Written by Luca Salvemini
No. 161 - May 10, 2026

On the sixtieth day of war, the contest between the United States and Iran is being fought on the terrain of patience.

Convinced that it can bring the theocracy to its knees under the weight of punishing economic deprivation, Washington has in recent weeks staked its position on strangling Iranian maritime traffic in an attempt to salvage — at the very least — its own thalassocracy.

Thus, amid blockades and counter-blockades, the Pentagon launched Project Freedom: the ill-fated operation that managed to escort a mere two vessels before triggering Iranian reprisals against the United States Navy and the Emirati petroleum facility at Fujairah.

Suspended after less than two days, the mission laid bare — once again — the severe constraints on Washington’s room for manoeuvre in the Strait, while simultaneously consolidating Tehran’s standing.

This episode is merely the latest in a protracted series of miscalculations by President Donald Trump regarding the Iranian regime.

In recent months, Trump has repeatedly deluded himself into believing that a combination of diplomatic, military and economic pressure would compel the regime to capitulate and accept the terms dictated by Washington.

Even before the outbreak of hostilities, Trump had convinced himself that Iran would never seal the Strait of Hormuz, on the assumption that the initial shock of American bombardment would be sufficient to bring the regime crashing down within days.

The misreadings persisted in the weeks that followed: on his Truth Social platform, Trump repeatedly appeared at a loss to explain why Iran refused to yield to his threats.

Even now, as the Wall Street Journal has reported, Trump has expressed frustration that the naval blockade, despite inflicting genuine damage on the Iranian economy, has failed to coerce the regime into submission.

American intelligence itself acknowledges that Iran’s stockpiles of missiles and rockets have sustained no significant depletion.

All of this reveals that Trump has not yet grasped — or perhaps does not wish to grasp — the single most consequential feature of the Iranian regime: the fact that since its very founding in 1979, it was engineered to sustain an indefinite defence against external enemies, and above all against the United States.

Situated at the crossroads between the Mediterranean and the Indian subcontinent, this territory has historically been the theatre of relentless turbulence, conditioning its inhabitants to reckon with the precariousness of existence.

This is the very foundation of the regime’s ideology and internal legitimacy — and, in a meaningful sense, the very justification for the Islamic Republic’s existence: to resist at any cost, even when that cost is catastrophic, even when doing so appears irrational.

In over two months of war, Trump has failed to apprehend this element of apparent irrationality — which, from the regime’s perspective, is entirely rational.

This is not to say that Iranian resilience is limitless, nor that the regime can withstand any conceivable pressure from the most powerful military force on earth. Things could change, and change swiftly. What it does mean is that Trump has systematically underestimated it — at least thus far.

The notion of Iran as a besieged nation obliged to defend itself against external threats did not originate with the current regime.

Iran’s history across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is a chronicle of invasions, foreign interference and protectorates.

Even Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who governed the country from 1941 until the revolution of 1979, was consumed by the imperative of arming Iran against outside encroachment — though his principal preoccupation was the Soviet Union rather than the United States.

When the regime assumed power, it entered almost immediately into a harsh confrontational dynamic with Washington, which from the earliest months imposed policies of containment and penalisation against Iran, partly in response to the hostage crisis of 1979 to early 1981.

In 1980, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Iran — and that proved a watershed. The Iran-Iraq War lasted eight years, was ferociously complex and sanguinary, but in the decades that followed, Iranian official memory mythologised it thus: Iran had fought alone not merely against Iraq, but against the entire world, which had bankrolled, armed and sustained Saddam’s regime.

Encircled and abandoned, Iran had survived through the unyielding resolve of its people and its revolutionary government.

This narrative is only partially accurate, yet that war nonetheless forged the present Iranian ruling class — a generation shaped in the crucible of resistance at all costs.

Even the current Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, the country’s pre-eminent military and religious authority, is a veteran of that conflict.

As the Iranian-American analyst Vali Nasr writes in his book Iran’s Grand Strategy, the idea of resistance has “shaped the Islamic Republic, its politics, its economy and its social institutions.” Particularly significant is the concept of defa’e moqaddas — sacred defence — which emerged from the war against Iraq.

Initially it expressed the readiness of the Iranian people to make any sacrifice in defence of the homeland. In the decades since, the regime has effectively hollowed out that concept, demonstrating instead a willingness to inflict any sacrifice upon the population in order to defend itself.

This ideological disposition has translated into concrete policy.

From the early 2000s onward, the confrontation with the United States and Israel intensified markedly, and the regime devised an elaborate architecture of deterrence both to forestall attack and to sustain itself in the event of war.

Externally, it constructed the so-called Axis of Resistance — a network of allied militias operating across the Middle East that have in recent months bolstered Iran’s war effort: Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Shia militias in Iraq, and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, each with varying degrees of fealty.

At the military level, the regime has adopted what analysts describe as a “mosaic” structure, designed to ensure that its armed forces remain operational during conflict through radical decentralisation of command.

The regime is, moreover, possessed of extraordinary institutional depth: should a leader be eliminated, a constellation of potential successors stands ready to step into the breach.

On the economic front, the regime has spent decades habituating the population to absorb sanctions and austerity, while pursuing autarky — the domestic production of everything the country requires — by every available means.

Internal loyalty has been secured through the centralisation of economic activity and the distribution of public appointments: today, millions of Iranians depend on the regime for their livelihoods, either as holders of state employment or as participants in enterprises bound to state interests.

The Iranian regime is vast and variegated, and the ideology of unremitting resistance is held with varying intensity depending on the faction in power and the period in question.

It is championed most fervently by the Supreme Leader and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — the country’s most formidable armed body — while more reformist elements within the system would countenance greater accommodation.

The war, however, has empowered the hardliners.

The ideology of resistance has, of course, its limits — a threshold beyond which even the regime’s prodigious will to endure might ultimately give way. That breaking point could be reached through intensified military strikes, amplified economic strangulation, or a popular insurrection, among other contingencies.

A significant defection from within the regime could equally prove decisive.

The problem for the United States is that this threshold has not yet been reached, and no form of pressure applied by the Trump administration thus far appears to have yielded the results it anticipated.

Energy sector specialists believe Iran has at least several weeks before being compelled to curtail production in ways that might cause lasting damage to its petroleum infrastructure.

In the meantime, Iran — which in April was exporting approximately 1.81 million barrels of oil per day — can reduce output while continuing to stockpile crude aboard idled or ageing tankers, each capable of holding around two million barrels, or redirect a portion overland and by rail to Pakistan.

During Trump’s first term, Iran reduced production to roughly 200,000 barrels per day without inflicting significant structural damage on its oil infrastructure.

“Iran is not even particularly close to beginning” to shut down its wells, said Brett Erickson of Obsidian Risk Advisors. The sanctions and blockade will have an impact, but “there is no realistic scenario in which they produce the necessary result within a timeframe compatible” with Trump’s political imperatives. Even if the war were to end today, Erickson added, “it will take many months before the situation returns to anything resembling normality.”

Experts are sceptical that time is on Trump’s side.

“We can certainly inflict further damage on the Iranian economy, but they have withstood greater pressure than virtually any other economy in modern history, and it has produced neither regime collapse nor more reasonable positions,” said Suzanne Maloney, Iran specialist and director of the Foreign Policy programme at the Brookings Institution.

“I believe President Trump does not truly understand what motivates Iranians,” said Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa programme at Chatham House. “They do not make decisions on the basis of GDP — if they did, they would have reached an agreement years ago.”

If anything, Iran’s positions have hardened over the course of the war. Yet Trump’s tactics have not changed. “Every time pressure has failed to produce the desired outcome, he has reached for a new coercive instrument that he believed would magically deliver victory,” said Ali Vaez, director of the Iran project at the International Crisis Group. “He always believes he is one final turn of the screw away from success.”

This is not to say that American strategy is not inflicting suffering. It is.

But Iran is a sufficiently authoritarian state that the political mechanisms which might otherwise produce pressure toward compromise simply do not exist, as Maloney has observed. “Trump, by contrast, faces the midterm elections in the autumn. And voters will tolerate only a finite quantity of economic pain.”

This renders all the more pertinent the observation that the average price of petrol in the United States has surpassed $4.50 per gallon, closing in daily on the all-time record of $5.01 reached in June 2022. The cost of aviation fuel has doubled; airfare prices have risen by 20 per cent; cancellations are mounting.

While the Iranian regime has spent decades engineering itself to withstand enormous suffering and violence — and has cruelly conditioned its population to do likewise — in democracies, five percentage points of inflation can be sufficient to topple a government.

Confronting totalitarian regimes is both necessary and right. But the strategy of “let us see who can endure more” does not work.

Yet this is not to suggest that the situation inside Iran is anything approaching tranquil or impervious to the damage inflicted by the American-Israeli offensive.

Iran’s current historical conjuncture is defined by a multi-layered crisis: geopolitical, economic and generational.

It is no coincidence that the epicentre of recent protests has been Tehran’s grand bazaar. Throughout Iranian history, the bazaar has served as a barometer of sociopolitical tension: when contradictions reach boiling point, the merchants shutter their stalls.

Since October 7th, the Islamic Republic has witnessed the progressive erosion of its regional sphere of influence. The degradation of Hamas, the decapitation of Hezbollah and the collapse of Alawite-led Syria have delivered a stinging blow to Persian pride.

This has given rise to an ambivalent dynamic: while criticism of the system and its modes of regional projection has intensified, the imperial core has simultaneously grasped the centrality of the ballistic missile programme, now regarded across a broad spectrum of Iranian society as the sole reliable guarantee of national defence.

