British archaeologist, academic and historian David Breeze has argued that “the study of history best proceeds through controversy”, suggesting that scholarly debate and differing interpretations of historical events are vital for a deeper understanding of the past, that that confronting alternative perspectives, reinterpreting evidence, and engaging in critical analysis can lead to more nuanced and accurate historical narrative.
This is particularly relevant with regard to the study of the historical and contemporary relationship between Australia and its indigenous minority.
I’ve written often about the indigenous history of our country. The following passage from my piece on Australia’s The Frontier Warsencapsulates my perspective:
”There is a darkness at the heart of democracy in the new world “settler colonial” countries like Australia and New Zealand, America and Canada that we struggle to come to terms with. For almost all of our history, we’ve confronted the gulf between the ideal of political equality and the reality of indigenous dispossession and exclusion. To a greater or lesser extent, with greater or lesser success, we’ve laboured to close the gap. It’s a slow train coming, and in Australia in these divisive days, it doesn’t take much to reignite our “history wars” as we negotiate competing narratives and debate the “black armband” and “white blindfold” versions of our national story”.
The historical truth, elusive and subjective, lies in the wide no man’s land between them – a view subscribed to by economist and commentator Henry Ergas in an informative tribute to the role of the recently deceased historian Keneth Wind
shuttle in The Australian. Ergas maps the topography of the history wars, marking out the battle lines between the so-called “revisionist” historians who are said to see no good in our history as it related to indigenous Australians and those, often on the conservative side of Australian politics, who ostensibly see no evil.
He begins by citing the nineteenth century German historian Leopold von Ranke who held that the historian’s highest calling was to write about the past “wie es eigentlich gewesen” – “as it had really been”. To achieve that task, Ranke had observed, three qualities were indispensable – common sense, courage and honesty: the first, to grasp things at all; the second, to not become frightened at what one sees; the third, to avoid the temptations of self-deception. Most of all, however, the historian needed to recognise that “Every epoch is equally close to God”, equally infused by grandeur and equally scarred by tragedy. It is not “the office of judging the past, or of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages” that has been assigned to historians; it is that of carefully reconstructing, rationally analysing and dispassionately presenting the past in all of its remoteness and complexity.
Reading Ergas’s tribute, I was reminded of what George MacDonald Fraser, creator of the infamously funny Flashman diaries, wrote in his wartime memoir Quartered Safe Out Here:
“You cannot, you must not, judge the past by the present; you must try to see it in its own terms and values, if you are to have any inkling of it. You may not like what you see, but do not on that account fall into the error of trying to adjust it to suit your own vision of what it ought to have been.”
Below are pieces published in In That Howling Infinite in regard to Australian history as it these relate to Indigenous Australians:
Keith Windschuttle and the continuing battle for history
Henry Ergas, The Australian, 18 April 2025
Historian Keith Windschuttle in Perth, 2004.Ross Swanborough
With the death last week of Keith Windschuttle Australia lost a scholar driven by the duty Leopold von Ranke famously defined as the historian’s highest calling: to write about the past “wie es eigentlich gewesen” – “as it had really been”.
To achieve that task, Ranke observed, three qualities were indispensable – common sense, courage and honesty: the first, to grasp things at all; the second, to not become frightened at what one sees; the third, to avoid the temptations of self-deception.
Most of all, however, the historian needed to recognise that “Every epoch is equally close to God”, equally infused by grandeur and equally scarred by tragedy. It is not “the office of judging the past, or of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages” that has been assigned to historians; it is that of carefully reconstructing, rationally analysing and dispassionately presenting the past in all of its remoteness and complexity.
Never was that task harder than in this country’s “history wars”. Triggered, in the self-congratulatory words of the ANU’s Tom Griffiths, by a “concerted scholarly quest to dismantle the Great Australian Silence” – a silence that had “hardened into denialism … denial of bloody warfare on Australian soil” – the revisionist historians’ portrayal of Australia’s history as a never-ending tale of murderous dispossession, cultural decimation and environmental destruction inevitably took its toll on accuracy and objectivity.
There was, in the revisionists’ onslaught, little room for the Rankean virtues, first and foremost that of meticulous attention to the documentary records. It was therefore unsurprising that The Fabrication of Aboriginal History’s relentless focus on those records thrust Windschuttle into the firing line.
Historians Keith Windschuttle and Henry Reynolds.
Nor was it surprising that he paid a high price for his audacity. As Tim Rowse, one of Australia’s most distinguished scholars of Aboriginal history, noted, “at least one speaker” at a 2001 National Museum of Australia conference on Windschuttle’s work “was patronising towards Windschuttle to a degree that exceeded anything I’ve experienced in academic life”; instead of addressing his arguments, the focus was on comparing Windschuttle to David Irving, thereby placing him “outside the conversations of humanists”.
Yet it would be wrong to suggest Windschuttle’s colossal efforts were ignored. As Rowse, who could hardly be accused of being a reactionary, admitted, Windschuttle’s review of the NSW archival evidence on the Stolen Generations was “compelling”, raising real questions about an episode that has become emblematic of “the heavy-handed and insensitive management of Indigenous Australians”.
Moreover, even the attempts to debunk the Fabrication’s contentions yielded tangible benefits. Windschuttle’s Quadrant articles were “widely derided as politically mischievous”, writes Mark Finnane, a legal historian whose work on the interactions between Indigenous Australians and the law has reshaped the field; but their longer-term impact “has been to accelerate research in local and regional studies”, providing a sounder factual base for broader analyses.
At least partly as a result, there are some outstanding works, including by historians broadly on the left, that are far removed both from the revisionists’ overwhelming Manicheanism and from the flights of fancy of the post-modernists Windschuttle had so effectively denounced in The Killing of History (1994).
For example, Rowse’s White Flour, White Power (1998) – with its conclusion that “‘assimilation’ was in some respects a constructive policy era, not only a destructive onslaught on Indigenous ways of life” – remains an exceptionally fine book, and several of his more recent essays, such as the one on the “protection” policy’s role in reversing the decline in the Indigenous population, directly challenge the revisionists’ core assumptions.
Equally, Finnane’s Indigenous Crime and Settler Law (2012), co-authored with Heather Douglas, provides a balanced account of the repeated efforts the colonial authorities made – albeit with only mixed success – to deal sensitively and humanely with the gap between tribal custom and English law.
Noting that putting “the colonial encounter in polarised terms” as a clash between black and white “is an abstraction from a complex and constantly shifting reality”, Finnane and Douglas highlight the need to recognise that “settlers were divided – convicts, free immigrants, military, governors”, as were “Indigenous peoples – jealous of their own country, accustomed in many places to constant warring, seeking advantage of alliances with settlers to advance or protect their own interests”.
And Andrew Fitzmaurice’s Sovereignty, Property and Empire, 1500–2000 (2014) is a deeply researched corrective to simple-minded claims (including, unfortunately, by the High Court) about the relevance of “terra nullius” to Britain’s assertion of sovereignty.
But despite those efforts, the sloppiness continues, as even a cursory glance at the ever-expanding literature on the Native Mounted Police shows.
For example, the military historian Peter Stanley – who has been influential in the Australian War Memorial’s portrayal of the “frontier wars” – has recently claimed that “the Native Police were Australia’s own Einsatzgruppen”, the Nazi murderers who machine-gunned hundreds of thousands of Jews that they had herded on to the edge of pits, stripped naked and beaten to within an inch of their lives. That Stanley’s claim is abhorrent for minimising the horrors of the Holocaust should not need to be said; that it is grotesque for its obvious historical inaccuracy ought to be apparent to even the least informed reader.
Striking too are the contentions of Queensland historian Raymond Evans. The mounted police, Evans claimed in 2010, were responsible for 24,000 deaths. But since then, Evans, in work with Robert Orsted-Jensen, has nearly doubled that estimate to 41,040, allegedly on the basis of a methodology that is “conservative” and “cautious”.
Peter Stanley
Keith Windschuttle
In an attempt to justify relying on highly selective samples and superficial extrapolations, Orsted-Jensen has claimed that there was a “a very systematic, deliberate and comprehensive destruction of virtually all sensitive flies stored in Queensland’s Police Department” – an accusation that has become one of the revisionist historians most widely repeated tropes.
However, a devastating review of Evans and Orsted-Jensen’s work by Finnane and Jonathan Richards not only points to the wealth of documentary material on which Evans and Orsted-Jensen could have drawn; it also concludes that any gaps in the records are more likely “an accumulated outcome of administrative culling, bureaucratic indifference, and misadventure” than of systematic destruction.
In fact, “rather than a history of cover-up, the entire administration of the Native Police from as early as 1861 on illustrates the concern of governing elites with the risk of unwarranted killing”.
As for Evans and Orsted-Jensen’s estimates of casualties, Finnane and Richards show that they are “highly subjective … and correspondingly unreliable”, while “the picture (Evans and Orsted-Jensen) paint of massive governmental indifference to or complicity in the deaths of tens of thousands of Aboriginal deaths does not stand up to scrutiny”.
But if questionable assertions remain common in the professional literature, they absolutely pervade the public commentary. Predictably, the ABC publicised Evans and Orsted-Jensen’s estimates; no less predictably, it has done nothing to correct the record. And if the academic historians are willing to rebut inaccuracies in scholarly publications, they are far more reluctant to do so when that involves intervening in the public debate.
That was apparent in the wake of Keryn Walshe and Peter Sutton’s Farmers or Hunter Gatherers? (2021), which vividly exposed the flaws of fact and analysis in Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu. The reviews in scholarly journals, such as that by Peter Veth in Australian Archaeology (2021), did not mince their words about Pascoe’s egregious errors; but more often than not, the media commentary by academic historians was cautiously circumspect.
There were, for sure, attacks on Walshe and Sutton that merely reproduced the left’s deeply engrained orthodoxy. To take but one example, Heidi Norman from UTS accused Walshe and Sutton of “wanting to strip the debate of contemporary meaning” by deploying a neo-colonial framework in which “Western definitions and labels are supreme”.
However, the academics’ dominant tone was mealy-mouthed, conceding that Pascoe had made mistakes but arguing that those mistakes counted less than Dark Emu’s merits in advancing reconciliation.
Peter Sutton
James Boyce
Thus, reviewing Farmers or Hunter Gatherers? in The Guardian, Sydney University’s Mark McKenna carefully put the word ‘fact’ in scare quotes, as if there was some doubt as to its meaning; while “at face value, this is a dispute about ‘facts’”, he wrote, the dry-as-dust issues of evidence and verisimilitude are far less important than “Pascoe’s ability to capture and move audiences desperate to hear his stories of Aboriginal ‘achievement’”.
In exactly the same way, the Tasmanian historian James Boyce recognised shortcomings in Pascoe’s work but nonetheless hailed it as a “significant cultural achievement”, whose “lifegiving” story “speaks to people for whom Aboriginal Australia remains a foreign country but want this to change”.
And Henry Reynolds, writing in Meanjin, essentially pooh-poohed the criticisms, arguing that Pascoe’s faux pas was primarily one of terminology: had Pascoe “declared that the First Nations peoples were not ‘just’ hunters and gatherers but graziers rather than farmers”, the problems with his account would have been largely overcome.
The undertone, in those comments, was clear: that it would be unfair to disabuse Pascoe’s adoring white fans, whose intentions were as pure as their thoughts were confused. Keeping faith with those intentions might involve distorting the truth; but the lie, like those Plato advocates in The Republic, would be a noble one, which ruling elites tell “in order to benefit the polis” by convincing citizens that “it is not pious to quarrel”.
Bruce Pascoe
Ironically, in their effort not to discomfort the masses, the revisionists had enveloped themselves in a Great Australian Silence of their own.
Yet the harm those deliberate distortions of the historical record cause is not just to truthfulness; it is to our ability to live with the past, rather than to live in the past. For so long as we cannot accurately and dispassionately view this country’s history, we will lack the foundations needed to better shape its future.
And it is not much comfort to know that when intellectual constructs stray too far from careful readings of the world, as they so tragically have in everything to do with Indigenous history and policy, reality has a nasty habit of biting back.
In the end, Nietzsche was right: the basic question societies, no less than individuals, must face, is “How much truth can we endure? Error is not blindness; it is cowardice.” Exposing cowardice takes courage. Now, with Keith Windschuttle gone, that duty must fall to others.
If I ruled the world
Every day would be the first day of Spring
Every heart would have a new song to sing
And we’d sing of the joy every morning would bring
If I ruled the world
Every man would be as free as a bird
Every voice would be a voice to be heard
Take my word, we would treasure each day that occurred
My world would be a beautiful place
Where we would weave such wonderful dreams
My world would wear a smile on its face
Like the man in the moon has when the moon beams
Leslie Bricusse and Cyril Ornadel
On his inauguration on January 20 2025, US President Donald Trump declared to the American people, “My fellow citizens, the golden age of America begins right now.”
Pundits and partisans right across the political spectrum, both at home and overseas, agree that Donald John Trump’s second presidential term is probably the most consequential since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. That is perhaps the only thing that they can agree on.
After 100 days in office, he is in command, testing the limits of executive power, resetting political and cultural perceptions and expectations, and reframing America’s role in the worked. But it would seem to many that having arguably declared war on America and the world, he is veering out of control.
There is almost no part of American society which has not felt the blizzard of change from the day he was sworn in. In a stand-over style that is more mob boss than head of state, he has forged a new American imperialism to project what he perceives as US interests, secure strategic assets and rebuild American economic self-sufficiency. The global trading system that has been in place for 75 years has been crippled, if not destroyed, and economists and stock markets surmise that the US economy is on the verge of crashing. America is no longer the leader of the free world because the world is no longer following America, but rather, is taking evasive action. Trump has united the people of most countries around the world around their political leadership, and yet he has not united America and Americans.
In a recent opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald, Bruce Wolpe, a senior fellow at the University of Sydney’s United States Studies Centre and former Congressional staffer, wrote a concise overview of Trump’s tumultuous first 100 Days. I have borrowed from it to write the following précis.
Trump is not governing by legislating but by an unprecedented exercise of executive power. He has signed fewer bills into law than any recent modern president while his 100 executive orders have triggered a tidal wave of new policies to change what the government can and cannot do. His political style of is marked by decrees coupled with complete domination of the airwaves for several hours each day, from greeting world leaders in the Oval Office to his televised cabinet meetings. For Trump, it is all streaming, all the time.as he remarked in the prime-time public takedown of the Ukrainian president in the Ovak Office, this it makes for “good television”.
On foreign policy, Trump promised groundbreaking early success on the world stage. But he has to date failed to end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, come close to a nuclear deal with Iran , or settling the dozens of trade wars he launched against his allies. Instead, there are constant reversals in tactics and rhetoric. He has decoupled America from the wider world with ramifications which will be felt for many years, if not decades. He has treated allies like adversaries, withdrawn America from numerous global institutions and treaties, erected daunting tariff barriers on all US trading partners and slashed US foreign aid and the State Department, terminating foreign aid, vaccines and food programme. The cumulative effect has been to gravely weaken America’s ability to wield soft power at a time when China and Russia are rushing to fill the vacuum.
Aided and abetted by billionaire Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, Trump unleashed Project 2025’s sledgehammer to the bureaucracy with overriding acts of Congress to dismantle agencies and programmes, mass firings, loyalty oaths, and the seizure of databases. And, as he promised on the campaign trail, Trump is exacting vengeance on his enemies. He has called on judges who have ruled against him to be impeached. He has blacklisted law firms that worked with Democrats, or else shook them down for millions of dollars of free work. In a speech at the Department of Justice, Trump said his enemies were “scum”, that the cases brought against him were “bullshit”, that the judges who ruled against him were corrupt, his prosecutors were deranged, and that those who came after him should be imprisoned. In a war against the nation’s most prestigious universities, he is demanding their leftist woke elitism be expunged, or else research dollars and tax-free status will be eliminated. Meanwhile, he continues to target the media as the enemy of the people. The Associated Press has been excluded from presidential events; the Voice of America has been shut down; and Trump has asked the regulator to cancel the broadcast license of CBS whilst moving to defund public media’s NPR and PBS.
The Democrats in Washington meanwhile are adrift and effectively leaderless. With control of the House and the Senate, Trump dominates everything in the capital. The force, speed and scope of his administration’s actions are so intense that the Democrats cannot respond effectively. Its not as if everyone has been taken by surprise. If they had been paying attention, this is exactly what Trump and his team said they would do. It is the scale of this revolution that has put everyone into a spin. It is a time of everything happening everywhere all at once – in accordance with the MAGA mantra of “move fast and break things”.
But, say optimists, the pushback is coming. Every weekend, people are flooding the streets in cities across the country. That movement is growing. If all that Trump and his administration have let loose comes into full force but does not deliver the American miracle he promised – with recession, inflation, and chaos taking hold across the land – the midterm elections next year could be a turning point. The Democrats are in striking distance of retaking control of Congress. If so, Trump’s power may be checked and his golden age may be stillborn. And yet, nothing about Trump is certain. His approval ratings might now be at a historical low, but he has been wrongly written off many times before.
So, how did it come to this?
As the authors of the long but excellent opinion piece in The Atlantic published below explains, Donald Trump’s Second Coming began four years ago and took meticulous planning.
That’s right, it’s come to this Yes, it’s come to this And wasn’t it a long way down? Wasn’t it a strange way down?
L Cohen, Dress Rehearsal Rag
Postscript: a bad case of imperial purple …
The story goes that Roman Emperor and stoic “philosopher king” Marcus Aurelius engaged a slave to follow him as he walked around Rome; his only job, whenever his master was praised, was to whisper in his ear, “Remember, you are just a man, you are just a man”. Washington, meanwhile, is starting to resemble some of the more excruciating scenes from the BBC’s iconic sword and sandals series I Claudius.
‘Brazen transaction mixed with humbling obeisance is hardly unknown in Washington … In Trump’s Washington, the imperative has never been plainer: if you want to get ahead or stay out of trouble, praise the President as much as he praises himself … The gestures of servility come from all over. At a Cabinet meeting not long ago, Trump’s secretaries took turns: “Your vision is a turning point and inflection point in American history” (Brooke Rollins, Agriculture); “You were overwhelmingly elected by the biggest majority—Americans want you to be President” (Pam Bondi, Attorney General); “What you’re doing now is a great service to our country, but ultimately to the world” (Marco Rubio, State) … At a hearing of the House Committee on Natural Resources, where a dozen or so members were discussing the Gulf of America Act of 2025, sponsored by Marjorie Taylor Greene. Democrat congressman Jared Huffman said: “This is remarkable new stuff in this committee, just bootlicking sycophancy of the highest order,” he said. (Not long after the hearing, Huffman suggested an amendment to rename Earth “Planet Trump”.’
Illustration by Dale Stephanos. Source: Ethan Miller / Getty.
Before we begin, a primer on the science of arranging an interview with a sitting American president:
In ordinary times, reporters seeking an on-the-record encounter with the commander in chief first write an elaborate proposal. The proposal details the goals of the interview, the broad areas of concern, and the many reasons the president must, for his own good, talk to these particular reporters and not other, perfectly adequate but still lesser reporters. This pitch is then sent to White House officials. If the universe bends favorably, negotiations ensue. If the staff feel reasonably confident that the interview will somehow help their cause, they will ask the president—with trepidation, at times—to sit for the interview. Sometimes, the president will agree.
Such is what happened recently to us. We went through this process in the course of reporting the story you are reading. We made our pitch, which went like this: President Donald Trump, by virtue of winning a second term and so dramatically reshaping the country and the world, can now be considered the most consequential American leader of the 21st century, and we want to describe, in detail, how this came to be. Just four years ago, after the violent insurrection he fomented, Trump appeared to be finished. Social-media companies had banned or suspended him, and he had been repudiated by corporate donors. Republicans had denounced him, and the country was moving on to the fresh start of Joe Biden’s presidency. Then came further blows—the indictments, the civil judgments, and the endless disavowals by people who once worked for him.
And yet, here we are, months into a second Trump term. We wanted to hear, in his own words, how he’d pulled off one of the most remarkable comebacks in political history, and what lessons, if any, he’d internalized along the way.
Trump agreed to see us. We were tentatively promised a meeting and a photo shoot—likely in the Oval Office, though possibly the Lincoln Bedroom. But then, as is so often the case with this White House, everything went sideways.
The week our interview was supposed to occur, Trump posted a vituperative message on Truth Social, attacking us by name. “Ashley Parker is not capable of doing a fair and unbiased interview. She is a Radical Left Lunatic, and has been as terrible as is possible for as long as I have known her,” he wrote. “To this date, she doesn’t even know that I won the Presidency THREE times.” (That last sentence is true—Ashley Parker does not know that Trump won the presidency three times.) “Likewise, Michael Scherer has never written a fair story about me, only negative, and virtually always LIES.”
Apparently, as word of our meeting spread through Trump’s inner circle, someone had reminded him of some of the things we (specifically Ashley) had said and written that he didn’t like. We still don’t know who it was—but we immediately understood the consequences: no photo shoot, no tour of the newly redecorated Oval Office or the Lincoln Bedroom, and definitely no interview.
But we’ve both covered Trump long enough to know that his first word is rarely his final one. So at 10:45 on a Saturday morning in late March, we called him on his cellphone. (Don’t ask how we got his number. All we can say is that the White House staff have imperfect control over Trump’s personal communication devices.) The president was at the country club he owns in Bedminster, New Jersey. The number that flashed on his screen was an unfamiliar one, but he answered anyway. “Who’s calling?” he asked.
Despite his attacks on us a few days earlier, the president, evidently feeling buoyed by a week of successes, was eager to talk about his accomplishments. As we spoke, the sounds of another conversation, perhaps from a television, hummed in the background.
The president seemed exhilarated by everything he had managed to do in the first two months of his second term: He had begun a purge of diversity efforts from the federal government; granted clemency to nearly 1,600 supporterswho had participated in the invasion of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, including those caught beating police officers on camera; and signed 98 executive orders and counting (26 of them on his first day in office). He had fired independent regulators; gutted entire agencies; laid off great swaths of the federal workforce; and invoked 18th-century wartime powers to use against a criminal gang from Venezuela. He had adjusted tariffs like a DJ spinning knobs in the booth, upsetting the rhythms of global trade and inducing vertigo in the financial markets. He had raged at the leader of Ukraine, a democratic ally repelling an imperialist invasion, for not being “thankful”—and praised the leader of the invading country, Russia, as “very smart,” reversing in an instant 80 years of U.S. foreign-policy doctrine, and prompting the countries of NATO to prepare for their own defense, without the protective umbrella of American power, for the first time since 1945.
Donald Trump after being sworn in as president for his second term in the Rotunda of the United States Capitol (Shawn Thew / Reuters)
He had empowered one of his top political donors, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, to slice away at the federal government and take control of its operating systems. He had disemboweled ethics and anti-corruption architecture installed after Watergate, and had declared that he, not the attorney general, was the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer. He had revoked Secret Service protection and security clearances from political opponents, including some facing Iranian death threats for carrying out actions Trump himself had ordered in his first term. He had announced plans to pave over part of the Rose Garden, and he had redecorated the Oval Office—gold trim and gold trophies and gold frames to go with an array of past presidential portraits, making the room look like a Palm Beach approximation of an 18th-century royal court.
Old foes were pleading for his grace. Meta—whose founder, Mark Zuckerberg, had become an enthusiastic supplicant—had paid $25 million to settle a civil lawsuit with Trump that many experts believed was meritless. Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post, announced that he was banning his opinion writers from holding certain opinions—and then joined Trump for dinner the same night at the White House.
“He’s 100 percent. He’s been great,” the president told us, referring to Bezos. “Zuckerberg’s been great.”
We asked Trump why he thought the billionaire class was prostrating itself before him.
“It’s just a higher level of respect. I don’t know,” Trump said. “Maybe they didn’t know me at the beginning, and they know me now.”
“I mean, you saw yesterday with the law firm,” he said. He was referring to Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, one of the nation’s most prestigious firms, whose leader had come to the Oval Office days earlier to beg for relief from an executive order that could have crippled its business. Trump had issued the order at least partially because a former partner at the firm had in 2021 gone to work for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, where he was part of an investigation of the Trump Organization’s business practices. Also that week, an Ivy League institution, threatened with the cancellation of $400 million in federal funding, had agreed to overhaul its Middle Eastern–studies programs at the Trump administration’s request, while also acceding to other significant demands. “You saw yesterday with Columbia University. What do you think of the law firm? Were you shocked at that?” Trump asked us.
Yes—all of it was shocking, much of it without precedent. Legal scholars were drawing comparisons to Franklin D. Roosevelt and the early stages of the New Deal, when Congress had allowed FDR to demolish norms and greatly expand the powers of the presidency.
As ever, Trump was on the hunt for a deal. If he liked the story we wrote, he said, he might even speak with us again.
“Tell the people at The Atlantic, if they’d write good stories and truthful stories, the magazine would be hot,” he said. Perhaps the magazine can risk forgoing hotness, he suggested, because it is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, which buffers it, he implied, from commercial imperatives. But that doesn’t guarantee anything, he warned. “You know at some point, they give up,” he said, referring to media owners generally and—we suspected—Bezos specifically. “At some point they say, No más, no más.” He laughed quietly.
Media owners weren’t the only ones on his mind. He also seemed to be referring to law firms, universities, broadcast networks, tech titans, artists, research scientists, military commanders, civil servants, moderate Republicans—all the people and institutions he expected to eventually, inevitably, submit to his will.
We asked the president if his second term felt different from his first. He said it did. “The first time, I had two things to do—run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys,” he said. “And the second time, I run the country and the world.”
For weeks, we’d been hearing from both inside and outside the White House that the president was having more fun than he’d had in his first term. “The first time, the first weeks, it was just ‘Let’s blow this place up,’ ” Brian Ballard, a lobbyist and an ally of the president’s, had told us. “This time, he’s blowing it up with a twinkle in his eye.”
When we put this observation to Trump over the phone, he agreed. “I’m having a lot of fun, considering what I do,” he said. “You know, what I do is such serious stuff.”
EXILE
that trump now finds himself once again in a position to blow things up is astonishing, considering the depth of his fall. So much has happened so fast that the improbability of his comeback gets obscured. Perhaps no one in American history has had a political resurrection as remarkable as Donald Trump’s.
In the waning days of his first term, his approval rating stood at a pallid 34 percent. A few weeks earlier, he had watched on television while an insurrection he incited overran the Capitol; polls showed that a clear majority of Americans believed he bore responsibility for the attack. The House of Representatives had just impeached him for the second time—making him the only president to ever achieve that ignominy. And although the Senate failed to reach the two-thirds majority required for conviction, seven Republican senators voted to convict—the most members of a president’s own party to vote for an impeachment conviction in history.
Twitter and Facebook, his favorite social-media platforms, had banned or effectively silenced him, along with Instagram and YouTube. To try to reestablish direct connection with his followers, he would launch a blog, “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump.” But it gained little traction and was abandoned within weeks.
Major corporations announced that they were cutting off political contributions to officials who had supported Trump’s election lies. Deutsche Bank and Signature Bank decided to stop doing business with Trump and his companies. Perhaps most painful to the president, the PGA of America yanked its scheduled 2022 championship tournament from Trump’s Bedminster golf course. Former members of his own Cabinet and staff—people he had hired—would declare him, or had already declared him, “a moron” (Rex Tillerson, secretary of state), “more dangerous than anyone could ever imagine” (James Mattis, secretary of defense), “the most flawed person I have ever met” (John Kelly, chief of staff), and “a laughing fool” (John Bolton, national security adviser). And now longtime allies were abandoning him. Kevin McCarthy, the Republican House minority leader, had discussed pushing Trump to resign from office. On the evening of the insurrection, Senator Lindsey Graham, a compass reliably magnetized toward wherever power in the Republican Party lies, pointed away from Trump for the first time in four years. “Count me out,” Graham had declared on the Senate floor. “Enough is enough.” Rupert Murdoch, then the chairman of Fox Corporation, sent an email to a former Fox Broadcasting executive in which he declared, “We want to make Trump a non person.” Coming from Murdoch himself, the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon told us recently, “that’s a papal bull.”
On the morning of Joe Biden’s inauguration, Trump was a dozen miles southeast of the festivities, at Joint Base Andrews, preparing to depart for Florida. (Trump was the first president since Andrew Johnson, in 1869, to boycott the swearing-in of his successor.) Standing before a modest crowd, his dark overcoat a meager bulwark against the cold, the soon-to-be-former president cut a diminished figure.
Just before boarding Air Force One for the final time, to head to Mar-a-Lago, Trump spoke to those gathered to bid him farewell. “We will be back in some form,” he said, a notably modest framing from such a formerly oversize figure.
Few believed him. It didn’t even sound like he believed it himself. The Trump era was over.
Almost as soon as Trump arrived at his gilded Elba, he began plotting his return. He missed the press pool—the gaggle of reporters that tails every president—and once tried to summon it, only to be told that no such pool still existed. But it would turn out that the lack of attention in those first months—and the lack of access to social-media platforms—was a blessing. Enforced obscurity gave him the time and clarity he needed to plan his comeback.
To understand how Trump rose from the political dead, and how he set himself up to wield power in his second term, we spoke with dozens of top advisers, senior aides, allies, adversaries, and confidants. Many who talked with us did so only on the condition of anonymity, in order to be more candid or to avoid angering the president. The story they told us revealed that Trump’s time in the political wilderness is crucial to understanding the way he’s exercising power now.
He had been in Palm Beach a week when an opportunity presented itself. Trump heard that Kevin McCarthy would be in South Florida for fundraisers. Though the two men had clashed after the Capitol riot, Trump invited McCarthy to Mar-a-Lago. Even before the meeting happened, news of it leaked to The New York Times, shaking the political universe: Were Republican leaders, who had seemed so intent on purging Trump, embracing him again? When Trump and McCarthy met in person, the former president asked the minority leader who had tipped off the Times.
Donald Trump departed Washington in 2021 a pariah, twice impeached, abandoned by former allies, and banned or suspended from his favorite social-media platforms. (Photo-illustration by Paul Spella. Sources: Noam Galai / Getty; Alex Edelman / AFP / Getty; Sepia Times / Universal Images Group / Getty.)
“I know who leaked it—you did,” McCarthy replied, multiple people briefed on the exchange told us.
“It’s good for both of us,” Trump shot back.
Both men were right. McCarthy had already concluded that the path back to Republican control of the House in the 2022 midterms—and his own path to the speakership—required a unified party, one that included Trump and his MAGA base. After the meeting, each man separately released the same photo: the two of them grinning amid the ostentatious splendor of Mar-a-Lago. Trump had taken his first step toward political redemption.
It is a truism that Trump has never felt governed by the traditional rules of politics. And he has always been convinced of his own genius, his pure gut instincts. But never more so than today. The past four years have turned him into a Nietzschean cliché. Banishment, multiple indictments, a 34-count felony conviction, repeated brushes with assassins—all have combined to convince him that he is impervious to challenges that would destroy others. Those years also strengthened in him the salesman’s instinct that he can bend reality to his will—turn facts into “fake news,” make the inconceivable not just conceivable but actual, transform the Gulf of Mexico into the Gulf of America, make people believe what he’s selling in defiance of what they see with their own eyes. This is the core lesson that Trump and his acolytes internalized from the 2020 election and January 6. The real-estate mogul who branded buildings with his name everywhere from Turkey to Uruguay, who sold the “world’s greatest steaks” and the “finest” wine and “fantastic” mattresses, had mastered the alchemy of perception. Reality, to Trump, is fungible. While reporting on Trump over the past four years, we were repeatedly struck that, in failing to drive a stake directly through his heart, all of the would-be vampire slayers—Democrats, Never Trumpers, Republican-primary opponents, prosecutors, judges, media critics—only strengthened him. Which brings us to a second lesson: Trump and his team realized that they could behave with near impunity by embracing controversies and scandals that would have taken down just about any other president—as long as they showed no weakness.
Even now, Trump—who described himself to us as “a very positive thinker”—struggles to admit that his return to power was a comeback. To concede that he’d had to come back would be to admit that he had fallen in the first place.
Early in our reporting for this article, we asked the Trump loyalist and former Breitbart News editor Raheem Kassam to explain how the president had been able to bend the country, and the world, to his will. Over a meal of oysters brûlées, duck confit, and fries cooked in beef tallow at Butterworth’s, the new MAGA haunt on Capitol Hill, he responded crudely, if vividly. “He didn’t bend them to his will,” Kassam said. “He bent them over.”
