that truth was over blown It rests with the ghosts of the posts that she made And the crown she thought she’d owned
So raise a glass to the saints of spite Who confuse the glare for grace For they’re the children of the night And are locked its wild embrace
Trump’s muckraker-in-chief wants to be feared
James Billot, Unherd, 11 October 2026
The famous Italian-American crime boss Frank Costello once said, “I’m a man who believes in the law. But I also believe in a little intimidation.” It’s a sentiment that Laura Loomer, MAGA’s most notorious activist-journalist, embraces with gusto. “It’s good to be feared because you have to keep people on their toes,” she says. “You’re not going to command respect otherwise.”
No one is feared more in MAGA world than Laura Loomer. She is Donald Trump’s unofficial muckraker-in-chief, a human-sized security wand who scans for political impurities in the government workforce. As she describes it, her job as an “investigative journalist” is to root out anyone disloyal to the President, be they bureaucrats, judges, or even cabinet secretaries.
Loomer does this by spending 16 hours a day, seven days a week, researching targets on the Internet. When she finds an incriminating piece of information — BLM support, vaccine promotion, or, worst of all, neoconservatism — she will push out the news to her 1.8 million X followers. She then presents it to the President, either in person or through his staff, and days later, that person is out of a job. They have been, as she modestly puts it, “Loomered”.
Once a Right-wing internet provocateur confined to the dark corners of the internet, Loomer now wields extraordinary influence in the White House. With near-unfettered access to the President — an informal adviser whose online crusades can make or break staff careers — she proudly declares that she has claimed over “four dozen” federal employee “scalps”, and expects “hundreds” more. These might be a “good metric” for success, but there is a more important measure in her eyes: validation from Trump, her peers, and the public.
Loomer’s life, though, has been characterised by disappointment: missing out on a spot at Dartmouth University (her father’s alma mater), narrowly losing a Congressional seat twice, and most recently being passed over for a White House job. Each loss has fuelled an enduring sense of injustice — that somehow the world owes her for her misfortune.
When I speak to her, she is seething with indignation. “I am the most underappreciated and undervalued journalist in America today,” Loomer tells me. “I don’t get the respect I deserve.” It is an interesting assumption from someone who has spent the better part of a decade stretching the bounds of what can be called “journalism”. Back in her college days, Loomer worked for Project Veritas, an activist group that uses sting recordings, stunts and entrapment to create bad publicity for its targets. On the day of the 2016 presidential election, Loomer arrived at a polling station dressed in a burqa and demanded a ballot under the name Huma Abedin. Her ballot was rejected, but the lesson stuck: outrage got attention.
Nine years on, her taste for controversy is undiluted. She has seized on national tragedies to advance her own political agenda and rarely, if ever, apologises when she is in the wrong. In September this year, shortly after a gunman killed four churchgoers in Michigan, Loomer claimed, “hate against Christians is widespread in places like Michigan because the entire state is being taken over by Muslims who refuse to assimilate”. The shooter later turned out to be a Trump-supporting Republican, yet Loomer stayed silent. And weeks before Charlie Kirk’s assassination, she labelled him a “charlatan” — a charge she stands by to this day.
Trump remains a fan, describing her as “a free spirit” and a “patriot”. She boasts that the pair of them chatted just a couple of weeks ago, but when I ask for details, she affects coyness, claiming she “doesn’t want to get into specifics”. This is the President after all. “I never ask him for anything,” says Loomer, “which is probably why he likes me so much.”
“She has seized on national tragedies to advance her own political agenda and rarely, if ever, apologises when she is in the wrong.”
Loomer’s devotion to the President is total. Her work, her weight (she lost 25 pounds to look “presentable” for him), and even her Mar-a-Lago face is shaped for Trump-appeal. But it took years of relentless campaigning, cheerleading, and provocative stunts for him to even notice her. In one memorable — and eerily prescient — example, Loomer disrupted a New York City production of Julius Caesar in 2017, in which Trump was reimagined as the titular character during his first term. Onstage, she screamed: “This is violence against Donald Trump! Stop the normalisation of political violence against the Right! This is unacceptable!” While Trump never publicly acknowledged the incident, it would be hard to imagine that he did not notice the subsequent widespread Fox News coverage.
Loomer revelled in the controversy that these stunts generated, and as her profile grew, so too did her notoriety. In 2017, she was banned by Uber and Lyft for complaining about a lack of “non-Muslim” drivers. Then, in 2018, Twitter banned her for attacking Ilhan Omar as “anti Jewish”, claiming that she was a member of a religion in which “homosexuals are oppressed” and “women are abused”. The bans kept coming, but she only grew louder and more provocative. By 2021, she had been barred from at least eight platforms — Uber, Lyft, Twitter, PayPal, GoFundMe, Venmo, Facebook, and Clubhouse — for hate speech and disinformation.
“I don’t know anybody else, aside from President Trump, who has been subjected to the level of deplatforming that I’ve been subjected to,” Loomer tells me with something akin to pride. She says this is why she failed to win her two Florida Congressional races in 2020 and 2022, despite Trump’s endorsement in the latter. “I was the first candidate in federal history that was completely denied all access to social media… I would have been the youngest woman ever elected to the United States Congress in US history had I not been silenced by Big Tech.” And the outrage-generation business clearly has benefits. On her website, where you can buy “Donald Trump did nothing wrong!” and “Forever Trump” T-shirts, a $30 book is on sale called Loomered: How I became the most banned woman in the world. Free speech martyrdom seems to have a few financial perks.
Her irritation has only deepened after the Supreme Court threw out her appeal this week against Big Tech over her bans — a case so weak that both X and Meta waived their right to respond (Elon Musk reinstated her in 2022). And she is indignant about her “stolen potential”. While she languished in Palo Alto purgatory, other Right-wing podcasters made their riches. “As a woman, you’re in your prime time in your twenties and thirties, so I wasn’t able to amass a fortune and build a media empire,” she says. “What’s so special about Ben Shapiro? He’s not breaking stories. He’s just commenting on the news. He’s Jewish, I’m Jewish. He’s conservative, I’m conservative. And yet, he has a company that is worth hundreds of millions of dollars.”
But nor was Ben Shapiro going around calling himself a “proud Islamophobe” and stating that Islam is a “cancer on humanity”. He wasn’t dressing up in Burqas to vote in presidential elections either. But Loomer breezes past these awkward facts. “I carry this resentment against Big Tech with me on a daily basis,” she says. “’I’ve had professional opportunities stolen from me, I’ve also had social opportunities stolen from me.”
Despite these bans, she still records a twice-weekly Rumble show that brings in around $15,000 a month. It is filmed in the spare bedroom of her Florida Panhandle rental apartment that she shares with her boyfriend and four rescue dogs. Each show runs for around three hours and features extensive, unscripted monologues on the “EXPLOSION” of Islamic terror in Britain, along with interviews with RFK’s so-called “Tylenol whisperer” and Camp Lejeune widows. They are part crusade, part carnival and part confessional; the only breaks come in the form of MAGA’s holy trinity of ads: hair loss, erectile dysfunction, and gold.
Her broadcasts are filled with a litany of familiar gripes. She is angry that she’s not a millionaire; angry that her work is overlooked; and angry that other journalists are deemed more respectable. “I know a lot of people who don’t even have anywhere near the following that I have — people who are kind of a joke — who have been given access to Air Force One,” she says. “It makes no sense.”
All the while, Loomer swims in a river of bitterness and entitlement. Her home is the command centre for what she describes as “opposition research”, where tips pour in about Biden holdovers, closet Leftists, and anyone she considers disloyal to the President. It is a craft she learnt from Roger Stone, her mentor and a longtime GOP operative who was sentenced to 40 months in federal prison during the Russiagate investigation in 2020. The 73-year-old made his name as the “original political hitman” by unearthing damaging (and sometimes fake) information about his political opponents. It turned him into an invaluable resource for not only Trump, but his Republican predecessors too.
Loomer’s approach to politics bears all the hallmarks of Stone’s skullduggery. She has weaponised opposition research and public pressure into tools which topple officials. During one particularly productive week over the summer, she claimed three “scalps”: the Trump administration ousted FDA vaccine chief Dr. Vinay Prasad, dismissed NSA General Counsel April Falcon Doss, and revoked Jen Easterly’s appointment as chair of West Point’s social sciences department — each decision coming shortly after her public attacks.
Loomer has also shown no hesitation in taking on even the most prominent figures in Trump’s cabinet. After attacking Pam “Blondi” for her handling of the Epstein files in July, a month later, she turned her sights on RFK Jr., claiming that he was plotting a 2028 presidential run. He denied the allegations, but what happened next was classic Loomerism: the pair made amends, with RFK meeting Loomer and announcing a plan to phase out animal testing — a cause close to her heart.
“Cabinet secretaries all try to have cordial relations with me because they’re scared of getting blown up,” she says when I ask whether she maintains contact with the administration. “So there’ve been a couple of times that I’ve had them call me and say, ‘Hey, I just want to explain what happened here’ because they’re worried about the backlash.” Are they frightened of her? “Well, my receipts are bulletproof,” she says. Was it the same with RKF? “We had a few conversations,” Loomer cryptically replies.
She will even criticise the President on rare occasions. Earlier this year, Loomer attacked Trump’s decision to accept a $400 million Qatari jet for Air Force One, calling it a “stain” on the presidency. And more recently, she threatened to pull her 2026 midterm vote when Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the US had approved the establishment of a Qatari Emiri Air Force facility in Idaho. “I cannot in good conscience make any excuses for the harboring of jihadis,” she posted. “This is where I draw the line.” “America could have been so great,” she followed up. “Now we will be a Muslim country. This must be what hell feels like.”
Given this power, why then, I ask, has she not been given a White House role, let alone a press pass? She claims that Trump has offered her a job four times, but White House staff have quietly blocked it on each occasion. “It’s professional jealousy,” she says. “President Trump’s staff who don’t like the fact he likes me… They just get high on their own power and don’t let me in.” She is, she insists, the victim of small-minded gatekeeping — a misunderstood ally whose loyalty is undervalued by the petty bureaucrats who feel threatened by her power. In Loomer’s eyes, she is utterly blameless.
But there is a danger here. As she recklessly burns through the administration, tying herself so closely to the fate and fortune of one man, with no formal role or official recognition, what, then, happens when he goes? She is left with no allies, no job, no platforms, no car rides — just scorched earth. For the first time, Loomer sounds uncertain. She pauses; introspection doesn’t come naturally. “By the time Trump’s out of office, I’ll be 36 years old. And by then, I’m going to have to start thinking about other things in life. So who knows whether I’ll be doing this forever.” And then she adds, with a straight face, “the Right-wing ecosystem has also become very toxic”.
Loomer, arguably more than anyone else in this sphere, has helped stoke that toxicity. Haranguing politicians with bullhorns, filming people without their knowledge or consent, and attempting to cancel public figures online represent the Right at its worst. These are gutter politics — and that’s before we flick through the long charge sheet of particularly “provocative” statements, including that the 2018 Parkland and Santa Fe high school shootings involved crisis actors; that Casey DeSantis, wife of then presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, exaggerated her breast cancer to boost her husband’s campaign; and that 9/11 was an “inside job”.
Our conversation revealed a woman who is a cocktail of festering resentment and entitlement, who will use any new connection for her own ends. She is the classic Trump pawn: deployed for as long as she is useful, and then discarded. The President will throw her a morsel of camaraderie from time to time, but it’ll never be more than that. She’s driven by this toxic frustration. It came as no real surprise when, a day after our conversation, she texted me a photo of “independent journalists” at the White House from Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt’s account. “No invite for me though.”
Loomer will inevitably be cast out — though she doesn’t seem to know it. “I don’t aggregate news, I create the news,” she says proudly. “The President has said that he sees my content and I’m pretty much followed by every single main White House staffer and cabinet member on X.” Her content extends far beyond X, but the poison that she helped to inject now courses through America’s body politic.
Trump’s Gaza Peace Plan: Spectacle, Strategy, and the Limits of Diplomacy
In late September 2025, US President Donald Trump unveiled a sweeping 20‑point peace plan for Gaza, accompanied by the familiar trappings of performance: the East Room of the White House, cameras flashing, a florid declaration of “eternal peace in the Middle East,” and a newly anointed “Board of Peace” with Trump as chair and Tony Blair as his deputy. On paper, the plan promises ceasefire, reconstruction, hostage releases, demilitarization, a staged Israeli withdrawal, and a technocratic administration in Gaza overseen by an international board. In practice, it reads as equal parts showmanship, improvisation, and coercive diplomacy, an audacious gambit with enormous potential benefits and equally enormous pitfalls.
For the Trump administration, the plan is a chance to rewrite the narrative: to isolate Hamas, reassert US influence in the Gulf, forestall further annexation of the West Bank, and offer Netanyahu a politically palatable off‑ramp from the brutal two‑year campaign in Gaza. For the international community — including the Arab Gulf states, Qatar, Jordan, Turkey, and Indonesia — it presents an opportunity to participate in a stabilizing initiative and to demonstrate relevance after years of watching humanitarian crises unfold from the sidelines. Yet beneath the pageantry lie structural asymmetries, enormous trust deficits, and profound omissions, particularly the conspicuous absence of the Palestinians themselves from meaningful negotiation.
In That Howling Infinite reserves its opinion in these early days. It’s the only show in town right now and it is generating interest and potential commitment by all those parties who would have to make it happen. There are already dissenting voices on all sides – the pro-Palestinian “progressive” left have been predictably dismissive of what is indeed an imposed solution to an intractable problem – although it would appear that there are many cooks in the kitchen other than Donald Trump and Binyamin Netanyahu. Some have even condemned it for its demand that Hamas, the instigator of the war, to surrender unconditionally. But at the end of the day, they have little to offer except more war and vitriol. You don’t use gasoline to put out a fire. The reality is that the parties that can make this happen, including providing the proposed security forces and the resources to rebuild the devastated enclave and rehouse and rehabilitate its homeless and harrowed people, appear at this stage to have signed on. Early days, but, to borrow from J Lennon, “all we are saying is give peace a chance”.