To this must be added decades of systemic corruption and resource mismanagement, compounded by an increasingly suffocating international sanctions regime.

Galloping inflation and surging prices are compelling vast swathes of the population to multiply their sources of income — many supplementing their earnings with evening work through platforms such as Snapp, Iran’s equivalent of Uber.

Today the Iranian socioeconomic fabric is deeply intertwined with enterprises connected to the Revolutionary Guards Corps, while large segments of the most vulnerable population depend on subsidies dispensed by the bonyad — charitable foundations that accumulated their capital through the expropriation of assets in the post-revolutionary period.

Though they do nothing to address the structural causes of poverty and serve instead to nourish the clientelist networks that sustain clerical power, these conglomerates nonetheless guarantee the survival of millions.

Into this context is woven a profound generational crisis of the nezam.

During the early decades following the Shah’s downfall, Iran was led by a predominantly youthful ruling class — one inclined to mock the gerontocracy of the Gulf’s other rulers.

Today the tables have turned entirely.

The ageing of the leadership and the emergence of new generations who are hostile to the revolutionary ideals have produced a structural fracture in Iranian society.

After the repeated failures of reformist initiatives — perpetually forced to mediate between the impulse for change and the resistance of the system’s conservative factions — a considerable share of young Iranians has concluded that the nezam is unreformable.

They are choosing exile, or nursing a deep frustration that is curdling into political radicalisation and a desire to overturn the existing order.

Two observations suffice to capture the current collective psychology of Iranians.

First: though exhausted by the inefficiencies and contradictions of the theocracy, the Persian heart of Iran is unwilling to relinquish this system of power — which embodies the institutional architecture responsible for the country’s sovereignty — in the absence of a structured alternative capable of replacing it swiftly.

Second: any population, even one living under oppression, would begin to question the intentions of a putative liberator if bombs were falling on civilian infrastructure in the opening phases of an intervention — especially when the party dropping them is theoretically capable of conducting precision operations.

While the American worldview tends to interpret engagement with the other in terms of submission and dominance, Iranians have been raised within a cultural inheritance steeped in the concept of resistance — against governments perceived as unjust and against powers whose hegemony is deemed oppressive.

There is a cruel irony in all of this.

The harder Trump squeezes, the more he reinforces precisely what he seeks to destroy: the regime’s narrative of resistance against the external enemy — the very narrative that holds together a country which, in so many other respects, is coming apart.

Every missile that falls, every tanker that is blocked, every sanction imposed becomes, for Khamenei, an argument.

Without intending to, Trump is authoring the propaganda of his own adversary.

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Written by Luca Salvemini
No. 159 - April 26, 2026

“On March 23rd, 2021, a sandstorm strikes the Suez Canal. Sandstorms are a fairly common occurrence in the Sinai, a flat, dry and dusty region.

When the dust settles, the Ever Given, a vessel as long as the Empire State Building is tall, finds itself wedged across the Suez Canal, blocking all passage.

Fifteen percent of all global cargo moves through Suez and, because of the obstruction, an enormous quantity of goods — from toilet paper to tennis balls — grinds to a halt.

The world stops before a ship carrying billions of dollars’ worth of merchandise.

Among the 18,000 containers aboard the Ever Given are blankets, furniture and laptops. On other ships, queuing behind the stricken vessel, there is everything: personal protective equipment needed in the fight against COVID, supplies destined for garden retailers.

The ship is Japanese-owned, operated by a German firm, chartered to a Taiwanese company, steered by an Indian crew, insured by a British broker and sailing under a Panamanian flag.

Many countries and many companies have interests tied to the vessel, and all of them have an opinion on how to free it.

Dredgers and tugboats are mobilised with remarkable speed, and millions of cubic metres of mud and water are shifted. Two of the largest and most powerful tugs in the world, the Dutch Alp Guard and the Italian Carlo Magno, join the effort.

What experts feared might be a blockage lasting weeks or months was resolved in just six days.

Without global cooperation, the outcome would have been far worse.

For those six days, the Ever Given was the weakest link in the global supply chain, a broken link, and only coordinated global action could repair it.”1

So opens Chapter 11 of Permacrisis, written by Michael Spence, Gordon Brown and Mohamed El-Erian.

The parallels with the present situation are unmistakable, and not only because of the thread connecting the obstruction of the Suez Canal to the current crisis at the Strait of Hormuz.

It is the deep structure of the event that speaks: global interdependence, laid bare before our eyes with unsparing clarity.

As the authors of the book put it, in an interdependent world “we are only as strong as our weakest link.”

Today, that weakest link is called Hormuz, and it is 33 kilometres wide.

Political and economic events of planetary scale, the lives of billions of people, even their prayers, are at this moment bound to what becomes of those 33 kilometres.

But were we not living in an era of globalisation?

How is it possible that global politics and global economics should depend on something so small? And on so many other segments equally small, such as the distance between Wuqiu Island, the westernmost point of Taiwan, and the Chinese mainland?

Must we then conclude that globalisation has failed and ended? The temptation is to say yes. But.

Hormuz would count for nothing if it were not embedded in a global energy supply network. In the same way, the tariffs imposed by the Trump administration function only because trade is global.

The same holds for China: what would become of its present power if it could not export to the markets of distant societies that do not share its values? The vetoes of Putin and Xi, like those of Orbán until recently, work because they are exercised within post-national political institutions such as the European Union and the United Nations.

A grain of sand matters enormously inside a mechanism and not at all on a beach.

Geography, it is true, has returned to force its way back into a world that once imagined it had abolished space.

As in physics, so too in politics and economics: space has ceased to appear a neutral backdrop. Certain areas of the planet demonstrate a capacity to alter flows and reshape context.

Oil, gas, rare earths, soya, water: through their physical location, these resources have reasserted a weight before which even the most sophisticated artificial intelligence must bow. In finance, gold has returned.

Perhaps, then, what has failed is not globalisation itself but a particular idea of it: the notion that everything could be dematerialised and disembodied, reduced to information and transmitted at the speed of light, abolishing time, space and physical substance.

What has collapsed is the illusion of a perfect and global market, one immune to time, place and the constraints of matter. Much can indeed travel at that speed, but much else, and by no means the marginal parts, can move only at the speed of sound, or more often at the far slower pace at which bodies traverse the surface of the earth.

From Suez in 2021 to Hormuz in 2026, history repeats itself.

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Written by Luca Salvemini
No. 158 - April 19, 2026

The conflict has entered its fifth week, and its consequences are rippling outward far beyond the Gulf.

The pattern, familiar from other episodes of global disruption — the pandemic of 2020, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 — is by now well established: winners and losers, widening inequalities between nations and between social strata within them.

The global export of inflation on one side; the entrenchment of economic power on the other.

A Chokepoint Unlike Any Other

The strategy pursued by the Islamic Republic of Iran since the Israeli-American strike of 28 February 2026 — the opening act of the Third Gulf War — has thrust the Strait of Hormuz back to the centre of geopolitical reckoning as an indispensable artery of the world’s oil supply.

The waterway is barely 33 kilometres wide; its navigable lanes narrow to two corridors of roughly three kilometres each, one inbound, one outbound.

Through them flows one fifth of the crude oil traded globally, accounting for approximately 30 percent of worldwide primary energy consumption.

When the flow through a node of this magnitude is disrupted, entire economies are forced to reconfigure their energy priorities.

But the consequences extend far beyond the price of fuel at the pump.

Our Daily Bread

We are accustomed to overlooking the degree to which the petroleum century, so frequently declared over, persists because hydrocarbons permeate, directly or otherwise, virtually every activity of our hyperindustrial societies.

The ramifications surface in the most unexpected places.

Consider food.

Urea is the most widely used nitrogen-based fertiliser in agriculture.

Its industrial production is an intensely energy-hungry process, wholly dependent on natural gas.

This is where the Gulf asserts its centrality: the region produces approximately 40 percent of the world’s exported urea and 20 percent of its ammonia.

Roughly 30 percent of global fertiliser exports and 20 percent of liquefied natural gas pass through the Strait of Hormuz.

Even sulphur, a byproduct of oil refining and an essential input in fertiliser production, originates in the Gulf for nearly half of the world’s supply.

A single month of closure, arriving on the eve of the planting season across the northern hemisphere, is sufficient to threaten a widespread shortfall in crops that depend heavily on nitrogen fertilisers: maize, wheat and rice — the grains that sustain the greater part of humanity.

The impact would be felt across the world’s leading agricultural producers, from Brazil, India and South Africa to the major European growers, including Germany, France, Italy and Spain.

Alternative suppliers — Russia, China and the United States among them — have little spare capacity and are structurally unable to compensate for a disruption of this magnitude.

When natural gas becomes expensive, fertiliser prices follow.

Combined with the increased cost of the petroleum that powers farm machinery and cold-chain logistics, this burden ultimately falls upon the price of food, where energy accounts for roughly 50 percent of total cost.

For the approximately one billion inhabitants of the wealthy world, the consequence is inflation. For much of the rest, it is hunger.

The alimentary cost of the war is unevenly distributed.

India, with a population of 1.4 billion, is among the most acutely exposed.

The region at greatest risk, however, remains sub-Saharan Africa, where even in ordinary circumstances many countries apply quantities of fertiliser wholly inadequate to meet nutritional needs.

Paradoxically, the food security of the Gulf states themselves has been thrown into question.