When we spoke with Trump in late March, his approval ratings seemed steady, his political base apparently unshakable. Institution after institution was submitting to him—“obeying in advance,” as the historian of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder has put it. Trump was carrying out his agenda with surprisingly little resistance, even from Democrats. But in the days and weeks that followed, the patina of infallibility began to crack. At the instigation of Elon Musk’s DOGE team, critical workers had been getting fired—and then hired back. An embarrassing (and possibly illegal) operations-security snafu, in which the editor of this magazine was included on a Signal group chat that discussed imminent attack plans on Houthi targets in Yemen, made the administration look incompetent, in a fashion reminiscent of the clown-car chaos of Trump 1.0. The president’s tariff rollout was shambolic, tanking the stock market and causing even some loyalists to question him publicly. His approval rating on the economy, long a buttress of his polling support, went negative. Was this what happens when a feeling of indomitability curdles into hubris? Or was this just the next setback for Trump—some combination of Houdini and Lazarus—to recover from?
he had almost been destroyed before. After a real-estate downturn in the early 1990s, Trump found himself on the brink of financial ruin. His near bankruptcy and recovery led to his 1997 book, The Art of the Comeback. For his political advisers in exile, this book became essential reading.
The first pages list Trump’s “Top Ten Comeback Tips.” When we met one of his advisers recently, this person recounted from memory some of the rules on the list. “Rule 1 is: Play golf,” this adviser told us. “Rule 9 is: Get even.” (Rule 10, “Always have a prenuptial agreement,” seemed less applicable to politics.)
To stage a comeback, Trump would need the right staff. He had realized, in his exile, that at nearly every turn in his first term, someone on his own team—Reince Priebus, John Kelly, James Mattis, Bill Barr, Gary Cohn—had blocked him. He needed smart people who would figure out how to let him do everything that he wanted to do, in whatever way he wanted to do it. His first key hire was a political operative who had impressed the former president with her retrospective analysis of the 2020 election. Biden had won the election that year by flipping back into the Democratic column five key states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (along with a lone congressional district in Nebraska). One of the few bright spots for Trump in 2020 had been Florida, where he had increased his winning margin from 2016. What, Trump began asking his allies after the election, had he done right in Florida that he hadn’t done in the rest of the country?
The answer, in large part, boiled down to Susie Wiles, who had run Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns in the state. Wiles, the daughter of the legendary NFL announcer Pat Summerall, is an experienced campaign operative (she was a scheduler for Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign), who over the past three decades had developed deep Florida ties. After every campaign she runs, Wiles writes an “after action” report, documenting what worked and what didn’t. Over dinner with Trump on the patio at Mar-a-Lago in early 2021, she delivered “the Florida memo.” Soon after, he hired her to run his political operation, which eventually became his 2024 campaign.
Wiles saw that one thing that had held Trump back in 2020 was that he had not finished taking over the Republican Party during his first term. Part of Trump’s leverage had been his ability to endorse in Republican primaries—influence he was eager to reprise. “When I endorse somebody, they win,” Trump told us on the phone. “But even when I endorse them in the general election, mostly they win. It’s important.” (Now when Trump calls to pressure a fellow Republican about an issue or a vote, they are almost always grateful for his past support, or feel that they owe their seat to him.)
The Wiles process for evaluating potential endorsees—which she undertook with James Blair, now a deputy chief of staff in the White House, and Brian Jack, now a congressman representing Georgia—involved researching how they had spoken about Trump in the past. “The basic thing was their loyalty and their political viability,” one adviser told us. “So we were looking for things like: So, what did they say on J6? What did they say during the Access Hollywood tapes? What is their voting record with us?” Trump was building a coalition of loyalists, something he hadn’t sufficiently done during the first term.
Wiles had plenty of experience managing men with big personalities. But colleagues say a key reason she’s been successful working with Trump (she is now his White House chief of staff) is that she never tries to manage him. She does not imagine that she can control him, as some former top advisers attempted, and she tends not to offer advice unless specifically asked. Her primary role, as she sees it, is to set up processes to help ensure Trump’s success, and then to execute his directives, whatever they may be.
At first, Trump’s banishment from the big social-media platforms, along with mainstream media outlets’ reluctance—including Fox News’s—to give him much coverage, seemed potentially devastating. But Trump turned to the far-right platforms and activists still welcoming him. Taylor Budowich—now a White House deputy chief of staff—worked with MAGA influencers to evade the Twitter and Facebook bans: They would print out pro-Trump social-media posts; Budowich would have Trump sign the paper with his Sharpie, and then mail the signed post back to the influencer; almost invariably, the influencer would then post the signed missive, flexing their access and building their audience—while simultaneously amplifying Trump’s voice. At the same time, a video ecosystem grew up around Trump, with streaming platforms such as Right Side Broadcasting Network stepping in to cover his events when cable networks would not.
“Him being banned gave rise to people like me, because the president’s supporters followed me to find out what he was saying,” one MAGA influencer told us. “It backfired on the tech people who deplatformed him, because it platformed all of us.”
Trump, meanwhile, continued to promote the lie that he’d won the 2020 election, and that January 6 was just an ordinary Wednesday. Normal political logic suggested that this was a bad strategy. But his shamelessness, as ever, remained a strength. By repeating something frequently enough, he could slowly make it feel true, at least for his supporters.
Not long ago, we sat in Steve Bannon’s Capitol Hill rowhouse, where he records his War Room podcast, pressing him on Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election, and his denial of what transpired on January 6. “Our reality is that we won” and that January 6 was a “fedsurrection,” Bannon said, referring to the conspiracy theory that FBI agents had incited the crowd on the Ellipse that day.
But this reality, we pointed out to Bannon, is simply not true.
“Now, here’s the interesting thing,” Bannon said. “Who’s won that argument? I think we have.”
“BE READY!”
the first televised hearing of the House select committee on January 6 was scheduled for the beginning of June 2022, and it was sure to be a spectacle that reminded viewers of the horror of the insurrection and emphasized the former president’s culpability. Trump’s team at Mar-a-Lago was desperate to distract attention from the hearing. At one point, someone proposed a brazen gambit: Trump could announce his 2024 bid for the presidency just minutes before the hearing gaveled in.
Trump’s response was telling. “I’m not ready for this,” he said. “We’re not ready for this right now.”
“That was the first moment of, like, ‘Okay, he’s not just thinking about it; he’s seriously thinking about how he wants to do it,’ ” one of his advisers told us. “He’s not going to just use it as a stunt to make a moment. He wants to win.”
Before long, Trump began emphasizing behind the scenes that he was serious. “Be ready,” he would repeat to people who had served with him the first time around. “Be ready! Be ready! We’re coming back! Be ready!”
Still, when Trump did launch his campaign, in November 2022, it did not get off to an auspicious start. Even his most fiercely supportive advisers concede that the announcement, in the form of an hour-long speech at Mar-a-Lago, was a dud.
Surprisingly few political reporters from major outlets were in attendance; it was as though the mainstream media still didn’t believe that Trump could be a viable candidate again. Worse, some members of Trump’s own family hadn’t bothered to show up. As the speech dragged on, even Fox News cut away, switching to what Bannon called “a C-level panel,” before returning for the final few minutes.
The campaign struggled to gain traction. Trump’s longtime pollster Tony Fabrizio told us that even months later, into early 2023, getting donors to attend the first big super-PAC event “was like pulling teeth.” And although Trump was now a declared presidential candidate, his team said it was still having trouble getting him booked even on shows such as Fox & Friends.
The first turning point, several advisers told us, came in February 2023. A Norfolk Southern train carrying hazardous chemicals derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, near the Pennsylvania border, spewing toxic material. Sitting in the West Palm Beach campaign headquarters one day, Trump’s team watched Joe Biden’s press secretary struggle to answer a question about the president’s plans for outreach to East Palestine. Soon after, Susie Wiles received a call from Trump’s oldest son, Don Jr., saying that his father ought to just show up there himself. When Wiles brought the suggestion to Trump, in the living room of Mar-a-Lago, his response was unequivocal: “That’s a great idea,” he enthused. “When can we go?”
Trump’s visit to East Palestine—and the footage of him buying McDonald’s for the first responders—had a potent effect. “It just reminded everyone that people still like this guy,” one adviser told us. “He’s still a draw.” Nearly two years later, Trump’s visit continued to resonate. “People are living their lives and they don’t delve that easily into policy,” a woman across the border in the swing state of Pennsylvania told our colleague George Packer before the election last fall. “All they know is that Trump was here buying everyone McDonald’s” and that Biden hadn’t visited for more than a year.
The halting start to the campaign kept Trump off the radar, giving his team time to plan. Former Trump advisers had used their years out of power to set up their own groups—America First Legal, America First Policy Institute, Center for Renewing America—to prepare for a second Trump administration.
“The people who were the true believers knew Trump was going to run again and win,” Caroline Wren, a former top Trump fundraiser, told us, adding that Trump’s policy loyalists “sat there and prepared executive orders for four years.”
The time out of the spotlight also allowed the team to build a new election strategy. By now, Trump had alienated a significant share of the voting public, and he was polling lower among some demographic groups than in previous elections. The conventional wisdom was that the criminal investigations and legal proceedings then under way would only increase that alienation. His campaign directors decided that the best tactic was to turn this problem into a strength. Chris LaCivita, who was a co–campaign manager alongside Susie Wiles and a military veteran wounded in the Gulf War in 1991, took to exhorting younger staffers with a Marine slogan: “Embrace the suck.”
The impulse to let Trump be Trump, so contrary to the instincts of much of the first-term staff, was laid out in a memo that James Blair and Tim Saler, the campaign’s lead data expert, sent to Wiles in early 2024. This became known around the campaign as the “gender memo.” “Instead of saying, ‘Look, we did two points worse with white suburban women between 2016 and 2020’ and ‘How do we get those points back?,’ what if we did it the other way?” an adviser familiar with the memo told us. “What if we said, ‘We gained eight points with non-college-educated men. What if we won them by 12?’ ”
During his brief political exile, Trump hired the campaign operative Susie Wiles. (Photo-illustration by Paul Spella. Sources: ablokhin / Getty; Tom Brenner / The Washington Post / Getty; ZUMA Press / Alamy.)
The strategy had the benefit of letting Trump be the version of himself that appealed to those men. In a moment when the Democratic Party often felt like an amalgamation of East Coast elitists, niggling scolds, and far-left activists, Trump appeared to offer judgment-free populism to a populace sick of being judged.
Trump’s own view, we were told, was more self-referential: “Why would I distance myself from my people? They love me.”
“IT MADE ME STRONGER”
on friday, may 31, 2024, the day after Trump was convicted of 34 felony charges in a New York City courtroom, the treasurer at Make America Great Again Inc., the main super PAC supporting the former president, called his boss, Taylor Budowich, with good news. A large wire transfer was incoming—a record $15 million. The call set off an internal scramble, because the bank needed the donor’s name to approve the transfer, and nobody knew who it was.
Shortly thereafter, the treasurer called back. “I’m so sorry,” he told Budowich. “I misheard him. It’s not $15 million—it’s $50 million.”
“Don’t be sorry!” Budowich said. (The donation was eventually traced to Timothy Mellon, an heir to the Mellon banking fortune.)
The Democrats assumed that Trump’s legal issues would politically neuter him. “A convicted felon is now seeking the office of the presidency,” Biden would say. But all the scandals and controversies that would have sunk a different candidate became background static. “The thing about the court cases is there were too many of them, and this is one of Trump’s superpowers—he never just breaks the law a little bit; he does it all over the place,” Sarah Longwell, a formerly Republican, anti-MAGA political strategist who regularly conducts focus groups, told us. “And as a result, there were so many court cases that it was just white noise to voters. They couldn’t tell them apart.”
The Democratic base remained outraged. Trump’s base continued to believe his claims that all the criminal investigations and January 6 hearings constituted a “witch hunt.” But for the sliver of voters who would actually decide the election, the Democratic argument that Trump was a threat to democracy was too far removed from their more urgent concerns about grocery prices. As time passed and Trump continued to rewrite history to turn insurrectionists into “patriots,” the events of January 6 receded into abstraction for many of these voters.
“If you said, ‘What’s J6?,’ it’s like, ‘What is that? Bingo? Are you playing Battleship?’ ” the adviser familiar with the gender memo told us, describing what the campaign’s voter research had found.
Trump’s felony conviction actually proved to be a boon. This did not surprise his advisers. A year earlier, in the spring of 2023, when Trump had been indicted over hush-money payments to a porn star, his support in Republican-primary polls jumped 10 points within a month, to more than 50 percent—a level it would never drop below again. In the first three months of 2023, MAGA Inc. had reported raising only about $600,000; in the three months following the indictment, the group took in nearly $13 million. “Democrats just played right into our hands,” Fabrizio, the Trump pollster, told us.
For Trump’s base, the cases were energizing, and they put his Republican-primary opponents in the difficult position of having to defend Trump against “lawfare” or risk being seen as supporting the Democrats’ position. So even while campaigning against him for the nomination, they were in effect campaigning for him.
During his 2016 campaign, Trump had ignored the traditional fundraising circuit, which increased donor skepticism of him. But during his time in the wilderness, he began to enjoy raising money. He asked advisers to schedule more call time for him with top donors. He wrote personal notes, and he regularly invited wealthy supporters and potential donors to dine with him at Mar-a-Lago. He judged generosity not by the size of the check, his allies told us, but by the size of the check relative to the donor’s net worth. He liked pressuring donors to bet on him—and watching them squirm if they hedged. Sometimes he was blunt, invoking the specter of a President Kamala Harris taking their wealth.
(“If I’m not president, you’re fucked,” he would tell a roomful of oil executives at Mar-a-Lago after the election. “Look at your profit-and-loss statements. You realize what would have happened to you if she was president? What’s wrong with you?”)
The Supreme Court decision in July 2024 regarding a legal challenge to the federal prosecution of Trump for interfering in the 2020 election gave Trump and his allies further momentum. Trump v. United States addressed the question of legal liability for a president, but Trump’s allies focused on how the Court described the presidency itself, suggesting that all the powers of the executive branch were imbued in the personage. “Unlike anyone else,” the Court wrote, “the President is a branch of government.” That the prosecution of Trump both revivified his candidacy and then gave him more executive power in his second term remains a stinging irony for Democrats.
When we talked with Trump, we asked him if he thought the criminal prosecutions had made him stronger. “Shockingly, yes,” he said. “Normally, it would knock you out. You wouldn’t even live for the next day. You know, you’d announce your resignation, and you’d go back and ‘fight for your name,’ like everybody says—you know, ‘fight for your name, go back to your family.’ ”
He paused. “Yeah, it made me stronger, made me a lot stronger.”
In the final months of the campaign, Democratic strategists working for Vice President Harris focused on seven swing states. Trump, by contrast, told aides that he wanted to put resources into picking up voters even in states he was already certain to win.
“We don’t want anyone to know—it’s a surprise—but I think we might win the popular vote,” Trump would say to his advisers. “We have got to run up the score.”
During breaks between events, his team would place calls to groups of voters in red states and put him on the line. “This is your favorite president, Donald Trump,” he’d say, before launching into brief remarks. They would make calls from the motorcade, from the campaign plane, as many as 10 a day. In this way, working around the old mass media, Trump reached thousands of voters directly.
“If there was someone in America in some state, still awake, Donald Trump would find a way to get to them,” Chris LaCivita told us.
In 2016, Trump had been so frustrated about losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton that he’d falsely asserted, “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” Eight years later, he didn’t have to pretend. As Election Night gave way to dawn in Palm Beach, Trump basked in the comprehensiveness of his victory—all seven swing states, and a strong showing in the popular-vote tally, which he ultimately won. Several aides got calls from him around 4 a.m. “You won’t believe it,” Trump crowed, according to one. “I’ve already had 20 world leaders call me. They all want to kiss my ass.”
Some time later, Trump addressed a gathering of supporters in the living room at Mar-a-Lago. During his first term people would say, “Yeah, he won, but he doesn’t have a mandate, ” Trump told the crowd. “Now they can’t say it anymore.”
THE TRANSITION
people who worked with Trump in his first term used to play a parlor game of sorts. What would happen, they wondered, if they, the human guardrails, weren’t there to correct the president’s errors, to explain to him all the things he did not know or understand, to talk him out of or slow-walk his most destructive impulses?
During his first term, he faced resistance and obstruction from all over the government: from the courts and from the Democrats, but also from Republicans in the House and Senate, who at times treated him like a floundering student. The contempt was mutual. “Paul Ryan was a stupid person,” Trump told us in March, referring to the former Republican speaker of the House. “And Mitch, Mitch wasn’t much better,” Trump said of Mitch McConnell, the former Senate Republican leader and, lately, the epicenter of GOP resistance to Trump, such as it is. But some of the most crucial pushback came from within the executive branch. At times, his chief of staff and his White House counsel declined to carry out his orders. Trump had been apoplectic when “his” Justice Department, under Jeff Sessions and Rod Rosenstein, opened an independent-counsel investigation into whether the Russians had influenced the 2016 election and whether the Trump campaign had colluded with them.
This time would be different, because he’d learned from experience. “When I did it before, I never did it, you know?” he told us. “I didn’t know people in Washington.”
On January 15, at 8 p.m., five days before the inauguration, Trump sent out an incendiary post on Truth Social. In it, he described the sorts of people his incoming administration would not be hiring—a list that included anyone who had ever worked for, in his words, “Americans for No Prosperity (headed by Charles Koch), ‘Dumb as a Rock’ John Bolton, ‘Birdbrain’ Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, disloyal Warmongerers Dick Cheney, and his Psycho daughter, Liz,” and anyone “suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome.” For those staffing Trump’s second term, the missive was doctrine: This time, loyalty would be absolute.
In 2016, few experienced Republicans had been involved in Trump’s campaign, so the pool of presumptive loyalists to draw from was small. His incoming team also used key transition picks—Cabinet secretaries, West Wing advisers—to reassure a still-skeptical Republican Party that Trump was one of them. This produced a dysfunctional dichotomy in which Reince Priebus, a mild-mannered traditional Republican from Wisconsin, and Steve Bannon, a revolutionary hell-bent on dismantling the administrative state, shared top billing in the West Wing. The competing camps—the MAGA fire-breathers, the establishment swamp creatures, “Javanka” and the globalists—leaked relentlessly to the media and tried to knife one another. A miasma of chaos surrounded Trump, and impaired the administration’s ability to carry out its policy agenda.
But by 2024, Trump had effectively consumed the party, and he had no need to recruit traditional Republicans, if any even remained. Cliff Sims, who during Trump’s first term had served as a communications aide in the White House before going to work for the director of national intelligence, helped the transition team manage hiring for the second term. The formula for staffing the administration wasn’t hard this time, Sims told us: “Don’t hire anyone who wasn’t committed to the agenda last time.”
“I knew that Stephen Miller would ultimately run the policy operation, with immigration as a top priority,” Sims told us, referring to Trump’s senior domestic-policy adviser, who is, famously, an immigration hard-liner. “So I just asked him, ‘Who do you want? Who should prepare DHS? Who should prepare ICE? Who are the rock stars from your team? Let’s get them all rolling.’ ” Same, too, with trade. Sims called Jamieson Greer, who had served as the chief of staff to the U.S. trade representative in Trump’s first term before taking over the role himself this time around. He asked Greer who Trump’s pro-tariff “killers on trade” were. “And he’s like, ‘I’ve been sitting here hoping someone would call about this; I’ve already got a list ready,’ ” Sims told us.
Because the transition hiring for the second term harvested a uniformly loyalist crop of staffers, getting things done the way Trump wants became easier. In the first term, executive orders designed by the MAGA faction were sometimes rushed through without proper legal vetting, in an attempt to prevent a warring faction from killing the directive, someone familiar with this process told us—which made them vulnerable to court challenges. This time around, the process for generating the orders is more disciplined.
Trump’s aides and advisers also now understood the hydraulics of the government better. They’d learned, for instance, that immigration policy was not contained solely within the Department of Homeland Security, and that to curb the flow of immigrants across the southern border, they also needed to install loyalists in crucial roles at the Department of Health and Human Services. When it came to the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs at the State Department, they now knew they needed MAGA diehards in key roles. This kind of knowledge would now be applied to thousands of hires across dozens of agencies.
When his cabinet nominees hit trouble in the Senate, Trump and his team were determined to test their new power. “It was ‘You’ll eat your breakfast and you’ll like it,’ ” a veteran Republican operative told us. The first major test came during the former Fox News host Pete Hegseth’s quest for confirmation as defense secretary.
Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, a Republican, was skeptical about Hegseth’s qualifications. Ernst is the first female combat veteran to serve in the Senate; Hegseth had previously said that women should not serve in combat roles. Ernst is also a sexual-assault survivor; Hegseth has been accused of sexual assault and other misconduct, including alcohol abuse. (Hegseth has denied the accusations.) But when Ernst publicly signaled that she might not be able to support the nomination, Trump’s allies leaped into action. On private text chains, they talked about how failing to win confirmation for Hegseth was untenable. The consensus was clear: Because Matt Gaetz had already had to withdraw as Trump’s pick for attorney general, if they lost another major nominee, there would be blood in the water. Even the most controversial—Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kash Patel—needed to be muscled through.
Trump and his team saw the confirmation of their most controversial Cabinet nominees—Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard—as a chance to flex their power over the Republican Party. (Photo-illustration by Paul Spella. Sources: Rebecca Noble / Getty; Anna Moneymaker / Getty; Philip Yabut / Getty; Print Collector / Getty.)
They decided to make an example of Ernst, as a warning to other senators about what to expect if they stepped out of line. An op‑ed implicitly excoriating her appeared on Breitbart News ; Bannon and the gang on his War Room podcast hammered her relentlessly; and the powerful young conservative activist Charlie Kirk and his Turning Point USA team threatened to send resources to Iowa to oppose her reelection in 2026. Ernst’s effort to “end Pete Hegseth,” Kirk posted on X in early December, “is a direct attempt to undermine the President and his voters. Pete Hegseth is the redline. If you vote against him, primaries will ensue.”
Trump’s team knew that once the most prominent MAGA figures began their onslaught, second-tier influencers would follow. Ernst called around to Trump allies, begging them to stop the attacks. But they wouldn’t relent; she voted to confirm Hegseth.
Bill Cassidy, a Republican senator and physician from Louisiana, also briefly found himself in the hot seat as he struggled with his confirmation vote on Kennedy, a vaccine critic who has misstated scientific findings, to lead the nation’s top health agency. (Cassidy was also viewed as a problem by Trump supporters because he’d voted to convict the president for his role in the January 6 insurrection.)
Cassidy ultimately supported Kennedy’s nomination, though he maintained that the vote had nothing to do with his own reelection prospects in 2026. Afterward, in the course of general conversations about the midterms, Cassidy’s team sought Trump’s support in his upcoming GOP primary. Trump told an aide to relay to Cassidy: “I’ll think about it.” (A Trump adviser told us that, for the moment, the president and Cassidy have reached “an uneasy détente.”)
Business leaders fell more quickly in line. After the election, they descended on Mar-a-Lago.
At dinner with Silicon Valley moguls, Trump would sometimes play “Justice for All”—a song by the J6 Prison Choir that features men imprisoned for their actions on January 6 singing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” interspersed with Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. One Trump adviser gleefully recounted how confused the tech billionaires appeared when “Justice for All” started, looking around for cues before inevitably rising and putting their hands over their hearts.
“The troll is strong,” the adviser told us.
The Thursday before the inauguration, a friend of Trump’s was sitting with him at Mar-a-Lago when the once and future president held up his phone to show off his recent-call log.
“Look who called in the past hour,” Trump boasted, then scrolled through a list that included Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Tiger Woods. Apart from Woods, all were former Trump critics who, eight years earlier, had tried to keep their distance.
SHOCK AND AWE
the start of a new presidency is a famously harried and jury-rigged affair. But Trump and his team had spent his time out of office preparing for his return. Longwell, the anti-MAGA strategist, told us—echoing something our colleague David Frum had warned about four years ago—that watching Trump’s second-term team attack the federal bureaucracy was like watching “the velociraptors who have figured out how to work the doorknobs.” Day one of the second term, the product of weeks of meticulous planning, was all about—in the Trump team’s words—“shock and awe.” “We did all the immigration and border executive orders,” an adviser told us. “If we just left it at that, all the stories would have been about what bad people we are—we’re kicking people out of this country. But then right after he signed those border executive orders, bam: the J6 pardons.” The adviser explained that, along with Trump’s multiple speeches that day and inaugural balls that evening, this meant “the media had to choose what to cover. It’s either the J6 pardons or the immigration executive orders.” This convulsion of activity, the adviser told us, was all “planned”—designed to overwhelm.
“We have everyone kind of in the barrel, like everyone’s on the spin cycle, just getting whipped around, and that’s advantageous for us,” another adviser told us.
In his first term, Trump had floated the idea of buying Greenland—speaking of it almost offhandedly as a potentially intriguing if unusual real-estate acquisition. But now, even before taking office again, he had suggested that Canada should be America’s 51st state, threatened to reclaim the Panama Canal, and vowed to gain control of Greenland—“one way or the other,” as he would later put it. He followed this during his inaugural address by invoking “manifest destiny,” the 19th-century idea that the United States has a divinely ordained right to control North America.
He added that many of the things that, in his first term, Trump had floated as provocations or trollings or idle musings are now things the president realizes he can actually do. “These are all doable,” Bannon told us. “When you’ve come back from such long odds, you clearly feel, ‘I can do anything.’ ”
In his first term, Trump and his team had not done certain things—fired key bureaucrats, upended certain alliances, overhauled various initiatives—because, as one former adviser told us, “we thought they were red-hot.
“And then you touch it,” the former adviser continued, “and you realize it’s actually not that hot.” This may be the key insight of Trump’s second term. The first time around, aides were constantly warning him that the stove was too hot. This time, no one is even telling him not to touch the stove.
Tradition holds that artists honored with lifetime-achievement awards at the Kennedy Center meet with the sitting president. During Trump’s first term, some of the most prominent artists refused to do so. He, in turn, didn’t attend a single performance there.
“I didn’t really get to go the first time, because I was always getting impeached or some bullshit, and I could never enjoy a show,” Trump said, according to an adviser familiar with the comments. But as planning for the second inauguration got under way, someone mentioned the possibility of holding an event there, impelling Trump to muse aloud about naming himself chairman of the Kennedy Center, a position that had long been held by the philanthropist and Carlyle Group founder David Rubenstein. Trump ordered, “Call David Rubenstein and tell him he’s fired.”
Overnight, Trump’s cultural remit went from queuing oldies on his iPad on the patio of Mar-a-Lago to being chairman of the Kennedy Center, one of the nation’s premier arts institutions. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty)
Some of Trump’s advisers have learned to operate by an unofficial rule: They make sure to do things after he says them twice. This is a necessary and important rule because, as one adviser explained, “he says a lot of shit.” So the second time Trump mentioned wanting to take over the Kennedy Center, his aides got to work, and in early February, Trump fired most of the board and named himself chairman. His cultural remit had gone overnight from entertaining his aides by playing oldies on his iPad on the patio of Mar-a-Lago to being chairman of the board of one of the nation’s premier arts institutions.
One of the most chaotic departures from convention has been Elon Musk’s prominent role in the administration. The disruption Musk has unleashed through DOGE, putting swaths of government “into the wood chipper,” as he described it, has tended to obscure the fact that the richest man in the world, who is one of Trump’s biggest financial donors, is attending Cabinet meetings while continuing to run his private businesses, which benefit from billions of dollars in federal contracts. The conflicts of interest here run fathoms deep. But Trump has confidently normalized all of it, even going so far as to conduct an infomercial for Tesla on the White House grounds.
In previous presidencies, Musk’s role in the administration would have been a scandal that dominated the media and congressional hearings for months. In Trump’s second term, this—by design—gets drowned out by everything else.
So, too, does Trump’s complete departure from convention regarding the Justice Department, which has historically had some independence from the president. In April, Trump ordered the DOJ to investigate Chris Krebs, who in Trump’s first term ran the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which declared the 2020 election secure and Biden the legitimate winner. Trump, in short, wanted to prosecute Krebs for accepting reality. He has also made clear that he wants the attorney general to protect his supporters, including Musk, whose Tesla dealerships and charging stations have been targeted by vandals. “When I see things going on like what they’re doing to Elon, that’s terrible,” Trump told us. “That’s a terrible thing. That’s terrorism.”
Trump boasted to us of Musk’s private business successes as if they were his own. One of Musk’s companies, SpaceX, had just helped to retrieve astronauts who had been marooned for months on the International Space Station. “They don’t come out of there at some point, you know, the bones start to break down,” Trump said.
Trump marveled at the media’s coverage of the splashdown. “They said, ‘And the rocket’s coming down in the Gulf of America.’ They didn’t make a big deal. They didn’t say Trump named it,” he told us. “It was like it was old hat. And it’s been the Gulf of Mexico for hundreds of years, literally hundreds of years. The Gulf of Mexico, before our country was formed. It’s been a long time. And that’s good.”
“THAT IS NOT WHAT THEY SIGNED UP FOR”
for all of trump’s success in dominating the political sphere, Democrats have grown more optimistic that his political fortunes may be changing. Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, who gave the Democratic rebuttal to Trump’s address to Congress in early March, told us that some of her constituents say their votes for Trump were born of despair. “They’ll say to me, ‘Look, it’s like I’m a Stage 4 cancer patient. My life has been getting worse, from my grandfather to my father, from my father to me, and my kids are going to do worse than me, so I need experimental chemo. Trump is my experimental chemo. It may hurt like hell. It may not work at all. But I’m at the end of my rope, and I’ll try anything.’ ”
We asked her whether now, several months into the second Trump administration, her constituents think the chemo is working. “I can’t tell you how many Trump voters have said to me, like, ‘Look, I voted for him to make the economy work. I did not vote for all of this craziness, and I certainly didn’t vote, for instance, for cuts to the VA,’ ” Slotkin said. “That is not what they signed up for.”
But in nearly every conversation we had with various Trump advisers, they told us that delivering on what people had voted for was in fact essential to holding the House and the Senate in the 2026 midterms. Trump himself has his eyes on a larger, long-term political realignment. “It’s a much different party,” he told us. “I got 38 percent of the male Black vote. Nobody knew that was possible. That’s a lot. I got 56 percent of Hispanics. How about that one? Every county along the Texas border is Hispanic. I won every one of them.” Though every single number he cited was wrong, the general thrust of his observation was correct.
Delivering on Trump’s campaign promises, his advisers told us, was the key not only to securing his legacy but to transforming the MAGA base into Republican voters for decades to come. (This project—persuading MAGA supporters to vote for Republicans even when Trump is not on the ballot—is a “central theme” of this presidency, one adviser repeatedly told us.) During the campaign and then the transition, Trump’s aides kept a shared document that meticulously cataloged and updated his promises for what he would do on day one, as well as what he’d promised to do more generally. The advisers we spoke with said that voters had absolutely known what they were asking for when they pulled the lever for Trump—and Trump’s team was determined to deliver.
But this is where the now nationally ingrained tendency to take Trump seriously but not literally may have created a disconnect between what Trump’s supporters thought they were voting for and what they are now getting, even among his most committed base. Over the years, Trump said many things that never came to fruition. Or he spoke with such hyperbole that everyone substantially discounted the reality of what he was ostensibly committing to. Or the policy implications of what he said would get obscured in the cloud of his ruminations about shark attacks and electrocutions and Hannibal Lecter—allowing voters to focus on what they liked and to ignore the riskier, more worrisome aspects of his promises. So although it’s true that Trump is delivering on commitments to impose tariffs, cut government waste, and aggressively deport immigrants, many of his voters are only now beginning to realize the effect these policies will have on their daily lives.
Several months into his second chance, the blitzkrieg of the early days continues—but it seems to be meeting more substantial resistance. Federal courts are once again blocking—or at least trying to block—Trump plans that flout the Constitution or stretch legal reasoning. The repeated rollouts and rollbacks and re-rollouts of his tariff measures have pushed the world toward an economic breaking point. (Even in the best-case scenario, any renaissance of the U.S. industrial base remains a long way off.) The Federal Reserve recently adjusted short-term-inflation projections higher, and GDP projections are getting lower. Financial analysts say the odds of a recession have risen significantly. The stock market just had its worst quarter in three years. When we talked with him in March, Trump had told us that Vladimir Putin “is going to be fine” in the Ukraine peace negotiations—but Putin has thwarted Trump’s promise of a quick deal. (“I’m trying to save a lot of lives in the world,” Trump told us. “You know, Ukraine and Russia—it’s not our lives, but it could end up in a Third World War.”)