[The following analysis is the outcome of a conversation and collaboration between In That Howling Infinite and ChatGPT.
Screenshot
Mechanics of the Plan
The plan’s framework is deceptively simple:
Immediate Ceasefire and Hostage Exchange: Hamas must release all remaining Israeli hostages, alive or dead, within 72 hours. In return, Israel promises a staged withdrawal to a security perimeter.
Prisoner Release and Amnesty: Israel would release approximately 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, including those detained after the October 2023 attacks. Hamas fighters willing to renounce violence could gain amnesty; those choosing exile would receive safe passage.
Board of Peace and Reconstruction: A transitional authority, the so-called Board of Peace, would oversee governance and reconstruction, with Trump as chair and Blair as deputy. Aid delivery, infrastructure rebuilding, and the restoration of hospitals, water, electricity, and sewage would be managed under this international technocratic oversight.
International Stabilization Force (ISF): Western and Arab troops would replace Israeli forces in Gaza, ensuring security during reconstruction and the reestablishment of governance. The exact composition and mandate remain undefined, a critical gap given the operational risks.
Pathway to Palestinian Statehood: A vague promise of “conditions for self-determination” exists, contingent on PA reform, reconciliation between Gaza and the West Bank, and adherence to technocratic administration under international oversight.
On paper, it is a plan that offers incentives to every major party: Hamas faces conditional amnesty; Israel gains hostages, de-escalation, and security assurances; the Gulf states gain influence; and the PA is positioned to regain a governance role in Gaza. It is, in principle, a diplomatic masterstroke — if it can be implemented.
Gaps, Omissions, and Absurdities
Yet the devil — and much of the comedy — lies in the details not addressed:
Hamas Exclusion: The central conflict party, Hamas, was neither consulted nor invited. Trump openly admitted, “I have not dealt with them,” and proposed outsourcing the group’s compliance to Arab and Muslim mediators. The result is a coercive ultimatum dressed as a peace initiative: accept the terms or face complete annihilation with US backing.
Palestinian Agency Ignored: The two million Gazans whose lives are at stake had no seat at the table. Aid, reconstruction, and governance are treated as top-down deliverables, with no credible mechanism for local input. Gaza becomes a theatre set, not a living society.
Unclear Implementation: The ISF, Board of Peace, and PA reform mechanisms are vaguely defined. Who will command the stabilization troops? How will the PA be reformed to earn legitimacy in Gaza? What safeguards prevent reconstruction materials from being diverted to military purposes? These questions are unanswered, leaving enormous operational and political gaps.
West Bank Neglected: Despite daily settler-Palestinian clashes, the plan offers almost no operational framework for the West Bank. New settlements, such as the E1 project, threaten to fracture any contiguous Palestinian state. The plan’s silence on this is a glaring omission.
Asymmetry and Risk: The plan favors Israel far more than Hamas. The militant group is asked to surrender hostages and arms simultaneously, a leap of faith in a context of zero trust. The amnesty offer is conditional and uncertain; refusal triggers an existential threat. Israel, by contrast, faces comparatively modest obligations, particularly given the indefinite “security perimeter” it maintains.
Domestic Israeli Politics: Netanyahu’s right-wing cabinet, notably Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, remain uncompromisingly hawkish. Trump’s backing gives Netanyahu room to sell the plan domestically, but hardliners could sabotage implementation, and prior experience demonstrates Netanyahu’s readiness to resume military operations when politically expedient.
Performance Over Policy: The East Room spectacle was classic Trump: a reality-TV cadence applied to diplomacy. Grandiose claims of “eternal peace,” self-anointment, photo ops with global leaders, and theatrical references to “the ocean” Israel ceded in 2005 illustrate a plan heavy on optics and light on enforceable substance.
International Reception
The plan has drawn broad, if cautious, support:
Arab and Muslim States: Qatar, Jordan, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, and Turkey issued a joint endorsement emphasizing aid delivery, hostages, non-displacement, and the integration of Gaza with the West Bank under a Palestinian state framework.
Europe: Macron and Starmer endorsed the effort to secure hostages and reduce conflict.
Australia: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese welcomed the initiative as a constructive step, while opposition figures criticized Canberra’s earlier symbolic recognition of Palestinian statehood as performative and irrelevant.
Yet these endorsements are conditional and aspirational, recognizing the plan’s promise without committing to enforcement.
Perspectives of Israelis, Palestinians, and Activists
Israeli Public: Polls indicate two-thirds of Israelis want the war to end. The hostage release and cessation of bombardment offer tangible relief. Hardline right-wing factions, however, may resist compromises that limit continued Israeli military prerogatives. Indeed, the far-right, whose ethnic cleansing designs are explicit and who have driven so much of Netanyahu’s prosecution of this war appear to hate Trump’s plan: “a tragedy of leadership” and “an act of wilful blindness” in the phrase of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.
Palestinians: Exhausted by years of blockade and bombardment, Gazans desire immediate relief. But the lack of agency and the conditional, externally imposed nature of governance and reconstruction make the plan potentially resented as foreign administration rather than liberation.
Progressives and Activists: Pro-Palestinian advocates will likely view the plan skeptically. While it promises aid and reconstruction, it circumvents local agency, substitutes technocratic administration for democratic governance, and leaves Palestinian sovereignty largely aspirational. International human rights groups will monitor for coercion, displacement, and military overreach.
Political Theatre
The plan is an exercise in spectacle: Trump as self-styled savior, Netanyahu as pliant yet menacing partner, Palestinians and Hamas as props off-stage. The terminology — “Board of Peace,” “International Stabilisation Force,” “demilitarization” — evokes bureaucracy rather than genuine power-sharing. It is as much a political theatre as a policy framework, designed to satisfy domestic and international optics. In that sense, it is both brilliant and cynical: brilliant in its choreography of alliances and threats; cynical in its disregard for the lived realities of Gaza’s population.
Promise and Peril
Trump’s plan is audacious. It isolates Hamas, engages Gulf wealth, nudges Netanyahu toward tactical concessions, and offers a narrow window for reconstruction and peace. Yet structural asymmetries, zero trust, vague operational mechanisms, potential sabotage from hardliners, and the absence of Palestinian agency render it precarious.
If Hamas accepts, the plan could relieve immediate humanitarian crises, return hostages, and establish a technocratic administration capable of rebuilding Gaza — a diplomatic triumph in a region long starved of them. If it fails, it will cement perceptions of American theatre in place of effective policy, leaving Gaza’s suffering unresolved and occupation repackaged as transition.
And if Hamas actually accepts, and the plan moves ahead, what would happen if, having received the hostages, Israel simply decided to remain in Gaza, or refused to return Palestinian prisoners. Given how Netanyahu’s political survival depends on his far-right coalition partners, and given how clearly those partners want the war to continue and Israel to remain in Gaza, this is not remotely a fanciful scenario. And if it transpired, who aside from Trump could do anything about it? Netanyahu highlighted this feature of the plan for a reason: almost certainly as a signal to those far-right allies that they needn’t fear.
The plan is shot through with such difficulties. Netanyahu notes that Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza will be gradual and “linked to the extent of disarmament and demilitarisation” of Hamas. What happens if Israel decides progress on this is too slow and resumes bombing?
The deal envisages a technocratic Palestinian committee to provide day-to-day services, until the Palestinian Authority is adequately reformed. Who would be the arbiter of whether this has been satisfied? And more specifically, what would happen if Israel simply declared it hasn’t? Given this is the precursor to the possibility of the Palestinian state Netanyahu has always opposed, it’s again a perfectly likely scenario. Will some independent body resolve this?
All of this is a reflection of the fact that this is not a deal in any sense. No Arab nation was present at that press conference. The plan was developed with no discernible Palestinian involvement at all. Trump has declared there’s “not much” room for Hamas to negotiate terms, and that it had days to accept or “pay in hell”. The Arab and Muslim nations that welcomed this, and whose involvement will be crucial in it working, have set out conditions Netanyahu explicitly rejects and which the Trump plan doesn’t allow for, including that Israel withdraw fully from Gaza and commit to a pathway for a Palestinian state. Moreover, they want the Palestinian Authority to invite them to provide troops to stabilise Gaza so they aren’t seen as yet another occupying force. Trump’s plan provides for none of that.
The lesson is stark: diplomacy without inclusion, even when performed at the highest theatrical scale, is fragile. For now, the Board of Peace is more a symbol of hope than a guarantor of change — a test of whether spectacle can ever substitute for governance, and whether exhausted populations, international actors, and political opportunists will allow vision to overcome reality.
It is all down to will. The will of Hamas to accept its dismantling, when this has always been non-negotiable for it. The will of Netanyahu to end a war he has shown every interest in prolonging. The will of Trump to force Israel to abide faithfully by the plan, even where it’s politically inconvenient. The worry isn’t just that this seems unlikely on all fronts. That’s inevitable in such an intractable tragedy.
In short, the plan may well work; or it may simply provide another act in a two-decade-long tragedy, with Trump and Netanyahu as performers and Gaza as the stage.
US President Donald Trump’s twenty-point comprehensive peace plan for Gaza, published in full below, is a fascinating document – part fever dream of a “deal of the century,” part boardroom restructuring plan, part realpolitik ceasefire blueprint. And for Trump, yes – the dangling Nobel, the glittering carrot at the end of the labyrinth.
On paper it sounds almost seductively tidy: IDF withdrawal, Hamas stand-down, aid flowing, hostages returned in return for prisoners released, multinational security force, guns decommissioned, technocrats taking over, reformed PA, while a “Board of Peace” chaired by Trump (and perhaps Tony Blair in a cameo) ushers in a gleaming new Gaza.
In That Howling Infinite reserves its opinion in these early days. It’s the only show in town right now and it is generating interest and potential commitment by all those parties who would have to make it happen. There’ll be dissenting voices on all sides, but at the end of the day, they have little to offer except more war and vitriol. You don’t use gasoline to put out a fire. To borrow from J Lennon, all we are saying is give peace a chance”.
But, nevertheless, the gap between the paper and the ground is immense.
Here are some early observations:
Ambition vs. feasibility. The plan imagines simultaneous hostage exchanges, mass prisoner releases, Hamas disarmament, and international deployment – all within days or weeks. Each step is individually fraught; stacked together, the sequencing is almost fantastical.
Actors and trust. It assumes that Hamas will voluntarily surrender weapons and that Israel will trust an international stabilization force enough to withdraw, all while regional guarantors enforce compliance. None of these actors currently exhibit the trust or cohesion needed.
Power dynamics. The “Board of Peace” with Trump as chair feels less like neutral governance and more like a branding exercise. Palestinians, already wary of external control, would likely see it as another foreign trusteeship.
Statehood dangling. The plan holds out a “credible pathway” to Palestinian self-determination but keeps it conditional on reforms and compliance – carrot and stick politics that might prolong, rather than resolve, the status question.
Optics of ownership. The redevelopment language (special economic zones, “miracle cities”) reads like a Gulf mega-project transplanted onto a traumatised strip of land, risking the perception of Gaza as a real-estate venture rather than a society with its own political agency.
So, on paper, it is clever and comprehensive, giving something to everybody, and promising an imminent end to the destruction and carnage of the past two years. But in reality, it is almost impossible to realise without a fundamental shift in regional politics and in the balance of trust. It reads less as a near-term peace plan than as a campaign manifesto – designed to signal vision and dominance, to offer every constituency a glimmer of what they want, and to position Trump as indispensable even if none of it materialises.
What will the warring parties and outsiders take the plan?
This will depend less on the fine print than on who authored it, and on the political imaginaries each camp carries into the debate. A few likely responses:
1. Israel & Netanyahu
Netanyahu, ever the tactician, would welcome the optics: Trump is both his old ally and a political shield. “Deradicalised Gaza,” hostages back, no forced concessions on West Bank settlements—what’s not to like?
The Israeli right could live with it, because it leaves the question of Palestinian statehood indefinitely conditional.
Centrists and security hawks might applaud the ISF mechanism and U.S. guarantees, though the idea of foreign troops patrolling Gaza would make many nervous.
2. Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank
Gaza:
Immediate Relief vs. Distrust. Ordinary Gazans, exhausted by war and blockade, might welcome the promise of aid, reconstruction, and an end to bombardment. Rubble removed, water flowing, bakeries open—that is tangible.
But many will see it as conditional relief: they must surrender political agency, accept foreign trusteeship (“Trump’s Board of Peace”), and live under an imposed technocracy. To them, this may feel like a wardship, not a liberation.
Trauma & Pragmatism. After such devastation, some Gazans might pragmatically say, “we’ll take the deal, anything is better than this,” but the resentment toward outside control will simmer.
West Bank:
Deep Cynicism. Palestinians in the West Bank already regard the PA as corrupt and ineffectual, and many see U.S.-brokered plans as cover for Israeli expansion. The plan doesn’t address settlements, land seizures, checkpoints, or settler violence—all daily realities.
Result: West Bank Palestinians are likely to dismiss it as another charade – aid and optics in Gaza while the core occupation issue festers on their side of the Green Line.
3. Hamas and Its Supporters/Enablers
Hamas in Gaza:
Existential Threat. The plan effectively demands Hamas disarm, disband, or exile itself. For Hamas leadership, this is unconditional defeat in all but name.
Pragmatists vs. Hardliners. Some Hamas figures might toy with amnesty or safe passage, but for the movement’s core (military wing, ideological diehards), surrendering weapons = suicide.
Hamas Supporters in the West Bank:
They will frame the plan as capitulation and collaboration with occupiers. It hands Hamas a propaganda card: “see, the Americans and Israelis want to erase us.”
This could deepen West Bank radicalisation and further delegitimize the PA if it tries to administer such a deal.
Iran & Hezbollah: Will reject outright – it neuters their “Axis of Resistance”. They will continue funding and arming whatever underground or splinter groups emerge.