The Arab Gulf imports 90 percent of the food it consumes. Under normal conditions, 70 percent of the food supply reaching Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates passes through the Strait of Hormuz and arrives at the port of Jebel Ali in Abu Dhabi, one of the largest container terminals in the world.

Since the outbreak of hostilities, part of this flow has been rerouted through the ports of Fujairah and Sohar, but both are significantly undersized for the volumes involved. Cargo is being redirected overland by truck, at greater cost, with longer lead times and diminished throughput.

Iran, which has suspended its own exports since the conflict began, was, until recently, the principal supplier of fresh fruit and vegetables to the United Arab Emirates.

The Logistics of a World Under Strain

The effects of the Hormuz blockade are compounded by the precarious situation at the Strait of Bab el-Mandab, the other critical bottleneck of the Gulf-Red Sea system, on which roughly one third of global maritime trade depends.

The Houthi militia has been relatively quiet in the opening weeks of the conflict, but its capacity to strike vessels transiting to and from Suez remains formidable.

With the exception of China’s COSCO, the major shipping lines — Maersk, MSC, CMA CGM and Hapag-Lloyd — have suspended all transits through Hormuz and are giving Bab el-Mandab a wide berth.

The only viable alternative is the circumnavigation of Africa, which adds approximately 3,500 nautical miles to each voyage, several additional weeks at sea and upward of one million dollars in extra fuel costs.

These expenses are passed on, in large measure, to consumers.

Rounding the Cape of Good Hope ties up vessels for a materially longer period, thereby contracting the effective supply of global cargo capacity and driving container freight rates higher.

Over the course of these weeks, an average of 600 to 700 ships have been immobilised, representing roughly 10 percent of the world’s total cargo capacity.

Gulf ports, either shut down entirely or operating at severely reduced throughput, normally handle some 14 million containers annually, carrying chemicals, polymers, metals, construction materials and consumer goods.

The disruption has reached sectors that rarely attract attention: aluminium smelters in Qatar and Bahrain together supply close to 10 percent of the world’s output.

Qatar, the second-largest exporter of helium after the United States, produces approximately one third of the global total at the Ras Laffan industrial complex, which has been repeatedly targeted by Iranian drones and missiles.

Helium is indispensable across a range of industries, from cryogenics and welding to nuclear fusion research and particle acceleration. No other producer can make good the shortfall.

The war has also disrupted overflights of the Gulf, with airspace partially or wholly closed across Iran, Iraq, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and the UAE.

Semiconductors, electronic components, medical supplies, perishable goods: these are categories of cargo that routinely travel in the holds of passenger aircraft and dedicated freighters.

Longer routings require more fuel, which reduces usable payload capacity.

Jet fuel has risen by more than 70 percent since the onset of hostilities. The cost of air freight between Asia and Europe has increased by approximately 50 percent, compared with 25 percent on Asia-United States routes.

The outcome is a global air cargo network that is simultaneously more expensive, slower and less reliable.

The situation is further aggravated by the continued closure of Russian-Ukrainian airspace to the north: two fronts of the same encompassing conflict have effectively bisected the globe along a longitudinal axis, disrupting some of the planet’s busiest flight corridors.

Who Pays, and Who Profits

The war has struck the economies of Europe and Asia more swiftly and severely than the American economy, owing to their greater dependence on Gulf hydrocarbons, their geographic proximity and their exposure to the affected maritime and air routes.

An analysis of fifteen economies finds that Italy bears the heaviest burden from rising energy costs. At the opposite extreme stand Canada and Norway, hydrocarbon exporters whose revenues benefit from elevated prices.

Within Asia, India, South Korea and Japan are the most acutely affected.

China, though also a significant importer of Gulf energy, has accumulated substantial strategic reserves and is partially offsetting the shortfall through increased imports from Russia.

The United States is not immune.

America has no supply shortage, but oil and gas are internationally priced commodities: in March, with crude trading at 110 dollars per barrel, petrol rose to nearly 3.9 dollars per gallon from 2.92 in mid-February.

This fresh inflationary wave compounds the structural price pressures that took hold in the post-pandemic economy, and falls with particular severity on lower-income households, which depend on the automobile for 80 percent of their daily travel.

At the financial level, the war’s impact is more concentrated.

Foreign direct investment in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries generates returns three to four times higher than comparable investments in developed markets. American companies alone operate approximately 3,000 sites in the region. This concentration of capital means that, for those who can sustain operations, the conflict yields extraordinary rents. For those who cannot, the losses compound.

But war does not create wealth. It redistributes it along pre-existing lines of force. And these, as invariably, tend toward concentration.

In March 2026 alone, the major oil and gas companies generated approximately 23 billion dollars in windfall profits, equivalent to 30 million dollars per hour.

Should current price levels persist, annual estimates exceed 200 billion dollars. ExxonMobil, Chevron, Saudi Aramco and Gazprom benefit almost automatically: physical scarcity translates into price, and price into margin.

The more significant development, however, occurs where volatility itself becomes an asset. The major integrated companies and energy traders amplify their returns through arbitrage, storage plays and geographic price differentials.

Equinor and BP have reported trading results above expectations, confirming that it is not production alone that generates rent, but the capacity to navigate uncertainty.

The second principal beneficiary is the defence industry.

War consumes military capital and necessitates its replenishment: missiles, missile defence systems, drones, munitions. RTX Corporation has more than doubled in value over recent years; Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics have risen by more than 50 percent.

Alongside the traditional contractors, a new generation of beneficiaries has emerged, less conspicuous but increasingly central: Palantir Technologies and CrowdStrike are recording rising demand for intelligence, surveillance and cybersecurity services, confirming that contemporary conflict is conducted as much in the information domain as on the battlefield.

A third tier, less visible but economically significant, encompasses fertiliser producers and the chemical industry.

The Hormuz blockade disrupts roughly one third of global fertiliser flows, raising prices and margins for producers elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the increase in hydrocarbon costs improves the competitiveness of alternative fuels, particularly biofuels, favouring European and Asian operators active in those segments.

In a global system that presents itself as frictionless and interchangeable, thirty-three kilometres of contested water are sufficient to demonstrate that not everything can be substituted.

When geography reasserts itself, the bill is never shared equitably.

It is paid, as it has always been, by those least positioned to refuse it.

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Written by Luca Salvemini
No. 157 - April 12, 2026

Yesterday, the Orion capsule settled onto the Pacific Ocean, slowed by parachutes after travelling over a million kilometres through deep space. The four astronauts of Artemis II became the human beings who had ventured furthest from Earth in the history of mankind: 406,771 kilometres.

It had not happened in more than fifty years.

At that very same moment, the President of the United States was threatening via social media to send Iran “back to the Stone Age” or to erase it as a civilisation.

This is the world we inhabit: one capable of carrying humankind beyond the Moon and yet equally capable of placing, as an instrument of ordinary diplomacy, the annihilation of an entire civilisation on the negotiating table.

The week that closes today must be read in its entirety through this contradiction.

Pakistan | How an isolated country returned to the global stage

Until a few years ago, Pakistan was regarded by the United States as an unreliable partner, accused of playing both sides during the American invasion of Afghanistan (2001–2021), lending support to Washington while simultaneously sustaining the Taliban.

Trump himself, during his first term, had described it as a country that in exchange for 33 billion dollars in aid had offered nothing but “lies and deceit.”

The three levers that made the mediation possible

From 2025 onwards, the landscape shifted radically, owing to Pakistan’s ability to leverage three distinct and complementary relationships.

With the United States. The rapprochement with Trump was swift and partly grounded in tangible interests: the prospect of extracting rare earth minerals in Pakistan, enthusiastic adhesion to the Board of Peace for Gaza, the proposal to nominate Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, and even an agreement with a company linked to the Trump family’s cryptocurrency ventures. Personal rapport did the rest: Trump referred to General Asim Munir as “my favourite field marshal”.

With Iran. Pakistan enjoys a historical credibility with Tehran that is difficult to replicate: it was the first country to recognise the Islamic Republic, shares an 800-kilometre border with it, hosts the world’s second-largest Shia community, and jointly manages with the ayatollahs the question of the Baloch insurgency.

The absence of American military bases on its soil and its refusal to recognise Israel complete the portrait of a country perceived as genuinely neutral. General Munir, who was educated in Islamic schools and has longstanding ties with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, is the personal embodiment of this bond.

With China. Sino-Pakistani relations are grounded in the CPEC economic corridor, which connects Chinese territory to the port of Gwadar on the Arabian Sea, in Beijing’s substantial investments, and in an anti-Indian strategic convergence that has encompassed military supplies.

It was Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi who chose the two Pakistani leaders — Ishaq Dar and Asim Munir — as the pivotal figures capable of opening a channel towards Washington. According to several accounts, China also brought direct pressure to bear on Iran to accept the ceasefire.

The geometry of the negotiation

The Pakistani mediation team, assembled by Foreign Minister Dar, drew in Turkey, Egypt and Qatar — the very same countries that had proven decisive in pressing Hamas to accede to the release of the last Israeli hostages, thereby closing the war in Gaza.

The method mirrors what Trump had already deployed in that context, with Turkey playing the central role; this time, that role falls to Pakistan.

The Sunni monarchies of the Gulf, still reeling from Iranian missile and drone attacks, feel themselves in some measure guaranteed by this architecture: China had already brokered the resumption of diplomatic relations between Tehran and Riyadh in 2023.