The Signalgate fiasco appalled even a majority of Republicans. (Here Trump has so far stuck to his second-term policy of conceding essentially nothing, of never admitting weakness or a lie. To date, no one has been fired over Signalgate—though advisers we spoke with privately predicted that National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, who inadvertently added The Atlantic’s editor in chief to the attack-planning chain, would exit the administration by the end of the year, if not much sooner.) Mass anti-Trump protests, notably absent during the first two months of this term, have become more frequent, including in red states.
Even as Trump continually seeks to expand his presidential powers, he at times seems to acknowledge that they have limits. In our March conversation, he seemed frustrated at the notion that a court might try to curb his ability to deport anyone he wanted, however he wanted. Yet when we asked if he would go so far as to actively disregard a judicial order, his answer suggested that he understood the Constitution would not allow that. “I think the judge is horrible,” he said, referring to James Boasberg, the federal-district-court judge who had tried to stop deportations of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador. But Trump then referenced the Supreme Court’s more congenial opinion in Trump v. United States, which had given him immunity from criminal prosecution for anything he does as part of his core “official” duties as president. “But I’ve had a lot of horrible judges, and I won on appeal, right? I got immunity on appeal,” he said. He told us that the Court is “going to do what’s right” when reviewing his expansive use of executive power, and he spoke with uncharacteristic charity about the Court’s Democratic appointees. “I see them at the State of the Union, things that I do, and I think they’re very good people,” he said.
When questioned, Trump has sought to evade direct responsibility for individual deportations by his administration, legal challenges to which are wending their way through the courts.
“You know, I’m not involved in that. I have many people, many layers of people that do that,” Trump told us when we asked if he was worried that he may have mistakenly deported innocent people. “I would say they are all extremely tough, dangerous people. I would say that. And, don’t forget, they came in the country illegally.”
Trump’s advisers argue that, overall, the shock-and-awe approach is working. “Think about everything that’s happened immediately on immigration,” Cliff Sims told us. “Oh, we’re just going to ship gang members to a prison in El Salvador? ‘Sure.’ We’re going to send Tom Homan”—Trump’s border czar—“to kick down the door of every criminal illegally in the country? ‘Have at it.’ It is the ultimate example of the ruthless efficiency of Trump 2.0.”
We asked Trump about the portraits on the walls of the Oval Office. Who, we wondered, had a legacy that he himself might like to have? “Ronald Reagan, I like in terms of style. But he was not good on trade—terrible on trade,” Trump replied. We pointed out that Reagan was also far more welcoming of immigrants. “Well, the toughest one in immigration was Eisenhower, believe it or not,” Trump said. “He was tough, and he just didn’t want people to come in illegally, like, you know, me. Well, I’m great on trade.”
Trump has also started talking publicly about running for a third term, which the Twenty-Second Amendment clearly prohibits. This started as joking comments with advisers—before making them, he would sometimes teasingly instruct the sober-minded Wiles, “Susie, close your ears”—but now seems to have become more serious. MAGA acolytes outside the administration have said they’ve been investigating ways of getting around the Twenty-Second Amendment, and an adviser acknowledged that if Trump thought a third term could somehow be made feasible, he would likely consider it.
We asked Trump about a rumor we’d heard that he had tasked his Justice Department with looking into the legality of his running again in 2028. He said he hadn’t, but then seemed to leave open the possibility. Was this the rare democratic norm he was unwilling to shatter? “That would be a big shattering, wouldn’t it?” he mused, laughing. “Well, maybe I’m just trying to shatter.” He noted, twice, that his supporters regularly shout for him to seek a third term, but concluded, “It’s not something that I’m looking to do. And I think it would be a very hard thing to do.” But not, it appears, a hard thing to profit from: The Trump Organization is now selling “Trump 2028” hats.
As a final question during our conversation in March, we asked the president whether he had concerns that his successor will follow his precedent and directly steer the powers of the presidency against his opponents, something he had accused Biden of doing against him. Wasn’t he laying the groundwork for an endless cycle of tit-for-tat retribution?
“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve already gone through it,” the president told us. “I got indicted five different times by five different scumbags, and they’re all looking for jobs now, so it’s one of those things. Who would have thought, right? It’s been pretty amazing.”
Three weeks after our initial phone call, the political complexion of the moment seemed to have shifted rather dramatically, and we wondered if that had changed Trump’s thinking. So we called the president’s cellphone, hoping to ask some follow-up questions. He didn’t answer. We left a voicemail.
That night, Saturday, April 12, Trump traveled from Mar-a-Lago to Miami to watch the mixed-martial-arts spectacle of UFC 314. He entered the arena like a conquering general, surrounded by a coterie of Cabinet secretaries and other high-level advisers and officials. The cheers from the adoring fans were uproarious. After some of the fights, the winner would rush to the side of the ring where Trump was sitting, to demonstrate fealty.
When the fights were over, well after midnight, Trump’s motorcade headed back to Air Force One, at the Miami airport. The next morning, one of us awoke to find that, at 1:28 a.m., the president had called, just as the pool report showed he was getting back in his motorcade. He hadn’t left a message. Had he been calling to ask if we’d seen what had transpired—the display of obeisance from these gladiators, and from his base? Or was this merely a late-night pocket dial? His team declined to clarify.
We made another appeal for an in-person interview. Later that day, an aide told us Trump was denying our request. But the rejection came with a message from the president—a message, Trump specified, only for Michael, not Ashley, with whom he was still annoyed. If the article we were working on really told the remarkable story of how he had come back from the political dead, “maybe The Atlantic will survive after all.” As is often the case with Trump, his business advice could also be interpreted as a kind of a threat.
The president had one last message for us. “What can be said?” Trump had instructed his aide to tell us. “I won the election in a landslide, and there isn’t anyone who can say anything about that. What can they write about?”
We thought we’d finished our story. But for Trump, negotiation is a perpetual state, and nine days later, he reversed himself again. We were asked to report to the Oval Office on the afternoon of April 24 for the interview we had first requested two months earlier. Trump also invited the editor in chief of this magazine, Jeffrey Goldberg, whom he had recently attacked as a “total sleazebag,” to join the meeting. Then, hours before we arrived, the president announced the interview to the world.
“I am doing this interview out of curiosity,” he wrote on Truth Social, “and as a competition with myself, just to see if it’s possible for The Atlantic to be ‘truthful.’ ” Goldberg, he added falsely, was a writer of “many fictional stories about me.” (Several White House aides, upon reading the message, joked about playing a prank on National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, the official who had accidentally added Goldberg to the Signal chat. “Tell Waltz to go into the Oval,” they dared one another, “but don’t tell him who’s in there.”)
“This will be very, very interesting,” Trump said, by way of greeting us as we approached the Resolute Desk. “You think Biden would do this? I don’t think so.”
In private, Trump often plays against the bombastic persona he projects in larger settings—at rallies, on television, on social media. He was launching a charm offensive, directed mainly at Goldberg. There was none of the name-calling or hostility he regularly levels at our magazine. He boasted about the 24-karat gold leaf he’d had imported from Palm Beach to decorate the Oval Office. “The question is: Do I do a chandelier?” he asked. “Beautiful crystal chandelier, top of the line.”
“I am in the first group, believe it or not,” he said. (This was indeed difficult to believe, we interjected.) “But a lot of people that are in the administration aren’t. They feel that I was really badly treated.” In our presence, he seemed inclined to outsource his retributive id to others. But soon after we left the Oval Office, Trump sought to exact further political revenge on his foes by directing the Justice Department to investigate ActBlue, the main Democratic fundraising platform.
When we mentioned the turmoil at the Pentagon, including recent reporting that Pete Hegseth had installed a makeup room in the building, the president smiled. “I think he’s gonna get it together,” Trump said of Hegseth. “I had a talk with him, a positive talk, but I had a talk with him.” Trump also said that Waltz was “fine” despite being “beat up” by accidentally adding Goldberg to the Signal chat. What had Trump told his staff after the controversy? “Maybe don’t use Signal, okay?”
He spoke of his opposition with earnest befuddlement, if not actual pity. “I think that the Democrats have lost their confidence in the truest sense,” he said. “I don’t think they know what they’re doing. I think they have no leader. You know, if you ask me now, I know a lot about the Democrat Party, right? I can’t tell you who their leader is. I can’t tell you that I see anybody on the horizon.”
Trump pushed back on the notion, popular among some Wall Street analysts, that financial turmoil—plummeting markets, the threat of a recession, a weakened dollar—would cause him to roll back his tariff policies. “It always affects you a little bit,” he said, but there’s no red line, no “certain number” at which he would feel compelled to change course.
We asked about the concern that his administration was pushing the country toward authoritarianism, where politicians use the power of their office to punish their enemies for speaking their minds, as Trump was attempting to do to Chris Krebs, Harvard, law firms, universities, and news outlets. He did not answer the question directly, but instead talked about how he’d been wronged.
We pressed further, again bringing up his efforts to deport undocumented immigrants without due process. What would happen, we asked, if his administration accidentally got the wrong person—a legal resident, or even an American citizen? “Let me tell you that nothing will ever be perfect in this world,” he said.
Near the end of the interview, we asked Trump why, given that he’s now definitively won a second term, he can’t just let go of the claim that he won the 2020 election.
The president told us it would “be easier” for him to just accept our assertion. But he couldn’t. “I’m a very honest person, and I believe it with all my heart,” he said. “And I believe it with fact—you know, more important than heart. I believe it with fact.”
“I’d like to say that that is reality,” Trump said. “Probably I do create some things, but I didn’t create that.”
Never mind that the votes had been counted, the court cases concluded. He was still trying to shift perceptions, make a sale, bend the world to his will.
This article appears in the June 2025 print edition with the headline “Donald Trump Is Enjoying This.”
In That Howling Infinite’ has written often about Russian and Ukrainian history, not only because personally it has been of long-term academic interest, but also, because of the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war.
“Like many countries on the borders of powerful neighbours, Ukraine has long endured the slings and arrows of outrageous history. Its story, like that its neighbours, is long and complex. In competing national narratives, Russians and Ukrainians both claim credit for the creation of the Russian state, though others attribute this, with some credence, to the Vikings. The historical reality of Ukraine is complicated, a thousand-year history of changing religions, borders and peoples. The capital, Kyiv, was established hundreds of years before Moscow, although both Russians and Ukrainians claim Kyiv as a birthplace of their modern cultures, religion and language.
I highly recommend Serhii Plokhy’s The Gates of Europe, a well told and fascinating story of the origins of Ukraine and Belarus, and how their histories were intertwined, and entwined with those of of Poland, Lithuania (which was a large and powerful state once) and Russia. Ukraine has historically been the border between the catholic west and the orthodox east, the division running virtually down the middle. The name Ukraine is Slav for border land. Its geopolitical location and natural resources have led to the land being inflicted by invaders, civil wars, man-made famine and repression.
Eastern European countries, Ukraine included, have with good reason no love for Russia, be it Czarist, Soviet or Putin’s. Hungarians, Czechs, Poles and East Germans have seen Russian “peacekeeping” troops and tanks on their city streets, as have the Baltic countries, Afghans and Chechens. Millions of Ukrainians died under Stalin’s rule (and many, many millions of fellow-Soviet citizens). The 20th Century was not kind to the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Historian Timothy Snyder called them “the blood lands”.
We republish below a recent article in The Australian by Melbourne historian and academic Mark Edele. It gives the uninformed but interested reader a short but comprehensive history of the relationship between Russia and Ukraine from the ninth century to the present day.
Here are posts in In That Howling Infinite, about Russia, Ukraine and Eastern Europe:
Donald Trump’s bullying ‘peace plans’ to end the Ukraine war will only embolden Vladimir Putin, who fancies himself a leading a great power with historical rights beyond his borders.
Mark Edele, The Australian, 8 March 2025
Last weekend, the United States vacated the post of leader of the free world. Supporters of democracy the world over watching in disbelief as the US President and Vice-President berated, belittled, and bullied the leader of a democracy at war. On Monday, then, followed what this “great television”, as Donald Trump called it, was all about: a pretext to halt military aid to Ukraine, followed soon by the end of intelligence-sharing. The end goal: force Ukraine to the negotiation table with no security guarantees included in a “deal” with Vladimir Putin.
Four things will come out of an emboldened Russia now: more air raids on Ukraine’s civilians; a renewed push at the frontline; praise for the US administration and its visionary leader; and a disinformation campaign to convince the democratic world that black is white, up is down, left is right, Ukraine the aggressor and Russia the victim in this war. Astonishingly, we can also expect the White House to parrot such propaganda. Welcome to the era of strategic chaos.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov noted the obvious: The US’s shift from supporting its allies to courting Moscow “largely coincides with our vision”. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova ladled on now familiar Russian propaganda. Volodymyr Zelensky, she claimed, was the head of a “neo-Nazi regime”, a “corrupt individual who lost his grip on reality”, whose “outrageously rude behaviour during his stay in Washington … reaffirmed his status of the most dangerous threat to the international community”. Zelensky was an “irresponsible figure”, a “terrorist leader” who had “built a totalitarian state” and is “ruthlessly sending millions of his fellow citizens to their deaths”.
Sigmund Freud would have classified these statements as “projection”: they are true, but apply to Zakharova’s boss, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. Born in 1952, Putin grew up in St Petersburg, then called Leningrad. Surrounded with stories of World War II, in which his father served and his brother perished, he came of age on the rough streets of Leningrad during the heydays of Soviet superpower. In 1975 he joined the KGB, an organisation that deeply formed his world view and behaviour. His sport is judo, a deeply tactical martial art focused on exploiting the opponent’s weaknesses and redirecting the adversary’s momentum.
After the breakdown of the Soviet empire in 1991, he served in the city administration of St Petersburg. Later he moved to Moscow to make a career in the administration of the first president of post-Soviet Russia. When Boris Yeltsin looked for a successor who would guarantee his own and his family’s safety, Putin’s name came up. He was seen as competent but unthreatening to the oligarchs running Russia at the time. In 1999, Putin became premier. Later the same year, he was appointed acting president. His tenure was defined by the brutal second Chechen War, which he prosecuted with utter ruthlessness. In 2000, he was elected President. He remained in this post until today, with a stint stepping back to the prime ministership in 2008-12, to get around term limitations in the constitution (subsequently changed).
In the quarter-century he ruled Russia, Putin broke the power of the oligarchs, rebuilt the state as a security organisation run by former KGB officers, suffocated free speech, pluralism and the opposition, and built one of the most unpleasant electoral dictatorships of the post-Soviet space. Despite an economy still only a quarter of that of the EU or the US (to say nothing of China’s), Putin fancies himself as leading a great power with a right to a sphere of influence and a major say in shaping the international order.
By the end of the second decade of his rule, however, the ageing dictator in the Kremlin began to worry about his legacy. His track record was mixed. The Russian population had been declining steadily until the 2010s. The following uptick was mostly undone again during and after the Covid pandemic, fuelling longstanding apocalyptic fears that the Russians would be dying out. The economy had grown significantly, but social inequality had exploded alongside, while political liberties continually atrophied. The Covid crisis was handled extremely poorly. Great-power status remained an aspiration. Putin worried what the history books would say about him. The answers respectable historians gave him when asked were evasive. And he was turning 70 in 2022.
History, and his place in it, obsessed Vladimir Vladimirovich. During his, quite extreme, Covid isolation, he read history books, immersing himself in the Russian imperialist tradition. Such historians had long denied that Ukraine was anything but a part of Russia. He summarised this traditional Russian view “on the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians” in an essay of that title, published on July 12, 2021. It read like the musings of an ageing Russian imperialist. A bit over seven months later, it revealed itself as the ideological justification of a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Ukraine and Russia: histories entangled but separate
At the heart of Putin’s worldview is that Russia continues to be a great power with historical rights on Ukraine. It thus bears repeating that Russia and Ukraine are separate nations, which trace their heritage back to a common origin: a collection of principalities centred on Kyiv, known as the Rus of the ninth to 13th centuries. After the Mongol invasions of the 1220s and 1230s, however, the southwestern and the northeastern parts of this civilisation developed in different and quite separate ways, eventually leading to Russia and Ukraine as we know them today. As a result of such divergence, Russian and Ukrainian have developed as separate, if related, languages.
Putin attends the Victory Day military parade in Moscow on May 9, 2024. AFP
Overlapping histories and linguistic similarities are not unique among nations. Both Germany and France claim the Frankish empire under Charlemagne (French) or Karl (German) as part of their deeper history. Yet nobody would suggest (any more) that therefore France should be part of Germany or vice-versa. Likewise, French and Portuguese have related grammatical structures and some overlap in vocabulary. And yet nobody would argue that Portuguese is a French dialect.
Ukrainians formed a state twice: once in 1649, the Cossack-led “Hetmanate” fighting for its independence from Poland; the second time in 1917-21, after both the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires had collapsed in World War I. Both were defeated militarily, but both were important inspirations for a democratically minded national movement.
Ukraine’s lands and peoples came into the Russian orbit in stages. First was the disastrous Treaty of Periaslav of 1654, when the Hetmanate joined a temporary military alliance with Muscovy against Poland, which the Muscovites read as a subjugation under the autocrat instead. After much fighting and diplomatic manoeuvring, Poland and Russia agreed in 1667 that Moscow could control the lands east of the Dnipro (“left bank Ukraine”) as well as Kyiv on the “right bank”. When Poland was partitioned at the end of the 18th century, what was left of Ukraine came partially under Habsburg and partially under Romanov rule. At the end of World War I, Ukraine emerged as one of the successor states of the Romanov empire, alongside Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Finland, Poland and Bolshevik Russia. In contrast to these states, however, it did not survive the wars and civil wars that followed the disintegration of the empire in 1917.
In 1921, it was divided between the newly resurrected state of Poland and the emergent successor of the vast majority of the lands of the Romanov empire: Bolshevik Russia. Within the latter, Ukraine was granted a pseudo independence as one of the Union republics making up the newly formed “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”, or USSR.
The Ukrainian SSR was a Bolshevik ploy to disarm national sentiment while reasserting imperial, and increasingly totalitarian, control by Moscow. In the long run, however, it allowed not just the maintenance but even the growth of national culture and national self-awareness. Ukraine also grew geographically. During World War II, the Soviets gobbled up the rest of Ukraine from Poland and Romania. In 1954, the government transferred Crimea to Ukraine, to ease the economic development of a region with no geographic connection to Russia. Thus Ukraine acquired its current, internationally recognised borders. Eventually, they provided a ready-made demarcation of post-imperial Ukraine, once the Soviet empire collapsed in 1989-91.
After the Soviet Union
Of the 15 successor states of the Soviet Union, Russia is the largest in terms of territory (17.1 million square kilometres). Ukraine, with 0.6 million square kilometres, comes third after Kazakhstan (2.7 million square kilometres). In a comparison of population sizes, Ukraine occupies the second position, with 37.7 million in 2023, according to the World Bank, quite a way behind Russia with 143.8 million. By comparison, the most populous country of the EU, Germany, has 83.3 million, while the EU as a whole counts 448.8 million.
As the largest country in the post-Soviet region, in 2023 Russia had the largest GDP adjusted for purchasing power ($US6.5 trillion), followed by Kazakhstan ($US0.8 trillion) and Ukraine ($US0.6 trillion). Again, compare this to Germany ($US5.7 trillion) or Australia ($US1.9 trillion), to say nothing of the EU ($US26.4 trillion), the US ($US27.7 trillion) or China ($US34.7 trillion).
As far as the political system is concerned, between the breakdown of the Soviet empire and today Russia has been on a steady downwards slope, from some early democratic promises to ever darker authoritarianism. Ukraine, meanwhile, evolved in three waves of democratic surges followed by counter movements: the 1990s, the second half of the 2000s, and from the middle of the 2010s. While not the freest country in the post-Soviet space (that privilege belongs to the three Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, all members of EU and NATO), it is in no way comparable to Russia. Zelensky was elected President in 2019 with 73 per cent of the vote. As of late February 2025, he had an approval rating of 52 per cent.
Zelensky was elected president in 2019 with 73 per cent of the vote. AFP
The latest report on Ukraine from a Washington-based independent watchdog, Freedom House, notes that both the President and the current legislative were elected in free, competitive, and fair elections. Since 2022, there was some deterioration of political freedoms because of the war, including the suspension of elections due to martial law, new restrictions against parties that support Russia’s aggression, and greater control of the reporting in the main news channels. However, opposition parties continue to sit in parliament and their political activities “are generally not impeded by administrative restrictions or legal harassment”. Communication channels outside the official network, such as social media platforms, remain available and used freely.
All of this contrasts sharply to the repressive nature of Russian rule, not just in the occupied territories of Ukraine, but also in Russia itself. For 2025, Freedom House categorised Ukraine as a “transitional or hybrid regime”, while Russia was a “consolidated authoritarian regime”.
The war
Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 after a popular revolution in Kyiv had ousted pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych. Russia illegally annexed Crimea and fostered a proxy war in Ukraine’s east, the Donbas, at times fought with regular Russian troops; at others by Russia-sponsored rebels. Most observers at the time assumed that this was the endgame: taking over Crimea was popular among Russians who saw it as their own Riviera; the frozen conflict in Ukraine’s east served as a festering wound keeping the recalcitrant democracy down.
Ukrainian firefighters putout a fire after a strike in Zaporizhzhia in 2022. AFP
Two ceasefire agreements, Minsk I (September 5, 2014) and Minsk II (February 12, 2015), failed. After the first, Russia sent troops across the border to defeat Ukraine’s armed forces in the Second Battle of Donetsk Airport (September 2014 to January 2015) and the Battle of Debaltseve (January to February 2015). After the second, the frontlines remained frozen, but shelling and sporadic fighting continued. No part of the agreement was ever fully implemented and soldiers kept dying. The world, however, moved on.
Who had not moved on was Putin, dreaming of great power and empire. While convincing himself of the righteousness of his position by reading Russian imperial historiography, he observed “the West” move from crisis to crisis. In Europe, the liberal consensus was challenged by new-right populist movements. The UK was in political chaos. The US could not even execute an orderly withdrawal from Afghanistan, unlike the Soviet army in 1988. And that army, now Russia’s, had been modernised significantly under Putin’s watch. It was time to strike.
Preparations for the invasion started shortly after the fall of Kabul in August 2021. By October, the US had conclusive evidence that Russia planned an assault with the goal of controlling all of Ukraine and eliminating its President. Between then and the start of the war, the US tried repeatedly to create diplomatic off-ramps for the Kremlin. Putin was not interested.
On February 24, 2022, Putin unleashed his war of conquest. Within 10 days, Ukraine’s military was supposed to be disabled, the country’s leaders arrested or executed, pro-Russian popular support mobilised, and resisters detained. By mid-August, all of Ukraine would be occupied, the plan went. Then, it could be either annexed or given over to a puppet regime.
The plan failed. There were few collaborators and much resistance. The battle for Hostomel airport was lost by the Russian airborne forces sent in at short notice; two groups of assassins sent to kill Zelensky were hunted down and eliminated; the columns advancing towards Kyiv were stopped by the fire of artillery and main battle tanks, both of Ukrainian origin. While social media was obsessed by the David-versus-Goliath spectacle of US-made shoulder-launched missiles taking out Russian tanks, the real damage was done using Ukraine’s own resources. Victory in the battle of Kyiv was achieved by late March 2022.
Over the next three years, the war changed from a battle of movement to position warfare and a war of attrition. Russia began to rely on massed use of artillery and the liberal sacrifice of manpower. This looked like WWII: the frontal assaults, the artillery barrages, the utter disregard for human resources. But there was a new element as well: terror attacks on civilians and their infrastructure. This was not a Soviet tradition: during WWII, it was British and US air forces that had flattened German and Japanese cities. Such bombing was not part of the Red Army’s military repertoire. Its air forces were geared towards support of ground troops, not “strategic” bombing of civilians.
In its changed focus on hurting civilians from the air, Putin’s army drew on the neo-imperial wars he had overseen: Chechnya and Syria. It was here that the Russian air force first flattened cities (Grozny in 1999-2000 and Aleppo in 2015-16) and it was this experience that now came to bear on the war in Ukraine. Except that here they did not control the airspace and did not face defenceless civilians they could simply “de-house” at will. Instead, they had to deal with an enemy capable of shooting down not just bombers, which as a result were not sent into Ukraine’s airspace, but also many of the missiles and drones sent from a safe distance.
While air assaults on civilian targets became part of the normalcy of Russia’s changing way of war, tactics on the ground also evolved: rather than mass assaults after preliminary artillery preparation, increasingly Russia used surprise attacks by small groups of storm troopers to conduct reconnaissance by force. If they encountered major resistance, they would then call in airstrikes or artillery barrages. They also stopped frontal assaults on fortified positions, bypassing and encircling them instead.
But none of this led to major breakthroughs. The war bogged down.
Russia was better prepared than Ukraine for a war of attrition. It had long built a food system that could withstand international isolation, demonstrating that a major war had been on the minds of the planners in the Kremlin for a very long time. The discrepancy in the size of both the economy and the population also meant Russia had the edge in the long run. And while the militarisation of the economy came with increasingly serious economic imbalances, they were not serious enough to force Putin’s dictatorship to back down. Instead, military salaries and the growing investments in military industries led to economic mini-booms in several of the regions that supplied the volunteers and the weapons to fight in Ukraine. To many Russians, this continues to be a profitable war.
Putin’s overall strategy thus shifted from a lightning war of conquest to outlasting the democratic world. Having the Soviet experience of extreme suffering and endurance in mind, and construing “the West” as weak, effeminate and degenerate, he had every confidence that Russia would be successful in the long run. With Trump’s election victory, this confidence grew. With his behaviour in the first six weeks in office, it must have soared. Putin has less reason than ever to compromise. And he can achieve much by playing Trump diplomatically.
What now?
After the spectacular dust-up in the Oval Office a week ago, doom and gloom have descended over Ukraine and its supporters. A pouting US President seems to assume that if he pulls the plug on Ukraine, the war will simply end: “Zelensky better move fast or is not going to have a Country left,” he wrote a week before he ambushed him in front of the cameras.
The withdrawal of US support is a serious setback for Ukraine. The US and Europe have provided about equal amounts of money to Ukraine. If Europe were to try to replace US contributions, it thus would have to double its financial commitments at a time when the economy is not exactly booming and will soon be further hit by Trump’s trade wars.
The withdrawal of US support is a serious setback for Ukraine. AFP
The major victims of Trump’s retreat will be Ukraine’s civilians. The US air defence systems currently protecting cities cannot be replaced easily. An increase in civilian deaths is the inevitable result. The withdrawal of intelligence is also a serious blow and difficult to substitute.
However, the EU’s economy is big enough to replace US contributions. An increase equal to 0.12 per cent of Europe’s GDP would suffice. Germany’s taxpayers spend three times more on domestic subsidies for diesel fuel than they devote to military aid to Ukraine. And production capacity is growing. At the start of the war, most military aid came from quickly depleting stockpiles. By 2024, the vast majority of materiel fuelling Ukraine’s war effort are newly produced weapons and equipment.
More than half of Ukraine’s weaponry is produced in Ukraine, a further 25 per cent comes from Europe. The 20 per cent the United States contributes is particularly valuable and high-quality, but it is not the backbone of Ukraine’s capacity. In a war of attrition heavily dependent on artillery, Europe will produce some two million artillery shells for Ukraine this year. The US, before Trump pulled the plug, was expected to deliver less than one million. Elon Musk’s Starlink, providing communications at the frontline, can be replaced with alternatives.
Thus, Ukraine’s defences are unlikely to collapse. Russia has been advancing recently, but progress was slow. By the third anniversary of the invasion, Russia controlled about 20 per cent of Ukraine’s territory, including some 4000 square kilometres gained in 2024. However, Ukraine is a big country. Russia’s 2024 gains represent a mere 0.6 per cent of Ukraine’s territory. Russia has not taken major cities in 2024 and urban life continues everywhere.
Meanwhile, Russia lost parts of the Kursk region to a counteroffensive the Russian military was unable to reverse. Russia has likely enough materiel for at least another year of fighting, but not enough for a major breakthrough.
In an assessment of the war written at the end of 2024, one of the most perceptive analysts of the military side of the war in Ukraine, exiled Russian historian and former civil rights activist Nikolai Mitrokhin, developed four possible scenarios for what could happen in 2025. None of them included a complete breakdown. His “catastrophic” scenario was a “partial collapse of the front due to the reduction of Ukrainian forward units”, leading to a “rapid advance of Russian units to the left bank of the Dnipro”. He predicted that this might lead to a leadership change, but also a further rallying around the flag and a continuation of the fight.
Less catastrophic would be a return to a grinding Russian offensive, as in 2024. “At the current rate of advance,” wrote the Institute for the Study of War in its Ukraine Fact Sheet of February 21, 2025, “it would take Russian forces over 83 years to capture the remaining 80 per cent of Ukraine, assuming that they can sustain massive personnel losses indefinitely”.
This outlook explains why Putin is so enthusiastic about Trump’s “peace plans”. They might achieve diplomatically what he cannot achieve on the battlefield: the subjugation of Russia’s democratic neighbour to neo-imperial domination.
Mark Edele is a historian of the Soviet Union and its successor states, in particular Russia. He is Hansen Professor in History at the University of Melbourne. His latest book is Russia’s War Against Ukraine: The Whole Story (Melbourne University Press, 2023
Trump and Vance ambush Zelensky at the White House
“America is in a mess. We need someone to clean it up. And his name is …”
So run the opening titles of Tim Robbin’s’ 1992 satire Bob Roberts. In a dark case of life imitating art, the story of a Wall Street millionaire who begins his political career as a reactionary folk singer foreshadows the rise of a uniquely American autocrat who channels the pain and anger of millions who feel that they’ve been left behind. The eponymous Bob Roberts is portrayed as a rightwing Bob Dylan, right down to a parody of the famous Subterranean Homesick Blues story boards to the iconoclastic song Times are a’changin’ … Back. Read a 2020 retrospective of this prescient film HERE. [From In That Howling Infinite‘s Deconstructing Donald – translating Trumpspeak]
Fast track to the present day as second coming began with a barnstorming inaugural address:
“ … the United States will once again consider itself a growing nation, one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons [and] will pursue our Manifest Destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars”.
In a pugnacious declaration of American exceptionalism and, dare we say it, Magafest Destiny, he said: “Nothing will stand in our way because we are Americans, the future is ours, and our Golden Age has just begun.”
His first press conference followed shortly afterwards as he signed off on a plethora of executive orders and bantered with the assembled Fourth Estate. Apart from his customary vindictiveness, grievance-driven musings and hyperbole, he was clearly in good humour, folksy even. We were, against our better instincts, bemused, amused, entertained even.
Whatever comes next – and the hectic events of the last fortnight have provided many clues. Along with the name “Gulf of Mexico”, it’s out with the old and in with the new. Tech billionaire Elon Musk has moved into the White House as the new power behind the throne; the purge of public servants and the deportation of illegal migrants have begun; foreign aid is suspended; and “woke” programmes and pronouns are cactus. Panama and Greenland are on the president’s shopping list, and the trade wars are now on: “This will be the golden age of America,” Trump posted on his Truth Social account. “Will there be some pain? Yes, maybe (and maybe not!) But we will make America great again, and it will all be worth the price that must be paid.”
America made its choice – most, for quite understandable reasons that have little to do with populism, racism, fascism or in fact any of the other “isms’ that are tossed about like confetti at a wedding – and must live with it.
Meanwhile there’s predictable faux panic on the left, in Australia and elsewhere, as armchair and keyboard warriors whinge from the sidelines with the same old discussions, the same old articles, serviced by the same bias-confirming algorithms, denigrate and demean America and Americans, and endeavour to tar our own ostensibly “trumpian” conservatives with the same tired brush. Countless social media memes and comments about American stupidity illustrate how out of touch, self-righteous, arrogant and morally “superior” many of the so-called “left” have become. But while they may derive some vicarious satisfaction from their predictable put-downs, they are just pissing in the wind.
America made its choice – most, for quite understandable reasons that have little to do with populism, racism, fascism or in fact any of the other “isms’ that are tossed about like confetti at a wedding – and must live with it. The march to the “right side of history” has turned out just to be to the right. And there’s nothing we can about it. As a Facebook friend commented recently, ” … it’s like watching the Titanic sail away knowing it’s going to sink, but the details of where and when are unknown. But it keeps our old brains active”.