Qatar & Turkey: May hedge. They might support parts of the plan if it relieves humanitarian disaster, but not if it sidelines Hamas entirely.
Diaspora Palestinians & Pro-Hamas Sympathisers:
Many in exile view Hamas (however critically) as a symbol of armed resistance. For them, a Trump-blessed disarmament deal is betrayal dressed as peace.
Expect mass rejection from diaspora activists, especially in Europe and the Americas, where “Free Palestine” remains the rallying cry.
Net Effect
For Gazans: temporary relief but long-term discontent.
For West Bank Palestinians: scorn and dismissal.
For Hamas: existential rejection.
For Hamas’s backers: rejection, with potential escalation elsewhere (Lebanon, Syria, Red Sea) to keep the “resistance flame” alive.
In short, the plan may stop the bombs, but it does not resolve the politics. Gazans might sigh with relief; West Bankers will sneer; Hamas will fight on; its allies will sabotage; and the diaspora will rage.
3. Arab League & Regional States
Publicly, Arab governments (Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, UAE) would almost certainly bless the plan, because it ends the bloodletting, brings in money, and doesn’t force them to grapple with Hamas. Privately, they’d be wary: nobody relishes underwriting Gaza’s reconstruction while taking the blame for failed implementation. But in a rules-based, donor-heavy framework, they could sell it as Arab pragmatism.
4. Western Powers
Washington under Trump (and perhaps a Republican-leaning Congress) would present this as a masterstroke—“the deal no one else could deliver.” Europe would likely sigh in relief: anything that halts the war is better than nothing, and the technocratic language about governance and reform plays to EU ears. But the suspicion will linger: is this peace-building, or is it Trump building another gilded tower on scorched earth?
5. UN & International Institutions
UN agencies would leap at guaranteed humanitarian access, even under Trump’s “Board of Peace.” The problem: the UN is accustomed to being scapegoated, and here it would once again be implementing someone else’s design, while absorbing the failures if and when they come.
6. Progressives & Global Pro-Palestinian Activists
For many, this is a non-starter. It doesn’t dismantle the occupation, doesn’t guarantee sovereignty, doesn’t address the Nakba legacy – it freezes the conflict in a Trump-branded frame. They will dismiss it as paternalism dressed as pragmatism: Gazans are told to behave, hand over weapons, accept foreign trusteeship, and maybe, one day, statehood might be considered. For many progressives, and their Arab collaborators, the plan will probably not be enough. Though they’ve clamoured all along for a ceasefire, it’s not the one they wanted – a Free Palestine, and for some a Juden Frei Palestine “from the river to the sea”. Add the Trump factor: for progressives, he is the antithesis of credibility, and they abhor all he stands for. Even if the plan included a sovereign Palestinian state tomorrow, they’d likely distrust it as a Trojan horse.
7. The Subtext
The stark divide is this:
For state actors (Israel, Arab governments, Western powers), this looks like a workable ceasefire mechanism dressed up as reconstruction.
For non-state voices (Palestinian street, global solidarity movements), it looks like an elaborate cage, perhaps cleaner and better lit, but still a cage.
Netanyahu and the Arab League could sell it; the UN and EU could implement it; the U.S. could campaign on it; but progressives and much of Palestinian civil society will continue to shout: it’s not liberation, it’s management. And “management,” in the political imagination of the dispossessed, is simply another word for betrayal.
How will Donald Trump “sell” his “deal of the century “?
Trump’s political “genius” (and danger) is that he doesn’t need buy-in from the ground; he needs headlines at home and optics abroad. Here’s how the calculus lines up:
1. In the U.S. Domestic Arena
“The Deal Nobody Else Could Do.” Trump frames himself as the only leader who could stop the war, get hostages released, and bring aid trucks rolling in. The fact that Gazans or the diaspora are furious is immaterial – he’s selling to voters in Michigan, not in Khan Younis.
Optics of Strength. He casts the plan as disciplining Hamas (“they lay down arms or leave”) while also delivering humanitarian relief. That duality – tough but generous – is powerful on the campaign trail.
Nobel Peace Prize Theater. He doesn’t need to win it; he just needs to say he deserves it. The claim itself becomes part of his narrative of grievance and triumph.
2. Internationally
Israel: Netanyahu nods, Israeli centrists sigh in relief – Trump can present himself as Israel’s indispensable friend who also delivers quiet.
Arab League: Even tepid Arab League approval lets Trump boast: “I got the Arabs and Israelis on the same page.” That plays huge in diplomatic theater.
Europe: Brussels won’t love him, but the EU will be glad the bombs stopped. That’s enough for Trump to say, “they all lined up behind me.”
3. Against His Rivals
Against Biden/Democrats: He can taunt: “Biden let it burn, I brought peace.” Never mind the plan’s contradictions; soundbites are what matter.
Against Progressives: Their rejection of his plan – because it’s not liberation, because it has his name on it – becomes his foil. He’ll say: “They wanted chaos, I delivered peace, and they’re still angry.” That reframes them as radical spoilers.
4. The Spin Strategy
Even if Gazans accept aid but curse Trump, West Bank Palestinians reject it outright, Hamas refuses and Iran sneers, Trump still wins in the court of perception. He’ll point to convoys of aid, hostages walking free, and international press conferences flanked by Arab and Israeli leaders
For Trump, that’s success: not solving the conflict, but owning the narrative. He thrives on appearances of deal-making mastery, regardless of whether the underlying conflict is frozen, festering, or flaring again.
In other words: he doesn’t need the plan to work on the ground; he needs it to look like it worked just long enough. If later it unravels—well, that just proves others failed to sustain his deal.
A New Gaza governed by a New Palestinian Authority?
Trump’s plan waves vaguely toward a “reformed” Palestinian Authority (PA) as the eventual sovereign custodian of Gaza, but the devil lives in the details. The PA’s own house is famously messy.
Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority (PA) are deeply unpopular among Palestinians because they are seen as stale, corrupt, and complicit. Abbas has overstayed his democratic mandate – his presidential term expired in 2009, yet he still rules by decree. Elections have been repeatedly postponed, hollowing out legitimacy. The PA is plagued by corruption, nepotism, and inefficiency, with patronage networks benefiting a small elite while everyday life in the West Bank deteriorates under occupation.
Worse, many Palestinians view the PA’s security coordination with Israel as collaboration – protecting Israel from attacks but delivering little political gain in return. Add to that the lack of progress toward statehood, the failure to heal the Fatah–Hamas split, and an aging leadership out of touch with a restless younger generation. The result: a widespread sense that the PA is more interested in preserving its own survival than advancing Palestinian freedom.
So what are the prospects for cleaning out these Augean Stables?
Every credible roadmap to Palestinian self-rule (whether in US “peace plans”, Arab League proposals, or European policy papers) circles back to roughly the same cluster of reforms:
Governance & Legitimacy
Elections: The PA has not held national elections since 2006. Regular, transparent presidential and legislative elections – monitored by international observers – are the baseline for legitimacy.
Leadership Renewal: President Mahmoud Abbas is in his late eighties and is highly unpopular. A clear succession process and generational turnover are essential to avoid a post-Abbas vacuum.
Rule of Law: Independent judiciary, due process in security courts, and an end to arbitrary detentions.
Security Sector Reform
Professionalisation of Forces: Unifying and depoliticising security services, with recruitment based on merit rather than factional loyalty.
Accountability Mechanisms: Civilian oversight, parliamentary scrutiny, and credible disciplinary systems to curb corruption and abuses.
Monopoly of Force: Ending the proliferation of armed factions and militias under semi-official umbrellas.
Anti-Corruption & Financial Transparency
Audit & Oversight: Strengthening the Palestinian Anti-Corruption Commission and ensuring regular public audits of ministries and security budgets.
Revenue Management: Transparent tax collection and spending, including reforms to the “clearance revenue” system Israel currently controls.
Private-Sector Safeguards: Modern procurement laws and independent regulators to reduce crony capitalism.
Institutional Consolidation
West Bank–Gaza Integration: Building unified administrative structures so that a future Gaza administration is not a parallel mini-state.
Service Delivery: Reliable health, education, and municipal services that reduce dependence on patronage networks.
Civil Society Engagement: Empowering NGOs and trade unions to act as watchdogs.
How Could This Be Realised?
External Leverage
Conditional Aid: The EU, U.S., and Gulf donors can tie financial support to measurable governance benchmarks (audits, election timelines, security milestones).
Arab Sponsorship: Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE can provide both funding and political cover, helping broker intra-Palestinian reconciliation and mediating with Israel.
Internal Dynamics
Generational Change: A younger cohort of Fatah leaders and technocrats—already impatient with the old guard—must be empowered through credible elections.
Reconciliation with Hamas: Without some power-sharing or security arrangement, reform in the West Bank alone will not translate into legitimate rule in Gaza.
Israeli Role
Movement & Access: Reforms are impossible if Israel continues to restrict travel, tax revenue, and trade. Donors will demand at least tacit Israeli cooperation.
Security Coordination: A reformed PA security force must convince Israel that it can prevent attacks without being perceived domestically as a subcontractor for occupation.
Sustainability
Economic Viability: Reforms will collapse without a functioning economy—investment, trade corridors, and reliable tax revenue are oxygen.
Public Buy-In: Palestinians must see tangible improvements (jobs, mobility, basic freedoms) or reforms will be dismissed as foreign diktats.
Political Horizon: Even the best technocracy cannot survive perpetual occupation. A credible path to sovereignty—however distant—must accompany reforms to give them meaning.
In short, the PA must become a transparent, accountable proto-state while operating under occupation and facing a rival government in Gaza. It is a Sisyphean task, but not impossible if external actors (Israel included) provide real incentives, if donors enforce conditionality with patience, and if a younger Palestinian leadership can seize the moment. Without those three legs – international pressure, internal renewal, and a political horizon – the reform talk remains another Nobel-baiting paragraph in a White House press release.
[The above commentary and hypothetical is a the outcome of a conversation and collaboration between In That Howling Infinite and ChatGPT. The following list is the real deal]
Screenshot
Trump’s 20-point plan to end the war in Gaza:
Deradicalisation & Security – Gaza will be a deradicalised, terror-free zone that does not pose a threat to its neighbours.
Redevelopment for Gazans – Gaza will be redeveloped for the benefit of the people of Gaza, who have suffered more than enough.
Immediate Ceasefire & Withdrawal – If both sides agree to this proposal, the war will immediately end. Israeli forces will withdraw to the agreed-upon line to prepare for a hostage release. During this time, all military operations, including aerial and artillery bombardment, will be suspended, and battle lines will remain frozen until conditions are met for the complete staged withdrawal.
Hostage Return – Within 72 hours of Israel publicly accepting this agreement, all hostages, alive and deceased, will be returned.
Prisoner Exchange – Once all hostages are released, Israel will release 250 life-sentence prisoners plus 1,700 Gazans detained after October 7th, 2023 (including all women and children detained in that context). For every Israeli hostage whose remains are released, Israel will release the remains of 15 deceased Gazans.
Hamas Amnesty & Exit – Once all hostages are returned, Hamas members who commit to peaceful co-existence and to decommissioning their weapons will be given amnesty. Members of Hamas who wish to leave Gaza will be provided safe passage to receiving countries.
Immediate Humanitarian Aid – Upon acceptance of this agreement, full aid will be immediately sent into the Gaza Strip, at minimum matching the quantities specified in the January 19, 2025 agreement, including infrastructure rehabilitation (water, electricity, sewage), hospital and bakery repairs, and equipment to remove rubble and open roads.
Uninterrupted Aid Channels – Entry and distribution of aid in Gaza will proceed without interference from either party through the United Nations, the Red Crescent, and other neutral international institutions. Opening the Rafah crossing in both directions will follow the same mechanism as in the January 19, 2025 agreement.
Transitional Governance – Gaza will be governed by a temporary technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee responsible for daily public services, supervised by a new international transitional body, the Board of Peace, chaired by President Donald J. Trump with other members and heads of state (including former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair) to be announced. This body will manage funding and redevelopment until the Palestinian Authority completes its reform program and can securely take control.
Trump Economic Development Plan – A Trump-led economic development plan will convene experts who have helped build thriving Middle Eastern cities, synthesizing security and governance frameworks to attract investment and create jobs, opportunity, and hope in Gaza.
Special Economic Zone – A special economic zone will be established with preferred tariff and access rates to be negotiated with participating countries.
Freedom of Movement – No one will be forced to leave Gaza. Those who wish to leave will be free to do so and free to return. People will be encouraged to stay and build a better Gaza.
Demilitarization & Monitoring – Hamas and other factions will have no role in Gaza’s governance. All military, terror, and offensive infrastructure—including tunnels and weapons production—will be destroyed and not rebuilt. An independent, internationally funded buy-back and reintegration program will oversee the permanent decommissioning of weapons, verified by independent monitors.
Regional Security Guarantee – Regional partners will provide guarantees to ensure that Hamas and other factions comply with their obligations and that “New Gaza” poses no threat to its neighbors or its own people.
International Stabilization Force (ISF) – The United States will work with Arab and international partners to develop a temporary ISF to immediately deploy in Gaza. The ISF will train and support vetted Palestinian police, consult with Jordan and Egypt, help secure border areas, prevent munitions smuggling, and facilitate the rapid and secure flow of goods to rebuild Gaza. A deconfliction mechanism will be agreed upon.
Israeli Withdrawal – Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza. As the ISF establishes control and stability, the Israeli military will withdraw based on standards, milestones, and timeframes linked to demilitarization, progressively handing over Gaza to the ISF and transitional authority until complete withdrawal (except for a temporary security perimeter).
Partial Implementation if Hamas Refuses – If Hamas delays or rejects the proposal, the plan—including scaled-up aid—will proceed in the terror-free areas handed over from the Israeli military to the ISF.