The broader picture: Pakistan as a fulcrum between Washington and Beijing

Pakistan’s mediation is not an isolated episode.

It is the regional projection of a relationship still under construction between Trump and Xi, who are due to meet at the mid-May summit.

Asim Munir and his Iranian counterpart Ghalibaf are the instruments through which the two great powers seek to redraw the balance of power in the Gulf — with implications ranging from rare earths to tariffs.

Control of the Strait of Hormuz, vital to China’s energy flows and to Pakistan’s oil and gas imports, lies at the very heart of this game.

In this configuration, Russia and the European Union remain on the margins: Putin emerges diminished from the conflict, increasingly absorbed into China’s sphere of influence; the EU finds itself estranged from Washington, wary of Moscow and mistrustful of Beijing, with precious few cards to play.

Pakistan’s own interests

Beyond the diplomatic prestige, Islamabad has concrete reasons of its own for seeking a swift resolution: it depends on the Strait of Hormuz for its energy imports and is bound to Saudi Arabia by a mutual defence pact signed last year.

It further expects that the success of this mediation will yield positive effects on its internal conflict with the Afghan Taliban and strengthen its strategic positioning ahead of potential future crises with India.

Whether this proves to be the case remains to be seen, but the stakes could not be higher.

Iran | Hormuz is the real nuclear weapon

Yesterday, on the first day of negotiations, Iran announced through state television the presentation of four “red lines” on which no compromise would be entertained:

• sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz;

• payment of war reparations;

• the full unfreezing of all Iranian financial assets;

• a guarantee of a comprehensive regional ceasefire.

It is sovereignty over Hormuz that constitutes the crux around which the Islamabad negotiations will revolve.

Iranian authorities have confirmed their intention to continue levying a toll on all vessels in transit, with the obvious exception of Iranian ships. The toll is to be paid in cryptocurrency and calibrated to a vessel’s cargo: for oil tankers, one dollar per barrel. The largest tankers can carry in excess of two million barrels.

The Associated Press has reported that Iran and Oman may be permitted to charge a transit fee for passage through the Strait.

The inclusion of Oman — the country that controls the southern tip of the Strait — would serve to legitimise Iran’s claim over the northern coast.

This, in part, explains why Oman has been the least targeted Arab country in the Gulf: barely twenty attacks, compared to the thousands directed against the United Arab Emirates and the hundreds against Qatar.

Trump’s own references to the reconstruction of Iran seem implicitly to leave room for this new revenue stream for the Tehran regime.

Should the toll hypothesis materialise, it would constitute a substantial victory for Tehran: it would define the outcome of this war and go down in history as one of the most stinging defeats ever suffered by the United States.

Through this war, Trump has effectively assigned an economic value to one of the world’s most critical pieces of infrastructure.

Where previously passage was free of charge, that stretch of water has now acquired, in practice, a state proprietor.

It is as though the Atlantic Ocean had come under the control of an entity empowered to extract a toll.

This war has altered something fundamental: it has transformed a stretch of open sea into a controlled infrastructure. And those who wish to traverse it will henceforth pay a price.

On the question of nuclear enrichment, Iran continues to assert its right to enrich uranium “for civilian purposes.”

It may, however, prove willing to renounce a military nuclear capability — as it had already done under the accord negotiated by Obama and subsequently abrogated by Trump — confining itself to civilian development under stringent international monitoring of existing uranium stockpiles, potentially overseen by one or more countries with established civilian nuclear programmes (France being among the plausible candidates).

Such an arrangement would be unthinkable without, in return, the total removal of sanctions, unconditional reintegration into global hydrocarbon markets, and formal recognition of Iran’s status as a full-spectrum actor on the international stage.

Tehran can entertain this negotiating framework because it now understands that the potential closure of Hormuz confers upon it a power of deterrence and coercion comparable, in its effect on the international system, to that of a nuclear arsenal.

United States | The ultimatum trap

The week had opened with Trump threatening via social media to send Iran “back to the Stone Age” or even to eradicate it as a civilisation. It closes with the announcement of a ceasefire and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, while television networks were already setting up overnight specials.

To understand this volte-face, one must retrace the logic — and the contradictions — of the conflict.

The failure of military strategy

The architecture of the original plan had been laid out by Netanyahu to Trump at a White House meeting: assassinate Khamenei, destroy Iran’s military capabilities, and wait for the regime to collapse under the pressure of a popular uprising, while simultaneously neutralising any threat to the Strait of Hormuz.

According to a richly detailed reconstruction in the New York Times by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Trump had accepted this framework wholesale.

Events confounded every assumption.

The regime held for six weeks, demonstrating a resilience far exceeding initial projections; the internal opposition proved substantially weaker than anticipated.

On the military plane, the destruction of the Iranian navy failed to impair Tehran’s capacity to blockade the Strait, and the dismantling of the chain of command did not prevent a highly decentralised system from continuing to strike high-value targets — culminating in the downing of two American fighter jets.

The war has been mired in stalemate since the end of February, with weekly exchanges producing damage and casualties without shifting the underlying balance.

Here the crucial distinction between tactical capability and strategic outcome comes into sharp relief: the ability to execute spectacular and circumscribed military actions does not automatically translate into the imposition of one’s will upon the adversary.

A war is won by whichever party, at its conclusion, finds itself in a more advantageous position than it occupied at the outset.

Trump’s frustration and the ultimatum crisis

Trump’s frustration mounted week by week, manifesting itself in ever more extreme threats, ultimatums announced and then deferred, declarations of victory followed by fresh demands.

At the opening of this week, he issued a new ultimatum, threatening the destruction of Iranian civilian infrastructure — an escalation that openly encroached upon the territory of war crimes.

Iran, fully aware that it held the upper hand, responded by overturning the table: immediate cessation of attacks, compensation for damages sustained, revocation of sanctions, and latitude on the nuclear question.

And, in addition, the assertion of sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, accompanied by the announcement of a transit toll.

Proposals structurally unacceptable to both Washington and the Gulf monarchies, which, having endured Iranian bombardment, would now have found themselves paying tribute to their own assailant.

At that juncture, the ultimatum had become a trap of the issuer’s own making: to withdraw it meant not merely an immediate loss of face, but the permanent erosion of any future capacity to be taken seriously — an outcome intolerable for a president whose sole diplomatic register is the threat.

A provisional reckoning

In the short term, measured against the objective of overthrowing the Islamic Republic, the ayatollahs have won the first half without ambiguity: the regime survives, has elevated a younger and more radical leader, and has absorbed the elimination of prominent figures without yielding to negotiation.

On the military balance sheet, the damage sustained by Iran is real but asymmetric relative to the costs borne by the United States.

Washington, for its part, has expended a considerable volume of precision munitions — Tomahawk cruise missiles foremost among them — that will require at least two years to replenish.

This contraction will diminish the security guarantees extended to allies, who are already exploring alternatives. The Gulf states have seen hundreds of billions of dollars and decades of effort to modernise and render themselves attractive evaporate.

On the American domestic front, the war’s costs in terms of social expenditure and its impact on energy prices across the real economy are shaping up as a destabilising factor ahead of the November midterm elections.

The permanent variable: the Strait of Hormuz

The question that transcends the truce and determines its true worth concerns the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran has tested in the field the feasibility of a blockade, measured the pressure it exerts on global oil flows, and registered the reluctance of other actors to deploy military means to reopen it.

From this moment forward, sovereignty over the Strait is a structural weapon, deployable at any future juncture in the confrontation — more persuasive, in certain respects, than a nuclear arsenal.

The truce may, in this sense, prove to be nothing more than the interval between two halves of a match that remains very much open.

The windfall profits of American energy companies

While economic hardship deepens among the American population — with petrol prices surpassing four dollars per gallon, a threshold that carries real weight in the United States — there are those who are profiting handsomely from the situation: American energy companies, able to export at elevated prices a commodity in acute global demand.

The United States is the world’s foremost producer and exporter of crude oil, and over the past six weeks of conflict has contributed substantially to offsetting the supply deficit created by the war in the Middle East.

According to the research firm Kpler, which tracks maritime shipments and derives estimates from cargo data, American exports of oil and refined products in April are already approaching approximately 4.9 million barrels per day, compared with 4 million barrels per day in March — an increase of nearly 24 per cent. Analysts suggest that by late April and early May, exports could rise further to 5.2 million barrels per day.

A Kpler analyst told the Financial Times that an “armada of tankers” is making its way towards the United States to load crude for onward delivery: 68 vessels are currently heading for American ports, more than double the average of 27 recorded throughout last year.

Demand from Asian countries — those most dependent on Gulf oil — has nearly doubled. European demand has risen by 27 per cent, reflecting a pre-existing dependence on the United States for natural gas.

This international competition for raw materials simultaneously inflates the profits of American energy companies positioned to sell abroad and drives up the price of oil for all consumers, including the American domestic market — since crude prices are set at the global level.

A Pew Research Center survey found that nearly 70 per cent of the American population is concerned about the dramatic price increases being risked by Trump’s war against Iran.

Israel | A two-track strategy

Israel is a country that rediscovers unity and cohesion in wartime, only to fracture again the moment the fighting stops.

The Israeli strikes on Lebanon, launched on the very first day of the American-Iranian truce, swiftly became the first obstacle to be overcome in the negotiations under way in Islamabad.

Iran has placed the cessation of Israeli missile attacks on Lebanon among its conditions, while Israel has refused and in recent days has intensified its bombardment to its heaviest level since the conflict began.