It’s not that people are unaware of Trump’s faults. They harbour no illusions that he will behave any better this time around. They know he will never change; he is erratic, unhinged and foments chaos; he is arrogant, has no sense of history, and is completely transactional. He never apologises, recants or retreats. He never expresses regret for his actions. When under attack for scandalous behaviour or abuse of power, Trump has one playbook: deny, denounce, discredit, defame.
Even dyed-in-the-wool conservatives acknowledge this. Former Australian attorney general George Brandis wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald on 18 November:
“… the sheer weirdness of Donald Trump himself: narcissistic, vulgar, bombastic, mendacious, idiosyncratic, outrageous; while at the same time flamboyant, mesmerising and on occasions very funny. He broke every rule, told every lie, did the unthinkable, said the unsayable and still came up … (you complete the pun). The epic unconventionality of Trump’s campaign dramatised a result that would probably have been the same had the Republican candidate been less unorthodox. For that reason, the outcome is fertile ground for over-interpretation and exaggeration”.
Commentators and author Troy Branston wrote in The Australian, on 9th November 2024: “It’ll be a wild four years with Trump back in power. He remains a despicable and disgusting man devoid of integrity and ethical values, is boorish, moronic, and unstable, and I fear, by a narrow margin, Americans have made the wrong decision. But it a decision that they must live with we must accept”.
We are on the threshold of a consequential four years. Like it or not, we are in interesting times.
From time to time, I republish articles by News Ltd commentators that I believe are worth sharing with those who cannot scale the News paywall – and those who, out of misguided principle, refuse to read articles by its more erudite and eloquent contributors. This, by The Australian’s Greg Sheridan, is one of those.
We published a similar piece exactly six years ago at the commencement of Trump’s first term:The Ricochet of Trump’s Counter-revolution. Back then, we were unsure what the next three years would bring. This time around, we probably have a good idea, and it’s likely to be a wild ride for America and also the world.
I find it hard to tell you, ’cause I find it hard to take
When people run in circles, it’s a very very mad world
Trump remakes America with a revolution in common sense
Greg Sheridan, The Australian 25 January 2025
Boom. Boom. Boom. The second presidency of Donald Trump burst like a clap of thunder across the whole American nation, across the whole world.
Here is the Donald in unimagined glory, the victor of all he surveys, not just embarking on the latest unbelievable chapter in a completely unbelievable American life, from reality TV to the White House, via porn star dalliances, assassin’s bullets and politicised felony convictions that voters rightly ignored, but promising the very reinvention, the historic renewal, of America itself.
It’s a scene with biblical resonance.
But is Trump a modern Moses leading his people into the promised land? Or is he the Apocalypse? It’s too early to tell, but the blizzard of activity in Trump’s first few days demonstrates he is changing America, probably fundamentally. As with all things Trump, there will be good and bad, courageous and cringeworthy, inspiring and implausible.
The dangers are manifold: that Trump goes too far; that his administration is ill-disciplined if not incoherent; that the opposition in the courts and Democrat-controlled states frustrates his program; that he ignores the law; that he confuses personal profit with public policy; that America’s adversaries, wise to Trump this time, less intimidated by his bluster, refuse him the deals he wants, the deals he needs; that the meanness inherent in parts of Trump’s program becomes exaggerated or dominant; that he encompasses some monumental blunder.
But the promise is also manifold: that Trump unleashes the entrepreneurial spirits of the American economy; that the US military streaks ahead of the rest, providing unassailable deterrence; that the US sets up a huge lead in artificial intelligence and other areas of hi-tech; that America leads the West out of the debilitating ideologies of self-hatred and identity politics that grip the Western academy; that race is delegitimised as a central feature of Western politics and culture; that inflation is slayed; that bureaucracy is tamed, government spending reduced; that deregulation liberates business and slashes costs.
The frisson of danger that always accompanies Trump is palpable. It’s tied up not only with Trump’s personality but with his essential modus operandi. Everything is psycho-drama. Everything is a deal. So everything is unpredictable. Positions that seem solid, change in a minute, sacrificed as leverage in a deal. Strategic unpredictability can be an asset in negotiation, but as former diplomat Peter Varghese has argued, strategic unpredictability can easily become strategic unreliability.
To take one relatively minor example, Trump’s Vice-President, JD Vance, a few days before the inauguration, said any of the January 6, 2021, rioters who had attacked police wouldn’t be pardoned. Then Trump pardoned them anyway, saying they’d been in jail long enough. Vance surely had spoken to Trump before he made his public comments. Trump presumably was undecided until the last minute, characteristically. He certainly wasn’t fussed about embarrassing Vance.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his wife Jeanette AFP
Still, stepping back from the sheer volume and speed of action in the first days, you can see that Trump’s election, notwithstanding the new/old President’s many foibles, represents a characteristic American response to perceived decline and stagnation. The old left liberal orthodoxy that was strangling America, its economy and its society, just as it’s strangling Europe and even Australia, just wasn’t working. Everyone could see that except left-liberal ideologues. Crime. Homelessness. Skyrocketing energy prices. Uncontrolled illegal immigration. These things were a mess.
No nation suffers paradigm paralysis less willingly than the US. If things really aren’t working, its voters have a visceral reaction: throw the bums out! And if the next lot don’t work, throw them out too.
Often the US has looked permanently crippled by its internal difficulties – after the civil war in the 19th century, or the savage internal polarisation over Vietnam in the 1960s, or the stagflation of the ’70s. But every time, America comes roaring back.
Is it roaring back now? America certainly has profound social problems – drug abuse, especially fentanyl, gun violence, homelessness, inner-city crime, obesity. Ruinous inflation. But never forget the incredible American achievement.
Psychologist Jordan Peterson claimed recently that by the end of 2024, the poorest US state, Mississippi, was richer than the richest province of social democratic Canada, after a decade of enlightened left-liberal incompetence and ideological posturing from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The poorest American state enjoys a higher per capita income than Britain or France. The US is about $US30,000 ($47,700) richer per head than Canada, about twice as rich per capita as the EU. Even when America is doing poorly, it’s doing better than almost everybody else. Nonetheless, America has dangerously lost much of its manufacturing industry. In today’s militarily fraught environment, that’s dangerous.
A homeless encampment in San Francisco. Getty Images
But the modern world was still made in America – from Silicon Valley to Hollywood, from Pulitzer prizes to nation-shifting podcasts, from the internet to space travel. So while left-liberal formulas are failing, Trump inherits an America still possessed of profound strengths. Nonetheless, he’s going to change its direction and, if he can, its character. He’s attacking every issue with frightening energy.
His first week was political shock and awe: dozens of presidential executive orders; two states of emergency, energy and the southern border; two big international withdrawals, from the Paris climate accords and the World Health Organisation; a string of important appointments; a half-trillion-dollar AI investment announcement; the establishment of a new agency, the Department of Government Efficiency, to slash government spending; and the greatest repudiation of racial preferences by abolishing every program of the federal US government implementing or promoting diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
Trump gave us real actions in a dizzy range of policy areas. These include: the economy, including tariffs, energy policy, climate change, tax cuts, deregulation; foreign policy, including China, Russia, Israel and the Middle East; immigration, especially the southern border; and every aspect of identity politics, to promote “a colourblind society based on merit”.
It’s a cultural revolution, perhaps as Tesla boss and Trump bestie Elon Musk, head of DOGE, claimed, “a fork in the road of human civilisation”.
There will be plenty of resistance, even if Democrats rightly feel like idiots at the moment, demoralised at their loss, stunned at the people’s rejection, humiliated that the majority did not regard Trump in anything like the lurid light that Democrats had painted for eight years.
Nonetheless, although Trump’s victory was clear, it was relatively narrow. Trump got 77.3 million votes to Kamala Harris’s 75 million. That’s good but not landslide territory. He won 49.8 per cent of a relatively low turnout to Harris’s 48.3 per cent. Trump didn’t win a majority of the popular vote as George W. Bush did in 2004.
The result was, in the prescient phrase of former Trump campaign manager and adviser Kellyanne Conway, a “narrow landslide”.
Trump won all the battleground states, but narrowly. If Harris had won Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, she would be president. She lost those states respectively by 120,000, 80,000 and 29,000. So if just 115,000 votes in three key states, out of a total of more than 155 million votes cast, had gone the other way, the Trump revolution would be just one of the ghostly ifs of history.
None of this diminishes Trump’s victory. Given everything thrown against him, it was a magnificent triumph. But America is still a 50-50 nation. Trump will need to score successes that affect people’s lives to cement his political revolution. Just as conservatives were energised by Joe Biden’s appalling presidency, radical activists will be motivated to oppose Trump. Though not just yet, perhaps.
What do Trump’s early actions tell us about how he’ll govern? Stylistically, they’re revealing. This will be a personalised presidency where all big policy issues are deals, supervised by the President.
Some specific policies are clear. Trump will secure US borders. The American people want that. He says he will deport people who are in the US illegally. That’s more than 12 million people. He can’t physically deport that many. But he can deport a lot if he wants to.
Barack Obama, liberal hero, deported hundreds of thousands of people every year. That’s what it means to enter the US illegally. You don’t have the right to be there. If Trump concentrates on illegal immigrants who have committed serious crimes, and the more than a million who have been ordered to be deported but have not actually been removed, that’s likely to maintain strong support.
US Customs and Border Protection officers. AFP
For the moment, Trump has stopped all refugee arrivals. That surely must be temporary. Attempting to end automatic citizenship for babies born in the US appears unconstitutional. The constitutional amendment was first introduced to allow slaves and ex-slaves to become citizens. That will be fought legally.
Energy policy is clear. Trump withdrew from the Paris Agreement, ended federal mandates for electric vehicles and reversed every one of Biden’s multitudinous executive orders restricting fossil fuel exploration and exploitation. During the election, Harris did not campaign on climate change at all. This issue could be gone for the left.
Most politicians try to sniff the breeze. Some politicians make the weather. Trump is doing this, perhaps literally and figuratively, on climate change and energy. His administration will promote the use of every source of energy – oil, gas, coal, nuclear, wind, solar – everything altogether all at once. There will be a lot of legal battles but the direction is clear. And the US taxpayer won’t contribute a dime to green energy funds.
There are only a couple of nations formally outside the Paris Agreement. But Trump’s action demolishes global climate plans as they exist and demonstrates the extreme folly of the Albanese government bankrupting our economy to pursue the fantasy chimera of net zero.
Most developed nations have substantially deindustrialised because of crazy net-zero targets and the consequent spiralling costs of energy. This week’s Spectator magazine contains a mournful essay outlining the process in Britain. A recently returned European diplomat observes to me that climate action and green energy policies have damaged German industry more than the Royal Air Force did in World War II.
Trump won’t let this happen in America. Further, the big greenhouse gas emitters, whose emissions are growing most strongly, are not developed economies but nations such as China, India, Indonesia and so on. These nations are part of the Paris accords but don’t face any serious burdens under them. They use every source of energy they can.
The US Mexico border at El Paso, Texas. AFP
With the US effectively joining them, it’s the failing economies of Europe, and not much better performing Australia, that look out of touch with reality and committed to self-destruction. Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton are both right to say Australia can’t exit Paris like the US has done. This would be to become a target. It should instead do what so many do: stay notionally in Paris but maintain the economy anyway with traditional energy sources. And it should embrace nuclear.
Trump wants to cut taxes and attract foreign investment into the US. None of this foreign investment will hesitate for a nano-second because of ethical concerns about climate. Trump will face his greatest opposition in the courts, from some Democrat states such as California; and, if Republicans lose congress in two years, from congress as well.
On tariffs, Trump is still a mystery. He says punitive tariffs may begin against Canada and Mexico in a week or two. He’s unhappy that they let too many people, and too much fentanyl, cross into the US. Such tariffs would devastate Mexico and Canada. The slight delay seems to be an invitation to their governments to make him an offer he can’t refuse.
He has delayed the giant tariffs he was planning on China even further. Though Trump said he would impose such tariffs, it’s clear they were always essentially a bargaining ploy. He’s open to deals.
Trump offered actions and indications of direction on the Middle East, Russia and China. The actions are unified by Trump’s deal-making and by his America first predilections, but they can’t be connected by coherent policy otherwise.
On the Middle East, he forced a welcome ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. If Hamas comes back to dominate Gaza, Trump will likely back Israel if it decides it must resume military action.
Trump and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in 2018. AFP
On Russia, Trump wants a deal. However bad it is in principle, in that Ukraine should not have had to give up any territory, in reality the shape of the deal is obvious. Russia gets to keep the Ukrainian territory it has already conquered and Ukraine gets genuine security guarantees – if not NATO membership, perhaps the presence of British and French troops on its soil.
Trump began by hectoring Russia’s Vladimir Putin, saying he was destroying Russia and waging a ridiculous war. He threatened more sanctions if Putin didn’t make a deal. That seems a hollow threat but Trump’s deals typically begin with a lot of bluster. Trump wants this deal very badly.
On China, Trump has sent mixed and confusing signals. His decision to save TikTok is extremely perplexing. Congress passed legislation to force TikTok to sever its connection with its Chinese owner, ByteDance, or cease operations in the US. Trump has delayed enforcement of this law, and that in itself seems highly dubious legally. Trump also says he would accept a deal in which the US, whether government or private companies, owned 50 per cent of TikTok. But that would still be in breach of the law, which Trump himself called for way back in 2020, and would not stop China from harvesting all the user data from TikTok.
As a result of Trump’s stay of execution, TikTok has been lavishing praise on him. That’s pretty dubious from every point of view.
Trump has appointed genuine and profound China hawks such as new Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Elbridge Colby, the new Under Secretary of Defence for Policy at the Pentagon. But he also has appointed business-as-usual types to Treasury. Similarly, he has talked of wanting to visit China soon, which would seem unlikely if he’s levying punishing tariffs. The best you can say is that China policy is a movable feast, likely to harden over the course of Trump’s presidency, as it did during his first term.
Trump wants to renovate, modernise and expand American power. He’s greatly drawn to tariffs and economic sanctions as his “hard” power tools of choice. He’s pro-business, pro-hi tech, pro-patriotic and in alliance with many good forces in US society. And of course, he has his dark side and his share of very bad hangers-on.
History has often used much worse men than this to conduct necessary national renovations. Trump is planning to reinvent himself and reinvent America. The world awaits the reinvention.
In December, In That Howling Infinite published Syria. Illusion, delusion and the fall of tyrants, an analysis of the downfall of the Assad dynasty. It observed: “…the immediate future is far from clear. It is axiomatic to say that most commentators who say they understand what is going to happen in the Levant often don’t. To quote B Dylan, something’s happening, and we don’t yet know what it is … Syria now pauses at a crossroads, where both hope for a better future, and skepticism that it will be achieved, are equally warranted. Whether or not the new Syrian regime can succeed is an open question”.
Syria’s political transition is literally a regime change: not simply the switching out of personalities on the throne, but a total philosophical and conceptual reordering of governance. Maybe it’s not the wind of freedom that is blowing through the streets of Damascus.
Russian-oriented media platforms like RT and Mint have been saying for two months now that despite their friendly noises, including pragmatic contacts with western countries like the USA, Britain and France that once treated the Assad regime as a pariah and also regarded Hayat al Tahrir al Shams as a terrorist outfit, and wealthy Gulf states that had only just made up with the old regime, whilst hedging on the thorny issue of relations with Turkey and Israel on the one hand, and former enables of the regime, Russia, Iran and even Hezbollah, on the other, Syria’s new rulers are Islamists at heart and will soon show their true colours.
Maybe they have a point …
In late December, Obaida Arnout, a spokesperson for the Syrian transitional government, said that women’s “biological and physiological nature” rendered them unfit for certain governmental jobs, sparking demonstrations in Damascus and other cities. At a press conference, the new Syrian leader asked a female reporter to cover her hair. There are reportsthat the new authorities are purging the school curriculum of pre-Islamic history and content deemed contrary to Islamic strictures. Before Christmas, foreign jihadis allied to Hayat al Tahrir al Sham torched a Christmas tree in Hama, leading to protests by Syrian Christians.
Syria’s de facto ruler Ahmed al Shara’a declared that free elections could be four years away, and in late January, seven weeks after he led the rebel offensive that overthrew Bashar al-Assad. he was named president for the “transitional period“. Rebel military commander Hassan Abdul Ghani also announced the cancellation of Syria’s 2012 constitution and the dissolution of the former regime’s parliament, army and security agencies, according to the Sana news agency. As president, Sharaa would form an interim legislative council to help govern until a new constitution was approved, he said. Meanwhile, he added, all rebel groups which opposed Assad in the 13-year civil war would be dissolved and integrated into state institutions.
This may provie difficult if not impossible. in the north, Turkish proxy forces battle with Kurdish forces in semi-autonomous Rojava. in the south, rebel militias oppose the imposition of HTS authority. In the west, Alawite militias who supported the Assads engage in firefights with HTS. In the east, meanwhile, the Americans bombing surviving pockets of Islamic State fighters who may be encouraged by the chaos to stage a jailbreak of tens of thousands of jihadis held in camps guarded by the embattled Kurds.
Maybe it’ll be business as usual in the middle eastern axis of awful. It may be the wind of freedom that is blowing, but then again, maybe not. So far so bad …?
Women in Damascus celebrate the fall of the Assad regime
Fears Syria is the next Mid-East humanitarian nightmare
Henry Ergas, The Australian, December 13, 2024.
To describe the current Syria situation as combustible is consequently an understatement.
No one mourns the wicked, says the song. But, while the end of Bashar al-Assad’s blood-soaked rule is undoubtedly welcome, his overthrow is not likely to solve Syria’s crippling problems.
That Syria’s descent into a murderous civil war was partly triggered by economic factors is clear. Far-reaching land reforms in 1958 and 1962-63 created a vast number of small to very small farms, which accounted for 60 per cent of all agricultural holdings but only 23 per cent of cultivated land. That structure was always precarious; what destroyed it was a trebling in Syria’s population.
With inheritance laws subdividing those holdings as more and more sons survived into adulthood, the marginal farms, which accounted for the bulk of agricultural employment, became completely unviable. Steadily worsening water shortages, culminating in a disastrous drought from 2005 to 2010, then delivered the final blow, precipitating a flight to the cities, particularly from the Sunni areas, that left many rural villages without young men.
But Syria’s heavily regulated, corruption-ridden economy could scarcely absorb the inflow, so more than half of those young men became unemployed, eking out tenuous livelihoods in illegally built complexes on the urban fringes.
People gather to celebrate in Umayyad Square on December 11, 2024
None of that would have provoked the civil war had the rural collapse, and the subsequent rise in poverty, not aggravated deep-seated ethnic and religious conflicts. Exactly like Lebanon and Iraq, the country that gained independence in 1946 was a state without a nation. Nor were there any broadly shared goals or ideas that could shape a unifying national identity.
The extent of the differences became obvious in 1954, when a Sunni-dominated government enacted centralising laws that sparked a Druze revolt. The revolt was quickly suppressed but the inability to define a workable balance between the conflicting groups fuelled six military coups in rapid succession.
It was only in 1966, when the Baath (Resurrection) party seized power, and then in 1970, with the so-called Corrective Revolution, which vested undivided power in Hafez al-Assad, that a degree of stability prevailed. The Baath had secured just 15 per cent of the vote in 1963, the last more or less free election; but, at least initially, it managed to coalesce a viable, if never broad, base of support.
At the heart of that support was the army, whose officer corps, like the Baath, was dominated by Alawites, who replaced the Sunnis decimated in the military purges that followed the coups and countercoups of the previous decade. Complementing that core was a tidal wave of Baathist patronage as sweeping nationalisations in 1964-65 and a 20-fold increase in the size of the public service – enacted in the name of “the scientific Arab way to socialism” – politicised employment decisions.
There is, however, no doubt that the Sunnis, who derived few benefits from that patronage, were left behind, at a time when Islamic fundamentalism was gaining lavish funding from the newly wealthy petro-monarchies. Although a shadowy battle between the regime and the Muslim Brotherhood had raged for some years, the Hama revolt in 1982 proved the key turning point.
Suppressed in a sea of blood, the revolt of Hama’s Sunnis induced Assad to rely even more heavily on a pervasive security apparatus manned by Alawites and controlled by members of his family: of the 12 key officers who ran the military-security complex between 1970 and 1997, seven were linked to Assad by blood or marriage.
That pattern persisted when Bashar al-Assad acceded to the presidency in 2000. By then, however, the transition from “Arab socialism” to an especially degenerate form of crony capitalism had made the cracks in the regime’s foundations ever more glaring.
To begin with, because the Sunni birthrate was much higher than that of the ethnic and religious minorities, the minorities’ share of the Syrian population was a third lower than in 1980, narrowing the regime’s power base, heightening its paranoia and increasing its dependence on outside support (which eventually came from Iran and Russia).
At the same time, the growing concentration of young, unemployed Sunni men in the major towns created an immensely receptive audience for radical imams, who – repeating the Al-Jazeera sermons of Hamas’s spiritual leader, Sheik Youssef al-Qaradawi – denounced the Alawites as “even more defiled than the Jews”.
It is therefore no accident that it was a broadcast by al-Qaradawi, calling, on March 25, 2011, for an uprising to root out the unbelievers, that transformed highly localised demonstrations into a national civil war.
Retracing that civil war’s history would take too long. What matters is that each of its many protagonists sought to create a safe base for its constituency by ruthless ethnic cleansing.
The regime readily accepted – when it did not force – the displacement of some eight million people, mainly Sunnis, out of its area of control. That not only removed potential adversaries; it also allowed the regime, through a special law passed in mid-2018, to expropriate the displaced, reselling their assets (at bargain basement prices) to its Alawite, Christian and Druze supporters. That those minorities, which effected much of the regime’s dirty work, feel threatened by the victims’ return is readily understandable.
Nor was the ethnic cleansing any less brutal in the areas controlled by the regime’s Islamist opponents. In Turkish-controlled Afrin, for example, where Kurds previously comprised 90 per cent of the population, there are virtually no Kurds left, as Turkey’s military has replicated the “demolish and expel” strategy it implemented in Turkish-occupied Cyprus. To make things worse, it has, in what were relatively secular regions, enforced conformity to Islamic precepts to an extent unthinkable in Turkey itself.
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham chief Ahmed al-Sharaa
Equally, in Idlib, which is governed by HTS (the Movement for the Liberation of the Levant), Christians, who were treated as dhimmis, have fled, as have any surviving Alawite, Ismaili and Yazidi “heretics”. Ahmed al-Sharaa, who heads HTS, presents himself as a technocratic nation-builder; the reality is that he never abandoned his jihadi outlook, reined in the Islamist fanaticism of HTS’s followers or relaxed the sharia-inspired prohibitions that dominate Idlib’s daily life.
Far from being a model of modernity, Idlib under Sharaa (who has reverted from Abou Mohammed al-Jolani to his original name) closely resembles Gaza under Hamas – an authoritarian, Islamist enclave that survives by diverting humanitarian assistance to fund HTS’s operations. There is every reason to fear Sharaa will try to take Syria down that road, provoking (in a repeat of the Iraqi scenario) a renewed conflict with the former regime’s supporters, as well as with the US-backed Kurds.
To describe the current situation as combustible is consequently an understatement. And it is an understatement too to say that Israel’s precautionary measures, which include strengthening its grip on the Golan Heights, are eminently rational.
Of course, that won’t stop the UN, and Australia with it, condemning the Israeli moves, while staying mum about Turkey’s expansion of its so-called “self-protection zone” in Syria and its indiscriminate bombing of Kurdish villages. But if the Syrian tragedy has a lesson, it is this: in the Arab Middle East, with its deep hatreds, long memories and searing fractures, only sheer power counts. To believe anything else is just a childish fantasy
So we march to the rhythm of the revolution; Oh it is our shining hour. Move to the rhythm of the revolution, And the revolution’s power. Run with the rhythm of the revolution, Storm the palace, seize the crown. Rise to the rhythm of the revolution, Shake the system, break it down!
Paul Hemphill, Rhythm of the Revolution
Recent events in the Middle East seem to validate Vladimir Lenin’s aphorism, “there are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen”.
”For years” wrote Bel Tru, the Independent’s correspondent in the Levant, a worthy successor to the late Robert Fisk and now retired Patrick Cockburn.East, “the world forgot about Syria. Many believed it was lost in an unsolvable abyss following the collapse of the 2011 revolution into a bloody civil war – made increasingly complex by the intervention of a mess of internal and international actors. Most assumed that the immovable regime of Bashar al-Assad had won, and that nothing would ever change. Few could even tell you if the war was still ongoing, let alone what stage it was at”.
Until Syrian rebel fighters stormed out of their fastness in Idlib province, which had been besieged and contained and for years by government forces and Russian bombers, and in an off sense that too the world by surprise, they took control of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city?
Over the space of a week, it seemed as if the nightmares of the past had come rushing into the present as the current wars in Gaza and Lebanon were pushed to the sidelines.
Iran’s theocratic tyrant Ayatollah Khamenei declared that the rebel offensive that destroyed the 52-year-old Assad dynasty in a mere eleven days was all a foreign plot concocted by the Great Satan and the Little Satan, aided and abetted by the wannabe Sultan of Türkiye (and there might indeed be a kernel of truth in that). In his opinion, it had nothing to do with the fact that the brutal and irredeemably corrupt Syrian regime was rotten to its core and that like the Russian army in 1917, its reluctant conscript soldiers, neglected, poorly paid and hungry, refused to fight for it whilst its commanders ran for their lives. Built to fight Israel and then to subdue Syrians, it had over time ate itself in corruption, neglect and ineptitude. Western radicals of the regressive left will doubtless believe the good ayatollah because that is what they are conditioned to believe rather than learning anything about Syria or the region generally.
if Khamenei could only have removed the mote from his eye, he’d have seen that the fall of Bashar al Assad was the indirect result of the most disastrous series of foreign policy miscalculations since the theocratic regime took power in Tehran in 1979. In the wake of Hamas’s murderous attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, Iran made the fatal error of ordering its proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon to begin a low-level war against northern Israel, lobbing missiles and drones into it almost daily. What Tehran did not calculate was that once Israel had largely destroyed Hamas in Gaza it would turn its guns on to Hezbollah with stunning force. The indirect effect of Iran’s miscalculation was that neither Hezbollah nor Iran was in a position to help Assad repel the rebels when they launched their assault. Iran has now lost its regional ally Syria, in addition to Hezbollah and Hamas, leaving it unusually isolated in the region when its ageing clerical leadership is increasingly unpopular with its own people.
Over the coming weeks and months, commentators, pundits and so-called experts will ruminate on the causes of the fall of one of the Middle East’s most enduring and also, even by the region’s low standards, brutal regime, and on what may or may not happen now.
I republish below two excellent opinion pieces offering some answers to each question respectively. Each in their own way follow the advice of most scholars of the Middle East: expect the unexpected. And whilst most observers admit to having been taken by surprise when Hayat al Tahrir al Sham fell upon Aleppo, including intelligence organizations that ought to have known better, none were perhaps more surprised than the insurgents themselves when only a fortnight ago, they were given the nod by their Turkish patron to endeavour to expand the borders of their statelet and suddenly found themselves on an almost empty highway to Damascus.
Analyst and commentator David McCullen (who has featured prominently on this blog in the past) examines warning signs that may have indicated that all was not well in the Assad kingdom, drawing on on historical parallels to explain why the Bashar al Assad and his longtime all-pervasive and ever-watching security apparatus failed to see the gathering storm unlit it had engulfed them.
He references particularly the political scientist Timur Kuran, the originator of the concept of “preference cascade”: “… under repressive regimes (or ostensibly democratic ones that censor dissent) the gap between public pronouncements and private opinions increases over time, until many individuals dissent from the approved narrative and lose faith in institutions that promote it but remain reluctant to reveal their real views. This “preference falsification” creates a deceptive impression of consensus. It can make regimes believe they have more support than they really do, while convincing dissidents they are all alone so there is no point expressing a contrary opinion. But when an unexpected shock reduces the regime’s power to suppress dissent, people suddenly feel empowered to express their real opinions. They realise these opinions are widely shared and the false consensus evaporates. This can trigger a “preference cascade”, where individuals or institutions suddenly change sides and support for the government collapses overnight”.
Kilcullen concludes: “Given the speed and totality of Assad’s collapse, some observers seem to be assuming that HTS will now, by default, become the dominant player in Syria. On its face, this may seem a reasonable assumption, given what happened in similar situations – Havana 1959, Saigon 1975, Kabul 2021 and so on”. But he cautions that “it would be premature in Syria’s case since the war is very much ongoing. As the northern hemisphere winter closes in and Western allies prepare for a change of administration in Washington, Syria – along with Gaza, Lebanon, the Red Sea, Ukraine, Taiwan and the Korean peninsula – will remain a major flashpoint into the new year”.
Indeed, the immediate future is far from clear. It is axiomatic to say that most commentators who say they understand what is going to happen in the Levant often don’t. To quote B Dylan, something’s happening, and we don’t yet know what it is …
In the second article republished below, Israeli commentator Zvi Bar’el examines possibilities, including the Herculean task of putting the fractured state of Syria back together again. As Australian diplomat David Livingstone wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald on 3 December, “Syria and its conflict is a mosaic of combatants rather than a dichotomy of good versus evil. Loyalties usually reflect a person’s religion or ethnicity. The Sunnis hate the nominally Shiite regime of Assad; Assad himself is the inheritor of atrocities by his father’s regime against the Sunni, including the destruction of Hama and slaughter of many of its inhabitants in 1982; the Kurds want an autonomous homeland; and the Turkmen are no friends to Assad or extremist Sunnis”.
So, where to from here? Syria now pauses at a crossroads, where both hope for a better future, and scepticism that it will be achieved, are equally warranted. Whether or not the new Syrian regime can succeed is an open question.
There is much to be done, with little time and meagre resources to do it. Forces, factions and faiths will now have to be reconciled. The divided country is shattered physically, economically and psychologically. Some 410,000 Syrians are estimated to have been killed in war-related violence up to the end of last year making it the bloodiest conflict of the 21st century to date. The dead will have to counted and accounted for, including tens and tens of thousands lost in the regime’s jails and prisons, and the survivors of rehabilitated. Scores may have to be settled either in blood or in spirit. About half of the country’s pre-war population has either fled abroad or internally displaced. The new government will need to ensure civilians’ safety, enable the return of millions of refugees and internally displaced, and rehabilitate the infrastructure and civil services. But the country is broke, while one economist estimates that the physical damage across the country amounts to $150 billion.
What form will a government take? Does the new administration intend to hold elections? Will HTS leader Ahmed al Shara and his comrades set up a government that will be agreed on by all the communities, factions, militia, and foreign forces? Will the new constitution be Islamic? To this his new prime minister replies, “God willing, but clearly all these details will be discussed in the constitutional process.” When Italian journalist Andrea Nicastro asks him “do I understand correctly when I say you’re ready to make peace with Israel and that you’re hostile to Iran, Hezbollah and Russia?” Al-Bashir thanks him and leaves without answering.
Meanwhile, Arab states, who once spurned Assad’s regime and were tentatively cozying up to him only recently, having invited Syria back into the Arab League. European states are contemplating whether or not to remove HTS from their lists of proscribed terrorist organizations. Assad’s erstwhile backers, Iran and Russia, which in fact controlled large parts of Syria, left Dodge in haste and are now replaced by two new-old occupiers, Israel, and Turkey. One took over the “Syrian Hermon” and a little further – to the condemnation of Arab regimes and the United Nations, the other is completing the occupation of the Kurdish regions in northern Syria.
No love is lost between the two of them, but it seems fate insists on making them meet in war fronts. As Bar’el adds, “… once as partners when they helped Azerbaijan in its war against Armenia and once as enemies in the Gaza front or now on Syrian soil. There’s no knowing, maybe al Shara will be the best man who will get to reconcile between them. Miracles happen, even if under the nose of the best intelligence services in the world, who didn’t know and didn’t evaluate the complete collapse of the Assad regime”. “The warm Arab and international envelope tightening around Damascus”, he writes, “is ready to give him credit although it doesn’t know yet where he’s heading, assuming any leader will be better than Assad. That, by the way, is what the Syrians also believed Assad senior would be when he toppled the rule of General Salah Jedid, only to get a new mass murderer.
Right now, as the old song goes, “the future’s not ours to see …” But we might take hope from the last line of the late Robert Fisk‘s last book, The Night of Power, published posthumously earlier this year: “… all wars come to an end and that’s where history restarts”.