Interfaith Dialogue – An interfaith dialogue process will be established to promote tolerance and peaceful coexistence, aiming to change mindsets and narratives among Palestinians and Israelis by highlighting the benefits of peace.
Path to Palestinian Statehood – While Gaza’s redevelopment advances and Palestinian Authority reforms are implemented, conditions may emerge for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood, recognized as the aspiration of the Palestinian people.
U.S.-Brokered Political Horizon – The United States will establish a dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians to agree on a political horizon for peaceful and prosperous coexistence.
“All wars come to an end and that’s where history restarts”
“History stretches out into the future as well as the past”
“All wars may end in negotiations, but not all negotiations end wars”
The indefatigable British journalist, author, and longtime Beirut resident Robert Fisk Robert Fisk died of a stroke in St Vincent’s Hospital, Dublin, on October 30, 2020. He was 75. Fearless and inquisitive, often iconoclastic and controversial, “Mister Robert,” as he was known from Algeria to Afghanistan, was one of the finest journalists of his generation—the greatest reporter on the modern Middle East. There is probably no better body of work for understanding the region. Respected and reviled in equal measure by left and right alike, Fisk spoke truth to power for more than half a century.
He was obsessive, he was angry, and – having read many of his books – I believe he suffered from undiagnosed PTSD throughout his career in the Middle East. His lifelong obsessions were the arrogance and misuse of power, the lies and impunity of the rulers: presidents and prime ministers, kings and emirs, dictators and theocrats, torturers and murderers. And always the countless innocents who endured and suffered, dying in their tens – and tens – of thousands on the altar of power and greed.
The Night of Power
His last book, The Night of Power: The Betrayal of the Middle East, published posthumously in 2023, takes up where his monumental The Great War for Civilisation (2005) ended—with the contrived U.S.-British-Australian invasion of Iraq. The Great War for Civilisation was a tombstone of a book, literally and figuratively, as was its predecessor Pity the Nation (1990), his definitive history of the Lebanese civil war.
The Night of Power is no less harrowing, covering the occupation of Iraq, the 2006 Israel–Lebanon war, the Arab Spring, the rise of Egypt’s new pharaoh Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the lonely death of Mohammed Morsi, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and seize of Gaza, and the Syrian civil war. It ranges widely – but its coherence lies in Fisk’s unrelenting theme: the cycle of war, the corruption of power, and the persistence of memory. To read it is to feel Fisk’s own cynicism, sadness and anger.
The title is deeply symbolic. In Islamic tradition, Laylat al-Qadr, the Night of Power, is the night the Qur’an was first revealed to the Prophet Muhammad: “The Night of Power is better than a thousand months … Peace it is, until the rising of the dawn” (Qur’an 97). It is a night of blessing beyond measure, greater than a lifetime of devotion. The title is bitterly ironic: the “night of power” he recounts is one of betrayal, cruelty, and endless war.
It is both a summation of his life’s work and a testament to his method. Over four decades, Fisk was a witness to almost every major conflict in the Middle East — Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Algeria, Afghanistan, Syria, Egypt — and the wars of the Yugoslav succession. His dispatches carried both forensic detail and moral outrage. This last work, published in the year of his death, is less a memoir than a vast chronicle of empire, war, betrayal, and resistance.
Fisk had long insisted that reporters must “be on the side of those who suffer.” He was no neutral stenographer of official sources. He distrusted governments – Western and Arab alike – and prized first hand testimony, walking the ruins, speaking to survivors, writing down the words of the powerless. The Night of Power continues in this vein, but with a sharpened sense of history. Fisk threads together centuries of conquest and resistance, showing how imperial arrogance, local despotism, and religious zealotry have conspired to devastate the region.
The last two paragraphs Robert Fisk wrote before his death, closing The Night of Power, cut like a blade through the pieties of Western journalism:
“Failure to distinguish between absolute evil, semi-evil, corruption, cynicism and hubris produced strange mirages. Regimes which we favoured always possessed ‘crack’ army divisions, ‘elite’ security units, and were sustained by fatherly and much revered ruling families. Regimes we wished to destroy were equipped with third-rate troops, mutineers, defectors, corrupt cops, and blinded by ruling families. Egypt with its political prisoners, its police torture and fake elections, was a tourist paradise. Syria with its political prisoners, police torture and fake elections, would like to be. Iran, with its political prisoners, police torture and fake elections was not — and did not wish to — be a tourist paradise.” (p. 533)
In the end, according to those closest to him, including his wife Nelofer Pazira-Fisk, an award-winning Afghan-Canadian author, journalist and filmmaker, who edited the book and wrote its final chapter, Fisk despaired. He feared that nothing he had written over four decades had made any difference – that things had, in fact, grown worse. As Kent says to the blinded King Lear, “All is cheerless, dark, and deadly”.
And yet the worst was arguably still to come: the chaotic retreat of America and its allies from Afghanistan and the Taliban’s reimposition of rule, including the literal silencing of women’s voices; Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its murderous war of attrition that has now passed its thousandth day; Hamas’s atrocity of October 7, 2023, Israel’s biblical-scale revenge, and the utter destruction of Gaza; and the latest Israel–Lebanon war that saw the decapitation and emasculation of Hezbollah.
The Legacy of a Fearless Reporter
The Night of Power stands as a testament to Robert Fisk’s fearless journalism and his relentless moral compass. Across decades of war reporting, Fisk bore witness to suffering few dared to confront. He was unflinching in exposing the hypocrisies of Western powers, the brutality of dictators, and the costs of occupation, war, and empire. Yet he also captured the human dimension: the courage, endurance, and resilience of those who suffered, whether in Iraq, Gaza, Egypt, or Syria.
This final work synthesizes Fisk’s signature qualities: exhaustive research, direct engagement with the people whose lives were upended, and an ethical rigor that held both oppressors and complicit outsiders accountable. The Night of Power is not merely a chronicle of events; it is a meditation on power, betrayal, and history itself.
Fisk’s prose, vivid and often lyrical, reminds readers that journalism can be a form of witness — bearing truth against overwhelming odds. Even in despair, he recognized the persistence of human agency, the cycles of history, and the moral imperative to see, to name, and to remember. His death in 2020 marked the end of a career unparalleled in courage and conscience, but his work, particularly this last book, endures as both a warning and a guide for understanding the Middle East and the forces that shape our world.
In reading The Night of Power, one cannot avoid Fisk’s central lesson: history may restart at the end of every war, but the witness to injustice is what shapes the moral memory of humanity. The quotations at the head of this review, indeed, the final words of the book, weary yet resolute, are a fitting epitaph. Fisk saw the world as it was, not as we wished it to be: corrupt, cruel, but always turning, always restarting.
All wars come to an end and that’s where history restarts
Robert Fisk, The Night of Power
Postscript
The final chapter of The Night of Power was written by Fisk’s wife Nelofer Pazira-Fisk, She was based in Beirut for fifteen years working alongside her late husband and reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, Turkey, Egypt and Syria. The following podcast by American war correspondent Chris Hedges, with Fisk’s first wife Lara Marlowe is a worthy tribute .
The following briefly summarizes the main themes of The Night of Power drawing largely upon his own words
Robert Fisk’s Catalogue of Carnage
Hear the cry in the tropic night, should be the cry of love but it’s a cry of fright Some people never see the light till it shines through bullet holes
Bruce Cockburn, Tropic Moon
Iraq: Catastrophe Foretold
Fisk argued that Iraq’s occupation was fraudulent from the start, brutal in execution, and ferocious in its response to insurgency. The Americans tolerated the inhuman behaviour of their own soldiers, relied on mercenaries and “greedy adventurers,” and mixed Christian religious extremism with an absurd political goal of “remaking the Middle East.” It was “tangled up in a web of political naivety and Christian muscularity”.It was bound, he wrote, to end in catastrophe.
“We were pulling at the threads of the society with no sense of responsibility as occupiers just as we had no serious plans for state reconstruction. Washington never wanted Iraq’s land. Of course the countries resources were a different matter, but its tactics did fit neatly into the prairies of the old West. The tribes could be divided and occupiers would pay less in blood. as long as they chose to stay. One set of tribes were bought off with guns and firewater the other with guns and dollar bills. Serious resistance, however, would invoke “the flaming imperial anger” of all occupation armies.
The rhetoric echoed the 19th century missionary zeal of empire. Western fascination with the Biblical lands was used to justify conquest: as Lieutenant General Stanley Maude told the people of Baghdad in 1917, the Allies wished them to “prosper even as in the past when your ancestors gave to the world Literature, Science, and Art, and when Baghdad city was one of the wonders of the world” (p. 92).
The modern occupation, Fisk observed, was nothing but “the rape of Iraq”. Oil wealth was divided up in a scandal of corruption involving US contractors and Iraqi officials. “The costs were inevitably as dishonest as the lies that created the war … I knew corruption was the cancer of the Arab world but I did not conceive of how occupying Power supposedly delivering Iraqi their long sort freedom could into a mafia and at such breathtaking speed”.
Security became a malignant industry; by 2006 mercenaries accounted for half of Western forces, sucking money out of the country. The food system, 10,000 years old, was destroyed by Paul Bremer’s infamous Order 81, which forbade farmers from saving their own seed. Iraq became a “giant live laboratory for GMO wheat,” its people “the human guinea pigs of the experiment”.
And through it all, a campaign of suicide bombings – unprecedented in scale – turned Iraq into the crucible of modern terror. Editors never tried to count them. The figures, Fisk noted, were historically unparalleled.
The trial of Saddam Hussein
The US ambassador to Iraq once claimed she had been “unable to convince Saddam that we would carry through what we warned we would.” Fisk dismissed this as absurd. Saddam, he argued, was well aware of Western threats, but the framing of his trial was designed to obscure deeper truths.
If Saddam had been charged with the chemical massacre at Halabja, defence lawyers could have pointed out that every US administration from 1980 to 1992 was complicit in his crimes. Instead, he was tried for the judicial murder of 148 men from Dujail — heinous, but “trifling in comparison” (p. 92). The great crimes of the Baathist regime — the 1980 invasion of Iran, the suppression of Shia and Kurdish revolts in 1991 — were deemed unworthy of the court’s attention.
Pakistan: Fragile State, Useful Pawn
Fisk’s lens widened to Pakistan, where he recorded with scorn the ISI’s admission that the reality of the state was defined not by American might but by “corrupt and low-grade governance”. A US intelligence officer boasted: “You’re so cheap … we can buy you with a visa, with a visit to the US, even with a dinner.”
This, Fisk suggested, was not just Pakistan but almost every Arab or Muslim state in thrall to Washington: Egypt, Jordan, Syria, the Gulf states under their dictators and kings, even Turkey. He wrote that Osama Bin Laden’s choice to hide in Pakistan embodied a weird symmetry: the man who dreamed of a frontierless caliphate sought refuge in the very sort of corrupt, Western-backed dictatorship he despised.
Rendition: Complicity in Torture
The “war on terror” extended beyond borders. CIA, MI5 and MI6 operatives were deeply involved in rendition. Prisoners were knowingly dispatched to states where torture was inevitable, even fatal. Fisk insisted on repeating this uncomfortable truth: Western democracies had integrated torture into their security architecture.
Israel and Palestine: The Last Colonial War
Fisk was unsparing in his treatment of Israel’s expansion. He rejected any obfuscation: Israel seized the opportunity to consolidate its control with a land grab for the most prominent hilltops and the most fertile property in the West Bank for settlements constructed on land legally owned for generations by Arabs, destroying any chance the Palestinian Arabs could have a viable state let alone a secure one.”). These settlements, he wrote, “would become the focus of the world’s last colonial war.”
He surmised: “Will the Jews of what was Palestine annex the West Bank and turn its inhabitants into voteless guest workers and all of mandate Palestine into an apartheid state? There was a mantra all repeat that only other way to resolve Israeli rule in the West Bank would be a transfer of the Palestinians across the Jordan into the Hashemite kingdom on the other side of the river. In other words, expulsion”
The Wall
Fisk’s Fisk’s description of the Separation Wall is dramatic and unforgettable: an “immense fortress wall” which snakes “firstly around Jerusalem but then north and south of the city as far as 12 miles deep into Palestine territory, cutting and escarping its way over the landscape to embrace most of the Jewish colonies … It did deter suicide bombers, but it was also gobbled up more Arab land. In places it is 26 feet or twice the height of the Berlin wall. Ditches, barbed wire, patrol roads and reinforced concrete watchtowers completed this grim travesty of peace. But as the wall grew to 440 miles in length, journalists clung to the language of ‘normalcy’ a ‘barrier’ after all surely is just a pole across the road, at most a police checkpoint, while a ‘fence’ something we might find between gardens or neighbouring fields. So why would we be surprised when Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlisconi, traveling through the massive obstruction outside Bethlehem in February 2010 said that he did not notice it. But visitors to Jerusalem are struck by the wall’s surpassing gray ugliness. Its immensity dwarfed the landscape of low hills and Palestinian villages and crudely humiliated beauty of the original Ottoman walls Churches mosques and synagogues .. Ultimately the wall was found to have put nearly 15% of West Bank land on the Israeli side and disrupted the lives of a third of the Palestine population. It would, the UN discovered, entrap 274,000 Palestinians in enclaves and cut off another 400,000 from their fields, jobs, schools and hospitals. The UN concluded that many would “choose to move out.” Was that the true purpose?“.
Leftwing Israeli journalist Amira Haas, who lives in the West Bank, takes Fisk on a tour of the wall: “Towering 26 feet above us, stern, monstrous in its determination, coiling and snaking between the apartment blocks and skulking in wadis and turning back on itself until you have two walls, one after the other. You shake your head a moment – when suddenly through some miscalculation surely – there is no wall at all but a shopping street or a bare hillside of scrub and rock. And then the splash of red, sloping rooves and pools and trees of the colonies and yes, more walks and barbed wire fences and yet bigger walls. And then, once more the beast itself, guardian of Israel’s colonies: the Wall”.