Israel’s objective is to treat its war against Hezbollah as an entirely separate front from the conflict with the Islamic Republic of Iran — a position that requires explicit American endorsement.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Benjamin Netanyahu agreed with Donald Trump on Tuesday evening to keep Beirut outside the scope of the ceasefire with Iran.

Netanyahu’s aim is transparent: to press on with the fighting at least on the Lebanese front and to inflict maximum damage on Hezbollah — Tehran’s ally and a persistent threat on the northern border — before the window closes.

The intensification of strikes following the Iranian ceasefire signals that the Prime Minister dreads the end of the war and is determined to exploit what may be the final days in which such damage can be inflicted on the Shia militia.

On Thursday, Trump personally asked Netanyahu to scale back the attacks: “I spoke with Bibi and he said he’d ease up a bit.”

Washington is pressing for operations in Lebanon not to jeopardise the broader negotiations with Tehran. That evening, in an unexpected move, Netanyahu announced his intention to open direct negotiations with the Lebanese government on an agreement requiring the disarmament of Hezbollah.

It is worth noting that the militia is deeply embedded in Lebanese politics, while remaining institutionally distinct from the government, with which its relations are increasingly strained.

The announcement admits of two readings: either as a sincere Israeli attempt to respond to American pressure and resolve the Lebanese question, or as a tactical manoeuvre to buy time.

A negotiation with Beirut will require days merely to get under way and weeks to conclude — during which Israel can continue to strike with full force. By this means, Netanyahu would display “good faith” to his American allies without surrendering operational freedom against Hezbollah.

The decision to halt the war against the Tehran regime has, however, provoked severe internal criticism.

Israelis had supported the conflict with conviction, persuaded that its stated objectives had not yet been achieved, and accordingly refuse to accept that the fighting has been brought to a stop.

Yair Lapid, leader of Yesh Atid and the principal voice of the opposition, accused Netanyahu of having accepted a hasty agreement without regard for the country’s genuine security requirements. On X, he wrote: “There has been no political disaster of this magnitude in our entire history. Netanyahu has failed politically and strategically.”

In the days ahead, Trump will face a delicate choice: risk unravelling the broader accord with Iran, or intensify pressure on Netanyahu to the point of compelling a complete halt to operations in Lebanon.

Israel’s position remains unequivocal: the war against Hezbollah does not end with the one against Iran. And to keep that separation intact, Jerusalem is prepared to play on multiple boards simultaneously.

China | Never interrupt an enemy in the act of making mistakes

China’s role has been acknowledged by multiple parties — Donald Trump foremost among them — and has unfolded through an extended sequence of bilateral exchanges over recent weeks.

Beijing’s official communications have seized the opportunity to highlight both the twenty-six telephone calls placed by Foreign Minister Wang Yi with all parties concerned, and the five-point initiative published jointly with Pakistan days ago, calling for an immediate ceasefire, negotiations respectful of state sovereignty, the protection of civilians, freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz, and a multilateral framework under UN auspices.

This is not the first occasion on which Beijing has put itself forward as a mediator in a major conflict. In 2023 it presented a twelve-point position paper on Ukraine’s path to peace — evidently without success.

On this occasion, China has not acted alone, and not solely because its direct interests were at stake. Above all, as recounted in the opening section, Beijing chose to put Pakistan forward as its instrument — its ally and economic dependent.

It is partly for this reason that on Thursday, with a timeliness that may not have been entirely coincidental, the Chinese leadership announced the conclusion of Pakistan-Afghanistan talks hosted in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang region. “The three parties,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry reported, “have identified the fundamental points and priorities to be addressed” in the negotiations.

From the standpoint of image management, brokering peace between Kabul and Islamabad is for China considerably more prudent than plunging directly into the Middle Eastern cauldron.

The Pakistani Foreign Minister’s visit to Beijing, where the joint plan was finalised, allowed China to place its credibility behind an interlocutor who already had open channels on both sides of the conflict, while lending a local character to its own proposal.

Through its constructive role in the accord, Xi Jinping stands to capitalise on a moment of image consolidation he has been pursuing for years: that of a responsible power that respects international law, while Washington bombs without a UN mandate.

Even if the ceasefire falls short of resolving the war — amounting, as it does, to a fragile truce — China can with justification claim to have contributed concretely, and with the acknowledgement of its American adversary, to silencing the guns.

To assess the true weight of Beijing’s intervention in the Iranian puzzle, one will need to await the outcome of the negotiations opening in Islamabad.

Yet what can already be registered today is that China’s intervention may herald an epochal turning point, cementing Beijing’s political influence in a Middle East that has been American-dominated since the Second World War, but across which Chinese interests have spread in recent years with relentless momentum.

Beijing has maintained close contact with Tehran, its “strategic partner,” while signalling its intentions to the Americans by coordinating through Pakistan — China’s quasi-ally, yet a country with deep ties to the United States.

Two days ago, Foreign Minister Wang Yi — responding to Trump’s sustained threats against Iran — stepped into the open by demanding an “immediate” ceasefire, signalling Beijing’s opposition to an escalation that would have further destabilised a region from which not only does China draw over 40 per cent of its imported crude oil, but with which its trade has grown by 50 billion dollars per year since 2023, reaching 350 billion dollars in 2025.

With the United States having demonstrated its inability to guarantee the safe passage of tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, it may well be a Chinese initiative that provides relief not only to the emerging economies of the Global South, but also to advanced economies such as Japan and South Korea, both heavily dependent on energy imports from the Persian Gulf.

China’s diplomatic action is further intertwined with Trump’s forthcoming visit to Beijing, scheduled for 14–15 May, during which Xi Jinping will seek his support for an agenda that serves China’s strategic interests, six months before the midterm elections.

If Beijing succeeds in extricating Trump from what was threatening to become the quagmire of Hormuz, it will be in a position to ask the American president for something of genuine and far-reaching significance.

This week, Xi met Cheng Li-wun, the “unionist” leader of the Kuomintang, freshly elected to head Taiwan’s principal opposition party.

With Cheng’s backing and Trump’s — the latter expected to cease arms sales and curtail support for the ruling Democratic Progressive Party, a shift already partially under way — the Chinese leadership intends to make a meaningful advance towards the “peaceful reunification” of the breakaway island.

From the Strait of Hormuz to the Taiwan Strait, Beijing’s strategic patience has found in Trumpian turbulence an unexpected and formidable ally, one that is enabling the ascending power to accelerate its catch-up with the incumbent hegemon.

In the final reckoning: while Washington frets, Beijing builds.

Before this war, passage through Hormuz was free. Today, that stretch of water has an owner and a toll schedule.

It is a change that appears technical and is in fact epochal: it marks the moment at which a piece of global infrastructure became the effective property of a single state.

The parallel with the Suez Crisis of 1956 is inescapable.

Britain’s humiliation on that occasion sealed the end of Empire and confirmed that London could no longer act without the consent of the superpowers.

Today, America’s inability to guarantee freedom of navigation at Hormuz against Iran’s asymmetric strategy signals something analogous: not a sudden collapse, but the exhaustion of the role of global guarantor that Washington has exercised since the end of the Second World War.

The difference is that in 1956, a new guarantor stood ready to step forward.

Today, it is far from certain that one exists. And a world without a guarantor is, by definition, more perilous than any hegemony.

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Written by Luca Salvemini
No. 156 - April 4, 2026

With the daily column First Light Brief, published on Notes, we track events as they unfold, maintaining a steady focus on the present, from the war in Iran to its global reverberations, beginning in Southeast Asia.

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This is the editorial offering of Foreign Affairs Newsletter: an independent, ambitious project, read each week by +40.000 people and supported entirely through your subscriptions.

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There is a question that resurfaces every time a democracy suffers a terrorist attack of historic proportions: how far can the state clench its fist before the hand stops resembling that of a free society?

It is an uncomfortable question, because it implies that the threat to democracy comes not only from without - from jihadist cells, lone wolves, irregular armies - but can take root within: in parliamentary chambers, in emergency decrees, in laws passed on the swell of collective fear.

Terrorism, in its most perverse logic, does not merely aim to kill. It aims to force its enemy to betray itself.

The Permanent Post-War: The United States after 9/11

The obligatory starting point is the morning of September 11th, 2001 — not so much for the towers falling, an image history has already worn smooth, but for what happens in the weeks that follow, in the corridors of Congress and the offices of the Department of Justice.

On October 26th, 2001, forty-five days after the attacks, President Bush signs the USA PATRIOT Act — an acronym engineered to sound like a profession of patriotic faith: Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism.

It is a 342-page law passed with a speed that leaves little room for parliamentary deliberation. The House votes 357 to 66. The Senate, 98 to 1.

The substance is revolutionary in the most unsettling sense of the word.

It dramatically lowers the threshold for telephone and electronic surveillance, permits access to library records and medical files without specific warrants, and authorises the prolonged detention of suspected foreigners without formal charge.

The Fourth Amendment to the American Constitution — the one protecting citizens from arbitrary searches — is not abolished, but reinterpreted until it is barely recognisable.

In parallel, the Bush administration constructs a surveillance architecture that will remain largely secret for over a decade, until Edward Snowden reveals its full scope in 2013.

The PRISM programme, the telephone metadata of millions of Americans, the cooperation with major technology companies: all of it justified by the implicit authorisation of the PATRIOT Act and the logic of the permanent state of exception.