Author’s note
There have been many stunning pictures published to date of the Syrian revolution, but none that I’ve found as personally poignant as this one. It depicts jubilant Syrians lining the Roman archway that stands at the eastern end of Damascus’ historic Suq al Hamadiyah. When we were last in Syria, in the Spring of 2009, I photographed the arch from inside the darkened Suq (during one of the city’s frequent power cuts) , revealing the impressive remnants of the Roman Temple of Jupiter and the magnificent Omayyad Mosque, the fourth holiest place in Islam (after Mecca, Medina and Al Quds/Jerusalem).
Syrians atop the Roman archway at the end of Damascus’ historic Suq al Hamadiyah
The Suq Al Hamadiyah, Temple of Jupiter and the Umayyad Mosque Mosque. P Hemphill 2009
The Suq Al Hamadiyah, Temple of Jupiter and the Umayyad Mosque Mosque. P Hemphill 2009
Aleppo shock to Hama huge leap forward: triggers in Syria’s 11-day blitz that unravelled Assad
David Kilcullen, The Australian, 13th December 2024
The speed of the regime’s collapse was startling, but it should not have been. Beyond the general dynamics of government collapse, something else was happening.
The regime’s collapse accelerated dramatically after the fall of the central Syrian city of Hama on the evening of Thursday, December 5, Syria time. Picture: Emin Sansar/Anadolu via Getty Images
This was not strictly true: HTS had been biding its time in its stronghold of Idlib province, on Syria’s northwestern border with Turkey, for five years since a ceasefire brokered by Turkish and Russian negotiators in 2020, avoiding direct confrontation with the regime and building its own structure outside state control.
Its parallel government included several ministries and a civil administration, the Syrian Salvation Government, governing a population of four million, the size of Croatia or Panama. Though dominated by HTS, the SSG has been somewhat politically inclusive, and several non-HTS leaders have had key roles in its administration.
It sought to include the independent governance councils that had arisen organically during the early days of the anti-Assad rebellion, and it established local municipal managers to provide essential services across its territory.
HTS’s small combat groups operated like a fast-moving light cavalry force. Picture: Omar Haj Kadour / AFP
American analysts in 2020 assessed the SSG as technocratic, “post-jihadi”, focused on internal stability and non-ideological governance, seeking acceptance from Turkey and the US, and unlikely to become a launch pad for external attacks.
Aaron Zelin – the Western expert most familiar with HTS and the author of an important book on the organisation, The Age of Political Jihadism – has observed that despite still holding extremist beliefs, HTS acts more like a state than a jihadist group.
While the SSG was focusing on social services and economic activity, HTS commanders were investing in advanced military capabilities. Building on experience from before the 2020 ceasefire, HTS organised its forces into small combat groups of 20 to 40 fighters that could mass quickly to swarm a target using several teams, or disperse to avoid enemy airstrikes or artillery.
They were highly mobile, operating like a fast-moving light cavalry force, mounted in a mix of hard and soft-skinned vehicles that included captured armoured vehicles and armed pick-up trucks (known as technicals).
Reconnaissance teams, scouts and snipers moved in civilian cars or on motorcycles. HTS combat groups carried heavy and light weapons including rocket launchers, captured artillery pieces, mortars, recoilless rifles, anti-tank missiles and Soviet-bloc small arms seized from the government or rival resistance groups including Islamic State.
Rebel fighters stand next to the burning gravesite of Syria’s late president Hafez al-Assad at his mausoleum in the family’s ancestral village of Qardaha. Picture: Aaref Watad / AFP
HTS also used the ceasefire to professionalise itself, studying the wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Lebanon. It established a military academy to educate officers in “military art and science”, and created civil affairs units, humanitarian agencies and a specialised organisation to convince government supporters to defect.
It used drones for reconnaissance, for leaflet drops on regime-controlled areas and as one-way attack munitions to strike targets with explosive warheads. It manufactured weapons and drones, and modified technicals with additional armour. HTS leaders built intelligence networks and command-and-control systems while allegedly also forging relationships with regional intelligence services and special operations forces.
Thus, the strength of HTS was not unexpected in itself. On the other hand, the rapidity of the regime’s collapse – which accelerated dramatically after the fall of the central Syrian city of Hama on the evening of Thursday, December 5, Syria time – was startling. It probably should not have been. Governments, unlike resistance movements, are tightly coupled complex systems that rely on numerous institutions and organisations, all of which must work together for the state to function.
As Joseph Tainter showed in The Collapse of Complex Societies, once co-ordination begins to break down, these interdependent systems unravel, the collapse of each brings down the next, and the entire structure falls apart. For this reason, in a process familiar to practitioners of irregular warfare, resistance groups (which tend to be loosely structured and thus more resilient to chaos) degrade slowly under pressure – and rebound once it is relieved – whereas governments collapse quickly and irrevocably once initial cohesion is lost.
As a team led by Gordon McCormick showed in a seminal 2006 study, governments that are losing to insurgencies reach a tipping point, after which they begin to decay at an accelerating rate. The conflict then seems to speed up and the end “is typically decisive, sudden and often violent”.
This pattern was very noticeable during the fall of the Afghan republic in 2021, for example, which also occurred in an 11-day period. The final Taliban offensive captured every province but one, and took the capital, Kabul, in a series of victories between August 4 and 15, 2021. Many garrisons surrendered, fled without fighting or changed sides.
Initial rebel successes made the regime look weak, allies failed to offer support, the security forces defected and other rebel groups suddenly rose up across the country. Picture: Aaref Watad / AFP
To be sure, the Taliban’s final campaign was built on years of coalition-building and insurgent warfare. Similar to HTS, the Taliban relied on patient construction of parallel networks largely illegible to an Afghan state increasingly alienated from, and seen as illegitimate by, its own people.
It also was enabled by a stunningly shortsighted political deal with the US in 2020 and an incompetent US-led withdrawal in 2021. Even so, the collapse of the Kabul government was faster than expected, with president Ashraf Ghani fleeing by helicopter in a manner remarkably similar to Bashar al-Assad’s exit last weekend.
The fall of South Vietnam in 1975 was likewise extraordinarily rapid, occurring in just nine days after the decisive battle of Xuan Loc, with South Vietnam’s last president, Nguyen Van Thieu, fleeing for Taiwan on a military transport plane.
Similarly, Fulgencio Batista’s government in Cuba fell in only five days, between December 28, 1958 – when a rebel column under Che Guevara captured the town of Santa Clara – and the early hours of January 1, 1959, when Batista fled by aircraft to the Dominican Republic. He had announced his resignation to shocked supporters a few hours earlier at a New Year’s Eve party in Havana, starting a scramble for the airport.
In Syria’s case, beyond these general dynamics of government collapse, something else was happening: a military version of what political scientists call a “preference cascade”.
As Timur Kuran, originator of the concept, points out, under repressive regimes (or ostensibly democratic ones that censor dissent) the gap between public pronouncements and private opinions increases over time, until many individuals dissent from the approved narrative and lose faith in institutions that promote it but remain reluctant to reveal their real views. This “preference falsification” creates a deceptive impression of consensus. It can make regimes believe they have more support than they really do, while convincing dissidents they are all alone so there is no point expressing a contrary opinion.
But when an unexpected shock reduces the regime’s power to suppress dissent, people suddenly feel empowered to express their real opinions. They realise these opinions are widely shared and the false consensus evaporates. This can trigger a “preference cascade”, where individuals or institutions suddenly change sides and support for the government collapses overnight.
In particular, the moment when security forces, particularly police, refuse to fire on protesters is often decisive, as seen in the fall of the Suharto government in 1998, the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in 2011 or the collapse of the East German regime in 1989.
Kuran’s initial work centred on the East European revolutions of 1989, which were unexpected at the time but seemed inevitable in retrospect, something Kuran later came to see as inherent in revolutionary preference cascades.
The most extreme case was the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania. During a mass rally on December 21, 1989 the dictator suddenly realised, his face on camera registering utter shock, that what he had initially perceived as shouts of support were actually calls for his downfall. When his security services refused to fire on the protesters, Ceausescu was forced to flee by helicopter. Four days later, he and his wife Elena were dead, executed after a brief military trial.
A woman poses for a photograph with a rebel fighter’s gun in Umayyad Square in Damascus. Syria’s population finally felt free to dissent from the dominant narrative. Picture: Chris McGrath/Getty Images
Syria this week was another example of a preference cascade. Initial rebel successes made the regime look weak, allies failed to offer support, the security forces defected and other rebel groups suddenly rose up across the country. Syria’s population – previously reluctant to express anti-regime sentiment for fear of repression or social ostracism – finally felt free to dissent from the dominant narrative. Assad lost control, was forced to flee, and his government collapsed. It is worth briefly recounting the sequence of events.
On November 27, the HTS offensive began with a sudden attack on Aleppo City. The outskirts of Aleppo are only 25km from the HTS stronghold in Idlib, so although the outbreak of violence was a surprise, there was little initial panic. The regime responded with airstrikes and artillery, with Russian warplanes in support.
The first major shock was the fall of Aleppo on November 30, after three days of heavy fighting. As Syria’s second largest city, scene of a bloody urban battle in 2012-16, Aleppo’s sudden collapse was a huge blow to the government. The HTS capture of Aleppo airport, east of the city, denied the regime a key airbase from which to strike the rebels, and cut the highway to northeast Syria. At this point the regime seemed capable of containing HTS, though clearly under pressure, and there was still relatively little panic.
But then on December 4, HTS attacked the city of Hama, which fell on the evening of December 5. This was a huge leap forward – Hama is 140km south of Aleppo down Syria’s main north-south M5 highway, meaning the rebel forces had covered a third of the distance to Damascus in a week. The fall of Hama was another political and psychological blow to Assad’s regime: Hama had never been under rebel control at any time since 2011.
Syrian rebel fighters at the town of Homs, 40km south of Hama, a critically important junction controlling the M5 and the east-west M1 highway that links Damascus and central Syria to the coast, and dominating Syria’s heavily populated central breadbasket. Picture: Aaref Watad / AFP
The collapse at Hama – and the perception of regime weakness this created – triggered a preference cascade. Immediately, commanders began negotiating with or surrendering to the rebels or evacuating their positions. Also, after Hama’s fall, Iranian forces negotiated safe passage and began withdrawing from Syria, denying the government one of its key allies, further weakening Assad’s credibility, and encouraging yet more supporters to defect.
The regime’s other main ally, Russia, had already retreated to its bases at Khmeimim and Tartous, on Syria’s Mediterranean coast, after losing large amounts of military equipment and a still-unknown number of casualties. The same day, Hezbollah declined to offer material assistance to the Syrian government, given that it was still under Israeli pressure and had taken significant damage in 66 days of conflict.
The town of Homs lay 40km south of Hama – not much closer to Damascus but a critically important junction controlling the M5 and the east-west M1 highway that links Damascus and central Syria to the coast, and dominating Syria’s heavily populated central breadbasket. By early Friday, December 6, HTS combat groups were massing to assault Homs, but the city’s defences collapsed and it fell without a significant fight. By this point, security forces were dispersing, some retreating to Damascus but many fleeing to coastal areas.
The fall of Hama and Homs in quick succession encouraged other rebel groups to pile on, with several now mounting their own offensives against the regime. Uprisings broke out in the southern cities of Daraa and As-Suwayda on Friday and Saturday, December 6 and 7. These were less of a shock than the loss of Hama – Daraa was, after all, the cradle of the revolution in 2011 – but given everything else that was happening, the government simply lacked the forces to suppress them.
Simultaneously, US-backed forces in the far south advanced north from their base at al-Tanf, near the Jordanian border, while US-allied Kurdish troops of the Syrian Democratic Forces attacked in the east, crossing the Euphrates and seizing regime-controlled territory near Deir Ezzour. American aircraft flew airstrikes to support the SDF, which also seized the border post at Bou Kamal, blocking access to Iraqi militias that had been crossing into Syria to support the regime.
By Sunday, the regime had collapsed and the rebels occupied Damascus without a fight. Picture: Louai Beshara / AFP
By this point – last Saturday evening, December 7, Syria time – the government was on its last legs. That night an uprising broke out in Damascus, launched by civilian resistance groups and disaffected military units keen to distance themselves from the regime as the rebels closed in. Government troops began abandoning their posts, changing into civilian clothes, ditching their equipment and disappearing into the night. Large numbers of armoured vehicles, including T-72 tanks, were abandoned in the streets of the capital. Assad had planned to address the nation that evening but did not appear.
Later that night, apparently without asking Assad, the high command of the Syrian armed forces issued an order to all remaining troops to lay down their weapons and disperse. Assad fled about 2am on Sunday, flying out in a Russian transport aircraft. Assad’s prime minister, Mohammed al-Jalali, announced that he was willing to act as caretaker during transition to a provisional government, showing that Syria’s civil government, like the regime’s military forces, had collapsed. Despite initial reports that Assad’s aircraft had been denied entry into Lebanese airspace then shot down over Homs, Russian media reported later on Sunday that he had arrived in Moscow.
By Sunday, the regime had completely collapsed and the rebels, led by HTS commander Ahmed al-Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, occupied Damascus without a fight.
The same day, US aircraft mounted dozens of airstrikes across the country, targeting Islamic State or regime forces, while Israeli troops crossed the Golan Heights buffer zone and began advancing towards Damascus. By Monday, despite initially claiming their incursion was limited and temporary, Israeli forces were 25km from Damascus, Israeli politicians had announced the permanent annexation of the Golan, and Israeli aircraft were striking Syrian military bases and sinking Syrian ships at the Latakia naval base.
Israel has denied media reports that its troops have taken control of Syrian territory.
In addition to theIsraeli incursion through the Golan, Turkish-backed troops of the Syrian National Army are attacking the SDF across a strip of northern Syria, apparently attempting to create their own buffer zone separating the SDF – which Ankara sees as allied to the Kurdistan Workers Party – from Turkish territory.
The SDF has seized a chunk of eastern Syria, other US-allied rebel groups hold key parts of the south, and Islamic State still has numerous supporters and active cells in the country. Russia still controls its two Syrian bases, while Syria’s ethnic and religious minorities including Christians and Alawites are deeply anxious about the future, despite promises of tolerance from HTS.
Given the speed and totality of Assad’s collapse, some observers seem to be assuming that HTS will now, by default, become the dominant player in Syria. On its face, this may seem a reasonable assumption, given what happened in similar situations – Havana 1959, Saigon 1975, Kabul 2021 and so on.
But it would be premature in Syria’s case since the war is very much ongoing. As the northern hemisphere winter closes in and Western allies prepare for a change of administration in Washington, Syria – along with Gaza, Lebanon, the Red Sea, Ukraine, Taiwan and the Korean peninsula – will remain a major flashpoint into the new year.
David Kilcullen served in the Australian Army from 1985 to 2007 and was a senior counter-insurgency adviser to General David Petraeus in 2007 and 2008, when he helped design and monitor the Iraq War troop surge.
The Most Courted Leader in the Middle East Still Has No State
Arab and European heads of state are lining up to meet Ahmed A-Shara, the leader of the Syrian rebel organizations that ousted Assad, who has returned to his original name and is no longer calling himself al-Golani
After taking control, he hastened to renounce his underground name and resumed his local name, Ahmed A-Shara. He ousted Bashar Assad’s horror regime and started to sprout the first buds of “new Syria,” whose outcome is still hard to fathom. The race for shaking his hand is in full swing.
On Wednesday Qatar announced it would reopen its embassy in Damascus, after refusing to do so even when Assad was rehabilitated in the Arab World, returned to the warm bosom of the Arab League and even Saudi Arabia resumed diplomatic ties with him.
Qatar is an old friend of A-Shara (one has to practice the name) and during the years of his organization’s existence it supported the militias that made up Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which he set up on the ruins of Jabhat a-Nusra and it’s also expected to help him rehabilitate his country.
Qatar isn’t alone. In the race to the presidential palace in Damascus the Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan came first to shake A-Shara’s hand. The foreign ministers of other Arab states, such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE are preparing to land in Damascus in the coming days to personally congratulate the leader of the sister state.
At the same time Biden’s administration is examining the possibility of removing A-Shara and his group from the terrorists’ list while European leaders, headed by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who only two weeks ago spoke of the possibility to normalize their relations with the Assad regime, are already trying to coordinate meetings with the new regime’s leadership.
The irony doesn’t stop there. Iran and Russia, which in fact controlled large parts of Syria, are now replaced by two new-old occupiers, Israel, and Turkey. One took over the “Syrian Hermon “and a little further, the other is completing the occupation of the Kurdish regions in North Syria. No love is lost between the two of them, but it seems fate insists on making them meet in war fronts.
Once as partners when they helped Azerbaijan in its war against Armenia and once as enemies in the Gaza front or now on Syrian soil. There’s no knowing, maybe A-Shara will be the best man who will get to reconcile between them. Miracles happen, even if under the nose of the best intelligence services in the world, who didn’t know and didn’t evaluate the complete collapse of the Assad regime.
The warm Arab and international envelope tightening around Damascus is ready to give him credit although it doesn’t know yet where he’s heading, assuming any leader will be better than Assad. That, by the way, is what the Syrians also believed Assad senior would be when he toppled the rule of General Salah Jedid, only to get a new mass murderer.
The first declarations and interviews of A-Shara and senior officials of his administration sound good and even encouraging. The temporary prime minister, Mohammed al-Bashir, said in an interview to the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera on Wednesday that at this stage the new administration has three top goals – to ensure the civilians’ safety, to return the refugees and to rehabilitate the infrastructure and civil services.
How to achieve those goals? “It will take time but we’ll get there,” says the former prime minister of the Idlib region’s rescue government under A-Shara’s command and was blasted publicly for the brutal way he ran the rebel province.
Al-Bashir also says the temporary government will serve until the beginning of March, but does not clarify what will happen after that date. Will he manage to draft a new constitution and election law by then? Does the new administration even intend to hold elections, or does he hope within that time to set up a government that will be agreed on by all the communities, factions, militia, and foreign forces?
Will the new constitution be Islamic? To this he replies, “God willing, but clearly all these details will be discussed in the constitutional process.”
Journalist Andrea Nicastro asks him “do I understand correctly when I say you’re ready to make peace with Israel and that you’re hostile to Iran, Hezbollah and Russia?” Al-Bashir thanks him and leaves without answering.
There can be no complaints about a prime minister or organization head who only two weeks ago merely prepared to expand the borders of his control region and suddenly found himself on an empty highway to Damascus, for having no political, economic, or strategic plan and for having to wriggle around ideological and religious issues. A-Shara has more urgent business, for example, an empty state coffer.
If he wants to ensure civilian safety and public services he’ll have to pay wages to thousands of policemen, teachers, judges, garbage contractors, rebuild the crushed electric system, mend roads and traffic lights when not a single dollar, according to al-Bashir, remain in the till.
Head of the Syrian trade bureau said this week Syria will move from a state-controlled economy to a free market economy. This is encouraging but to apply it they will need investors and ensure their investment.
Government ministers, most of them served in the “rescue government” in Idlib, estimate they’d be able to raise funds from Arab countries and mainly the UAE and Turkey, persuade Syrian businesspeople in exile to invest in the homeland and also return to Syria funds that were smuggled out by the Assad regime. But Arab and international aid usually comes with a list of rigid conditions, like demands for a profound economic reform, preserving human rights and minority rights, civilian safety, and no less important a political agenda that is compatible with the donor states’ aspirations.
Syria is not an only child. Soon the donor states will be asked to help to rebuild Lebanon and perhaps later Gaza as well. A conservative estimate sets Syria’s national debt at some $31 billion, $5 billion of them to the IMF and $26 billion to Russia and to Iran.
More realistic estimates cite a debt of more than $30 billion to Iran alone, which invested some $50 billion in the last 14 years.
The oil wells that remained in the Assad regime’s control produced only some 9,000 oil barrels a day, now the new administration can produce oil from the oil fields controlled by the Kurds in the northeast of the state after they retreated from Dir A-Zur, which was reoccupied by the pro-Turkish militias.
But perhaps this will no longer be enough to reinstate the agriculture and food production industry, or to generate millions of workplaces that were lost during the war.
A-Shara portrays himself as “everyone'” leader and his prime minister aspires to set up an administration that represents all the ethnic communities and minorities. But will he gain the cooperation of the Alawite minority, which makes up 10 percent of the population? Will the Kurds in the north give up their aspirations for autonomy?
A large concentration of Alawites resides in the Latakia province on the Mediterranean coast, its people are well armed and afraid that armed militias or the regime itself would want to take revenge on them. Will they agree to disarm?
The Kurds are being pushed out of some of their provinces and only this week retreated from Manjib city west of the Euphrates River, after the Syrian National Army, the large pro-Turkish militia, conquered the city.
This retreat is the outcome of American mediation leaning on a Turkish commitment not to harm Kurdish civilians who leave the city. But Kurds continue to control the regions east of Euphrates, and Turkey wants to keep them away from those too. AT the same time their conduct has made it clear it is ready to cooperate with the A-Shara regime and be an integral part of Syria.
But it’s not clear yet under what terms. Will they want to preserve their provinces’ autonomy, and will the Syrian regime agree, when Turkey operates its military and economic leverages. Will the Kurds even have a bargaining chip left when Trump enters the White House? Trump tried already in 2019 to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria and was blocked by internal and external pressure. Now he may implement his wish with his ally Recep Erdogan.
Syrian commentators have begun to draw a map in which Syria could be a federation divided into autonomous cantons, Kurdish in the north, Sunni-Arab in the center, Alawite in the west and perhaps Druze in the south, a sort of expansion of the Iraqi model where an autonomous Kurdish region exists. The Shi’ites in the south are demanding their own province.
It is doubtful whether this model has a chance of being implemented in Syria but bringing it up in itself shows the explosives in store for the new Syrian regime. This is only a partial list because beyond the various ethnic communities and minorities, A-Shara will have to deal with a population that is mostly Sunni but secular. Will this population toe the line with a radical religious agenda, on which A-Shara was raised and has preached?
So far Syria has conveniently been attached to the “Shi’ite axis though it was an organ of Iran’s Islamic revolution.
But the Alawite faction doesn’t count in Iran as an authentic Shi’ite faction. Hafez Assad himself had to ask his friend, the influential religious leader Moussa al-Sader, to issue a ruling that the Alawite religion is part of the formal “Shi’a” and therefore part of the Islam religion.
This was after a long violent clash he conducted against Sunni and Shi’ite religious leaders who ruled the Alawite faction wasn’t Muslim at all and therefore Assad senior cannot be president, because the constitution stipulated the state’s president had to be Muslim.
A-Shara won’t have that dilemma, but as one who hasn’t concealed his aspiration to set up a religious state, he will have to decide how to settle between the religious vision and the character of the population and the state that hasn’t yet been established
Countless left-wing memes about American stupidity illustrate how out of touch, self righteous, arrogant and morally “superior” many of the so-called “left” have become – unlike the Democrats whom New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd said were “finally waking up and realizing that woke is broke” after having embraced a self-defeating world view of “hyper-political correctness, condescension and cancellation”.
The Democrats. – and indeed, our Labor party – would ignore the outcome of the presidential election at their peril. The people, for better or worse, have spoken, and it’s a pointless exercise for the Democrats to live in a fantasy world of denial, not accepting their own responsibility in the loss. The Sydney Morning Herald’s Peter Hartcher wrote on 12 November:“ It’s also extremely condescending and arrogant to assume you know better and anyone who didn’t agree must be an idiot. In that light, I’d suggest Trump didn’t win this. The Democrats lost it in a spectacular fashion, and if you can lose it to the likes of Trump, something is majorly wrong on the left side of politics”.
There are lessons aplenty for Australian politics. The Coalition wants to spend the months leading up to next year’s election talking about migration driving up household bills. It has no actual plan for decreasing immigration or reducing inflation, but voters don’t care. They don’t do nuance. They’re disatisfied with the status quo and disappointed in the government. They’ll just want to punish the mob in charge. Sure, they’ll be burning down the house, and they’ll be in the house when it burns down (two song references there!) but they won’t care. The question will be “are you better off today than you were four years ago?” And, like in America, for a great many, the answer will be a big “no!”
Waleed Ali’s recent article on why Trump won concurs with the above: “Last week, a historically unpopular government, presiding over a period of high inflation that saw food prices especially explode, got thrown out of office. There is quite simply nothing extraordinary about that”. Former Liberal attorney general and high commissioner to the UK George Brandis wrote similar in the Herald on 18 November:“… the sheer weirdness of Donald Trump himself: narcissistic, vulgar, bombastic, mendacious, idiosyncratic, outrageous; while at the same time flamboyant, mesmerizing and on occasions very funny. He broke every rule, told every lie, did the unthinkable, said the unsayable and still came up … (you complete the pun). The epic unconventionality of Trump’s campaign dramatised a result that would probably have been the same had the Republican candidate been less unorthodox. For that reason, the outcome is fertile ground for over-interpretation and exaggeration”.
On a different but not dissimilar tack, John Carroll, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at La Trobe University wrote in The Australian:
“The resounding Trump victory confirms the cardinal law: politics is about power. In times of peace and prosperity, such as we in Australia have enjoyed for almost 80 years, it is easy to forget, and continue along in the hopeful illusion that life is good, people are intrinsically nice, and problems can be solved amicably …
… One of the appeals of Donald Trump to the United States electorate – I suspect his main appeal – has been that, in his bluster and braggadocio, he flexes power muscles and seems to show he is unafraid to mobilise power for his own ends. There is an intuitive understanding across middle and lower-middle America that progressive posturing and feel-good speeches will not steer the ship of state safely through turbulent waters. In contrast, Trump policy appears clear, direct, and down-to-earth – booming economy, secure borders, and resolved international conflict. When 70 per cent of Americans feel worse off than they were four years ago, they want strength in leadership and focus on their everyday interests.
…The Trump persona – aggressive, confrontational, and petulant, not to mention pathologically narcissistic – also seems to have appealed to marginalised social strata. Those living in poorer states, young black and Latino males, recent immigrants, and the old city working classes resenting their decline, all seem to have been drawn to his maverick contempt for the trendy issues of the time. His character may be suspect – indeed he is widely disliked – but he appears powerful, practical, and not of the coterie elite. In politics, power eclipses niceness”.
I republish below an opinion piece by The Australian’s editor at large Paul Kelly. It is to my mind one if the best articles I have read to date regarding the outcome of the American elections and how this may impact Australian politics. It is particularly interesting insofar as Kelly pushes back against the conservative narrative prevalent in the Murdoch media and among more extreme right wing commentators, politicians and culture warriors. Regarding Australian politics, he writes:
“If Trump succeeds he will further undermine the shaky policy framework of the Labor Party. The optics will be: Trump’s strength versus Albanese’s weakness. In this situation, the pro-Trump media and conservative drum-beaters in this country – in effect the Trump Appeasement Syndrome lobby – will demand the Peter Dutton-led Coalition follow their messiah while they will use Trump’s success to undermine Albanese. Destroying former prime minister Kevin Rudd as ambassador to the US is just the first step”.
“So what’s driving the campaign to target Rudd”, asked Hartcher on 16 November. “The Murdoch media, in short. Some other commentators have been drawn into it, too, useful idiots for the Murdoch effort. Ostensibly they demand that Rudd go because he was critical of Trump, but in reality, “this is revenge”, as Malcolm Turnbull explained this week. “This is a campaign that News Corp kicked off, and they are running a vendetta,” he told my colleague Matthew Knott. Revenge for what? Rudd founded a movement called Australians for a Murdoch Royal Commission. Murdoch’s empire was “a cancer on our democracy”, he said. A royal commission would examine the level of concentration in Australian media ownership and the conduct of the Murdoch group in particular”.
“But the Murdoch media is not monolithic”, Hartcher continues.”Its éminence grise is Paul Kelly. Kelly has the stature to make his own judgment. The campaign to remove Rudd as “a ritual sacrifice before Trump has even said anything” is “part of Trump Appeasement Syndrome”. “This shows a contempt for Australian sovereignty and a craven weakness before Trump,” Kelly wrote this week. “For any Americans wasting their time following this saga, we must look a sad, pathetic little country.”
Trump and his cabinet picks Robert F Kennedy Jr and Elon Musk
Donald Trump’s revolution leaves Albanese exposed
Paul Kelly, The Australian, 16 November 2024
The Trump Revolution is coming and, like all revolutions, its outcome will fluctuate between a glorious remaking of the existing order or a spectacular overreach and fall – maybe even a contradictory mix of both – with Anthony Albanese and Australia in front-row seats for the drama.
[In the same issue as this article, national affairs editor Joe Kelly summed up this revolution: “Trump’s sweeping “day one agenda” includes dismantling the deep state, pursuing mass deportations, imposing across-the-board tariffs, scrapping the “Green New Scam”, withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, rolling back environmental regulations, ending the Ukraine conflict, unpicking pro-transgender policies, pardoning January 6 offenders, and rolling back the Biden health and education agendas. This is a blueprint to overhaul the country. Leading thinkers are already focused on which items are set in stone and which could merely be attempts to enhance Trump’s negotiating position. While Trump is a familiar political figure, this exercise reveals his policy agenda has still generated widespread uncertainty. Paradoxically, no one knows how the experiment will turn out or even exactly what it is – a recipe for a populist catastrophe, or a profound new American reinvention”.]
From the Trump appointments so far, the big “America First” play is on. The sharemarket has been excited, the bond market is wary, Big Tech is king, Beijing should be worried. President Trump Mark II is more resolute and revolutionary than Trump Mark I.
His hunger for change seems ferocious; his willingness to take risks is more pronounced. He is assembling a tribe of Trump loyalists to punch through the disintegrating Democratic scaffold. Trump demands loyalty and prioritises vindication.
Two lights are flashing – danger and opportunity. Some people will make a stack of money and others will be cast into painful obscurity.
Trump is going to remind everyone of the extent of power vested in the office of US president when pushed to the limit.
Consider the Elon Musk appointment. Surely this can’t be true. The world’s richest man, heading social-media platform X, hanging out at Mar-a-Lago, almost part of the Trump family, will now co-lead a Department of Government Efficiency – sitting outside the federal government – and while keeping all his existing corporate positions, he will pursue his pledge to cut US agency budgets by $US2 trillion ($3 trillion), or about one-third.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk will now co-lead a Department of Government Efficiency. Picture: AFP
Of course, it is true – only in America. Think about this marriage: Trump’s America meets the Big Tech oligarchs. This is a serious moment for US capitalism, great for innovation, bad for integrity. Trump likens Musk’s brief to “the Manhattan Project of our time”. How many struggling Americans are going to be punished in the process? Australian officials, long familiar with our experience of external budget audits (think Tony Shepherd in 2013), know Musk’s promise is impossible in delivery terms. It can’t be done, short of a massive anti-Trump electoral revolt from the public.
At this time, however, such quibbles don’t matter. Nothing seems impossible in the exaggerated hype of Trump’s vindication. A tariff of 60 per cent on China’s imports? Sure. Cutting a third off federal agency budgets? No problem. Licensing the king of Big Tech, loaded with conflict-of-interest federal contracts, to stage a shooting gallery across the entire federal bureaucracy? Great idea. It’s called purging the deep state.
Change on the scale Trump wants generates both high excitement and high risk. Nobody can be sure of the consequences because these things have never been tried before and we don’t know where the line will be drawn between impression and reality. How long before Trump and Musk fall out?
Trump’s appointments show his priority to purge the “deep state” institutions of justice and intelligence. Given his history, these seem non-negotiable personal passions for Trump. He appointed former Democrat, now Trump loyalist, Tulsi Gabbard as director of national security despite, or perhaps because of, her sustained support for Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
He appointed a professional provocateur, Republican congressman Matt Gaetz, as attorney-general with Gaetz, already at political war with the Justice Department he is supposed to run, praised by Trump, who said Gaetz will end “the partisan weaponisation of our justice system”. That means a purge.
Trump has appointed Republican congressman Matt Gaetz as attorney-general. AFP
The wilful naivety of Trump’s apologists in this country looks embarrassing given Trump’s resolve to impose his will on the intelligence community, justice and the FBI. Gabbard’s appointment is highly dubious and Gaetz’s should be overruled, with The Wall Street Journal saying it would “undermine confidence in the law” and would be used for “political revenge”.
Trump’s mind seems a cross between powerful insights into the flaws of the Obama-Biden-Harris age and the vindictive fantasies of all rebels pulling down the established order.