Although Oslo’s creators fantasied that it would become part of the Palestinian state, Gaza’s destiny was isolation. It has been a junkyard of history variously ruled by Christians and Muslims, ruined and rebuilt under the Ottomans, and fought for by the British and Turks in the First World War, and now reduced to a prison state.,
Egypt: A Revolution Betrayed
Mohammed Morsi embodied both hope and tragedy. “An intelligent, honourable, obtuse, arrogant and naïve man”. No visionary, he was “was shambolic, inspiring, occasionally brutal and very arrogant”. He set off down the road to Egyptian democracy with no constitution no parliament and no right to command his own countries army …set off down the road to democracy “with no constitution, no parliament and no right to command his own country’s army”. And when the end came, as come it must, he could not smell trouble; he did not see what was coming.
In a coup that was not a coup, which former British prime minister Tony Blair called “an awesome manifestation of power”, “the democratically elected president was suspended, the constitution annulled, tekevion stations closed, the usual suspects arrested … Yet President Obama could not bring himself to admit this. He asked the Egyptian military “to return full authority back to a democratically elected civilian government… Through an inclusive and transparent process” without explaining which particular elected civil civilian government he had in mind”.
This was just the beginning. In the six years that followed, Egypt’s executioners and jailers were kept busy. “They hung 179 men, many of them tortured before confessing to murder, bomb attacks or other acts of terrorism”. It was claimed that Al Sisi had returned the country to a Mubarak style dictatorship in the seven years of his own war against the brotherhood between 1990 and 1997. Mubarak’s hangman had executed only 68 Islamists and locked up 15,000. By 2019 Al Sisi had 60,000 political prisoners
To Fisk, this was a sign of fear as much as it was evidence of determination to stamp out terror. Al Sisi had three separate conflict on his hands: his suppression of the brotherhood on the ground that they were themselves violent terrorists, the campaign by Islam extreme groups against Egypt’s minority Christian cops, and most frightening of all the very real al Qaeda and ISIS war against Al Sisi’s own regime. “The prisons of the Middle East, Fisk concluded, were “universities for future jihadi”.
The misogyny if the counterrevolution was stark. Fisk wrote: “… if the senior officers wished to prune the branches of the revolution the participation of women was something that could not be tolerated. Why did there suddenly occur without apparent reason a spate of sexual attacks by soldiers that were clearly intended to frighten young women off the street, revealing a side to the Egyptian military that none of us had recognised. The misogynistic and shocking display of brutality towards women that could not have been the work of a few indisciplined units”. With sexual assaults on women protesters, virginity tests and public humiliation, “heroes of the 1973 war had become molesters”.
The lonesome death of Muhammad Morsi
Morsi would struggle on for years before a series of mass trials would entrap him and his brotherhood colleagues and quite literally exhaust him to death. Morsi’s slow death in solitary confinement was, Fisk insisted, “utterly predictable, truly outrageous and arguably a case of murder”. He was denied treatment, denied family visits, denied a funeral. “To die in a dictator’s prison, or at the hands of a dictator’s security services”, Fisk wrote, “is to be murdered.”
It did not matter, he continued “if it was the solitary confinement, the lack of medical treatment or the isolation, or if Morsi had been broken by the lack of human contact for those whom he loved. “The evidence suggested that Morsi’s death must’ve been much sought after by his jailers, his judges, and the one man in Egypt who could not be contradicted. You don’t have to be tortured with electricity to be murdered”.
Fisk’s description of Morsi’s death is a sad one. “Symbolism becomes all”, he wrote. “The first and last elected president of a country dies in front of his own judges and is denied even a public funeral. The 67-year-old diabetic was speaking to the judges, on trial this time for espionage, when he fainted to the floor. Imagine the response of the judges when he collapsed. To be prepared to sentence a man to the gallows and to witness him meeting his maker earlier than planned must’ve provoked a unique concentration of judicial minds. could they have been surprised groups had complained of Morsi’s treatment for the world media and the world had largely ignored the denunciations. What might have been surprising to his judges was that he managed to talk for five minutes before he departed the jurisdiction forever?”
Regarding Russia’s critical intervention in the Syrian civil war, Fisk wrote:
“We Westerners have a habit of always looking at the Middle East through our own pious cartography, but tip the map 90° and you appreciate how close Syria is to Russia and its Chechen Muslim irredentists. No wonder Moscow watched the rebellion in Syria with the gravest of concern. Quoting Napoleon, who said “if everyone wants to understand the behaviour of a country, one has to look at a map”, my Israeli friend (the late) Uri Avnery wrote that “geography is more important than ideology, however fanatical. Ideology changed with time”.
The Soviet Union, he continued was most ideological country in the 20th century. “It abhorred it predecessor, Tsarist Russia. It would have abhorred its successor, Putin‘s Russia. But Lo and behold – the Tsars, Stalin and Putin conduct more or less the same foreign policy. I wrote that Russia is back in the Middle East. Iran is securing its political semicircle of Tehran, Baghdad Damascus, and Beirut. And if the Arabs – or the Americans – want to involve themselves, they can chat to Putin”.
Yarmouk camp, Damascus. Once the thriving home of Syria’s Palestinian refugees, September 2025
Author’s note
Laylatu al Qadri
لَْيلَُةاْلَقْدِر َخْيٌر ِّمْنأَْل ِف َشْھٍر. َسَلاٌم ِھَي َحَّتى َمْطلَِعاْلَفْجِر
Laylatu alqadri khayrun min alfi shahriin.Salamun hiya hatta matla’i alfajrii
The night of power is better than one thousand months.
(That night is) Peace until the rising of the dawn.
Al Qur’an al Karīm, Surat Al Qadr 97
I first learned about the Quran and The Night of Power in Cairo when I was staying at the home of Haji Abd al Sami al Mahrous a devout Muslim doctor who had cared for me when I had fallen ill. There was a particular beauty and magic about the idea of a night that surpassed all other nights in sacredness. The fascination stayed with me, and when I returned to London and was learning Arabic and studying Middle East politic at SOAS, it inspired a song.
Shape without form, a voice without sound,
He moves in an unseen way;
A night of power, eternal hour,
Peace until the break of day;
The doubter’s dart, the traveller’s chart,
An arrow piercing even to the coldest heart,
A hand surpassing every earthly art,
And shows everyone his own way
Paul Hemphill, Embryo
When Freedom Comes, She Crawls on Broken Glass
In an earlier post in In That Howling Infinite, I wrote:
My song When Freedom Comesis a tribute to Robert Fisk (1946-2020), indomitable, veteran British journalist and longtime resident of Beirut, who could say without exaggeration “I walk among the conquered, I walk among the dead” in “the battlegrounds and graveyards” of “long forgotten armies and long forgotten wars”. It’s all there, in his grim tombstone of a book, The Great War for Civilization (a book I would highly recommend to anyone wanting to know more about the history of the Middle East in the twentieth century – but it takes stamina – at near in 1,300 pages – and a strong stomach – its stories are harrowing).
The theme, alas, is timeless, and the lyrics, applicable to any of what Rudyard called the “savage wars of peace” being waged all across our planet, yesterday, today and tomorrow – and indeed any life-or-death battle in the name of the illusive phantom of liberty and against those intent on either denying it to us or depriving us of it. “When freedom runs through dogs and guns, and broken glass” could describe Paris and Chicago in 1968 or Kristallnacht in 1938. If it is about any struggle in particular, it is about the Palestinians and their endless, a fruitless yearning for their lost land. Ironically, should this ever be realized, freedom is probably the last thing they will enjoy. They like others before them will be helpless in the face of vested interest, corruption, and brute force, at the mercy of the ‘powers that be’ and the dead hand of history.
The mercenaries and the robber bands, the warlords and the big men, az zu’ama’, are the ones who successfully “storm the palace, seize the crown”. To the victors go the spoils – the people are but pawns in their game.
In 2005, on the occasion of the publication of his book, Fisk addressed a packed auditorium in Sydney’s Macquarie University. Answering a question from the audience regarding the prospects for democracy in the Middle East, he replied:
Theregoes the freedom fighter,
There blows the dragon’s breath.
There stands the sole survivor;
The time-worn shibboleth.
The zealots’ creed, the bold shahid,
Give me my daily bread
I walk amongst the conquered
I walk amongst the dead
Paul Hemphill, When Freedom Comes
I reference this melancholy state of affairs in man of my songs:
High stand the stars and moon, And meanwhile, down below, Towers fall and tyrants fade Like footprints in the snow. The bane of bad geography, The burden of topography. The lines where they’re not meant to be Are letters carved in stone. They’re hollowed of all empathy, And petrified through history, A medieval atrophy Defends a feeble throne. So order goes, and chaos flows Across the borderlines, For nature hates a vacuum, And in these shifting tides, Bombs and babies, girls and guns, Dollars, drugs, and more besides, Wash like waves on strangers’ shores, Damnation takes no sides.
Paul Hemphill, E Lucevan Le Stelle
… Robeson’s extraordinary career intersects with some of modernity’s worst traumas: slavery, colonialism, the Cold War, Fascism. Stalinism. These are wounds covered over and forgotten, but never fully healed. Not surprisingly, the paths Robeson walked remain full of ghosts, whose whispers we can hear if we stop to listen. They talk to the past, but they also speak to the future.
Jeff Sparrow, No Way But This. In Search of Paul Robeson (2017)
I read Jeff Sparrow’s excellent biography of the celebrated American singer and political activist Paul Robeson several years ago. I was reminded of it very recently with the publication of a book about Robeson’s visit to Australia in November 1960, a twenty-concert tour in nine cities. I have republished a review below, together with an article by Sparrow about his book, and a review of the book by commentator and literary critic Peter Craven. the featured picture is of Robeson singing for the workers constructing the Sydney Opera House.
I have always loved Paul Robeson’s songs and admired his courage and resilience in the face of prejudice and adversity. Duriung his colourful and controversial career (see the articles below), he travelled the world, including Australia and New Zealand and also, Britain. He visited England many times – it was there that my mother met him. She was working in a maternity hospital in Birmingham when he visited and sang for the doctors, nurses, helpers and patients. My mother was pregnant at the time – and, such was his charisma, that is why my name is Paul.
Paul Robeson was a 20th-century icon. He was the most famous African American of his time, and in his time, was called the most famous American in the world. His is a story of political ardour, heritage, and trauma.
The son of a former slave, he found worldwide fame as a singer and an actor, travelling from Hollywood in the USA to the West End of London, to Europe and also Communist Russia. In the sixties, he visited Australia and is long remembered for the occasion he sang the song Old Man River for the workers building the famous Sydney Opera House.
He became famous both for his cultural accomplishments and for his political activism as an educated and articulate black man in a white man’s racist world.
Educated at Rutgers College and Columbia University, he was a star athlete in his youth. His political activities began with his involvement with unemployed workers and anti-imperialist students whom he met in Britain and continued with support for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War and his opposition to fascism.
A respected performer, he was also a champion of social justice and equality. But he would go on to lose everything for the sake of his principles.
In the United States he became active in the civil rights movement and other social justice campaigns. His sympathies for the Soviet Union and for communism, and his criticism of the United States government and its foreign policies, caused him to be blacklisted as a communist during the McCarthy era when American politics were dominated by a wave of hatred, suspicion and racism that was very much like we see today,
Paul Robeson, the son of a slave, was a gifted linguist. He studied and spoke six languages, and sang songs from all over the world in their original language.
But his most famous song was from an American musical show from 1927 – Show Boat, by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein – called Old Man River. The song contrasted the struggles and hardships of African Americans during and after the years of slavery, with the endless, uncaring flow of the Mississippi River. It is sung the point of view of a black stevedore on a showboat, and is the most famous song from the show.
It is a paradox that a song written by Jewish Americans from the Jewish villages of Eastern Europe, the targets of prejudice and pogrom, should voice the cries of America’s down-trodden people.
When the song was first heard, America was a divided country and people of colour were segregated, abused and murdered. The plot of the musical was indeed about race, although it pulled its punches with the romantic message that love is colour-blind
It reflected America’s split personality – the land of the free, but the home of the heartless. Robeson sung the words as they were written, but later in his career, as he became more and more famous, he changed them to suit his own opinions, feelings, sentiments, and politics. So, when he sang to the workers in Sydney, Australia, his song was not one of slavery but one of resistance.
The Big Voice of the Left … Paul Robeson Resounds to this Day
Mahir Ali The Australian November 9, 2010
FIFTY years ago today, more than a decade before it was officially inaugurated, the Sydney Opera House hosted its first performance by an internationally renowned entertainer when Paul Robeson, in the midst of what turned out to be his final concert tour, sang to the construction workers during their lunch break.
Alfred Rankin, who was at the construction site on November 9, 1960, recalls this “giant of a man” enthralling the workers with his a cappella renditions of two of his signature songs, Ol’ Man River and Joe Hill.
“After he finished singing, the men climbed down from the scaffolding, gathered around him and presented him with a hard hat bearing his name,” Paul Robeson Jr writes in his biography of his father, The Undiscovered Robeson. “One of the men took off a work glove and asked Paul to sign it. The idea caught on and the men lined up. Paul stayed until he had signed a glove for each one of them.”
Workers had the best seats when Robeson sang at the Sydney Opera House, 9 November 1960
The visit, Rankin tells The Australian, was organised by the Building Workers Industrial Union of Australia and the Australian Peace Council’s Bill Morrow, a former Labor senator from Tasmania.
In a chapter on Robeson’s visit in the book Passionate Histories: Myth, Memory and Indigenous Australia, which will be launched in Sydney tomorrow, Ann Curthoys quotes the performer as saying on the day after his visit to the Opera House site: “I could see, you know, we had some differences here and there. But we hummed some songs together, and they all came up afterwards and just wanted to shake my hand and they had me sign gloves. These were tough guys and it was a very moving experience.”