Guantánamo becomes the most powerful symbol of this distortion: a legal limbo where individuals can be held indefinitely, classified as enemy combatants to strip them of the protections of ordinary criminal law and the Geneva Conventions.

At its peak, it holds 780 people. Many have never been formally charged with anything.

The question is not whether the United States had the right to defend itself — plainly it did.

The question is whether the form that defence took was compatible with the principles America claimed to be protecting.

As the legal scholar Cass Sunstein, himself a supporter of some emergency measures, wrote: “The risk is not that we become like our enemies. The risk is that we believe we have not.”

The Republic Under Siege: France since 2015

November 13th, 2015. Paris. The Bataclan, the Stade de France, the café terraces of the 10th and 11th arrondissements. 130 dead, 413 wounded.

The night France discovers it is at war on a front it had refused to see.

The French legislative response is in some ways more revealing than the American one, because it unfolds in a country with a different legal tradition, a culture of rights codified by Revolution, a Republic that has always made laïcisme and individual liberty the very DNA of its constitution.

The Hollande government declares a state of emergency that same night.

Nobody is surprised: it is a measure the constitution provides for acute crises.

But the state of emergency is extended six consecutive times, remaining in force for nearly two years — until November 2017. In the meantime, much of its exceptional apparatus is absorbed into ordinary legislation through the 2017 counter-terrorism law.

This is the most insidious mechanism of all: the problem is not the emergency itself, but its normalisation. When extraordinary measures become ordinary, when the exception becomes the rule, the perimeter of the rule of law contracts — permanently.

The measures adopted include warrantless home searches — over 3,500 carried out during the state of emergency — administrative detention on the basis of mere suspicion, the closure of places of worship for ‘apologia of terrorism’, and a proposal, eventually withdrawn after a ferocious parliamentary battle, to strip dual nationals convicted of terrorism offences of their citizenship.

In 2021, the so-called ‘separatism law’ extends state authority still further over religious communities, in ways that part of the administrative judiciary has described as straining the limits of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Up to this point, France appears to be following the same script as the United States: the wounded democracy tightening its grip, expanding its powers of control.

But the French story has a second act that makes it the most instructive — and in some ways the most affecting — case in this entire analysis.

V13: When Democracy Takes the Stand

On September 13th, 2021, nearly six years after that night, the trial of the November 13th attackers opens in Paris.

It is known simply as V13 — Vendredi 13, Friday the 13th.

It is the largest criminal trial in the history of the French Republic: twenty defendants, nearly two thousand civil parties, a courtroom purpose-built at the Palais de Justice to contain history.

The writer Emmanuel Carrère gains accreditation to follow the entire proceedings and turns the experience into a book — V13, published in 2022 — one of the most lucid and necessary accounts European literature has produced of what it actually means to deliver justice in a democracy that has suffered collective trauma.

What Carrère documents is something extraordinary in its procedural ordinariness: the attackers — or those accused of aiding them — had a lawyer, the right to speak, the right to remain silent, the right to contest the evidence.

Salah Abdeslam, the only surviving member of the commando, sits in court for months. He can defend himself. He can — and does, with a brazenness that strains the composure of the room — assert his actions, invoke his faith, provoke the victims sitting metres away.

And the victims are there, physically present, with their own lawyers, their own right to speak, to testify, to demand answers.

The trial becomes a space in which the grief of nearly two thousand people is heard by the state — not erased, not set aside, but acknowledged within a legal form that transforms it into something other than vengeance.

Carrère writes that sitting in that courtroom day after day taught him something he could not have articulated before experiencing it: that form is content.

That the way a society treats its most savage enemies says everything about what that society truly is, beneath the written constitutions and the official speeches.

It is an example worth setting explicitly against Guantánamo.

The perpetrators of 9/11 have never faced an ordinary trial.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, considered the principal architect of the attacks, has been held since 2003, and his military tribunal — suspended, resumed, suspended again — has not reached a conclusion after more than twenty years.

America chose legal limbo as its answer to terrorism.

France chose the courtroom.

The French Paradox

Is France, then, a positive example or a negative one?

The answer — uncomfortable, precise — is: both, and that is precisely what makes it the most useful case.

It toughened its laws, normalised emergency measures, succumbed to the temptation of making the exception into the rule. In this respect, it has followed a trajectory that should concern anyone attentive to the health of liberal institutions.

But it also did something that not every country struck by terrorism has had the courage or the patience to do: it brought its enemies into a court of law, guaranteed them a defence, and allowed the victims to look their tormentors in the face within proceedings governed by law.

That choice was a precise political act: proof that the Republic defines itself not only by what it defends, but by how it defends it. That method is inseparable from values.

That a democracy which suspends its own rules in order to defeat those who hate it ends up vindicating them.

Israel and the Breaking Point: The Death Penalty

October 7th, 2023 is an event of historic proportions: 1,200 dead in a single day, the worst pogrom against Jews since the Shoah. For Israel — a state born directly from the trauma of annihilation, a state whose very existence is grounded in the memory of what it means to be a defenceless people — that morning is not merely a terrorist attack.

It is a wound that reaches the deepest fibre of national identity.

The military response in Gaza has already generated international debates that lie beyond the scope of this analysis. What concerns us here is a specific piece of domestic legislation: the Knesset’s vote to extend the death penalty to terrorists convicted of mass murder.

Capital punishment already exists in Israeli law, but since 1948 it has functioned almost as a personal sentence reserved for Nazi war criminals — the only person ever executed being Adolf Eichmann in 1962.

That case was so exceptional, so laden with historical and symbolic weight, that it could never be treated as an ordinary precedent.

In that moment, a state barely thirteen years old told its people and the world that the persecution of Jews would henceforth be not merely a matter of historical inquiry or moral debate, but a crime punishable with biblical finality.

Since then, Israel has de facto abolished capital punishment, retaining it formally in its legal code only for war crimes and treason.

The new law would make the death penalty mandatory for those who cause the death of an Israeli citizen, willfully or through negligence, for reasons of racism or hostility toward the public, with the intent to harm the State of Israel or the rebirth of the Jewish people in its homeland.

The Knesset also lowered the threshold for its application: no longer unanimity of the jury, but a qualified majority.

Five months after the parliamentary constitutional committee approved the text on November 3rd, 2025, a bill that it would be an understatement to call controversial has passed its final reading.

The file now passes to the Supreme Court.

Composed of fifteen senior justices, the Court holds the power to limit or strike down legislation it deems incompatible with the state’s basic laws — and there are grounds to question whether this text is consistent with the basic law of 1992 enshrining the inviolability of human life and dignity.

Regardless of how the Court rules, the decision will generate significant controversy — and the consequences for Israel’s international standing matter more than the technical merits of the choice.

The move overturns decades of judicial practice. Its supporters present it as deterrence and justice for the victims of October 7th.

Its critics — among them some of Israel’s most respected legal scholars and a number of survivors of the massacres who have spoken publicly against it — raise an argument worth taking seriously: a state that executes its prisoners, however monstrous, places itself on different ground from the values it claims to uphold.

The law’s stated rationale is clear, and in principle broadly defensible: preventing civilian massacres in Palestinian terrorist attacks and eliminating the prospect of prisoner exchanges. But the mechanisms of its application and its legal effects place it at a vast remove from any ideal of justice centred on due process and rehabilitation.

Domestically, Israel risks eroding the already fragile principle of formal equality between its citizens.

A suicide bomber intent on blowing himself up on a bus in Tel Aviv will not be deterred by the death penalty.

Externally, the law will weigh further on an international image already under severe strain. And the inevitable increase in capital sentences will mark a definitive departure from the foundational principles of liberal democracy — above all, the dignity of human life.

There is also a political dimension that cannot be ignored.

Benjamin Netanyahu was among the 62 votes in favour — evidence that, with national elections approaching, the prime minister is willing to champion the most hardline positions of the far right.

Israel faces a genuine and existential threat from the Islamic Republic of Iran and its regional allies. But when the rockets stop, national unity will fracture and the country will have to reckon with its internal tensions.

Those who have long supported Israel have a moral obligation to criticise a law that would ultimately rebound against the citizens of the state itself.

The problem is not only legal or moral. It is political and communicative.

In the international public debate, complexity rarely prevails. What wins is what is simplest, most immediate, most emotionally potent.

The death penalty, from that standpoint, is a powerful rhetorical weapon for those who wish to damage Israel — and one that is difficult to neutralise.

The Mirror’s Temptation

These three cases — America, France, Israel — converge on a phenomenon that political theorists call “securitisation”: the process by which ordinary political questions are reframed as existential threats and, as such, removed from normal democratic deliberation and handed over to the logic of emergency.

Carl Schmitt, the early twentieth-century German jurist and theorist of the state of exception — and, not incidentally, a supporter of Nazism — identified this mechanism with disturbing clarity: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”

The trouble for liberal democracies is that they have never found a satisfying answer to Schmitt. Each time a crisis arrives severe enough, the temptation to suspend ordinary rules in the name of survival becomes almost irresistible.

But there is a fundamental difference between the logic of terrorism and the logic of democracy: terrorism aims at immediate destruction, while democracy is built on a long horizon.

Emergency laws that erode civil liberties may produce no visible damage in the short run — indeed, they often boost the popularity of the governments that adopt them.

The damage accumulates over time: in legal culture, in the habituation to surveillance, in the erosion of trust between state and citizens, in the normalisation of practices that a decade earlier would have seemed unthinkable.

Remaining Oneself

The final question is not whether democracies must defend themselves — they must, and they have every right and duty to do so with force.