But Trump’s experiment will resonate far beyond America. Markets seem alert to the inflationary consequences of his fiscal policy. The combination of Trump and our tight labour market will further weaken Anthony Albanese’s hope of an interest-rate cut before the election.
But the big picture consequences are far larger. At a time when most Western democracies are burdened by disillusion, poor economic and social outcomes and leadership that lacks either conviction or courage, Trump arrives as a giant on the stage of history.
He mocks the orthodox governing model. Much of Trump’s appeal is because he presents as a change agent against leaders running a failed status quo, witness the dismissed Biden-Harris team. More than 70 per cent of Americans felt their country was going in the wrong direction.
Trump’s win is the antithesis of Albanese’s victory in 2022 when Albanese ran on reassurance, incrementalism and “safe change”. Trump consigns “safe change” to the dustbin of history. He will steamroll Albanese’s “safe change” into the gutter. Trump’s American political strategy is the complete opposite of Albanese’s Australian strategy.
Of course, America is not Australia; we are different countries and in different moods. Yet the stakes for Australia cannot be denied – the more Trump succeeds, the more Labor’s policies will look feeble, ineffective and missing the big picture.
At almost every point in his agenda, Trump is diametrically opposed to Labor’s framework.
Consider the list: Trump wants savage public-sector cuts, a reduction in federal bureaucratic numbers, a purging of regulation, cutting the corporate tax rate to 15 per cent (half that of Australia), extending income tax cuts, imposing punitive tariffs on China where Australia is just restoring trade normality, repudiating free trade by resurrecting across-the-board tariffs, more support for oil and gas, walking out of the Paris Agreement on climate, dismantling environmental obstacles to development, cracking down on immigration, launching a domestic war on all forms of identity politics, boosting US defence spending and disdaining global institutions.
It is folly to think Trump won’t be influenced by the chasm between himself and Albanese. It’s good he told Albanese on the phone that Australia was the “perfect friendship”. Let’s cut to reality – if Trump has initial success in fuelling the animal spirits of the US economy, the governance model for Western democracy will be shaken to its foundations. Parties of the radical right will gain fresh traction everywhere.
It is folly to think Trump won’t be influenced by the chasm between himself and Albanese. AFP
If Trump succeeds he will further undermine the shaky policy framework of the Labor Party. The optics will be: Trump’s strength versus Albanese’s weakness. In this situation, the pro-Trump media and conservative drum-beaters in this country – in effect the Trump Appeasement Syndrome lobby – will demand the Peter Dutton-led Coalition follow their messiah while they will use Trump’s success to undermine Albanese. Destroying Kevin Rudd as ambassador is just the first step.
Of course, it might not evolve this way. It might be the precise opposite. You never know with Trump. He may overreach from the start, prioritising vengeance, smash too many institutional norms and, drunk on hubris, alienate even his own voters.
But last week Trump sent another message of profound significance for Australia – he is riding with the China hawks. This means Trump will expect Albanese to muscle up and toughen up against China. Forget the idea of Trump going cool on Australia – he likes us, he’ll go hot on Australia and expect more action from us to reinforce his China hawks.
This is surely the coming message from the appointment of Senator Marco Rubio as Secretary of State and Congressman Mike Waltz as his National Security Adviser.
Waltz, in a jointly written essay for The Economist, said the US must wind up the Ukraine conflict and direct its assets towards confronting and deterrence of China. Rubio warns China is “far more dangerous” than the old Soviet Union and poses the central threat of the 21st century. They will drive deeper US rivalry with China.
Rubio supports AUKUS. That’s the good news – but under Trump the US support for AUKUS means more action and commitment from Australia against China. That’s the transactional deal, got it?
China’s President Xi Jinping. AFP
How does this fit with Albanese’s “stabilisation” agenda with China? Answer: not comfortably. History tells us that Australian domestic support for the US alliance falls when there’s a US president we don’t like, witness the fall in popular backing for the alliance under George W. Bush. Now we will likely have in Trump a US president who expects us to get more hawkish on China while domestic support for that Trump-induced option will plummet.
It’s better for Australia that Trump rides with the China hawks, not the China doves. But you cannot miss the problem. Paul Keating sees it and fell upon the remarkable political monitor poll in The Sydney Morning Herald showing that 57 per cent said Australia should avoid taking sides in any war between the US and China, with only 16 per cent disagreeing. Extraordinary stuff.
Keating said this repudiated Albanese’s “lock-in” military arrangement with the US, the AUKUS agreement and the assumption Australia is tied to the US in any conflict.
Trump’s China policy looks ominous for Labor – his tariff strategy will weaken our trade with China while his overall “get tough” strategy will intensify anti-Trump sentiments within the public in Australia and ignite a debate within Labor, with protests the party is too accommodating of Trump’s anti-China stand. It will be dangerous and unpredictable.
The broader political takeout from Trump’s victory is the failure of Democratic Party progressivism – economic and cultural. This is a mammoth event. Of course, direct political lessons cannot be simply transposed from America to Australia. These are very different countries. Yet it would be unwise to assume there is no connection point for Australia from this epic US election.
Here are three propositions – that US progressives are no longer the party of the working class or the non-college educated; that US progressivism contains the seeds of its own destruction, witness the Trump counter-revolution; and that the deepest faith of the progressives – that Trump is a threat to democracy – didn’t work because the progressives constitute their own threat to democracy.
Let’s consider the first proposition – in effect, the voter realignment. Australian pollster Kos Samaras wrote post-election that low-income, working-class voters were heading right-wing. This realignment would reshape politics including in Australia and was tied to the changing nature of left-wing politics with its new priorities around climate change, social justice, urban fashions and housing.
Analysis by the Financial Times shows that in the US poorer and less-educated voters think Republicans best represent them, with the Democrats now the party of high-income and college-educated voters.
Trump won a majority of households with incomes of less than $100,000 while the Democrats won more support from the top third of the income bracket. Education is a sharp line of division – nearly two-thirds of voters without a college degree supported Trump.
Samaras warns the realignment in Australia deepens the divide between urban and rural voters and between professional and low-income voters, “creating fertile ground for conservative and populist leaders”. Is the urban professional class slowly suffocating Labor? Obviously, Dutton will be exploiting this divide at the coming poll.
On the second proposition, most progressives and elites in Australia are in denial, unable to admit what is happening, despite the defeat of the voice referendum at home and the evidence in the American election – many people voted for Trump on cultural grounds, pointing to a counter-revolution.
There are numerous pro-Trump commentators hailing the moment. Many exaggerate, yet the trend is manifest. Writing in the Financial Times, respected analyst John B Judis said Democrats must dissociate themselves from support for “gender-affirming care”, their opposition to strong borders, their backing of equal outcomes rather than equal opportunity on racial issues, their indifference to the plight of working-class men, just dismissing Trump supporters as racists and sexists, and their focus on imminent planetary apocalypse to justify draconian climate action.
He said the priorities of many voters who deserted the Democrats are decent jobs, safe streets and a proper safety net. But Judis warns even action on these fronts will fail politically “if Democrats don’t sever their identification with cultural radicalism”.
Labor hasn’t gone as far as the Democrats – but it is largely and proudly a progressive party now, and this risk is potent. Most progressive leadership elites in Australia don’t understand the consequences of the cultural positions they champion. Their cultural ignorance is astonishing and dangerous. They need to read the long masterclass provided in July this year by David Brooks in The New York Times.
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Brooks said that with the demise of religion, US public life became secular in recent decades with “science and reason” becoming the methods by which the nation could be held together. It is now obvious that this answer, championed by the elites, has failed. “By the 21st century, it became clear that Americans were no longer just disagreeing with one another,” Brooks said. “They didn’t even perceive the same reality.”
Was there anything to fill this moral void? As usual, the left produced an answer – identity politics. Brooks said: “This story provides a moral landscape – there are those bad guys over there and us good guys over here. The story provides a sense of belonging. It provides social recognition.” It is orientated around proper esteem for and inclusion of different identity groups.
The problem, however, is the incompatibility of identity politics with the liberal principle of equality – that regardless of identity we are bonded by a common humanity. This is the foundation stone of our liberal democracy. Undermine this principle and our society is undermined. As Brooks says, “the problem with this form of all-explaining identity politics is that it undermines democracy”.
Trump’s voters don’t offer such sophisticated reasoning for their vote. But their visceral distrust of how they are being treated says this is what they feel in their bones. It is reinforced by numerous examples across their lives, telling them they don’t really count.
The more progressives in Australia push this ideology, the more they guarantee a backlash. Dutton knows this – he just needs to judge how far it has gone in Australia and how much to advance the counter-revolution.
This leads directly to the third proposition. The Democrats were consumed by the idea of Trump as a threat to democracy. Ultimately, this was the Harris campaign – and the argument was correct. Watching Trump’s backers in this country trying to pretend black was white was pitiful intellectual dishonesty. Trump refused to concede he lost in 2020 – of course he was a threat to democracy.
But what the Democrats didn’t get was the point brilliantly made by political scientist Yascha Mounk – some exit polls suggested that people felt Harris was a greater threat to democracy than Trump. “This hints at the fundamental fact of the past decade,” Mounk said. “A fact that elite discourse still has not fully confronted: citizens’ trust in mainstream institutions has been absolutely shattered. Corporations and the military, universities and the courts, all used to enjoy a certain modicum of residual trust. That trust is now gone. It is unlikely to return any time soon.”
It is gone because of the left’s march through the institutions, the story in both America and Australia. Progressive activists took charge, while established leaders were weak and ignorant. When people look across the landscape – universities, bureaucracies, cultural bodies, corporates, government departments – they see progressive values, great and small, shoved in their faces. It’s not the democracy they voted for
“We are cursed to live in a time of great historical significance: when future historians look back at 2023, the distinguishing feature of this year will likely be the recurrence of ethnic cleansing on a vast scale”.
Thus wrote Unherd columnist and former war correspondent Aris Roussinos in December. 2023, but he would draw the same conclusion in 2024 and in 2025. He notes that ethnic cleansing is taking place on a vast scale in many parts of the world. Yet, apart from the current outrage at Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza, turbocharged as it is by unprecedented and arguably one-sided mainstream and social media coverage, international reaction has been muted to the point of indifference. Roussinos’ article is republished below, and the following overview is inspired by and draws on his observations.
The term ethnic cleansing is elusive and politically charged. In an age of endemic conflict, identity politics and competing narratives, it has become a contested and often diluted concept invoked with increasing frequency. Yet, it remains undefined in law. Unlike genocide or war crimes, it has never been codified as a distinct offence under international law, and so its use is contested.
A United Nations Commission of Experts investigating violations during the wars in the former Yugoslavia offered the most widely cited descriptions. In its interim report it defined ethnic cleansing as “rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area.” In its final report the following year, the Commission elaborated: it is “a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas.” What is clear in these descriptions is that ethnic cleansing is deliberate, systematic, and political in nature.
The Commission also catalogued the methods through which such policies are carried out. They include murder, torture, arbitrary arrest and detention, extrajudicial executions, rape and sexual violence, severe injury to civilians, confinement of populations in ghettos, forcible deportation and displacement, deliberate military attacks or threats of attacks on civilian areas, the use of human shields, the destruction and looting of property, and assaults on hospitals, medical staff and humanitarian organisations such as the Red Cross and Red Crescent. The Commission concluded that these acts could amount to crimes against humanity, war crimes, and in some instances, fall within the meaning of the Genocide Convention.
Many people today use the term ethnic cleansing interchangeably with genocide, since both involve the violent removal and destruction of communities and often lead to similar outcomes of death, displacement, and cultural erasure. Ethnic cleansing, which refers to the forced expulsion of a group from a territory through intimidation, violence, or coercion, frequently overlaps with acts that fall under the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, such as mass killings and the destruction of cultural or religious life. This blurring of concepts reflects not only the moral outrage provoked by such crimes but also frustration at the narrowness of legal categories, which can leave survivors feeling their suffering has been minimized by technical distinctions. Historical cases illustrate how the line between the two has often been perilously thin: the mass deportations and killings of Armenians in 1915, which many scholars and states regard as genocide and even describe as a holocaust – though Türkiye denies it and Israel avoids official recognition for fear of diluting the unique status of the Shoah – the expulsions and massacres of Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s, and the flight of the Rohingya from Myanmar all show how ethnic cleansing has so often carried genocidal dimensions – as is particularly the case today with the war in Gaza which has polarized and politicized ordinary people and activists alike worldwide who have through lack of knowledge or opportunism conflated the two.
Yet it is important to recognize that genocide and ethnic cleansing are not strictly interchangeable. Genocide requires proof of an intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, whereas ethnic cleansing focuses primarily on expulsion, which may or may not involve that deeper intent to annihilate. Ethnic cleansing can amount to genocide when the purpose is to eradicate a group, but not all instances meet this threshold. In public discourse, however, people motivated more by empathy and emotion than by detailed knowledge of history or law are often inclined to conflate the two, since the lived experience of the victims—violence, displacement, and cultural obliteration – appears indistinguishable from destruction itself. More informed observers, by contrast, emphasize legal precision and historical context, recognizing that while the outcomes often overlap, preserving the distinction remains vital for accurate analysis and accountability.
The moral revulsion ethnic cleansing excites is the natural and humane reaction, but historically and also presently, it is not an uncommon phenomenon. For the American sociologist and academic Michael Mann, ethnic cleansing is the natural consequence of modernity, “the dark side of democracy”: a recurring temptation of the modern nation-state. The following sections provided examples from the last thirty years, followed by a survey of instances of ethnic cleansing during the early to mid Twentieth Century. They describe how ethnic cleansing is not only a crime of forced removal and murder but also an assault on identity, memory, and the very visibility of a people.
[The featured picture at the head of this blog post is one of Palestinian artist Ismail Shammout’s striking illustrations of Al Nakba, the dispossession of tens of thousands of Palestinian Arabs during Israel’s war of independence, from In That Howling Infinite’s Visualizing the Palestinian Return – the art of Ismail Shammout]. More of his art is included below]
Expulsion, eradication and exile
The Wars of the Yugoslav Succession in the 1990s – encompassing Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo – offer a clear illustration of ethnic cleansing in a modern European context. As Yugoslavia disintegrated, political and military leaders pursued campaigns aimed at creating ethnically homogeneous territories, often through the systematic targeting of civilians. In Bosnia, Serb forces carried out mass killings, forced deportations, rape, and the deliberate destruction of homes, schools, and cultural heritage sites, culminating in the Srebrenica massacre of 1995, in which more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed. In Croatia and Kosovo, similar tactics were deployed: ethnic minorities were expelled, villages razed, and communities terrorised into flight. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) documented and prosecuted these actions as crimes against humanity and war crimes, establishing that the campaigns were not chaotic consequences of war, but deliberate, coordinated policies of ethnic removal. The tribunal’s rulings provide a legal benchmark for understanding ethnic cleansing as the purposeful removal of populations through violence, intimidation, and coercion, a pattern that recurs across history and geography—from the forced expulsions of Armenians in 1915, to the population exchanges of Greece and Turkey in 1923, to the contemporary displacement of Rohingya, Palestinians, Ukrainians, and Afghans. These cases demonstrate that ethnic cleansing combines physical violence, forced migration, and cultural erasure, often leaving long-term social, political, and demographic scars that endure generations after the immediate conflict.
Sudan has witnessed repeated waves of ethnic cleansing over recent decades, most infamously in Darfur in the early 2000s, when government-backed Arab Janjaweed militias targeted non-Arab communities with systematic violence. Villages were burned, civilians massacred, women subjected to mass rape, and more than 2.5 million people displaced, in what the International Criminal Court later described as crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide. The displacement and destruction in Darfur followed earlier campaigns of forced removal during Sudan’s long north–south civil war, where entire communities in the south and Nuba Mountains were uprooted by aerial bombardment, scorched earth tactics, and starvation sieges. Today, ethnic cleansing has returned with devastating intensity: since April 2023, renewed fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces (successors to the Janjaweed) has triggered mass atrocities, including the killing of thousands and the flight of more than 7 million civilians, many across borders into Chad, South Sudan, and Egypt. Reports of targeted massacres against non-Arab groups in West Darfur suggest continuity with earlier campaigns, underscoring how ethnic cleansing in Sudan is not an isolated event but a recurring feature of its violent political landscape.
The Rohingya expulsions in Myanmar provide a stark contemporary example of ethnic cleansing. Since 2017, Myanmar’s military has carried out systematic campaigns of violence, including mass killings, sexual violence, arson, and the destruction of villages, aimed at driving the Rohingya Muslim population from Rakhine State. More than 700,000 Rohingya have fled to neighbouring Bangladesh, creating one of the world’s largest refugee crises. The violence has been accompanied by measures of cultural and social exclusion: denial of citizenship, restrictions on movement, and the erasure of Rohingya identity from official records. The United Nations and international observers have described these actions as ethnic cleansing, noting the deliberate intent to remove an entire ethnic group from a geographic area, while some investigators have determined that elements of the campaign meet the criteria for genocide.
Armenia and its surrounding regions have been scarred by cycles of ethnic cleansing for more than a century. The Armenian genocide of 1915–1916, carried out by the Ottoman Empire, combined forced deportations, massacres, and cultural destruction with the intent of removing Armenians from their ancestral lands in Anatolia. More than a million were killed or died on death marches, and countless others were scattered into diaspora communities across the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas. Later, in the Soviet period, Armenians and Azerbaijanis experienced repeated forced movements, with pogroms and expulsions erupting during times of political instability. Most recently, the 2023 offensive by Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh resulted in the flight of almost the entire Armenian population of the enclave—around 120,000 people—into Armenia proper, effectively erasing a centuries-old community. These waves of displacement illustrate how ethnic cleansing in Armenia is not confined to the past but has recurred across generations, leaving lasting demographic, cultural, and political consequences for the region.
During the past two years, mass expulsions from neighbouring countries returned large numbers of Afghans to Taliban-run Afghanistan. Pakistan has deported nearly half a million Afghans; Iran has driven out hundreds of thousands more. What is packaged as “repatriation” is, in many cases, forced displacement: exiles who had tenuous livelihoods, access to education, or limited civil freedoms in exile are now returned to a polity where the rights — especially the rights of women and girls — are ruthlessly curtailed. The Taliban’s record on gender is well known: it controls a society where women are barred from education and work, forced into early marriages, and denied even minimal public freedoms. Public-life prohibitions and systematic punishments disproportionately harm women and girls. Returning families are therefore being pushed into what many observers describe as among the worst possible places in the world for women — a profoundly gendered and life-threatening form of displacement.
The erasure of culture and historical memory
Like genocide, ethnic cleansing may not be limited the physical expulsion or eradication of people. It can be political, cultural and geographical, and often works through more insidious forms of erasure.
China’s policies in Xinjiang are an example. It has renamed at least 630 villages in Xinjiang, erasing references to Uyghur culture in what human rights advocates say is a systematic propaganda rebrand designed to stamp out the Muslim minority group’s identity. Human Rights Watch has documented a campaign of renaming thousands of villages across the region, stripping out references to Uyghur religion, history and culture. At least 3,600 names have been altered since 2009, replaced by bland slogans such as “Happiness,” “Unity” and “Harmony.” Such bureaucratic changes appear mundane, but they are part of a systematic project to erase Uyghur identity from the landscape itself.
Ukraine illustrates another, more violent dimension of contemporary ethnic cleansing. Russia is coercively integrating five annexed Ukrainian regions — an area the size of South Korea — into its state and culture. Ukrainian identity is being wiped out through the imposition of Russian schooling and media, while more than a million Russian citizens have been settled illegally into the occupied zones. At the same time, some three million Ukrainians have fled or been forced out. Torture centres have been established, with one UN expert describing their use as “state war policy.” Russian forces have employed sexual violence, disappearances and arbitrary detentions, and carried out massacres. Civilian deaths officially stand at around 10,000, but independent estimates suggest a figure closer to 100,000. Homes and businesses have been seized and redistributed to the cronies of Russian officials and officers. On top of these abuses, thousands of Ukrainian children have been taken from their families and deported into Russia for adoption and assimilation, with the threat that when they reach 18 they will be conscripted into the Russian military. This programme of child transfers has been declared a war crime by international courts, and represents perhaps the most chilling element of the campaign to erase Ukrainian identity across generations. Russian propagandists, including ideologues such as Alexander Dugin, routinely describe Ukrainians as “vermin” to be eliminated — language that many experts say is consistent with genocidal intent.
The long arm of history
Historical precedent is sobering, underscoring how entrenched practices definable as ethnic cleansing are. Some examples follow.
The Armenian genocide of 1915–1916 is a historical example where the term “ethnic cleansing” can be applied alongside, though not identical to, the legal concept of genocide. Ottoman authorities systematically deported, massacred, and starved Armenians from their ancestral homelands in Anatolia, often under the guise of military necessity. Entire villages were emptied, survivors forced on death marches into the Syrian desert, and cultural and religious heritage deliberately destroyed. These actions aimed to remove the Armenian population from the territory of the Ottoman Empire, making the region ethnically and religiously homogeneous, which aligns closely with contemporary definitions of ethnic cleansing. The genocide combined mass killing with forced displacement and cultural erasure, illustrating how ethnic cleansing and genocide can overlap in both intent and method. (See The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of Türkiye)
The Armenian case also illustrates how recognition of genocide is often bound up not only with history but with contemporary politics. Türkiye continues to deny that the mass deportations and killings of Armenians in 1915 amounted to genocide, framing them instead as wartime relocations within the collapsing Ottoman Empire. Israel, despite wide acknowledgment among its own scholars of the genocidal character of the events, has avoided official recognition, partly out of diplomatic considerations toward Türkiye, once a key regional ally, but also out of concern that equating the Armenian tragedy with the Shoah might dilute the unique historical and moral status attached to the Holocaust in Jewish memory and international discourse. This reluctance is not unique to Israel: several states have long hesitated to employ the term “genocide” for fear of straining relations with Ankara or complicating their own foreign policy priorities. Such debates demonstrate how the line between ethnic cleansing and genocide is not only a matter of legal precision but also of political narrative, with governments and institutions sometimes reluctant to apply the most condemnatory labels even where evidence overwhelmingly supports them.
As the Northern Irish writer Bruce Clark observed in his excellent book Twice A Stranger on the euphemistically termed “population exchanges” between Greece and Turkey exactly a century ago, “Whether we like it or not, those of us who live in Europe or in places influenced by European ideas remain the children of Lausanne,” the 1923 peace treaty, finalizing the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War, which decreed a massive, forced population movement between Turkey and Greece”, and in effect, One and a quarter million Greek Orthodox Christians were removed from Anatolia, the heartland of the new republic of Türkiye, and nearly 400,000 Muslims from Greece, in a process overseen by the Norwegian diplomat Fridtjof Nansen leading a branch of the League of the Nations which would later – perhaps ironically – evolve into today’s UNHCR.
During the Second World War, Soviet Union alone deported half a million Crimean Tatars and tens of thousands of Volga Germans to Siberia. In 1945, the victorious Allied powers oversaw the removal of some 30 million people across Central and Eastern Europe to create ethnically homogeneous states. At Yalta and Potsdam, Britain, the US, and the Soviet Union endorsed the expulsion of 12 million Germans, over 2 million Poles, and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, Hungarians, and Finns.
The partition of British India in 1947 produced one of the largest and bloodiest forced migrations in modern history. As the new states of India and Pakistan were created, an estimated 12 to 15 million people crossed borders in both directions – Muslims moving into Pakistan, Hindus and Sikhs into India – in a desperate effort to reach what they hoped would be safer ground. The upheaval was marked by extreme communal violence, massacres, abductions, and sexual assaults. Between 500,000 and 1 million people are thought to have been killed, and millions more were uprooted from ancestral homes they would never see again. The trauma of Partition continues to shape Indian and Pakistani national identities, as well as the politics of South Asia to this day. (See Freedom at Midnight (2): the legacy of partition) and Freedom at Midnight (1): the birth of India and Pakistan
The dismemberment of Mandate Palestine by the new state of Israel, Jordan and Egypt in 1948 brought two simultaneous mass displacements that remain unresolved. During the first Arab–Israeli war more than 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes in what became Israel. Known as the Nakba or “catastrophe,” this created a vast refugee population now numbering in the millions, many still stateless. Jews living in what is now the Old City and East Jerusalem, and the West Bank seized by Jordan were expelled. Jews living across the Arab world in Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Syria and elsewhere – faced growing hostility, persecution, and expulsion. Between 1948 and the 1970s, an estimated 800,000 to 1,000,000 Jews left or were forced out, many stripped of property and citizenship. Most resettled in Israel, where their presence profoundly altered the country’s politics and culture. Palestinians and Jews alike endured dispossession, trauma and exile, and both experiences fuel competing narratives of grievance that continue to define the conflict.
Israelis are themselves, for the most part, the product of 20th-century ethnic cleansings, in the Middle East as well as Europe: indeed the descendants of Middle Eastern Jews, like the Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, are the country’s most radical voices on the Palestinian Question. But unlike the Mizrahim, and displaced of Eastern and south-eastern Europe, the Palestinians have no Israel to go to. There is no Palestinian state waiting to absorb them. Indeed, for Gaza’s population, the vast majority of whom descend from refugees from what is today Israel, Gaza was their place of refuge, and the 1948 Nakba the foundational event in their sense of Palestinian nationhood. For all that ethnic cleansing punctuates modern history, there is no precedent for such a process of double displacement, and the political consequences cannot at this stage be determined. We may assume they will not be good, and an analogue to Europe’s post-war neighbourly relations will not be found.
Conclusion: The Age of Dispossession
In many historical cases, expulsions, however brutal, were stabilized by the existence of ethnic homelands ready to absorb the displaced. Refugees were incorporated into nationalist projects in Greece and Türkiye, or into newly homogenized states such as Poland and Ukraine, where they became central to the shaping of modern politics. The Karabakh Armenians driven into Armenia may follow this precedent, potentially reshaping the political order of a small and embattled state.
Ethnic cleansing in the twenty-first century, however, combines these older methods with new techniques. Violence, rape, deportation, and massacre continue, but are now accompanied by cultural erasure, bureaucratic renaming, engineered resettlement, propaganda, and the deliberate targeting of children for assimilation. Unlike many twentieth-century precedents, today’s displaced populations often have nowhere safe to go, forced into territories with no protective homeland or into environments of repression, creating open-ended cycles of dispossession. The erasure of identities in Xinjiang, the coercive integration of Ukrainian territories, the expulsion of Rohingyas and Afghans, the depopulation of Karabakh, and the looming threat of Gaza – where Palestinians face the looming threat of another mass displacement, echoing the 1948 Nakba – collectively demonstrate that ethnic cleansing is not a relic of the past.
It remains a recurring feature of our age – modern history is indeed built upon exodus and displacement – and its human cost is profound and incalculable.
Postscript … Al Nakba, a case study in dispossesion
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European Jews came to a land that was already inhabited by another, different people. Over two decades, they forced the guarantor power out by terrorism and took the land by conquest, expelling most of its original inhabitants by force. They have sowed their share of wind, too. Both sides want all the land for themselves.
Al Nakba, is the Arabic name for the “catastrophe” that befell the Arab inhabitants of Mandate Palestine during the war that was fought between Arabs and Jews in 1947-1948, resulting in the expulsion of upwards of 700,000 Arab Palestinians. That it happened is incontrovertible. But the facts, even those that are attested to by all reputable politicians and academic authorities, including Israelis, have long been subject to doubt and distortion by all sides of what has since been called “The Middle East Conflict” – notwithstanding that there have been conflicts in the Middle East more devastating and bloodier in terms of destruction and mortality including in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Algeria, Libya, and Sudan.
I do not to intend here to retell the history of Al Nakba. There many accounts available in print including those by Arab and Israeli authors, and in film, particularly an excellent documentary broadcast by Al Jazeera in May 2013 and repeated often?
June 17th, 2018, I wrote about it in a Facebook post:
Al Nakba did not begin in 1948. Its origins lie over two centuries ago….
So begins this award-winning series from Al Jazeera, a detailed and comprehensive account of al Nakba, the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and the dispossession and expulsion of the Palestinians who lived within its borders.
It is a well-balanced narrative, with remarkable footage, that will not please the ardent partisans of both sides who prefer their story of 1948 to be black and white.
Revisionist Israeli historians Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim, and Teddy Katz describe the ruthless and relentless military operations to clear and cleanse “Ha’aretz”, the land, of its Arab inhabitants and their history, whilst Palestinian historians tell the story from the Palestinian perspective, describing the critical failings of Palestinian’s political leaders and neighbouring Arab governments. Elderly Palestinians who were forced into exile and to camps in Jordan and Lebanon tell their sad stories of starvation and poverty, violence and death, and of terrible sadness, homesickness and longing that the passing years and old age have never diminished.
“When I left my homeland, I was a child. Now, I’m an old man. So are my children. But did we move forward? Where is our patriotism? Patriotism is about the pockets of our current leaders. They build high buildings and go to fancy banquets. They pay thousands for their children’s weddings”. Refugee Hosni Samadaa.
“We’re repeating the same mistakes. Before 1948 the Palestinian National Movement was split on the basis of rival families. Today, it is split into different parties over ideology, jurisdiction and self-interests. We didn’t learn our lesson. We were led by large, feudal landowners. Today, we are led by the bourgeoisie. Before 1948, we were incapable of facing reality. Today, we are just as inept. Before 1948, people chose the wrong leadership. And today, we are following the wrong leaders”. Researcher Yusuf Hijazi.
The truth about the ethnic cleansing in Gaza – modern Europe was built on exodus and displacement
Aris Roussinos, Unherd, December 18 2023
We are cursed to live in a time of great historical significance: when future historians look back at 2023, the distinguishing feature of this year will likely be the recurrence of ethnic cleansing on a vast scale. In just the past few months, Pakistan has deported nearly half a million Afghan migrants, while Azerbaijan has forced 120,000 Armenians — the statelet’s entire population — from newly-conquered Karabakh, both to broad international indifference. As the UNHCR has warned, the forced expulsion — that is, the ethnic cleansing — of Gaza’s Palestinian population is now the most likely outcome of the current war.
With no prospect of Palestinians and Israelis living together peaceably, anything short of absolute military victory unacceptable to both the Israeli government and its voters, but no meaningful plan for who will rule the uninhabitable ruins of post-war Gaza, the only realistic solution to the Palestinian problem, for Israel, is the total removal of the Palestinians. As Israel’s former Interior Minister has declared: “We need to take advantage of the destruction to tell the countries that each of them should take a quota, it can be 20,000 or 50,000. We need all two million to leave. That’s the solution for Gaza.”
Israeli officials have not been shy in promoting this outcome to a war, according to the President Isaac Herzog, for which “an entire nation… is responsible”. Israel’s agriculture minister Avi Dichter has asserted that “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” adding for emphasis that the result of the war will be “Gaza Nakba 2023. That’s how it’ll end.”Israel’s Intelligence Ministry has published a “concept paper” proposing the expulsion of Gaza’s entire population to the Sinai desert, and Israeli diplomats have been trying to win international support for this idea. According to the Israeli press, Israeli officials have sought American backing for a different plan to distribute Gaza’s population between Egypt, Turkey, Iraq and Yemen, tying American aid to these countries’ willingness to accept the refugees. In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, two Israeli lawmakers have instead urged Western countries — particularly Europe — to host Gaza’s population, asserting that: “The international community has a moral imperative—and an opportunity—to demonstrate compassion [and] help the people of Gaza move toward a more prosperous future.” The outcome for Gaza’s Palestinians does not appear to be in doubt: what remains to be haggled over is their final location.
The only actor that can prevent the ethnic cleansing of Gaza is the United States, and for domestic political reasons it is disinclined to do so. While the Biden administration declaresit does not support “any forced relocation of Palestinians outside of the Gaza Strip”, it is not taking any action to prevent it. If the expulsion of Gaza’s 2.3 million population comes to pass, the result will be the most significant instance of ethnic cleansing in a generation, which will define Biden’s presidency for future historians. Yet outrage over such events is selective. It is not entirely true, as some Middle Eastern commentators claim, that Western complicity in the looming ethnic cleansing of Gaza highlights a lesser interest in Arab or Muslim lives: the Armenian case highlights that eastern Christians also barely flicker on the world’s moral radar.