In 1998, on the centenary of Robeson’s birth, former NSW minister John Aquilina told state parliament his father had been working as a carpenter at the Opera House site on November 9, 1960: “Dad told us that all the workers – carpenters, concreters and labourers – sang along and that the huge, burly men on the working site were reduced to tears by his presence and his inspiration.”
Curthoys, the Manning Clark professor of history at the Australian National University, who plans to write a book about the Robeson visit, also cites a contemporary report in The Daily Telegraph as saying that the American performer “talked to more than 250 workmen in their lunch hour, telling them they were working on a project they would be proud of one day”. [Curthoy’s book, The Last Tour: Paul and Eslanda Robeson’s visit to Australia and New Zealand, was published at last in 2025]
According to biographer Martin Duberman, Robeson wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about the offer of a tour of Australia and New Zealand from music entrepreneur D. D. O’Connor, but the idea of earning $US100,000 for a series of 20 concerts, plus extra fees for television appearances and the like, proved irresistible.
Robeson had once been one of the highest paid entertainers in the world, but from 1950 onwards he effectively had been deprived of the opportunity of earning a living. A combination of pressure from the US government and right-wing extremists meant American concert halls were closed to him, and the US State Department’s refusal to renew his passport meant he was unable to accept invitations for engagements in Europe and elsewhere. Robeson never stopped singing but was able to do so only at African-American churches and other relatively small venues. His annual income dwindled from more than $US100,000 to about $US6000.
At the time, Robeson was arguably one of the world’s best known African Americans. As a scholar at Rutgers University, he had endured all manner of taunts and physical intimidation to excel academically and as a formidable presence on the football field: alone among his Rutgers contemporaries, he was selected twice for the All-American side.
Alongside his athletic prowess, which was also displayed on the baseball field and the basketball court, he was beginning to find his voice as a bass baritone. When a degree in law from Columbia University failed to help him make much headway in the legal profession, he decided to opt for the world of entertainment, and made his mark on the stage and screen as a singer and actor.
An extended sojourn in London offered relief from the racism in his homeland and established his reputation as an entertainer, not least through leading roles in the musical Show Boat and in Othello opposite Peggy Ashcroft’s Desdemona.
(He reprised the role in a record Broadway run for a Shakespearean role in 1943 and again at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1959)
Robeson returned to the US as a star in 1939 and endeared himself to his compatriots with a cantata titled Ballad for Americans.
In the interim, he had been thoroughly politicised, not least through encounters in London with leaders of colonial liberation movements such as Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and India’s Jawaharlal Nehru.
He had sung for republicans in Spain and visited the Soviet Union at the invitation of filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein.
Robeson’s refusal to reconsider his political affiliations once World War II gave way to the Cold War made him persona non grata in his homeland: his infatuation with the Soviet Union did not perceptibly pale in the face of horrific revelations about Stalinist excesses, partly because he looked on Jim Crow as his pre-eminent foe. It is therefore hardly surprising that exposure in Australia to Aboriginal woes stirred his passion.
On the day after his appearance at the Opera House site, at the initiative of Aboriginal activist and Robeson fan Faith Bandler he watched a documentary about Aborigines in the Warburton Ranges during which his sorrow turned to anger, and he vowed to return to Australia in the near future to fight for their rights. He made similar promises to the Māori in New Zealand.
But the years of persecution had taken their toll physically and psychologically: Robeson’s health broke down in 1961 and, on returning to the US in 1963, he lived the remainder of his life as a virtual recluse. He died in 1976, long after many of his once radical aspirations for African Americans had been co-opted into the civil rights mainstream. His political views remained unchanged.
It’s no wonder that, as writer and broadcaster Phillip Adams recalls, Robeson’s tour was like “a second coming” to “aspiring young lefties” in Australia.
Duberman cites Aboriginal activist Lloyd L. Davies’s poignant recollection of Robeson’s arrival in Perth on the last leg of his tour, when he made a beeline for “a group of local Aborigines shyly hanging back”.
“When he reached them, he literally gathered the nearest half dozen in his great arms.”
Davies heard one of the little girls say, almost in wonder, “Mum, he likes us.”
She would have been less surprised had she been aware of the Robeson statement that serves as his epitaph: “The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.”
Left for Good – Peter Craven on Paul Robeson
The Weekend Australian. March 11 2017
What on earth impelled Jeff Sparrow, the Melbourne-based former editor of Overland and left-wing intellectual, to write a book about Paul Robeson, the great African American singer and actor?
Well, he tells us: as a young man he was transporting the libraries of a lot of old communists to a bookshop and was intrigued by how many of the books were by or about Robeson.
All of which provokes apprehension, because politics is a funny place to start with
Robeson, even if it is where you end or nearly end. Robeson was one of the greatest singers of the 20th century. When I was a little boy in the 1950s, my father used to play that velvet bottomlessly deep voice singing not only Ol’ Man River — though that was Robeson’s signature tune and his early recording of it is one of the greatest vocal performances of all time — but all manner of traditional songs. Not just the great negro spirituals (as they were known to a bygone age; Sparrow calls them slave songs) such as Go Down, Moses, but Shenandoah, No, John, No and Passing By, as well as the racketing lazy I Still Suits Me.
My mother, who was known as Sylvie and loathed her full name, which was Sylvia, said the only time she could stand it was when Robeson sang it (“Sylvia’s hair is like the night … such a face as drifts through dreams, such is Sylvia to the sight”). He had the diction of a god and the English language in his mouth sounded like a princely birthright no one could deny.
It was that which made theatre critic Kenneth Tynan say the noise Robeson made when he opened his mouth was too close to perfect for an actor. It did not stop him from doing Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun’ Got Wings or The Emperor Jones, nor an Othello in London in 1930 with Peggy Ashcroft as his Desdemona and with Sybil Thorndike as Emilia.
Robeson later did Othello in the 1940s in America with Jose Ferrer as Iago and with Uta Hagen (who created Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) as his Desdemona. He toured the country; he toured the south, which was almost inconceivable. When he was told someone had said the play had nothing to do with racial prejudice, Robeson said, “Let him play it in Memphis.”
Southern white audiences were docile until Robeson’s Othello kissed Hagen’s Desdemona: then they rioted. Robeson also made a point, at his concerts and stage shows, of insisting the audience not be segregated. James Earl Jones. who would play Robeson on the New York stage, says in his short book about Othello, “I believe Paul Robeson’s Othello is the landmark performance of the 20th century.”
Robeson would play the Moor again in 1959 at Stratford-upon-Avon. By that time, though, he had fallen foul of 1950s America. He had been called before the McCarthyist House Un-American Activities Committee. You can hear a dramatisation of his testimony with Earl Jones as Robeson, which includes an immemorial reverberation of his famous words when senator Francis E. Walter asked him why he didn’t just quit the US and live in Russia.
“Because my father was a slave and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay here and have a part of it just like you. And no fascist-minded people will drive me from it. Is that clear?”
It’s funny how it was the real communists such as Bertolt Brecht and Robeson who handled the committee best. Still, in an extraordinary act of illiberalism, they took away his US passport and it took two years for the Supreme Court to declare in 1958 in a 5-4 decision that the secretary of state was not empowered to withdraw the passport of any American citizen on the basis of political belief.
When Paul Robeson sang at the Sydney Opera House
It was this that allowed Robeson to do his Othello in Peter Hall’s great centenary Stratford celebration along with Charles Laughton’s Lear and Laurence Olivier’s Coriolanus. It also allowed him to come to Australia. Very early on Sparrow tells the story of watching the clip of Robeson singing Ol’ Man River to construction workers in Sydney with the Opera House still a dream in the process of meeting impediments. The version Robeson sings is his own bolshie rewrite (“I must keep fightin’/ Until I’m dyin’ ”).
Well, fight he did and bolshie he was. I remember when I was a child my father telling me Robeson was a brilliant man, that he had won a sporting scholarship for American football (to Rutgers, in fact), that he’d gone on to receive a law degree (from Columbia, no less) and that he was so smart he had taught himself Russian.
But the sad bit was, according to my father, that he’d become a communist. Understandably so, my father thought, because of how the Americans treated the blacks. My father’s own radical impulses as a schoolboy had been encouraged, as Robeson’s were on a grander scale, by World War II where Uncle Joe Stalin was our ally in the war against Hitler’s fascism.
But this was the Cold War now, and a lot of people thought, with good reason, that it was behind the Iron Curtain that today’s fascists were to be found. Even if others such as the great German novelist Thomas Mann and Robeson thought they were encroaching on Capitol Hill.
Sparrow’s book No Way But This is circumscribed at every point by his primary interest in Robeson as a political figure of the Left rather than as a performer and artist.
It’s an understandable trap to fall into because Robeson was an eloquent, intelligent man of the Left and his status was also for a while there — as Sparrow rightly says — as the most famous black American on Earth. So his radicalism is both pointed and poignant.
His father, who became a Methodist minister, was born a slave and was later cruelly brought down in the world. But, unlike the old Wobblies whose bookcases he transported, Sparrow is not inward with what made Robeson famous in the first place and it shows.
No Way But This is a great title (“no way but this / killing myself, to die upon a kiss” is what Othello says when he’s dying over the body of Desdemona, whom he has killed) but Sparrow’s search for Robeson is not a great book.
As the subtitle suggests, it is a quest book but Sparrow is a bit like the Maeterlinck character cited in Joyce’s Ulysses who ends up meeting himself (whether in his Socrates or his Judas aspect) on his own doorstep. Sparrow goes to somewhere in the US associated with Robeson and meets a black-deaths-in-custody activist full of radical fervour. She introduces him to an old African-American who was in Attica jail for years. There is much reflection on the thousands of black people who were slaves on the plantations and the disproportionate number of them now in US prisons.
Yes, the figures are disquieting. No, they are not aspects of the same phenomenon even though ultimately there will be historical connections of a kind.
And so it goes. But this is a quest book that turns into a kind of travelogue in which Sparrow goes around the world meeting people who might illuminate Robeson for him but don’t do much for the reader except confirm the suspicion that the author’s range of acquaintance ought to be broader or that he should listen to people for a bit more rather than seek confirmation of his own predilections.
There are also mistakes. Sparrow seems to know nothing about the people with whom Robeson did Othello. There’s no mention of Thorndike, and when Ashcroft comes up as someone he had an affair with, Sparrow refers to the greatest actress of the Olivier generation as “a beautiful glamorous star”. Never mind that she was an actress of such stature, Judi Dench said when she played Cleopatra she could only follow Ashcroft’s phrasing by way of homage.
Sparrow also says “American actor Edmund Kean started using paler make-up for the role, a shift that corresponded with the legitimisation of plantation slavery”. Kean, who was the greatest actor of the later romantic period, was English, not American. His Othello would, I think, be more or less contemporary with William Wilberforce lobbying to have slavery made illegal. Sparrow seems to be confusing Kean with Edwin Booth, the mid-century Othello who happens to have been the brother of John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln. But it’s still hard to see where the plantations fit in.
A few pages later — and it’s not important though it’s indicative — we hear of the rumour that Robeson was “romancing Edwina Mountbatten, Countess Mountbatten of Burma”. Well, whatever she was called in the early 1930s, it wasn’t Countess Mountbatten of Burma because her husband, Louis Mountbatten, the supreme allied commander in Southeast Asia during World War II, didn’t get the title until after the Japanese surrendered to him — guess where?
Such slips are worth belabouring only because they make you doubt Sparrow’s reliability generally. It’s worth adding, however, that his chapter about the prison house that the Soviet Union turned itself into is his most impressive. And the story of the last few years of Robeson’s life, afflicted with depression, subject to a lot of shock treatment, with recurrent suicide attempts, is deeply sad.
He felt towards the end that he had failed his people. He just didn’t know what to do. It was the melancholy talking as melancholy will.
It’s better to remember the Robeson who snapped back at someone who asked if he would join the civil rights movement: “I’ve been a part of the civil rights movement all my life.”
It’s to Sparrow’s credit that he’s fallen in love with the ghost of Robeson even if it’s only the spectral outline of that power and that glory he gives us.
Peter Craven is a cultural and literary critic
The Last Tour: Paul and Eslanda Robeson’s visit to Australia and NZ
Australians of a certain age know all about Paul Robeson’s magnificent voice. They know, too, that on a warm November day more than 60 years ago, the bass-baritone sang to 250 construction workers on the Sydney Opera House building site as the workers sat on scaffolding and stacks of timber and ate their lunch. Fewer know of Robeson’s Pro-Communist and pro-Soviet views and of how those beliefs damaged his career at home and abroad. And that’s not so surprising – as historian Ann Curthoys points out, the Cold War suppression of Robeson’s career and memory has been very effective.
Recovering the story of a man who was once the most famous African-American in the world and his equally impressive wife, Eslanda, is the task Curthoys, who grew up in an Australian communist family in the 1950s and 60s, sets herself in a new book, The Last Tour: Paul and Eslanda Robeson’s visit to Australia and New Zealand.
It follows the couple’s tour – a mix of his concerts and their public talks and media interviews – to Australia and New Zealand over October, November and December 1960. Curthoys goes further, using the seven-week tour by this celebrated singer to explore the social and political changes just beginning in post-War Australia. Her interest is “the slow transition from the Cold War era of the late 1940s and 50s, to the 60s era of the New Left, new social movements and the demand for Aboriginal rights”.
Curthoys is 79 now, but when Robeson toured she was 15 and living in Newcastle, a city the singer did not visit. Her mother, Barbara Curthoys, a well-known activist and feminist, was a fan of the singer but the trip passed the teenager by.
It was only decades later, as she researched her 2002 book on the 1965 Aboriginal Freedom Ride through regional NSW, that Curthoys connected with the story. As a university student she had taken part in the ride and moved from communism to the New Left. When she approached the subject as a historian, she realised that for some riders, their attendance at Robeson’s concerts five years earlier had been a defining moment in their “understanding of racial discrimination and Aboriginal rights”.