The question is how they do it, and at what cost.

Hannah Arendt, who understood the difference between totalitarianism and liberty better than almost anyone, wrote that democracy is not a state of nature but a continuous achievement, one that must be defended — above all — in the moments when defending it is most costly and most difficult.

Upholding due process for a terrorist does not mean sympathising with terrorism. It means believing that the rules apply always, not only when it is convenient.

Democracies that have responded to terrorism with draconian emergency measures have not become authoritarian regimes.

But some have become something different from what they were — more opaque, quicker to trample rights once considered fundamental, more inclined to sacrifice the liberties of the most vulnerable in the name of security for the many.

The true measure of terrorism’s success is not the body count. It is how much freedom a society is willing to surrender in order to feel safe.

That is an accounting that wounded democracies have yet to open with full honesty.

And yet there exists an image that keeps hope alive — one that comes from one of the countries most savagely struck.

It is the image of a courtroom in Paris, September 2021: Salah Abdeslam at the defendants’ bench, his lawyer beside him.

Nearly two thousand victims present, with their own lawyers.

A judge conducting proceedings according to the rules of the penal code.

No legal limbo, no military installation beyond ordinary jurisdiction, no suspension of guarantees.

Only a trial — long, painful, at times almost unbearable for those in that room who had lost a child, a partner, a friend.

Emmanuel Carrère, who attended every hearing and made it into the book V13, writes that watching that trial taught him something he could not have expressed before living it: that form is content.

That the way a society treats its most ferocious enemies says everything about what that society truly is, beyond its written constitutions and official proclamations.

Democracies are measured in the moments when it would be easier not to be one.

The courtroom at the Palais de Justice, across those nine months of hearings, was perhaps the most powerful answer France could have given to November 13th.

Not the most immediate, not the most visible, not the most popular.

But the most profound.

Because it demonstrated, without need of proclamation, that between the state and those who had attacked it there remained a difference no bomb could erase: the manner in which one confronts hatred without becoming it.

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Written by Luca Salvemini
No. 155 - March 29, 2026

After months of study, analysis, reading and research, the first issue of Strategic Atlas has finally seen the light of day.

I chose to dedicate the inaugural dossier to Mexico — a country in global ascent, expanding demographically, with a median age among the lowest in the world.

Its geographical position places it in direct adjacency to the United States — a border stretching 3,145 kilometres — situating a sharpened point in the underbelly of the hegemonic power.

At the same time, its ties with China run deep. The Dragon has become Mexico’s second-largest trading partner, with bilateral trade growing rapidly and a trajectory of presence that extends well beyond commerce: witness how Hangzhou-based Hikvision has blanketed several Mexican cities — from Puebla to Cancún — with surveillance cameras, while Huawei has built the server and cloud infrastructure underpinning Mexico’s 5G networks.

Mexico is a country where the state simultaneously exists and does not; where sovereignty is real in certain places and purely nominal in others; where economic integration with the United States has grown so profound as to produce a dependency that no declaration of independence will dissolve.

Mexico will be a great power. The question is when, at what cost, and for whom.

The full analysis of Mexico’s present condition and future trajectory can be found here.

A calendar month has passed since the outbreak of the war in the Middle East, which began on 28 February with the joint American and Israeli attack on Iran.

What President Donald Trump had promised would be a swift and successful campaign has instead become mired in complexity, inflicting severe damage on the global economy.

Here is a summary of how we arrived at this point.

The Buildup

The United States began massing warships and military assets in the Middle East between January and February, in the immediate aftermath of the Venezuela operation in which President Nicolás Maduro had been captured.

There are notable parallels between the preparatory phases of the two operations.

As in Venezuela, the United States dispatched large quantities of naval vessels to the region.

In both cases, Washington maintained that the deployments were intended to pressure the other side into negotiations. And in both cases, it broke off those negotiations and attacked.

There is, however, one critical difference: the military force assembled against Iran dwarfed what had been deployed around Venezuela. It represents the largest American military presence in the region since the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

With the attack on Iran, Trump had hoped to replicate what had been achieved in Venezuela — removing the country’s leader, in this case Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, facilitating the installation of a more pliable regime, and claiming a clean victory.

It did not go that way.

The Attack

The United States struck Iran in the early hours of Saturday, 28 February.

Israel participated in the attack; and although the bulk of the public signalling up to that point had come from Trump, intense controversy has since erupted over the role of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Many have argued that it was Netanyahu who pressured and ultimately persuaded Trump to proceed.

The war against Iran has been exclusively aerial to date: the United States and Israel have exploited their military superiority to bomb Iranian territory with virtually no meaningful resistance.

In the opening hours of the campaign, Israel killed Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader and paramount political, military and religious authority of the country.

It then proceeded to eliminate a succession of regime leaders in what has come to be described as a “decapitation strategy.”

Trump expressed frustration with this approach: his intention had been to identify a sufficiently compliant member of the regime with whom to negotiate a surrender, as had occurred with Venezuelan Vice-President Delcy Rodríguez.

But, as he acknowledged in the early days of the war, “almost everyone we had considered is now dead.”

From the outset, a sharp divergence emerged between American and Israeli strategic objectives, even as the two countries have continued to coordinate their strikes.

Trump wants a rapid success achieved at the lowest possible cost. Netanyahu wants to degrade what he regards as the Iranian threat to the maximum degree: in his view, the war should continue for as long as possible, even at the cost of plunging Iran into complete destabilisation.

The United States and Israel have also bombed Iranian infrastructure, and in particular the barracks, checkpoints and bases of the Revolutionary Guards, the police and the Basij: the intent was to weaken the regime’s apparatus of repression and thereby incite the population to revolt.

So far, this has not happened.

The Response

Iran’s response was entirely foreseeable.

For decades, generations of American military strategists had counselled against attacking Iran precisely because the regime retained two serious retaliatory options:

• striking with ballistic missiles and drones the Arab states on the far side of the Persian Gulf, which are American allies;

• closing the Strait of Hormuz, through which pass roughly one fifth of the world’s oil and vast quantities of natural gas.

We discussed the importance of the Strait of Hormuz and other bottlenecks in one of our recent newsletters.

In that regard, I also recommend this in-depth article from The Economist.

Iran pursued both courses of action simultaneously, as had long been anticipated.

Trump, however, declared that “nobody expected this retaliation. We were shocked.”

The regime’s greatest achievement to date, however, has been simply to survive.

Despite the elimination of its most senior leaders, the regime has held together.

It appointed Khamenei’s son Mojtaba as the new Supreme Leader, and has continued, with reasonable effectiveness, to mount a military response and to suppress internal dissent.

This resilience reflects a deliberate structural choice: Iran has built its leadership on a model that is both decentralised and deep.

Decentralised in the sense that if one decision-making node is destroyed, the others can continue to function. Deep in the sense that for every leader eliminated, another stands ready to take his place — and another after that.

Iran is betting that its leadership structure is sufficiently deep to absorb the blows, as it has proven to be so far.

Israel and the United States are wagering the opposite.

The Widening Conflict

Iran has also sought to extend the war to as many countries as possible beyond the Persian Gulf: it has struck Cyprus and Azerbaijan, among others sporadically, and has bombed the military bases of several non-belligerent nations in the Middle East.

Beyond the Gulf, the war has spread along two other main fronts.

In Lebanon, Israel has launched systematic bombing campaigns and ground operations against Hezbollah, Iran’s allied militia.

And in Iraq, various pro-Iranian Shia militias have begun firing missiles and drones at targets both within Iraq and abroad.

In Iraqi Kurdistan, moreover, anti-regime Iranian Kurdish militias are waiting to cross into Iran and enter the fighting. They have not yet done so — partly due to their unpreparedness, and partly because the United States, at least for now, wishes to avoid their involvement.

On Saturday, the Houthis launched a ballistic missile against Israel for the first time. The group, which is allied with Iran and controls much of Yemen, may be signalling its entry into the war.

The Energy Crisis

The war has triggered the most severe energy crisis in years.

On one side, the Arab states of the Gulf — which hold approximately 35 per cent of the world’s oil reserves and a substantial share of its natural gas reserves — have suspended part of their production as a result of Iranian strikes.

On the other, Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz has brought exports to a halt.

Around 80 per cent of the hydrocarbons produced in the Gulf are exported to Asia, which has suffered the most acute consequences.

Oil prices — and to a degree natural gas prices — are, however, set at the international level, and shortages in Asia have driven increases worldwide.

Rising oil prices push up the cost of fuel, generating inflationary pressure that ripples through all other prices: there is a real risk that the energy crisis will metastasise into an economic crisis with lasting consequences.

For this reason, Trump has pursued every available avenue to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, including organising a military escort mission for tankers and commercial vessels.

He sought NATO allies’ participation, but they refused on the grounds that the mission would be excessively dangerous, exposing their naval vessels to the risk of Iranian attack.

Trump declared that the United States “will remember” its allies’ ingratitude.

The Quagmire

Two fundamental developments have confounded Trump’s expectations.

The Iranian regime has not collapsed. And not only has it failed to collapse, it has also found an effective means of applying pressure on the United States through the energy crisis.

The result is that Trump finds himself, in practical terms, trapped in this war.

In an attempt to extricate himself, the United States has over the past few days sought to initiate diplomatic negotiations through intermediary countries such as Pakistan and Turkey.

Iran, however, has maintained highly maximalist positions: its demands include, among other things, compensation for war damages and the retention of at least partial control over the Strait of Hormuz, enabling it to collect tolls from passing vessels.