This week’s awarding of the right to host next year’s COP29 climate conference to Azerbaijan, just a few months after its ethnic cleansing of Karabakh, reminds us that the supposed international taboo on the practice does not, in reality, exist. When ethnic cleansing is permissible, and when it is a war crime, depends, it seems, on who is doing it, and to whom. Azerbaijan is oil-rich, useful to Europe, and able to buy favourable Western coverage; Armenia is poor, weak and friendless in the world. Similarly, the extinction of much of the Christian population of the Middle East as a result of the chaos following the Iraq War won very little international attention or sympathy: communities which survived in their ancient homelands from Late Antiquity, riding out the passage of Arab, Mamluk, Ottoman and European imperial rule, did not survive the American empire.
Yet while the moral revulsion such events excite is the natural and humane reaction, ethnic cleansing is less rare an event than the crusading military response to its Nineties occurrence in the Balkans may make us think. For the sociologist Michael Mann, ethnic cleansing is the natural consequence of modernity, “the dark side of democracy”. As the Northern Irish writer Bruce Clark observed in his excellent book Twice A Stranger on the euphemistically termed “population exchanges” between Greece and Turkey exactly a century ago, “Whether we like it or not, those of us who live in Europe or in places influenced by European ideas remain the children of Lausanne,” the 1923 peace treaty “which decreed a massive, forced population movement between Turkey and Greece”. One and a quarter million Greek Orthodox Christians were removed from Anatolia, and nearly 400,000 Muslims from Greece, in a process overseen by the Norwegian diplomat Fridtjof Nansen leading a branch of the League of the Nations which would later — perhaps ironically — evolve into today’s UNHCR.
It was a cruel process, wrenching peoples from ancestral homelands in which they had lived for centuries, even millennia— and by the end of it half a million people were unaccounted for, presumably dead. Yet it was viewed as a great diplomatic triumph of the age, perhaps with good reason: without meaningful minorities on each side of each others’ borders to stoke tensions, Greece and Turkey have not fought a war in a century. Indeed, as late as 1993, the Realist IR scholar John Mearsheimer could propose a “Balkan Population Exchange commission” for the former Yugoslavia explicitly modelled on the 1923 precedent, asserting that “populations would have to be moved in order to create homogeneous states” and “the international community should oversee and subsidize this population exchange”. For the younger Mearsheimer, ethnic cleansing was the only viable solution to Yugoslavia’s bloody and overlapping ethnic map: “Transfer is a fact. The only question is whether it will be organized, as envisioned by partition, or left to the murderous methods of the ethnic cleansers.” Thirty years later, however, Mearsheimercondemns Israel’s planned expulsions from Gaza outright.
There is a dark irony here: the forced expulsion of peoples is an affront to liberal European values, yet it is rarely acknowledged that our modern, hitherto peaceful and prosperous Europe is built on the foundation of ethnic cleansing. Perhaps the ramifications of such a truth are too stark to bear, yet it is nevertheless the case that the peaceable post-1945 order depended on mass expulsions for its stability. Using the 1923 exchange as their explicit model, the victorious allies oversaw the forced removal of 30 million people from their homes in Central and Eastern Europe towards newly homogeneous ethnic homelands they had never seen. At the Yalta and Potsdam conferences, Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union settled upon the expulsion of 12 million Germans, more than 2 million Poles and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, Hungarians and Finns from their ancestral homes.
As Churchill declared in Parliament in 1944, “expulsion is the method that, so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble, as has been in the case of Alsace-Lorraine. A clean sweep will be made.” Only two years later, once the Cold War had begun and the Soviet Union and its vassal Poland become a rival, did Churchill fulminate against the “enormous and wrongful inroads upon Germany, and mass expulsions of millions of Germans on a scale grievous and undreamed of” by “the Russian-dominated Polish Government”. In ethnic cleansing, as in so many other things, political context is the final arbiter of morality.
But as a result, Germany has never since unsettled Europe with revanchist dreams; both Poland and Western Ukraine became, for the first time in their histories, ethnically homogenous entities. As the Ukrainian-Canadian historian Orest Subtelny has observed, the forced separation of Poles and Ukrainians, once locked in bitter ethnic conflict against each other, has led to today’s amicable relationship: “It seems that the segregation of the two peoples was a necessary precondition for the development of a mutually beneficial relationship between them. Apparently the old adage that ‘good fences make for good neighbors’ has been proven true once more.” That we have forgotten the vast scale of the forced expulsions which established Europe’s peaceful post-war order is, in a strange way, a testament to their success.
Yet what made the mass expulsions following the First and Second World Wars broadly successful was that those expelled at least had ethnic homelands to receive them. In Greece and Turkey, the refugees fully adopted the ethnic nationalism of their new countries, in Greece providing the bedrock of later republican sympathies, and in Turkey the core support for both secular Kemalist nationalism and occasional bouts of military rule. In the newly-homogenous Poland and Ukraine, refugees shorn of their previous local roots and at times ambiguous ethnic identities fully adopted in recompense a self-identification with their new nation-states which has helped define these countries’ modern politics. The 120,000 Karabakh refugees will likely become a political bloc in tiny Armenia, affecting the country’s future political order in ways yet hard to discern.
Israelis are themselves, for the most part, the product of 20th-century ethnic cleansings, in the Middle East as well as Europe: indeed the descendants of Middle Eastern Jews, like the Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, are the country’s most radical voices on the Palestinian Question. But the Palestinians, like the ethnic French narrator of Houellebecq’s Submission, have no Israel to go to. Unlike the 20th century displaced of Eastern and south-eastern Europe, there is no Palestinian state waiting to absorb them. Indeed, for Gaza’s population, the vast majority of whom descend from refugees from what is today Israel, Gaza was their place of refuge, and the 1948 Nakba the foundational event in their sense of Palestinian nationhood. For all that ethnic cleansing punctuates modern history, there is no precedent for such a process of double displacement, and the political consequences can not at this stage be determined. We may assume they will not be good, and an analogue to Europe’s post-war neighbourly relations will not be found.
Egypt’s disinclination to host two million Gazan refugees is not merely a matter of solidarity, but also self-preservation: flows of embittered Palestinian refugees helped destabilise both Lebanon, where their presence set off the country’s bloody ethnic civil war, and Jordan, where they make up the demographic majority. It is doubtful too, given the recent tenor of its politics, that Europe will be eager to receive them, no matter how humanitarian the language with which Israeli officials couch their planned expulsion. Rendered stateless, driven from their homes and brutalised by war, Gaza’s refugees remain unwanted by the world, perhaps destined to become, as the Jews once were, a diaspora people forever at the mercy of suspicious hosts.
A terrible injustice for the Palestinians, their ethnic cleansing may yet provide Israel with a measure of security, even as it erodes the American sympathy on which the country’s existence depends. The broader question, perhaps, is whether or not the looming extinction of Palestinian life in Gaza, like the expulsion of Karabakh’s Armenians, heralds the beginning of a new era of ethnic cleansing, or merely the settling of the West’s unfinished accounts. Like the movements which bloodily reshaped Central Europe, Israel’s very existence is after all a product of the same nationalist intellectual ferment of fin-de-siècle Vienna. In 1923, while acknowledging its necessity, the British Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon called the Greco-Turkish population exchange “a thoroughly bad and vicious [idea] for which the world would pay a heavy penalty for a hundred years to come”. Exactly a century later, Gaza’s Palestinians look destined to become the final victims of Europe’s long and painful 20th century
Nakba, where Palestinian victim mythology began
‘Nakba Day’ was commemorated this week with even more vehemence than usual. The greatest tragedy is that the Palestinian people who fled remain frozen in time.
Protestors at a Sydney rally to mark the anniversary of the ‘Nakba’. David Gray/AFP
On Wednesday, “Nakba Day” was commemorated around the world with even more vehemence than usual as outpourings of hatred against Israel, sprinkled with ample doses of anti-Semitism, issued from screaming crowds.
What was entirely missing was any historical perspective on the Nakba – that is, the displacement, mainly through voluntary flight, of Palestinians from mandatory Palestine. Stripped out of its broader context, the event was invested with a uniqueness that distorts the processes that caused it and its contemporary significance.
It is, to begin with, important to understand that the displacement of Palestinians was only one facet of the sweeping population movements caused by the collapse of the great European land empires. At the heart of that process was the unravelling of the Ottoman Empire, which started with the Greek war of independence in 1821 and accelerated during subsequent decades.
As the empire teetered, religious conflicts exploded, forcing entire communities to leave. Following the Crimean War of 1854-56, earlier flows of Muslims out of Russia and its border territories became a flood, with as many as 900,000 people fleeing the Caucasus and Crimea regions for Ottoman territory. The successive Balkan wars and then World War I gave that flood torrential force as more than two million people left or were expelled from their ancestral homes and sought refuge among their co-religionists.
The transfers reshaped the population geography of the entire Middle East, with domino effects that affected virtually every one of the region’s ethnic and religious groups.
The formation of new nation-states out of what had been the Ottoman Empire then led to further rearrangements, with many of those states passing highly restrictive nationality laws in an attempt to secure ethnic and religious homogeneity.
Nothing more starkly symbolised that quest for homogeneity than the Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations signed on January 30, 1923. This was the first agreement that made movement mandatory: with only a few exceptions, all the Christians living in the newly established Turkish state were to be deported to Greece, while all of Greece’s Muslims were to be deported to Turkey. The agreement, reached under the auspices of the League of Nations, also specified that the populations being transferred would lose their original nationality along with any right to return, instead being resettled in the new homeland.
Underlying the transfer was the conviction, articulated by French prime minister (and foreign minister) Raymond Poincare, that “the mixture of populations of different races and religions has been the main cause of troubles and of war”, and that the “unmixing of peoples” would “remove one of the greatest menaces to peace”.
That the forced population transfers, which affected about 1.5 million people, imposed enormous suffering is beyond doubt. But they were generally viewed as a success. Despite considerable difficulties, the transferred populations became integrated into the fabric of the recipient communities – at least partly because they had no other option. At the same time, relations between Turkey and Greece improved immensely, with the Ankara Agreements of 1930 inaugurating a long period of relative stability.
The result was to give large-scale, permanent population movements, planned or unplanned, a marked degree of legitimacy.
Thus, the formation of what became the Irish Republic was accompanied by the flight of Protestants to England and Northern Ireland, eventually more than halving, into an insignificant minority, the Protestant share of the Irish state’s population; that was viewed as easing the tensions that had so embittered the Irish civil war.
It is therefore unsurprising that further “unmixing” was seen by the allies in World War II as vital to ensuring peace in the post-war world. In a statement later echoed by Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill made this explicit in 1944, telling the House of Commons he was “not alarmed by the prospect of the disentanglement of populations, nor even by these large transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions than they ever were before”.
The immediate effect, endorsed as part of the Potsdam Agreements and implemented as soon as the war ended, was the brutal expulsion from central and eastern Europe of 12 million ethnic Germans whose families had lived in those regions for centuries. Stripped of their nationality and possessions, then forcibly deported to a war-devastated Germany, the refugees – who received very little by way of assistance – gradually merged into German society, though the scars took decades to heal.
Even more traumatic was the movement in 1947 of 18 million people between India and the newly formed state of Pakistan.
As Indian novelist Alok Bhalla put it, India’s declaration of independence triggered the subcontinent’s sudden descent into “a bestial world of hatred, rage, self-interest and frenzy”, with Lord Ismay, who witnessed the process, later writing that “the frontier between India and Pakistan was to see more tragedy than any frontier conceived before or since”. Yet in the subcontinent too, and especially in India, the integration of refugees proceeded to the point where little now separates their descendants from those of the native born.
All that formed the context in which the planned partition of Palestine was to occur. The 1937 Peel Commission, which initially proposed partition, had recommended a mandatory population exchange but the entire issue was ignored in UN Resolution 181 that was supposed to govern the creation of the two new states.
When a majority of the UN General Assembly endorsed that resolution on November 29, 1947, the major Zionist forces reluctantly accepted the proposed partition, despite it being vastly unfavourable to them. But the Arab states not only rejected the plan, they launched what the Arab League described as “a war of extermination” whose aim was to “erase (Palestine’s Jewish population) from the face of the earth”. Nor did the fighting give any reason to doubt that was the Arabs’ goal.
At least until late May 1948, Jewish prisoners were invariably slaughtered. In one instance, 77 Jewish civilians were burned alive after a medical convey was captured; in another, soldiers who had surrendered were castrated before being shot; in yet another, death came by public decapitation. And even after the Arab armies declared they would abide by the Geneva Convention, Jewish prisoners were regularly murdered on the spot.
While those atrocities continued a longstanding pattern of barbarism, they also reflected the conviction that unrestrained terror would “push the Jews into the sea”, as Izzedin Shawa, who represented the Arab High Committee, put it.
Arabs flee in 1948 ahead of the ‘war of extermination’ against Israel.
History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
A crucial element of that strategy was to use civilian militias in the territory’s 450 Arab villages to ambush, encircle and destroy Jewish forces, as they did in the conflict’s first three months.
It was to reduce that risk that the Haganah – the predecessor of the Israel Defence Force – adopted the Dalet plan in March 1948 that ordered the evacuation of those “hostile” Arab villages, notably in the surrounds of Jerusalem, that posed a direct threat of encirclement. The implementation of its criteria for clearing villages was inevitably imperfect, but the Dalet plan neither sought nor was the primary cause of the massive outflow of Arab refugees that was well under way before it came into effect.
Nor was the scale of the outflow much influenced by the massacres committed by Irgun and Lehi – small Jewish militias that had broken away from the Haganah – which did not loom large in a prolonged, extremely violent, conflict that also displaced a very high proportion of the Jewish population.
Rather, three factors were mainly involved. First, the Muslim authorities, led by the rector of Cairo’s Al Azhar Mosque, instructed the faithful to “temporarily leave the territory, so that our warriors can freely undertake their task of extermination”.
Second, believing that the war would be short-lived and that they could soon return without having to incur its risks, the Arab elites fled immediately, leaving the Arab population leaderless, disoriented and demoralised, especially once the Jewish forces gained the upper hand.
Third and last, as Benny Morris, a harsh critic of Israel, stresses in his widely cited study of the Palestinian exodus, “knowing what the Arabs had done to the Jews, the Arabs were terrified the Jews would, once they could, do it to them”.
Seen in that perspective, the exodus was little different from the fear-ridden flights of civilians discussed above. There was, however, one immensely significant difference: having precipitated the creation of a pool of 700,000 Palestinian refugees, the Arab states refused to absorb them.
Rather, they used their clout in the UN to establish the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, which became a bloated, grant-funded bureaucracy whose survival depended on endlessly perpetuating the Palestinians’ refugee status.
In entrenching the problem, the UN was merely doing the bidding of the Arab states, which increasingly relied on the issue of Palestine to convert popular anger at their abject failures into rage against Israel and the West. Terminally corrupt, manifestly incapable of economic and social development, the Arab kleptocracies elevated Jew-hatred into the opium of the people – and empowered the Islamist fanaticism that has wreaked so much harm worldwide.
Nor did it end there. Fanning the flames of anti-Semitism, the Arab states proceeded to expel, or force the departure of, 800,000 Jews who had lived in the Arab lands for millennia, taking away their nationality, expropriating their assets and forbidding them from ever returning to the place of their birth. Those Jews were, however painfully, integrated into Israel; the Palestinian refugees, in contrast, remained isolated, subsisting mainly on welfare, rejected by countries that claimed to be their greatest friends. Thus was born the myth of the Nakba.
That vast population movements have inflicted enormous costs on those who have been ousted from their homes is undeniable. Nor have the tragedies ended: without a murmur from the Arab states, 400,000 Palestinians were expelled from Kuwait after the first Gulf War, in retaliation for the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s support of Saddam Hussein. More recently, Myanmar has expelled 1.2 million Rohingya.
But the greatest tragedy associated with the plight of the Palestinians is not the loss of a homeland; over the past century, that has been the fate of tens of millions. Rather, it is the refusal to look forward rather than always looking back, an attitude encapsulated in the slogan “from the river to the sea”.
That has suited the Arab leaders, but it has condemned ordinary Palestinians to endless misery and perpetual war. Until that changes, the future will be a constant repetition of a blood-soaked past
Most folk who are into history like to draw parallels and identify patterns in the past that reflect upon the present. As I do also, albeit in a more ambivalent way. Cleaving to Mark (Twain, that is). am fascinated more by the rhymes than the repetitions. Five years ago, i wrote Messing with the Mullahs – America’s phoney war? Events in the Middle East since October 7 2023, not least tit-for-tat aerial exchanges on we have seen in recent months between Israel and Iran, and the potential return of the unreformed and unchained prodigal son on January 6th 2025 render it relevant still. How long will it be before the war drums start beating on the Potomac and the Iran hawks circle over Washington DC seeking the restored king’s feckless and fickle ear? As they say, fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
Back then, I wrote:
“The story of the Iranian Revolution is a complex, multidimensional one, and it is difficult for its events and essence to be compressed into brief opinion pieces of any political flavour, no matter how even-handed they endeavour to be.
The revolution began slowly in late 1977 when demonstrations against Shah Reza Pahlevi, developed into a campaign of civil resistance by both secular and religious groups. These intensified through 1978, culminating In strikes and demonstrations that paralyzed the country. Millennia of monarchy in Iran ended in January 1979 when the Shah and his family fled into exile. By April, exiled cleric and longtime dissident Ayatollah Khomeini returned home to a rapturous welcome. Activist fighters and rebel soldiers overwhelmed troops loyal to the Shah, and Iran voted by national referendum to become an Islamic republic on April 1st, 1979. A new constitution saw Khomeini became Supreme Leader in December 1979.
The success and continuing durability of the Iranian Revolution derived from many sources, and many are not touched upon by commentators and pundits.
One can’t ignore the nature of the monarchy that preceded it – modernist on the one hand, and brutally repressive on the other; nor the unwavering and hypocritical support (including infrastructure, weapons, and intelligence) provided to it by western “democracies” since Britain and the US placed Reza Shah Pahlevi on the throne in 1953.
Nor should we ignore the nature of the unprecedented regime and state that was established forty years ago – a brutal, theocratic, patriarchal, quasi-totalitarian system that endeavours to control all aspects of its citizens’ lives, its rule enforced by loyal militias like the ruthless Basij and by the Revolutionary Guard, a military-industrial complex more powerful than the regular army.
The support and succour that the US gave to the deposed Shah and his family and entourage, and later, to the opponents of the revolution, served to unite the population around a dogmatic, cruel and vengeful regime, which, in the manner of revolutions past and present, “devoured its children”, harrying, jailing, exiling and slaughtering foes and onetime allies alike. One of the ironies of the early days of the revolution was its heterodox complexion – a loose and unstable alliance between factions of the left, right and divine. History is replete with examples of how a revolution besieged within and without by enemies actual and imagined mobilizes it people for its support, strength and survival.”
This brief outline summarises the events of 1979 and the decades which followed. It does not elaborate in any detail on the reasons for the downfall of the Shah and the durability of the regime that succeeded him. An impressive essay in the Jewish cultural e-zine Mosaic endeavours to do just that, providing as it does, insights into the history of modern Iranian history that few people today would be familiar with.
In it, the author suggests that “the most impressive of our experts persist in downplaying or ignoring the Islamic Republic of Iran’s driving forces can lead to misunderstandings of current affairs that are far from academic. Both nuclear negotiations and the sanctions, for instance, are premised on the assumption that Tehran is eager above all else to improve its country’s economy. While Ayatollah Khamenei and his minions doubtless care about trade and finances, they care much more about advancing their religious ideology across the Middle East, and like most religious believers, feel that spiritual concerns must ultimately trump material ones. It’s even possible that some might find the idea of suffering material hardships to achieve ideological goals appealing …
… If I’m right that Iranians didn’t rise up en masse because of the rising costs of onions or because they wanted to drive nicer cars, but because they were passionately opposed to secularization and American influence, then the U.S. cannot make peace with Iran even if the nuclear deal succeeds. The Islamic regime doesn’t oppose America because it supports Israel or Saudi Arabia, but because it represents Western secularism. Unless mass-conversion to Islam is in America’s future, that’s not something that’s likely to go away …
… One hopes that the loss of Afghanistan will finally hammer home the truth that the loss of Iran (in 1979) so signally failed to do: it’s religion, stupid.”
With a new nuclear deal on the way, attention is again turning to Iran. Four recent books, plus the deal itself, suggest that America and Europe are blind to the regime’s motivating spirit.
A portrait of the late Ayatollah Khomeini projected on the Azadi (Freedom) Monument in western Tehran on the 43rd anniversary of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution in February 2022. Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty Images.
There is a well-known Persian children’s game in which a parent recites limerick-like poems while engaging in horseplay. One version, popular in the mid-20th century, had the father of the household seat himself on a carpet in the living room with one of his progeny standing to his right and the other to his left. The father would declaim:
There once was a cat (yek gorbeh bud)
Poor and miserable (bichareh bud)
A dog came and bit him in the belly (delash-o sag gaz gerefte bud)
(At this point the first child charges across the room and dives headlong into his father’s stomach.)
Next came a bear from behind and nearly killed the cat (khers az poshtesh taghriban koshtesh)
(The second son now bounds over and leaps onto his father’s back.)
But that cat, he rose, and he roared, and . . . turned himself into a lion! (gorbeh beh shir avaz shodeh bud)
(This being the signal for the father to get up and hurl his offspring this way and that onto the soft furniture.)
More than just child’s play, this post-dinner diversion harbored an obvious historical-ideological meaning—a meaning as relevant today as it was 130 years ago. Anyone looking at a map of modern Iran will perceive the lineaments of what the country’s inhabitants call “the sleeping cat.” This cat—the Iranian state—was indeed in miserable shape domestically and geopolitically by the reign of Naser al-Din Shah (1848-1897). What little authority this Qajar king still possessed over his realm was retained by a method that a 20th-century Iranian intellectual would dub “positive equilibrium”: the sovereign survived by parceling out large swaths of Persian territory and granting irresponsibly generous economic concessions to local potentates and foreign powers so that each would defend the capital and environs against the encroachments of his counterparts. Of the many forces that Naser al-Din Shah had to “buy off” in this manner, none was more menacing than Russia, the bear that jumped onto the cat’s back, or more influential than Britain, the (bull)dog that bit the cat’s belly.
Before ousting the last Qajar ruler in a bloodless coup, the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty (1925-1979), Reza Shah, had risen through the ranks to become commander of the only serious military force in the country, the Cossack Brigade, created with Russian assistance decades earlier by that same Naser al-Din Shah. While in this post, Reza is said to have engaged every morning in a ritual reading of the newspaper, his face waxing redder with each account of Iranian failure or humiliation until finally, in a fit of rage, he would stand up and rip the tabloid to shreds. Soon, this determined corporal would rewrite the headlines that had so dismayed him, and do much to turn the sleeping cat into a rising lion.
Assisted by a cadre of military comrades and nationalist intellectuals, the new monarch set about pacifying the countryside, developing infrastructure, implementing reforms in fields like education, sanitation, technology, agriculture, and women’s rights, and in general shoving Iran, kicking and screaming, into the 20th century. He even gave his subjects three days to come up with last names for purposes of taxation, conscription, and general modernization (hitherto everyone had been known as “so-and-so son or daughter of so-and-so” or by a nickname reflecting his profession, town of origin, or infirmity). For all that Reza Shah has been depicted in post-revolutionary Khomeinist retrospect as the epitome of an incorrigible Westernizer, it cannot be denied that he raised Iran from a trampled and torn-apart virtual protectorate and a conspicuous consumer of European goods to the status of an essentially independent and self-respecting polity boasting border integrity and assiduously cultivating import-substitution industry. That the method employed to achieve all this progress was despotic was a price that even many liberal Iranian thinkers of the time were willing to pay.
Ousted by the allies in 1941 on the pretext of harboring Nazi sympathies—sympathies partially tied to the “Aryan Thesis” that made Germans and Persians ethnolinguistic cousins and that was all the rage in both countries at the time—Reza Shah was replaced by his twenty-one-year-old son Mohammad Reza Shah. In awe of his father, and having spent his teenage years in Switzerland at an elite boarding school, the new king was prepped to take up where the dynasty’s founder had left off. His career, and his overthrow in 1979 by the Islamist movement that now rules Iran, is at the center of four books published in the past decade which I will consider here. These books offer much in the way of fresh insights and original research, correcting some of the misconceptions that plague commentary about the country. And yet, for all their merits, they fail to grasp fully why the shah fell, what motivated the revolutionaries, and by extension, what motivates the current regime. For if we want to be able to make sense of the revolutionary ideologues who now rule Iran, we have to understand the political and cultural order they rebelled against, and why they rose up against it.
By looking at what these four works get right and, more importantly, what they get wrong, we can also better understand why so many Western experts and policymakers so consistently misread the Islamic Republic, its sensitivities, its hierarchies of honor and shame, holy and profane, just and unjust—and why academics are so ill-equipped to figure out a society that doesn’t conform to their own ideas of secular rationalism. With the U.S. about to conclude a second nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic, if press reports are to be believed, it’s worth considering how this regime came to be, and what makes it tick.
I. The Last Shah
As the Council on Foreign Relations scholar Ray Takeyh has shown better than any previous author in The Last Shah, Mohammad Reza’s reign began with an impressive geostrategic victory: with a little help from astute advisors at home and a determined postwar American administration, the fledgling Iranian sovereign induced no less a megalomaniacal expansionist than Joseph Stalin, at the zenith of his power, to pull his troops out of the northwestern province of Azarbayjan (not to be confused with the neighboring Soviet Republic of the same name), where they had supported local socialist secessionist movements. The cold war had begun, and Tehran was poised to reap the benefits.
Mohammad Reza’s next major challenge came from within, in the person of the charismatic prime minister Mohammad-e Mosaddeq (in office 1951-3), perceived ever since in popular imagination—and in much scholarship—as Iran’s fatefully foregone hope for true democracy.
Takeyh sets the record straight, demonstrating more effectively than any writer to date that Mosaddeq was, to the contrary, a highly unstable personality with dangerous dictatorial tendencies. (He also quashes once and for all the myth that the CIA and MI6 were primarily responsible for the 1953 coup that removed him.) The shah, argues this author, though no friend of democracy himself, was ultimately better for Iran than the prime minister. Indeed, Mohammad Reza eventually realized the very dream that Mosaddeq had failed so badly to achieve: not just oil independence, but oil hegemony for Iran. (Remember when we switched the limousine-like sedans we used to drive for the cramped, sardine-cans-on-wheels that we squeeze into today? That was because of the shah.)
Surrounding himself instead with one-dimensional, sycophantic technocrats, the shah soon became the lonely autocrat, a one-man-show.
The second Pahlavi sovereign got so good at his job, Takeyh maintains, that he felt he could dispense with the independent aristocratic elite whose corruption, bickering, and jostling for advantage threw a spoke into his rapidly rotating wheel of progress—even though it was just these aristocrats who had been the agents of his success, and had saved his throne on more than one occasion. Surrounding himself instead with one-dimensional, sycophantic technocrats, he soon became the lonely autocrat, a one-man-show. When the Middle East-wide, and worldwide, revolutionary fever of the second half of the 20th century finally caught up with him in 1979—another significant connection Takeyh makes—Iran’s ruler faced it bereft of the crucial assistance he needed to weather the storm.
II. The Fall of Heaven
The inability to delegate and insistence upon ruling instead of merely reigning that Takeyh perceives as a shortcoming, Andrew Scott Cooper sees as a strength: Mohammad Reza’s hands-on approach to monarchy got things done for his country. To Cooper, the shah is something very different from the corrupt autocrat of most histories, whose disastrous mistakes supposedly smothered democracy and brought about the revolution. Indeed, in The Fall of Heaven, Cooper’s 2016 history of the decline and fall of the Pahlavi dynasty, there is little that has traditionally been held against this despot that isn’t deftly turned into a virtue, or at worst a well-intentioned miscalculation. The abolition of the multiparty system in 1975, itself largely nominal by that time, and the inauguration in its place of the single Rastakhiz (“Resurrection”) party to which all citizens were obligated to pledge allegiance, is presented as a (botched) stepping-stone toward democracy—a claim doubly audacious since, as Takeyh had shown, Rastakhiz’s own leaders admitted that it was a bad joke from day one. Cooper does not scruple to attribute the refusal of Iran’s Westernizing monarch to rule constitutionally to “his skeptical attitude to the 1906 constitution, which he regarded as a European invention imposed on Iran by former colonial powers.” The shah’s innumerable affairs with married women and regular visits to Paris prostitutes were evidence of his “boundless energy,” and usefully cleared his head to attend to matters of state. Even the king’s leisurely helicopter rides (and those of his siblings) over a capital city choked to a stand-still by some of the worst traffic jams in history are depicted by this creative and sometimes credulous author as his majesty’s noble attempt to help alleviate that same congestion.
These impressive feats of legerdemain aside, however, Cooper is no cheap apologist. The Fall of Heaven is a stunning achievement, and will go down in literary-scholarly history as the book that did more to rehabilitate the Pahlavi family’s reputation than any volume published before or since the revolution. Cooper accomplishes this formidable task—punching a corridor through decades of pervasive and unrelenting vilification—primarily by amassing, organizing, analyzing, and presenting in vivid color an unprecedented amount of detail surrounding the final years of the monarchy. On top of play-by-play accounts of the political ins-and-outs, the economic ups-and-downs, the burgeoning unrest and the frantic diplomatic maneuverings, Cooper can tell us for any given date of 1978 what pop song topped the charts, which jewels Queen Farah Diba was wearing, whose child was killed in a hit-and-run accident, what TV series garnered the highest ratings, whether the king had indigestion (and what he took for it), which night-club was the hottest in town, and what the weather and pollution levels were like. Who knew, for instance, that on November 5, 1978, as the Khomeinist tidal wave crested and began to break over the Land of the Lion and the Sun, Fiddler on the Roof was playing to a full house at the Goldis movie theater in Tehran?
Cooper’s broad and meticulous sweep allows him to put a human face to Iranian society on the eve of what may plausibly be called the first genuinely popular revolution in modern times.
Such an accumulation of detail may seem frivolous; it is anything but. Cooper’s broad and meticulous sweep allows him to put a human face to Iranian society on the eve of what may plausibly be called the first genuinely popular revolution in modern times. It also allows him to put a human face to the royal couple—Mohammad Reza and his wife Farah Diba—painting them convincingly as benevolent, idealistic, patriotic, hard-working, fragile but fortitudinous, beleaguered but long-suffering, intelligent and generally likeable. Finally, this author’s wide grasp facilitates the assembly of an incomparably variegated collage of factors that, so he maintains, together contributed to the uprising of 1979. Beyond the usual suspects—a regime that educated the hell out of its subjects but denied them political participation; rapidly rising but no less rapidly disappointed economic expectations; the alienation and radicalization accompanying mass urbanization—Cooper adduces: a milk shortage, an egg shortage, a power outage, a cholera outbreak, a heatwave, a UFO sighting, an earthquake, a tax increase, the kidnapping and murder of a young boy, drought (on the one hand), unseasonably heavy rains (on the other), “a slew of disaster movies” that “emphasized failure of leadership, loss of control, and public panic,” the fact that according to the Asian zodiac 1978 was the Year of the Horse when people are prone to ”let loose” and “ignore the consequences of their actions,” and, to top it off, a plague of locusts.
The present writer admits to entertaining doubts about the “coalescence of causes” approach to historical convulsions. I remain convinced that people make history, and on the rare occasions when the particular person typing these lines does anything at all important, I tend to feel like I do it for one reason. Extrapolating to the relevant macrocosm, I’m basically with Ruhollah Khomeini, who famously remarked that “the Iranian people did not make the Islamic revolution to lower the price of watermelons” but rather did so “for the sake of throwing off the foreign yoke and restoring their kidnapped culture and creed.” (That’s two reasons, but they are closely related). Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that the human will, independent and focused though it may be, is nourished, guided, and battered this way and that by the context surrounding it, and for this reason Cooper’s litany is highly enlightening. Ironically, the only one of our four authors who is not Iranian digs more deeply into daily Iranian reality than any of his colleagues.
III. Moods of Self-Assurance and Insecurity
Louis XIV’s famous quip, L’etat c’est moi (“the state—is me”), rarely rang as true as it did in Iran of the 1960s and 70s. Flush with eleven-figure oil revenues and spoiled rotten by U.S. support that had gone from conditional to unconditional, Mohammad Reza neutered the government apparatuses, military command structures, and traditional pillars of the Persian state—court, bazaar, and mosque—that he saw as so many obstacles to his imperious charge in the direction of the “Great Civilization.” The king became the only game in town, his picture on the wall of every home and business, his decisions the only ones that mattered. Thus, an intimate biography of the man on the throne is essential to an understanding of the state of the Iranian nation in the decades immediately prior to the Khomeinist debacle. In his 2012 The Shah, Abbas Milani—a Stanford political scientist and Hoover Institution fellow—provides us with the best example of such a biography.