Curthoys has had a long career in research and teaching at the Australian National University and the University of Technology, Sydney. She’s part of a remarkable family, and not just parents Barbara and Geoffrey, who was a lecturer in chemistry at Newcastle University. Her sister Jean is a leading feminist philosopher and her husband, John Docker, has written several books on cultural history, popular culture and the history of ideas.
Curthoys began researching The Last Tour in 2007, but put it aside for another project on Indigenous Australians before resuming work on it during the Covid-19 lockdowns. Post-Robeson, she has worked with two scholars on a forthcoming book on the history of domestic violence in Australia.
The tour, she says, was really several tours rolled into one with the Robesons covering many bases – from music to Cold War politics to feminism to Aboriginal rights. It was a conservative era: Robert Menzies’ Liberals ruled federally and five of the six Australian states had conservative governments. Robeson’s presence went unremarked by governments but for fans of his music – and his ideals – the tour was a significant event that was well covered by the press, even those opposed to his views on the Soviet Union.
For some fans, it was a music tour – 20 concerts in nine cities in Australia and New Zealand, at which Robeson sang his show-stoppers, including Deep River, Go Down, Moses; We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder, and the song with which he is always identified, Ol’ Man River. The 62-year-old with the extraordinary voice also delivered “recitations” – a monologue from Shakespeare’s Othello, an anti-segregationist poem Freedom Train, and William Blake’s anthem, Jerusalem.
What a thrill for Australian audiences, some of whom had followed the handsome, 1.9m singer and actor since the 1920s. Even in an age of limited communications, Robeson was well-known here through films; records and radio. Curthoys notes that one indicator of his fame was the way promising Aboriginal singers in the 1930s were dubbed “Australia’s Paul Robeson”.
He was famous – and controversial. Unlike many other supporters of communist ideas, Robeson refused to break from the Soviets after the invasion of Hungary in 1958 and continued to defend Moscow. The “anti-communist repression and hysteria” that gripped the US in the McCarthy era had a profound effect on his life and career, Curthoys writes. He was cited in 1947 by the House Committee on Un-American Activities as “supporting the Communist Party and its front organisations”.
A 1949 US tour was destroyed “after mass cancelling of bookings by venue managers either vehemently opposed to his politics or afraid in such a hostile climate of being classed as communist sympathisers themselves”. Then in 1950, he lost his passport. Over the years, he would “become for communists an emblem of defiance in the face of adversity, and one of the communist world’s most prominent speakers for peace,” Curthoys writes.
Unable to travel until his passport was restored in 1958, Robeson was steadfast in his support for communist ideals. That commitment was evident in Australia when the “peace tour” – built around a series of public meetings – was as important to the singer as the popular concerts where he reached a different audience. Curthoys details a related strand – the “workers’ tour”, which involved seven informal concert performances to groups of railway workers, waterside workers and those at work on the Opera House on that November day.
She says the events revealed much about the “the nature of class in Australia and New Zealand” at a time when “strong and confident trade unions” were interested in “broad cultural concerns”. Over several weeks Robeson attracted people who loved his music alongside those who loved his politics. Far from being shunned for his pro-Soviet views, Curthoys suggests, there was support from two different audiences – music people and “left-wing people who were either pro-Soviet or not”.
Even so, the Cold War anxieties over the Soviets meant a positive reception was not necessarily assured when Paul and Eslanda flew into Sydney at midday on October 12, 1960. They were greeted by several hundred fans carrying peace banners but they faced pointed questions about the Soviet Union at the 20-minute press conference at the airport.
Robeson refused to condemn the suppression of the Hungarian uprising and media reports suggested a torrid exchange. Curthoys reviewed a tape of the press conference and says while the questioning was “a little aggressive”, the event was not as bad as reported in the media. Indeed it was “fairly friendly” albeit for a “bad patch” when Robeson refused to budge on Hungary.
That tape and others, along with newspapers and Trades Hall documentation, yielded rich material but so too did the ASIO files on the couple. At the Palace Hotel in Perth on December 2 an ASIO operative appeared to be among those at a reception organised by the communist-influenced Peace Council. Among guests were the writer (and well-known communist) Katharine Susannah Prichard and “two women by the name of Durack, who were writers and/or artists”.
Curthoys sees Robeson as a “very courageous, very intelligent, intellectual person, very thoughtful about music, about folk music, about people”, but says his commitment to the Soviet Union was a costly mistake. He had embraced Moscow when he and Eslanda visited in 1934 at the invitation of Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein. Later, Robeson, a fluent Russian speaker, would say it was in the Soviet Union that he felt for the first time he was treated “not through the prism of race but simply as a human being”. Curthoys writes: “The excitement and validation he received during this visit would create a loyalty that later events would not dislodge and the public expression of which would damage him politically, commercially and professionally.”
The couple made several trips to the Soviet Union and accepted its political system completely. Curthoys notes: “They made no public comments about Stalin’s forced collectivisation policies that were in place during the 1930s and led to famine and the loss of millions of lives.” In Sydney Robeson was careful, but on November 5 he celebrated the forthcoming anniversary of the Russian Revolution at the Waterside Workers Federation in Sussex Street. Two days later, during his first public concert in the city, he paid tribute to the Soviet Union as “a new society”.
The Soviet Union had been a great influence but so too was the Spanish Civil War, which Curthoys says helped define his view of the political responsibilities of the artist.
“Increasingly famous as a public speaker, on 24 June, 1937, he made a huge impression at a mass rally at the Albert Hall in London sponsored by prominent figures such as WH Auden, EM Forster, Sean O’Casey, HG Wells and Virginia Woolf, held to raise financial aid for Basque child refugees from the war. In what became his most well-known and influential speech, he stressed how important it was for artists and scientists and others to take a political stand: ‘Every artist, every scientist, every writer must decide NOW where he stands. He has no alternative. There is no standing above the conflict on Olympian heights.’”
After World War II, Robeson was deeply involved in radical and anti-racism politics in the US but in 1947, as the Cold War worsened, he had had enough. He announced he intended to abandon the theatre and concert stage for two years to speak out against race hatred and prejudice. In fact he stopped stage acting for 12 years but continued to perform as a singer, often in support of political causes.
It was another 13 years before Australian audiences heard that glorious voice “live”. Australians, it seemed were primed for Paul. The tour may have been ignored by governments but during her research, Curthoys was “overwhelmed” by people “ready to assist, donating old programs, photographs, pamphlets, records, cassette tapes, invitations and other documents”.
Today, much of the Robeson image is defined by his Opera House performance on November 9 – high culture delivered, without condescension, to a building crew by a champion of the workers. Robeson, in a heavy coat, despite the warm weather, sang “from a rough concrete stage”. A PR expert could not have dreamt up a a better way to “democratise” an opera house than having the “first concert” delivered in its half- built shell. Curthoys shows how the event, no matter how memorialised now, was a small part of a tour that proved a financial and political success for the Robesons, who left Australia on December 4.
A few months later, depressed and exhausted, Robeson tried to commit suicide in Moscow. Over the next three years he was treated but could no longer perform or engage in public speaking. Curthoys notes that though his affairs with other women had strained their marriage, he and Eslanda had a common political vision and were together until her death in 1965. Robeson died on January 23, 1976 at the age of 77.
Helen Trinca’s latest book is Looking for Elizabeth: The Life of
Elizabeth Harrower (Black Inc.)
Economist and commentator Henry Ergas wrote in The Australian recently: “With the Trump revolution wreaking havoc on conservative movements worldwide and the election rout leaving Liberals stunned, Australian conservatism faces an identity crisis it no longer can afford to ignore. Understanding its divergence from overseas traditions is vital to recovering and redefining the distinctive voice it needs to deal with the latest threat to its existence.” I have repolished it below.
Personally, I find the crisis in contemporary conservatism, particularly as it pertains to Australia politics, fascinating. Here it is in danger descending into a culture of grievance and of populism (- defined as the quest for simple solutions to complex problems).
These fast-moving times are shaky ground for the creed. People are losing faith in institutions; the church no longer has moral influence; the social norms that once tied the community together are changing at lightning speed. Even many within what can be classified as the centre-right acknowledge what might be described as the conservative movement is apparently on the back foot, scrambling to define itself by what it opposes rather than what it believes, plagued by self-doubt and confusion as to what to believe what to stand up for.
As younger voters in the Anglo-sphere veer away from conservative parties, old warhorses and young fogeys, an incongruous, anachronistic cabal of reactionaries if ever there was one, desperately seek relevance and comfort as they endeavour to beat back what they see as the rising tide of progressivism and the proliferation of what they condemned as “woke” – a portmanteau word for whatever that dislike and disdain in politics and society’s at large.
“Conservatism” is an intriguing concept. It can broadly be translated as “traditional” values, and can embrace a varied spectrum of “isms”, including authoritarianism, hierarchy, nationalism, nativism and ethnocentrism, and also, en passant, religiosity, homophobia, and indeed, anything deemed antithetical to the old, tried and true ways. In a general sense, it has gained traction across much of the world as people yearn for order and stability and belonging and identity that western-style liberalism with its ecumenical emphasis on identity, equity and diversity cannot satisfy. Many highlight what they see as to the erosion of national institutions, of Western culture and even morality itself. Some advocate a national conservatism that hold nations to be distinctive and to seek to protect this distinctiveness.
It is in essence an atavistic worldview, one which harks back to the ways of thinking and acting of a former time and a yearning for “la recherche du temps perdu”. In its modern manifestations, it is in many ways a belligerent, intolerant creed, quite distinct from the late 18th century English parliamentarian Edmund Burke’s benchmark conservatism, namely the preservation of principles of the past which emerge from “the nature of things by time, custom, succession, accumulation, permutation and improvement of property”, and in which institutions and customs were rendered sacred by longevity and continual use. The comfort of continuity, in fact.
And it is different to what perennial Australian prime minister Robert Menzies was alluding when he formed the Australian Liberal Party in 1945: “a healthy and proud sense of continuity, is one of the greatest steadying influences and a superb element of sanity in a mad world… “ in his Forgotten People speech of 1942, he invoked homes material, homes human and homes spiritual – the homes humans can live in and where families can be enriched spiritually – rather than the merits of some cold ideology. It was a uniquely reassuring doctrine for homely, ordinary folk opposed to change or frightened by it.
In his essay, “Why I Became A Conservative“, the late British philosopher Roger Scruton wrote that the romantic core of the creed was the search for the “lost experience of home”, the dream of a childhood that cannot ever be fully recaptured, but can be “regained and remodelled, to reward us for all the toil of separation through which we are condemned by our original transgression”. At the heart of conservatism, in other words, is love: love for things that exist or existed and must be saved.
In his introduction to A Political Philosophy, Scruton wrote: “the conservation of our shared resources — social, material, economic and spiritual — and resistance to social entropy in all its forms”. His conservatism was, above all, conservationist: constant care for institutions, customs, and family. His debt to Edmund Burke: society is a contract between the living, the dead and the unborn; a “civil association among neighbours” is superior to state intervention; “the most important thing a human being can do is to settle down, make a home and pass it on to one’s children”.
There is something quite benign about these concepts of conservatism. In stark contrast, conservatism that is gaining traction in many countries, particularly in eastern Europe, but also on the MAGA movement in the United States and on the far-right in Western Europe and also, Australia is a cold, atavistic and embittered beast. Populist in its nature, it appeals primarily to those who favour the reassuring hand of a paternal authority figure who is able to promise those aforementioned simple solutions to the modern world’s bewildering array of complex problems. Freethinkers, individuals, and all of heterodox opinions and practices, political, social, biological or spiritual – beware!
Disclaimer: the only thing this post has to do with Spanish director Luis Buñuel’s 1974 surrealist comedy drama Le Fantôme de la liberté is its title, although like the film, it challenges pre-conceived notions about the stability of social mores and reality.
With the Trump revolution wreaking havoc on conservative movements worldwide and the election rout leaving Liberals stunned, Australian conservatism faces an identity crisis it no longer can afford to ignore.
Henry Ergas and Alex McDermott, The Australian 10 May 2025
In the aftermath of last weekend’s devastating election loss it is easy to write off conservatism in Australia. This wouldn’t be for the first time. As historian Keith Hancock observed in Australia (1930), conservative, in this country, has always been a term of abuse, implying that its target is an out-and-out reactionary.
There is nonetheless a profound paradox. Although conservative may be a term of abuse, Australian politics has long had a marked conservative vein, even as its chief protagonists have studiously avoided the descriptor. A hardy perennial, with a distinctive voice that contrasts with overseas conservatism, the conservative instinct in Australia has run deep, dominating federal politics for decades – and recovering, time and again, from setbacks that had been claimed to foreshadow its demise.
US President Donald Trump and Vice-President JD Vance. Picture: AP
In part, that identity crisis reflects the factor that has made for conservatism’s enduring success: its infinite adaptability. Indeed, the term defies easy definition, just as the groups to which it has been applied defy ready categorisation, making the conservative identity inherently labile.
As Paul de Serville, a historian of Australian and British conservatism, has observed, every party that has emerged to represent conservatism’s interests and beliefs across the past 350 years “is a study in contradiction between opposing traditions and schools of thought”.
Even its founding parent, the movement that eventually became the Conservative Party in Britain, has “died or lain dormant” numerous times, split at least twice, and never settled on any singular set of policies, ideas and beliefs. Its capacity to incorporate diverse elements has in fact been one of its defining qualities. After all, “what other party has elected a Jewish novelist (Disraeli) to lead a group of wordless squires? Or a grocer’s daughter (Thatcher) to rule a sulky band of Tory Wets?”
But beneath the shifting terrain of cultural and political battlegrounds, there are in British conservatism some identifiable commitments. Originally, the commitment was above all to tradition. Born in the turmoil of the English civil war, the Tories (a term derived from the Middle English slang for outlaw) stood for loyalty to the Church of England and the crown. Unapologetic royalists, their clergy defended the church against the Puritans while stressing the values of family, home and nationhood. Over time, however, the primary emphasis of British conservatism changed into a commitment to the virtue of prudence.
Often associated with a sense of human limitations and the impossibility of achieving utopia, British conservatism became the embodiment of a Western intellectual tradition that extends back at least as far as St Augustine.
Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson led a populist style Conservative Party. AFP
Conservatism in the US had a starkly different origin and trajectory. Far from being a reaction to the threat of change, it was a by-product of the American Revolution’s fight against the crown. Initially, what it sought to conserve was the ideal of a “mixed constitution” whose myriad checks and balances could prevent the development of an overmighty state. That coexisted with the agrarian conservatism of the south that feared, above all, the centralism that might abolish slavery and privilege northern manufacturers over southern primary exporters. Together, those foundations fuelled the development of a staunchly conservative, often highly formalistic legalism whose power – unrivalled in any other Western country – grew with the ascendancy of the Supreme Court.
But as early as the 1820s that version of conservatism faced a powerful challenge from Andrew Jackson’s radical populism. Jacksonian populism had more than its fair share of incoherence but its grassroots pugnacity spawned one of US politics’ most enduring and certainly most distinctive notions: the spectre of a “deep state” that was liberty’s greatest enemy.
Permeated by a Manichean friend-enemy dynamic that distinguishes what American historian Richard Hofstadter famously called the “paranoid style” in US politics, the Jacksonians portrayed the federal government as far worse than overbearing: having been hijacked by the enemies of the common man, it was an actively malevolent force hiding behind the facade of law and order. Only by dismantling it could freedom be preserved.
Former US President Andrew Jackson
The Jacksonians left a deep imprint on the American right and most notably on its rhetoric, but they never entirely conquered the field. The somewhat rigid constitutional conservatism that had preceded Jacksonianism survived and, inspired by intellectual leaders such as Supreme Court associate justice Antonin Scalia, flourished.
At the same time, many other varieties of conservatism appeared and at times reappeared after having gone into abeyance.
For instance, Vice-President JD Vance’scommitment to an intensely moralistic vision of politics – that privileges honest labour over endless consumption, security at home over adventures overseas, family and local community over wider notions of society – renews a Catholic tradition that had waned as the ethnic communities that were its original bearers assimilated into the American mainstream.
Vice-President JD Vance
In that sense American conservatism was always as mutable, open-ended and diverse as the US itself. But for all of that diversity, the nature of the presidential contest periodically forced its differing elements to coalesce around a leader who somehow embodied the spirit of the times.
As with all populisms, Trump’s message jumbles together contradictory, even irreconcilable, components. But it isn’t intended as a coherent intellectual project – it is not a politics of ideas that Trump pursues but of emotive response and instantaneous impact.
Even less is it a politics of cautious pragmatism, as was the conservatism of Republicans George HW Bush or John McCain, who also channelled one of American patriotism’s many styles. And least of all is it, like Vance’s, a politics of high moral purpose. Rather, it is a politics of personal power, deployed, often arbitrarily, to purposes that can change unpredictably from day to day.
That it is not to deny that there runs through Trump’s project American conservatism’s golden thread: the goal of restoring what his supporters view as the freedoms that were the original promise of the American founding and, later, the American Revolution.
But much as was the case with the Jacksonians, that goal is to be achieved by demolishing existing institutions, which are cast as having betrayed the original promise, rather than through their cautious reform. Trumpism’s intensely antinomian character is starkly antagonistic to the American tradition of constitutional conservatism, which is why a number of unquestionably conservative scholars are challenging the administration’s actions in the courts. At the same time, its messianic quality, imbued with visions of future glory, breeds a fanaticism entirely alien to the British conservative tradition.
Trumpism breeds a fanaticism alien to the British and Australian conservative tradition. AFP
It is entirely alien to the Australian conservative tradition too. Here the greatest difference lies in the fact the Australian political ethos has not seen the state as the enemy, much less as a malignant force. It has been regarded instead as a tool to be effectively used to benefit the people and help them flourish.
That difference from the US has profound historical roots. America’s initial European settlement occurred in the 1600s, a period distinguished in Britain by what became known as the “Old Corruption”. Government offices were chiefly sinecures, officially apportioned rackets for personal gain, propping up an oligarchy whose favours were openly for sale.
In contrast, European settlement in Australia and New Zealand began as sweeping reforms to Britain’s system of government were taking hold. For the first time it was becoming possible to treat the government as a utility, dispensing valued benefits, rather than as a lurking predator. Colonial governors’ administrations, while not without their own rackety aspects, were shaped by changes reducing royal patronage and improving government accountability. As Australian historian John Hirst argued, that laid the seeds of an enduring respect for impersonal authority, exercised, at least in theory, in the pursuit of prosperity and good order.
There were, for sure, periodic outbreaks of radical opposition. But the Australian approach was almost always to absorb the conflict by institutionalising its protagonists. Embedding the agitators within the system they were fighting against, that solution traded moderation for tangible gains.
For example, violent class war and mass strikes in the 1890s Depression culminated in the birth of the ALP as an official parliamentary party, changing laws and winning government. Later, the Arbitration Court became run largely by what had been the warring parties – the infamous “industrial relations club”, as columnist Gerard Henderson called it. In exchange for prestigious sinecures, the former enemies descended into what Hancock derided as a “pettifogging” legalism that suffocated the radicals.
Equally, landless gold-diggers demanded the squatters’ leases be ripped up, and stormed Victoria’s parliament in the 1850s. The Land Selection Acts in the subsequent decades established a regional population of often struggling farmers whose 20th-century political incarnation took the form of country parties.
Those parties not only secured “protection all round” in the 1920s, along with significant direct subsidies; they also ensured the establishment of marketing boards to which party worthies were invariably appointed. And much the same could be said of the Tariff Board, which shaped manufacturing protection for decades.
The corollary of that solution was a particular type of conservatism. Yes, in the early years of settlement there had been “real” conservatives of the Tory variety. But when self-government began, they were rudely jostled aside. Australian conservatism would not draw its strength from them.
It was instead the middle class that provided the dominating motifs of enduring Australian conservative strength. It isn’t difficult to understand why. The “workingman’s paradise” was a place where ordinary settlers and working men could get ahead, not rags-to-riches style, as the American dream pitched it, but enough to acquire comfort, leisure and independence.
Australian wages had been essentially the highest in the world since first settlement and the political victory of liberalism, which occurred during the 1850s gold rushes, ensured free markets and social mobility. To become an independent small business owner, to own your own home, to provide for your family, your children – this was the dream, and in Australia they by and large found it.
The conservatism that resulted from that success story incorporated the liberal beliefs and practices that proved so decisively triumphant in the colonial context. Historian Zachary Gorman observes that liberalism’s 19th-century victory in Australia was so comprehensive it became “less of a clear agenda and more of a pervasive political culture”. No longer conservatism’s upstart challenger as in Britain, liberalism here almost instantaneously became the established mainstream – it became what needed to be protected, as well as what conservatives sought to conserve.
Australian conservatism, then, sprang not out of reverence for the past or social hierarchy but from attachment to the enjoyments and freedoms of ordinary life that the most liberal polity in the world encouraged to flourish. It kept faith with ordinary experience and the socially durable values of an open society.
It soon came to shape the whole of the centre-right, underpinning both the twin liberal traditions of early 20th-century Australian life – the neo-Gladstonian free trade liberalism typified by NSW’s Henry Parkes, George Reid and Joseph Carruthers and the Deakenite liberalism protectionist Victoria championed.
More pragmatic and willing to innovate than, say, Britain’s Home Counties conservatism, Australian conservatism was dispositional rather than traditionalist – as a byproduct of urban, aspirational, middle-class Australia, generally inspired by the hope of improvement, it had no difficulty accommodating an uninterest in the past. The attachment to steady improvement was the important thing.
Robert Menzies’ pitch in his justly famous “Forgotten People” broadcast in 1942 captures this spirit perhaps better than any other significant Australian political testament. In it Menzies speaks directly to the attachment to the home and the family as the cornerstone of the “real life of the nation … in the homes of people who are nameless and unadvertised, and who … see in their children their greatest contribution to the immortality of their race”.
Accompanying that emphasis on home and family is a classically conservative sense of continuity.
“It’s only when we realise that we are a part of a great procession,” Menzies declared in laying the foundation stone of the National Library of Australia two months after he retired in March 1966, “that we’re not just here today and gone tomorrow, that we draw strength from the past and we may transmit some strength to the future.”
Across several decades of political leadership Menzies’ speeches pulsed with phrases that exemplified this disposition. His governments have been “sensible and honest”. He speaks “in realistic terms”, sustained “by an unshakeable belief in the good sense and honesty of our people”.
Former PM Robert Menzies is pictured in 1941. Picture: Herald Sun
Yet this stress on continuity in Menzies’ rhetoric complemented rather than contradicted a commitment to what he referred to as “solid progress”. This country was a settler society built by successive waves of migrants; since its earliest days, its life had been saturated with optimism: Australia, said Menzies, was “our young and vigorous land”, still embarking on its glad, confident morning.
It was the constant undercurrent of hope and aspiration that gave Menzies’ conservatism its distinctive flavour, making it more explicitly geared to the confident expectation of future possibility than its European or American counterparts.
And it was precisely because it was so oriented to progress that the term conservative was generally avoided by the movement he forged, even as a conservative disposition bubbled along beneath its immediate surface, and was mirrored in electoral preferences of voters – not simply by voting right of centre but by giving governments a second term even if their first had been somewhat disappointing, and by regularly knocking back proposed constitutional changes.
However, those two elements – continuity and change – were uneasy bedfellows: continuity could, and eventually did, act as an obstacle to indispensable change.
The institutionalisation of conflict through entities such as the arbitration tribunals and the Tariff Board had, for decades, moderated conflict – but only at the price of inefficiencies that became ever more unsustainable as the world economy globalised in the 1970s and 80s. At that point, Australian conservatism entered into a prolonged crisis, torn between the deeply embedded value of caution and the equally strong value of adaptation.
It was easy to repeat Edmund Burke’s axiom that “A state without the means of some change, is without the means of its own conservation”; but effecting sweeping change without destroying the party’s unity was of an entirely different order of difficulty.
Nothing more clearly highlighted the dilemma than Liberal leader John Hewson’s Fightback – a call to arms that was as close as the movement ever came to a truly Thatcherite policy revolution. Its failure had many causes but one was the complete absence of the sense of continuity and stability that has always been dear to the Australian middle class.
It lacked, too, the high Gladstonian moral clarity that Margaret Thatcher articulated in her heroic campaign to reverse Britain’s slide to socialised mediocrity. In fact, Thatcher’s argument for the moral basis of capitalism had far more in common with Menzies’ creed of “lifters not leaners” than with Hewson’s “economic rationalism”.
Former British PM Margaret Thatcher2001. Picture: AP
What was needed was a new synthesis. As Menzies had, John Howard, the first Liberal leader to actively identify himself as a conservative, provided it.
Nigel Lawson, who served as the Thatcher government’s most consequential chancellor of the exchequer, once commented that whereas “Harold Macmillan had a contempt for the (Conservative) party, Alec Home tolerated it, and Ted Heath loathed it, Margaret (Thatcher) genuinely liked it. She felt a communion with it.” Exactly the same could be said about Howard: his scrupulous respect for his party’s traditional ethos helped him succeed for as long as he did.
That is not to deny that Howard at times pursued dramatic change – a GST, industrial relations reform, gun ownership – but the approach was rarely radical in style, much less revolutionary in tone. It is telling that the one reform that failed was Work Choices, which went furthest in dismantling existing institutions. And it is telling, too, that subsequent Coalition governments tinkered with the arrangements Labor put in its place rather than seeking their wholesale removal.
Now the synthesis Howard forged between conservation and change is yet again under extreme stress. So, too, are its electoral foundations, as the bases of politics undergo a profound transformation.
Because of Australian conservatism’s pragmatic nature, marshalling broad alliances against those forces and movements that endanger the foundations of the polity has always been its signature approach. Finding some common ground among its constituents, each of those alliances combined the shared opposition to an adversary with a positive program based on overlapping, if not entirely shared, values. The way Liberals, free-traders and protectionists alike rallied alongside Conservatives when threatened by a new common enemy, the ALP in the early 20th century, is a classic example.
John Howard pictured in 1996 after claiming victory for the Coalition. Picture: Michael Jones
However, the dominant force in contemporary politics is fragmentation: the centrifugal pressures that make coalitions hard to assemble but easy to destroy have become ever stronger as social media and identity politics shatter politics’ traditional alignments.
The centre-right is far from being immune from those tendencies, as the emergence of the teals shows. And they are compounded by the pressures of Trumpian populism, which is as hostile to the compromises coalition-building entails as it is to inherited institutions. The only coalitions Trumpism can forge are those that aggregate resentments: against the arrogance of the “progressives”, the abuses of power that occurred during the pandemic, the perception that common values are denigrated and despised.
To use a phrase American constitutional lawyer Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt coined for the left, Trumpism’s dominant mode of action is “common-enemy politics”, with the adversary being the principal factor unifying its disparate parts. There are no shared values, nor any shared aspirations; the glue comes from shared hatreds.
But intransigent oppositionalism is no basis for a viable politics. Regardless of what Trump’s Australian acolytes believe, its transposition to this country would make for a future of repeated failure.
Rather, for a broader alliance to be possible again, a new synthesis is needed. Australia’s two greatest prime ministers, Menzies and Howard, suggest the way. Both exemplified a social conservatism that drew from the distinctively Australian emphasis on the conservative temperament over and above distinctive philosophical creed. Both forged a synthesis that combined an attachment to liberal principles with a commitment to large-scale changes needed to underwrite prolonged prosperity and progress.
Now, after the rout of last weekend’s election, that synthesis desperately needs to be redefined.
In the end, politics is about argument and arguments are about ideas. When politics seems so entirely bereft of them, Australian conservatives have no choice but to think again.
Henry Ergas is a columnist with The Australian. Alex McDermott is an independent historian.
In That Howling Infinite 