Milani chronicles the initially reluctant sovereign’s rise to power with an apposite mixture of objectivity, sympathy, and drama. He masterfully interweaves the personal and political, offering probing analyses of Mohammad Reza’s ambitions and inhibitions, phantoms and phobias, worldviews and prejudices. He covers more widely and perceptively than any earlier scholar the experiences and influences of the prince’s formative years, and arrays before the reader the alternating moods of self-assurance and insecurity, tenaciousness and irresolution, optimism and depression that helped make his reign something akin to a non-stop roller-coaster ride. Milani aptly points out that “many of [the shah’s] weaknesses as a leader were his virtues as a human being,” referring, inter alia, to this embattled ruler’s unwillingness to spill gallons of his countrymen’s blood in order to stay in power.
The king made use of authoritarian methods to propel Iranian society forward—which set that society on a direct collision course with those same authoritarian methods.
No work details and dissects to the same degree the myriad challenges facing this well-meaning monarch on the foreign and domestic scenes (not the least of which was the rampant corruption of his own family), challenges which—by exploiting the cold war, dispersing petrodollars, repressing Communists and clergymen, and generally playing his cards right—he faced down successfully for almost four decades. His inability to face down the final challenge Milani ascribes to a paradox: the king had made use of authoritarian methods to propel Iranian society forward in the direction of literacy, industry, professionalism, research, technology, consumerism, capitalism, nationalism, intellectualism, secularism, and individualism—all of which set that society on a direct collision course with those same authoritarian methods. (Or as Takeyh puts it, the shah “built the modern middle class, but refused to grant it a voice in national affairs.”) Indeed, Milani asserts, monarchy itself as an institution, and the squelching of political participation it inevitably entails, was fast becoming an anachronism by the mid-20th century, especially in the countries that Mohammad Reza held up to his subjects as models, and to whose universities he sent thousands of college students.
IV. Reasons for Ruination
Whereas from Milani we learn about the general from the particular—about the situation in the country from the personality of its ruler—the Yale historian Abbas Amanat, in Iran: A Modern History(2012), takes the reader on an oceanic voyage in the opposite direction. One of the many advantages of this impressively ambitious magnum opus is the historical depth and topical breadth it brings to bear on the issues that have preoccupied us so far, and that preoccupy all who think about contemporary Iran: Mohammad Reza’s record as leader, and the reasons for his ruination.
Amanat, one of the premier Iranologists of our time, whose vast and diverse erudition is matched only by the humanity that permeates his texts, is uniquely qualified to construct the stage upon which the 20th-century showdown between Pahlavism and Khomeinism would be played out. By the time we reach the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah—some 500 pages into the book—we have been exposed repeatedly to an interlocking network of patterns and trends that have functioned as the matrix of Iranian history for centuries, sometimes millennia. Many of these are couched in terms of dichotomies: centripetal versus centrifugal forces, tribal versus sedentary existence, antinomian heterodoxy versus a state-supported clerical establishment, Persian versus Arab, Turk versus Persian, Russian versus British, religion versus nationalism, tyranny versus just rule.
Amanat tackles the tenure of the “King of Kings, Light of the Aryans” (Mohammad Reza’s self-chosen moniker) with all these tensions in mind, while simultaneously illuminating the political, economic, social, and especially cultural mise en scene of the period. We do not get the shah as a willful individual, as a volatile jumble of psychological traits, as with Milani, but the shah as one actor among hundreds of others, in what sometimes feels like a non-fiction Persian version of War and Peace. The dense tangle of processes that eventually led to the fall of the monarchy cannot be easily untangled here, but it should be said that unlike Tolstoy, Amanat does not present the tragic denouement of 1979 as the inevitable result of an amalgam of impersonal forces. The hundreds of authors, artists, ambassadors, academics, activists, and agitators, together with no few vendors, workers, thugs, and other ordinary Iranians who contributed to this momentous event are more often than not introduced by name, their dreams and activities fleshed out, and these many human threads woven together into a kaleidoscopic revolutionary tapestry.
Amanat’s presentation is painfully balanced: he rakes the post-revolutionary regime over the coals for its many human-rights violations, but criticizes the Western supporters of Iraq during its war with Iran in the same breath, and no less fiercely. He takes Mohammad Reza to task for curtailing liberty and stifling creativity, but overall—as with Takeyh, Cooper, and Milani—appreciates much of what the ill-fated Pahlavi sovereign did for Iran, depicting him as a driven reformer with high ideals who transformed his country so profoundly that even the Islamists could not turn back the clock.
Certainly, one must be careful not to overdo such revisionist rehabilitation. It is one thing to debunk Amnesty International’s ridiculous claim— popularized with most effect by Reza Barahani’s powerful but unreliable 1977 Crowned Cannibals—that over 100,000 political prisoners were tortured in the shah’s jails. It is quite another to claim—as does Ervand Abrahamian, the highly regarded scholar who literally wrote the book on the subject—that torture as a method of repression virtually disappeared from the Iranian scene under the Pahlavis, re-emerging with a vengeance only with the onset of the Islamic Republic. The shah was a more benevolent dictator than the image conjured up for the West by the various shrill (and ungrateful) Iranian Students Associations that regularly marred his visits to Europe and the United States; but no small number of atrocities were carried out in his name and with his knowledge. Even Cooper, the Pahlavis’ biggest fan, saddles the king with the ultimate responsibility for decades of state-sponsored prisoner abuse, including not a few extrajudicial murders.
Women in today’s Iran may have to cover their hair, but they vote like maniacs and there are more of them in the universities and in a whole slew of prestigious professions than their male counterparts.
Still, to read these four authors, Iran’s final monarch did far more good than harm. He took a particularly ignorant populace (tellingly, Jewish academicians concluded that even Persian Jews were less knowledgeable than their co-religionists anywhere on the planet) and increased their literacy level sevenfold in less than two decades. He used the endless supply of black gold that percolated up through the Khuzestan flats not just to purchase tanker-loads of state-of-the-art weaponry (useless, in the event, as they had been for his father), but also to build schools, roads, hospitals, clinics, orphanages, universities, vocational colleges, sports centers, airports, sea-ports, factories, research laboratories, parks, zoos, commercial centers, chemical plants, railroads, theaters, galleries, and museums by the thousands. He divvied up latifundia all over the country, compensating the owners fairly and doling out hundreds of thousands of acres to the peasantry. (The fact that these peasants often preferred migration to shantytowns on the edge of big cities to farming their newly acquired plots was a worldwide problem, and not Mohammad Reza’s fault). He protected minorities—Jews, Bahais, Sunni Muslims—and, though a dyed-in-the-wool chauvinist himself, energetically promoted women’s causes. The last achievement was one that Khomeinism could not roll back: women in today’s Iran may have to cover their hair, but they vote like maniacs and there are more of them in the universities and in a whole slew of prestigious professions than their male counterparts.
The king made Iran into a respected player on the international scene, encouraging and inspiring other third-world countries by example, to say nothing of financing their development projects. Though easily irritated by independent thinking among his subordinates, he tolerated more societal dissent than is generally acknowledged, and his “liberalization program” of the late 1970s, as Takeyh points out, actually saw that tolerance increase just before things got really hairy. When the revolutionary tsunami finally hit, thousands of oppositionist intellectuals and activists were of sound enough body and mind to surf on it all the way to victory.
V. Economy or Religion?
So why did the tsunami hit at all? Why, in the end, did the country choose Islamist rule instead? If so many impressive accomplishments can be laid at Mohammad Reza’s door—and they indubitably can—then why did his people, whom he had benefited so greatly, give him the heave-ho in such a peremptory and humiliating fashion? For many, the answer revolves around the bottom line. Despite the dazzling economic success story that was Pahlavi Iran—between 1957 and 1977 the standard of living among the Persian populace rose no less than 500 percent—many Middle East specialists persist in seeking the underlying causes of the Khomeinist revolution in economic woes of one sort or another. Scores of analysts have proffered such confident assertions as the following, from the pen of the astute student of Islamism Nazih Ayubi, drawing on the no-less-astute Iran expert Fred Halliday:
“The revolution was the outcome of a complex and painful process of rapid and uneven economic development. The main reason why it occurred was that “conflicts generated in capitalist development intersected with resilient institutions and popular attitudes which resisted the transformation process.” (Political Islam: Religion and Politics in the Arab World, p. 387)
Takeyh himself opens his study with a question, “Why did Iran have a revolution in 1979?,” and an answer: “The immediate causes can be easily summarized: the economic recession of the mid-1970s had halted the shah’s development projects and created expectations that the state could not meet.” (This is the well-known but discredited “J-curve” theory, which states that an economic boom followed by a sudden downturn tends to cause revolution and unrest.) To his credit, Takeyh contradicts his own assessment at the very end of the book: “The economic recession of the mid-1970s is sometimes casually blamed for the revolution, but the Iranian people were frustrated with the shah’s dictatorship even when the economy was performing well.”
The main problem with such claims is that the various processes they blame for engendering discontent and consequent unrest in Iran—including “inflationary pressures,” “rising expectations,” and the catch-all urbanization and its manifold consequences—were in no way unique to Iran, and were in many if not most cases more moderate versions of simultaneous developments in other third-world polities where no comparable revolutions ensued. One of Amanat’s arguments, for instance, is not only questionable in itself, but could be applied just as well to any other country in the developing world:
”Since the beginning of the Pahlavi era, the Iranian population had improved in every generation physically, hygienically, and medically, from the frail, malnourished, and diseased population at the turn of the 20th century . . . to a relatively healthy, sanitary, and better nourished people in the last quarter of the century. The need for greater quantities and greater varieties of food, home appliances, electronics, and cars thus was bound to become a burden for a government anxious to keep its population economically content. “(p. 655)
None of this holds water. The citizens of Iran did not bare their chests to the bullets of the largest and best-equipped army in the region, overthrow their sovereign, and put an end to a millennia-old monarchical tradition, all for the lack of a toaster oven. The Washington Post had it right way back in 1978: “Rarely would contemporary history appear to provide such an example of a people’s ingratitude towards a leader who has brought about an economic miracle of similar proportions.”
The citizens of Iran did not bare their chests to the bullets of the largest and best-equipped army in the region all for the lack of a toaster oven.
Though no amount of counterargument will eliminate the widespread post-facto imagining of Iranian economic distress (which somehow went unnoticed before the revolution), if we seek to isolate the sui-generis ingredients that went into making the Khomeinist upheaval of 1979, we must look elsewhere. Admittedly, this additionally rules out factors like irritation on the part of the educated classes at the lack of opportunities for political participation: such irritation, too, existed in spades in other countries, and although secular democracy-seekers had kept the embers of Iranian dissidence glowing for years, it was not they who ignited the conflagration. The central motivations for the mass revolutionary action of 1978-9 must be sought in factors more specific to Iran, or at least more unique to the situation in the country at the time.
Where shall we look? Here our masters all fall short. Ask the average Joe who was compos mentis 40 years ago why the Iranians rose up against their ruler. (Mind you, not your average Iranian Joe: Persian-speakers are conspiracy freaks of a caliber beyond anything one finds in the West, and they are convinced to a man that the U. S. was behind the whole thing. Even the shah thought so.) Anyone who paid attention at the time—and who was not an academic and could therefore think straight—was cognizant of the simple truth that the king got canned because he had spat on his people’s most hallowed traditions. He and his coterie of “Westoxified” sophisticates had mocked their rituals, stripped their women, insulted their clergymen, blasphemed their god, replaced their sacred paragons with pagan nymphomaniacs, gotten drunk on their solemn holidays, razed their mosques (sometimes building banks and stadiums in their place), and made common cause with heretics and infidels—all in the name of progress.
We should pause to admit that Milani, Cooper, and others don’t see it this way: they make much of what they claim was the second Pahlavi sovereign’s backpedaling of his father’s harsh secularizing policies, pointing to everything from the son’s oath of office, which included appeals to Allah and commitments to promote Shiism; the widely publicized visit paid by the new monarch to the hospitalized Grand Ayatollah Borujerdi, head of the seminary system in the holy city of Qom; mystical experiences in which Mohammad Reza claimed to have received blessings from this or that imam; his habit of carrying a mini-Quran into his breast pocket; and a significant increase in the number of new places of worship, and a partial easing of the restrictions on the veil, under his reign.
While there is truth to all of this, the broader picture tells a different story. Oaths of office and hospital visits are recognized by the genuinely pious for just what they are: lip service. While assertions of dream visitations by saintly figures can be a feather in the turban of a respected theologian, in the case of non-observant ignoramuses like Mohammad Reza Shah—who once boasted to a gathering of Muslim divines that “I say my prayers every night before bed,” a decidedly non-Muslim comment—such claims merely point to the claimant’s abject irreligiosity. And, one might add, the irreligiosity of those who record and build theories upon such empty gestures.
More importantly, while the father’s anti-clericalism and march toward modernization may have been gruffer, under the son these tendencies matured and expanded relentlessly, to a large extent due to Iran’s exponentially proliferating contacts with Europe and even more so the United States. There were, albeit, more mosques built during this period, but the mushrooming cinemas were the up-and-coming place to be. The veil, it is true, could now be worn, but it was scorned by refined society, and more and more women preferred bouffant hairdos and mini-skirts. As uncomfortable and un-moored as traditional members of Iranian society began to feel in the 1930s, they would feel so to a far greater extent in the 1960s, and if they did not, that was because they had grown accustomed to the direction the country had been taking for decades, not because that direction had changed or been reversed.
The few supposedly regressive features that characterized the reign of the second Pahlavi monarch in connection with religion were offset ten times over by the juggernaut of modernization that was the hallmark of the era. And while traditionalism would on occasion receive disingenuous royal support as a counterweight to radicalism, the shah and his governments were, if anything, more inclined toward socialism than Shiism. Above all, as all our authors readily admit, their lodestar was always the West. In the eyes of the vast conservative sector of Iranian society, Pahlavism was hedonism, plain and simple. In the eyes of the increasing number of students who subscribed to the lay theoretician Ali Shari’ati’s militant neo-Shiiism—young people for whom faith had become cool again, and for whom the imperative of the hour was “the return to ourselves”—Pahlavism was the contemptible, traitorous antithesis of religio-cultural authenticity.
Political Islam has been eulogized by untold analysts almost since its birth, the classic example being Olivier Roy’s 1992 L’échec de l’islam politique (“The Failure of Political Islam”), a book that, given all that has transpired since its publication, should long ago have been renamed “My Failure as a Middle East Expert.” Incurable rationalist-materialists that so many Western thinkers are, it is extremely difficult for them to credit the power of the spiritual or theological, and they accordingly search high and low for alternate motivations, especially economic ones, to explain the behavior of individuals and collectives. Such an approach both informs, and is informed by, schools of thought like Marxism and realpolitik, as well as no few social sciences. Immune to religious passions themselves, scholars and journalists simply can’t accept that these passions can motivate tens of thousands of people.
If there is one deficiency common to the four undeniably outstanding studies we have been reviewing, it is that whereas Ayatollah Khomeini and company were sure that they had risen in revolt because Westernization in Iran had gone too far, our authors are all convinced that the revolution occurred because Westernization had not gone far enough. A related argument has been advanced by the prominent postmodernist scholar Ali Mirsepassi in his 2019 Iran’s Quiet Revolution. Mirsepassi notes correctly that intellectuals close to the Pahlavi court, and the sovereign himself, sometimes coopted the anti-“Westoxification” discourse of leftists and Islamists in order to take the wind out of their sails and, at the same time, delegitimize democracy as a foreign implant. He then maintains, based on this paradox, that it was the Pahlavi rejection rather than the Pahlavi adoption of modernity that led to the dynasty’s destruction, a theory as creative and counterintuitive as it is utterly spurious.
Islam as the central propelling factor in the resistance movement to the shah receives extremely short shrift from Takeyh, Cooper, Milani, and even Amanat. The last scholar’s profound knowledge of Shiism is matched only by his dislike for it: for instance, he calls the premier intellectual pursuit of the ayatollahs in their seminaries “tedious” on no less than four separate occasions in his massive tome. The revolutionaries aver in no uncertain terms that they did it for Islam; but our four authors, and scores of their colleagues, claim to know better.
Certainly, there were other modernizing rulers in other Middle Eastern countries who antagonized their Muslim constituents, both before and after the Iranian revolution. Taking Islam seriously as a motivating and enabling factor means, however, familiarizing ourselves with this confession’s considerable inner diversity. Iranian Islam has been Shiite Islam for over 500 years, and Shiism is a revolutionary vehicle like no other. Thanks to the circumstances of its evolution, the slogan “Fight the Powers that Be” is virtually encoded on its DNA. Moreover, Shiite clerics are comparatively independent of temporal rulers, while enjoying the wall-to-wall obedience of their flocks. Not for nothing did Khomeinism succeed so spectacularly where other Islamist movements had succeeded only partially or failed: the creed on which it is based provided both the impetus and the instrument for its triumph.
VI. Missing the Point
That the most impressive of our experts persist in downplaying or ignoring the Islamic Republic of Iran’s driving forces can lead to misunderstandings of current affairs that are far from academic. Both nuclear negotiations and the sanctions, for instance, are premised on the assumption that Tehran is eager above all else to improve its country’s economy. While Ayatollah Khamenei and his minions doubtless care about trade and finances, they care much more about advancing their religious ideology across the Middle East, and like most religious believers, feel that spiritual concerns must ultimately trump material ones. It’s even possible that some might find the idea of suffering material hardships to achieve ideological goals appealing.
Likewise, President Obama’s negotiations with Iran sought to recognize the country’s “equities” in the Middle East, with the ultimate aim of creating a balance among Iranian, Saudi, and Israeli spheres of influence. Again, Tehran may not be immune to such realpolitik considerations. But ultimately the Islamic Republic is engaged militarily in Yemen, Iraq, and Lebanon to advance the Islamic Revolution. The idea that well-meaning Western diplomats can simply sit Iranian diplomats down with their Saudi, Emirati, and Yemeni counterparts and work out a compromise based on mutual interests completely ignores the theological aspect of Khomeinist foreign policy.
Both nuclear negotiations and the sanctions are premised on the assumption that Tehran is eager above all else to improve its country’s economy.
And all this is even more true when it comes to Israel. Economics and power politics simply fail to explain the conflict between the two countries, which share no borders and had cordial relations under the shah. While Shiism historically contains ample anti-Semitic currents, it is not indelibly anti-Semitic—but Khomeinism is. And it views Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East as an unacceptable offense, which must be eradicated at almost any cost.
But Israel is only the Little Satan. The Great Satan is America, the main driver of “Westoxification.” If I’m right that Iranians didn’t rise up en masse because of the rising costs of onions or because they wanted to drive nicer cars, but because they were passionately opposed to secularization and American influence, then the U.S. cannot make peace with Iran even if the nuclear deal succeeds. The Islamic regime doesn’t oppose America because it supports Israel or Saudi Arabia, but because it represents Western secularism. Unless mass-conversion to Islam is in America’s future, that’s not something that’s likely to go away.
Only several months have elapsed since the richest and most powerful country in the world, having spent $300 million per day for twenty consecutive years on the restoration of the various branches of the national economy and on the creation of a 300,000-strong national army, was sent ignominiously packing with its tail between its legs by a bunch of ill-equipped local amateurs wearing turbans, robes, and sandals. One hopes that the loss of Afghanistan will finally hammer home the truth that the loss of Iran so signally failed to do: it’s religion, stupid
Ze’ev Maghen is chair of the department of Arab and Islamic studies at Bar-Ilan University. His latest book is Reading the Ayatollahs: The Worldview of Iran’s Religio-Political Elite. He is also the author of John Lennon and the Jews: A Philosophical Rampage.
Two Islamic terms and one Hebrew have been making the media rounds of late.
Taqiyyah is the employment of deception and dissimulation in an ostensibly Islamic cause. The term تقیة taqiyyah is derived from the trilateral root wāw-qāf-yā, literally denoting caution, fear, prudence, guarding against a danger), carefulness and wariness. It is related to kitmān (كتمان), the act of covering or dissimulation. While the terms taqiyya and kitmān may be used synonymously, kitmān refers specifically to the concealment of one’s convictions by silence or omission. Kitmān derives from Arabic katama “to conceal, to hide”.
The Hebrew word ishasbara. It has no direct English translation, but roughly means “explaining”, a communicative strategy that seeks to explain actions, whether or not they are justified). It is often interpreted by critics of Israel as public relations or propaganda. It has even been described as the fool’s gold version of diplomacy.
The Hamas’ assault of October 7 2023 was an almost perfect act of Taqiyyah, It used unprecedented intelligence tactics to mislead Israel over months, by giving a public impression that it was not willing to go into a fight or confrontation with Israel while preparing for this massive operation. As part of its subterfuge over the past two years, Hamas refrained from military operations against Israel even as another Gaza-based armed group known as Islamic Jihad launched a series of its own assaults or rocket attacks.
It has been said before and often, that the Qatari-owned news platform Al Jazeera presents the non-Arabic speaking world with a markedly different narrative of to what it relays to its Arabic readers – it is the most popular news source in the Arab world, particularly among Palestinians. Viewing or reading Al Jazeera English, you would think that Israel’s ongoing onslaught in Gaza is directed entirely against the defenceless and helpless civilians of the unfortunate enclave. There are very rarely images of the militants who are engaged on a daily basis in fierce battles and deadly firefights with the IDF. Al Jazeera Arabic on the other hand, posts pictures and videos of the fighters, illustrating their courage, their resilience in the face of overwhelming odds, and their successes in the face of overwhelming military odds. In that Howling Infinite recently covered the issue of divergent narratives in Al Aqsa Flood and the Hamas holy war.
The following opinion piece published this week in Haaretz suggests that the gas-rich and influential emirate of Qatar, erstwhile mediator in many contemporary of conflicts has indeed need playing a much more subtle long game of taqiyyah and kitmān.
I leave it to the reader to determine whether there is some truth in the author’s case or whether this is part of some deceptive hasbara.It would indeed be in Israel’s interests to propagate a narrative that emphasises the existential threat posed by its Muslim neighbours.
Personally, I am inclined to take this opinion piece with a large pinch of salt. For a start, it is badly written and many of its historical references are inaccurate. And then there is the matter of ascribing caliphate ambitions to the Gulf emirate of Qatar, a tiny autocracy, albeit one of the richest, and until recently at odds with its equally autocratic Gulf neighbours with regard to it’s having given support and succour to the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood – from which Hamas evolved in Palestine – which is similarly reviled and repressed by the rulers of Egypt, Syria and Jordan, who have dealt brutally with the organisation in the past. Other Sunni Muslim regimes were, moreover, unimpressed by Qatar’s cordial relationship, political and economic, with The Shia Islamic Republic of Iran – although the Gulf regimes have of late been increasingly conducive to improving their relationships with the hardline theocracy. Indeed, it was not so long ago that Qatar’s neighbours endeavoured to impose a blockade on the recalcitrant emirate. They would be hardly inclined to countenance Qatar as the leader of an Islamic Caliphate – even if the Muslim street in most Arab states were enthusiastic about the idea.
In a brief article in Haaretz the following week, also republished below, a former Israeli diplomat took issue with Ronit Marzan’s “one-dimensional approach” to Qatar: “…Israel’s tendency to divide the world into “good” and “bad” is not a good approach to intelligent foreign policy. Skillful diplomacy identifies common interests shared by diverse and often opposing players – partners in one area who are adversaries in another. That is precisely why the term “frenemies” exists. Qatar is a classic example”.
On October 7, 2023, the idee fixe that Hamas was deterred was shattered. But Israel is still mired in another idee fixe – that Qatar is a friendly country that helps resolve conflicts.
Israel is ignoring the hearts-and-minds campaign Qatar is waging against it and against the entire Western world by arguing that liberating all of Palestine will liberate the Middle East from colonialism, liberate the world from the unipolar order of American hegemony and liberate the human psyche from Western culture.
The hashtags “Spain,” “Andalusia,” “Palestine” and “history and culture,” which Qatar’s online influencers regularly use, are not understood by either Israel or Spain.These hashtags are part of a historical, cultural and psychological campaign that links two central narratives. It seeks to convince Muslims worldwide that the medieval Islamic empire in Andalusia fell as a result of jealousy and rivalry among Muslim kings. Additionally, historical Palestine isn’t being liberated because of the rivalry among Arab countries and their cooperation with the Israeli enemy against Palestinian resistance organizations.
Tweets posted online by Qatari influencers such as “Haifa is beautiful, but it will be more beautiful when it burns down,” “Don’t dream about a happy world as long as Israel exists” and “Liberating all of Palestine is possible, and it has begun” have also not been met with any effective response by Israel’s official public diplomacy network.
And Qatar’s threats that it is considering deporting Hamas leaders from the country should not be taken seriously so long as senior Hamas leader Khaled Meshal, who lives there, keeps telling Muslims around the world that the Al-Aqsa Mosque is “the explosive that sets off intifadas”; inciting residents of the West Bank and “the 1948 Arabs” (i.e. Israeli Arabs) to resume suicide bombings; urging the Arab nation to embark on both a jihad of the soul and an armed jihad against the Zionist enemy, which isn’t a natural part of the region; encouraging the Arab masses to take to the streets and pressure their leaders to sever ties with Israel; and urging student leaders worldwide to renew street protests to put an end to Zionist and American hegemony.
It’s not only Israel that has fallen asleep while on guard duty. European and American leaders also don’t understand that Qatar is working via its agents of change to bring about a clash between the global north and the global south by exploiting the distress of failed states and the woke movement in the West. They are failing to recognize that it is undermining the Western model of the modern nation-state whose borders were drawn in the past.
Its goal is to replace this Western model with that of a traditional Arab state, meaning one where the regime’s legitimacy would come from its willingness to put the interests of the Arab-Islamic nation above those of its own country, first and foremost in the battle against Israel.
Tawakkol Karman, an Islamic activist from Yemen, received aid from Qatar to promote a revolutionary discourse in her country during the Arab Spring and was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for it.
Now, she is helping Qatar incite a revolt against Western governments among young people and indigenous peoples. At the One Young World Summit in Canada, she argued that democracy, human rights and the rule of law are in retreat in the United States, Canada, Britain and France and urged action against powerful companies and governments that had stolen the resources of indigenous peoples.
In an edited Al Jazeera video of a speech by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres at an Arab League summit, the following chyrons were prominently displayed: “Guterres urged the Arab states to unite and not let outside parties manipulate them,” “Guterres highlighted the golden age of Islamic culture and praised the Arab contribution over the course of hundreds of years, from the Andalusian renaissance in the Iberian peninsula to Baghdad, which was a global center of culture and civilization,” “The secretary-general blamed the Arab states’ backwardness on colonialism and the war of liberation that the Arab nation had to wage.”
All of the above show that Guterres, like many former UN employees who are today employed at Azmi Bishara’s research institute in Doha, don’t represent the values in whose name the United Nations was established. Instead, they have become Qatar’s water carriers.
Israel and the United States erred when they let Qatar send aid to the Gaza Strip.And they are erring now by allowing it to send aid to Lebanon. Now that Gaza has been devastated, and the chances of Hamas returning to power are low, Qatar is racing ahead towards Lebanon.
It is part of the five-member committee that was established to help resolve Lebanon’s political crisis, along with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, America and France.
Qatar is embracing veteran Druze politician Walid Jumblatt, the former head of Lebanon’s Progressive Socialist Party, in the hopes that the Druze community will provide help in the future to topple Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria.
It is giving millions of dollars to the Lebanese army to help pay soldiers’ salaries ($100 a month per soldier). And it is cooperating more closely with Lebanese government ministries – for instance, the internal security ministry, which is responsible for training police officers – while moving forward on agreements in the field of solar energy.
Israel’s ground operation in Lebanonis giving Qatar an opportunity to settle itself in the hearts of the Lebanese people. After Israel dismantles Shi’ite Hezbollah for it, along with the ring of fire Iran has for years nurtured in the region, Qatar will appear in the role of the “savior” and repeat what it did with Sunni Hamas in Gaza.
But this time, it will do so with the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Jordan. And Iran’s Shi’ite ring of firewill be replaced with Qatar’s Sunni ring, which will be no less dangerous, and might well lead Israel to new versions of the October 7 attacks, just as Meshal has been promising.
Saladin liberated Palestine, Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa after securing geographic and demographic depth for himself in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Egypt and Jordan. That’s what Meshal and Mohamed El-Shinqiti, a faculty member at Qatar University, have been saying, and presumably not by chance.
Lolwah Al-Khater, the country’s minister for international cooperation, landed in Beirut a few days ago with a generous supply of aid and promises of “plans for the medium and long term.” We should believe what she says, because Qatar is a long-distance runner, and patience is a key value in the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology.
Ronit Marzan is a researcher of Palestinian society and politics at the Tamrur-Politography
Qatar Can Be Part of the Solution, and Not Just Part of the Problem
In her article “Qatar is preparing a ‘ring of fire’ around Israel to supplant Iran’s,” (Haaretz, October 15), Dr. Ronit Marzan takes a one-dimensional approach toward Qatar. However, Israel’s tendency to divide the world into “good” and “bad” is not a good approach to intelligent foreign policy. Skillful diplomacy identifies common interests shared by diverse and often opposing players – partners in one area who are adversaries in another. That is precisely why the term “frenemies” exists.
Qatar is a classic example. It does indeed support the Muslim Brotherhood, but the conclusion that it therefore supports terrorism is mistaken and misleading. The Muslim Brotherhood spans a wide spectrum. Anyone who understands the dramatic difference between MK Mansour Abbas and Hamas, or Raed Salah and the late Mohammed Morsi, the former Egyptian president who, during his presidency, upheld the peace agreement with Israel, realizes this. Unlike Iran, Qatar has never sought to promote terrorism, even though it has not avoided connections with those involved in it.
The transfer of Qatari aid to Hamas was carried out in response to an Israeli-American request to create Western leverage over Hamas and mechanisms for ending the fighting in Gaza. Hosting the political leadership of Hamas in Qatar was part of a broader approach, aimed at distancing the movement from Iran.
Qatar’s assistance is highly valued by Israeli and American negotiators in the efforts to release hostages held by Hamas and this is a good example of the importance of working with Qatar. But even after the war, we will still need the Qataris as mediators and stabilizers, because Hamas will not disappear from Gaza and other Palestinian territories.
Qatar hosts the largest U.S. airbase in the Middle East, Al-Udeid Air Base. It is also home to branches of some of the most important American universities. Qatar and Iran are partners in a large offshore gas field, which allows it to influence and moderate Iran. Being the richest country per capita in the world enables Qatar to invest significant resources in rebuilding countries like Syria and Lebanon, and in Gaza – a capability that may be critical to any political settlement following the war.
Qatar’s soft power diplomacy could serve as an alternative to the ongoing military conflicts, which is perhaps a strategy Israel should also consider adopting. We should also learn from the U.S., which utilizes Qatar for diplomatic moves with hostile countries and organizations. For example, Qatar helped release American citizens from Iranian prisons and facilitated the agreement that allowed U.S. forces to exit Afghanistan.
After the Oslo Accords, Israel opened an Israeli interest office in Doha, Qatar’s capital. From this and other actions, we learned that Qatar is interested in helping create processes that promote peace and stability in the region through soft power. While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used Qatar to fund Hamas with the declared goal of weakening the Palestinian Authority and the chances of a political settlement, I propose using Qatar to help advance a settlement with the Palestinians as part of a regional agreement. Similarly, it is important to leverage Qatar, one of the five key countries assisting governance in Lebanon, to help weaken Hezbollah domination in Lebanon.
A country does not choose its surroundings and Qatar is not a friendly state, but it is a state that can serve as a counterforce to Iran’s rise. Qatar is an actor with economic and political interests in both the Western and Arab-Muslim worlds. It should be approached with caution but utilized rather than kept away.
Therefore, instead of denigrating Qatar’s significant influence in the region, we should consider how to leverage its skills in navigating among different regional alliances, which give Qatar unique capabilities – not as a sole player or even central one but as a country with influence that even much larger nations, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, don’t posses
In That Howling Infinite 
Boom. Boom. Boom. The second presidency of Donald Trump burst like a clap of thunder across the whole American nation, across the whole world.