These are conditions that the United States and its Gulf allies will find extremely difficult to accept — and they reveal the degree to which Iran believes itself capable of holding out, at least for now.

“Congress must not give Trump a blank cheque for the Iran war”

As Financial Times highlights, the Pentagon has stated that the first two days of the current war against Iran cost the US about $5.6bn in munitions alone, and the first week about twice that in total costs.

Considering the mix of offensive and defensive weapons fired against thousands of targets — perhaps as many as 15,000 to 20,000 already — this is a plausible pace of expenditure.

Advanced defensive interceptors like the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system (THAAD) and long-range attack weapons like Tomahawk can cost several million dollars apiece.

That is a lot, but it is a far cry from the amount the White House is now seeking from Congress.

The Trump administration plans to ask Congress for $200bn to fund the ongoing Iran war. This would be a gross overestimate of the costs of the war to date and at any time in coming weeks. Worse, if approved, it could be interpreted as a blessing by Congress for a major escalation — since nothing about the current operation implies such a price tag over the weeks to come.

To grasp how excessive the $200bn request is, consider the costs of some past conflicts in the modern era. Operation Desert Storm in 1991, with more than half a million US troops, lasted for 40 days of combat, plus several months of preparation and redeployment, and cost about $150bn as expressed in constant 2026 dollars (adjusted for inflation, that is).

The US role in the Iraq war of 2003-2011 cost about $135bn a year on average or more than $10bn a month, as expressed in 2026 dollars — with well over 100,000 American troops in the region on average.

The five-year campaign against Isis in Iraq and Syria from 2014 to 2019 cost less than $10bn per year for the air campaign in 2026 dollars. Typically, 2,000 to 3,000 munitions were dropped a month.

Scaling that to today’s larger operation, and accounting for the use of offensive and defensive weapons alike, would imply a pace of expenditure perhaps 20 to 30 times as great.

The 78-day Kosovo air war of 1999 involved about 1,000 Nato planes and cost the US about $10bn in 2026 dollars.

Taken together, these precedents suggest that the pace of costs of the first week of the Iran war was exceptionally high and has likely declined since. By the end of March, at the one-month mark, the US will probably have spent perhaps $30-40bn in overall military costs — just a fraction of the requested $200bn — unless this war goes through the entire summer, or winds up as a ground war.

Poor Options

The United States is effectively confronted with two options.

It can seek some form of diplomatic agreement that ends the war quickly, leaving the Iranian regime in place.

Trump has claimed on multiple occasions in recent weeks that the United States has already won because it has severely degraded Iran’s military capabilities — which is true, though they have not been eliminated entirely.

Moreover, Iran’s nuclear programme, one of the stated justifications for the American and Israeli intervention, remains intact.

An agreement at this juncture risks making Trump appear weak at a moment when he is already suffering in the polls: American public opinion is broadly opposed to the war and is feeling the effects of rising fuel prices.

An agreement would also alienate Washington’s allies: Israel, which wants the war to continue in order to weaken the regime as much as possible, and the Arab states of the Gulf, which now fear coexistence with an Iran rendered more aggressive by the experience of war.

The alternative is a new escalation, which in practical terms means a ground operation.

The United States is deploying thousands of marines specialised in amphibious landings — that is, capable of mounting special operations launched from the sea — to the Middle East.

Several thousand soldiers would be insufficient for a large-scale invasion, but could serve for a limited operation, such as one aimed at seizing Kharg Island, Iran’s principal oil export terminal.

Iran has already warned that any ground attack will be met with an intensification of its bombardments against the Gulf states.

Diverging Wars

The further the Middle East war advances, the more the objectives of the United States and Israel — the two countries attacking Iran — appear likely to diverge.

The Trump administration is concerned with regional stability in the aftermath of the conflict: that of Iran, but also that of the Arab states of the Gulf, on which a large share of the world’s energy supplies depends.

The Netanyahu government, by contrast, has a single overriding objective — the security of Israel. And to maintain a secure and dominant Israel in the Middle East, regional stability may not be a requirement. It may not even be desirable.

This divergence is now unmistakable and is beginning to surface on the ground.

In military terms, the United States and Israel operated in near-perfect coordination during the opening days of the war, dividing targets and zones of action between them — Israel bombing primarily in western and central Iran, the United States in the south.

But, as a report by Axios reconstructs, the first points of friction emerged after Israel struck fuel depots in Tehran, triggering massive explosions and sending a vast black cloud billowing over the Iranian capital.

The United States was taken aback by the strike, which caused damage affecting mainly the civilian population and risks strengthening domestic support for the regime. “The president didn’t like it,” an anonymous American administration official told the outlet.

Understanding the distance between Washington and Jerusalem requires understanding what each side is actually fighting for.

Trump’s objective was a war swift enough to eliminate immediate threats without fundamentally destabilising the Middle East — and, above all, without drawing the United States into a protracted regional conflict of the kind that consumed the country for the better part of two decades.

Netanyahu’s objective is far broader, and has been stated with clarity from the outset: the dismantlement of the Iranian regime, Israel’s historic adversary.

This means continuing to bomb Iran and eliminate its leadership until the regime has collapsed entirely. In pursuit of this goal, Israel gives no weight to Iranian or regional stability — indeed, if the outcome of the war is not merely regime collapse but the full destabilisation of Iran as a state, Netanyahu regards this as a potential advantage for Israel.

Danny Citrinowicz, an Iran specialist at the Israeli think tank Institute for National Security Studies, told the Financial Times that the Israeli government’s position is the following: “If we can have a coup, great. If we can push people to protest in the streets, great. If we can have a civil war, great. Israel couldn’t care less about the future or stability of Iran.”

The underlying logic is this: if the Iranian government survives — weakened and more amenable to American demands, perhaps, but intact — the threat to Israel will sooner or later reassert itself.

Iran is, after all, a large country of 92 million people who have been subjected to decades of intense anti-Israeli propaganda.

But an Iran that is weakened, destabilised, fragmented and consumed by civil war would be far easier for Israel to dominate militarily.

This prospect alarms the United States.

A fragile and unstable Iran would render the entire region fragile and unstable, with consequences that are difficult to predict and that range from a new migration crisis to a surge in terrorist threats.

Beyond that, it would make it virtually certain that the United States would have to re-engage in the Middle East on a sustained basis — precisely what the Trump administration is determined to avoid.

These differences are now beginning to manifest on the diplomatic front as well.

Axios reported a few days ago that the Israeli government had made clear its irritation at any potential American attempt to open a negotiating channel with the Iranian leadership: Israel wants no dialogue at this stage.

For now, the Israeli line appears to be prevailing.

But in recent days, with gas and oil prices at their highest levels in years, the economic pressure may prove too great for Trump to absorb — and the calculus could shift.

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Written by Luca Salvemini
No. 154 - March 22, 2026

Strategic Atlas is the new analytical column of Foreign Affairs Newsletter.

It is written for investors, entrepreneurs, analysts, researchers, and journalists who need to understand geopolitical complexity before it moves markets and governments.

The first issue is on Mexico, a story about power.

It sits at the intersection of two oceans, embedded in the American economic system to a degree no other country approaches — $900 billion in bilateral trade, the largest commercial relationship on the continent.

It is the world’s most populous Spanish-speaking nation, and one of the few countries where American cultural influence has found a ceiling: only 6% of Mexicans identify as evangelical-Protestant, against 55% in Costa Rica, 30% in Venezuela, 28% in Brazil.

And then there is the diaspora.

Thirty-eight million Mexicans living inside the United States, maintaining ties to the country of origin that no assimilation policy has severed. No other nation holds a comparable instrument of leverage over its neighbor — demographic, cultural, and political at once.

An emerging strategic power whose full weight has yet to be calculated.

That calculation is what Strategic Atlas is for.

Strategic Atlas — First Edition: Mexico - Available March 26, exclusively for paid subscribers.

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It has been another week of rockets and drones aimed where it hurts most.

The Iranian regime has struck or attempted to strike facilities in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Kuwait — ships, ports, refineries, storage depots, oilfields.

For three weeks, Iran has continued its retaliatory campaign against every Gulf state in reach. For three weeks, those states have continued not to strike back.

More than two weeks after triggering a war against Iran, Donald Trump faces a choice that admits no middle ground: press the offensive to achieve the objectives he declared at the outset, or seek a way out of a conflict that keeps expanding, with dangerous consequences on the military, diplomatic, and economic fronts.

Both options are deeply problematic.

Trump and his advisers drew the United States into the largest Middle Eastern war in twenty-five years while systematically underestimating what they were setting in motion.

According to American officials interviewed by the New York Times, the principal military achievement so far has been destroying much of Iran’s missile arsenal and air defences, and dealing a severe blow to its navy.

The regime, however, remains standing, and most of the stated objectives — beginning with the nuclear question — have not been met.

What follows is an attempt to bring order to the five principal mistakes that brought the United States to where it stands today.

I — Unilateral Isolation

Burning alliances before you need them

Allies treated with contempt eventually stop being allies.

Some respond to hostility in kind. Governments that have been humiliated find ways to hurt you — and sooner or later, the right moment presents itself.

Which is, more or less, what happened.

Trump’s fury at his allies’ refusal to help reopen navigation through the Strait of Hormuz has been widely reported.

Not one of the countries approached — European or otherwise — agreed to participate. This should surprise no one. For years, the president has attacked allies verbally, imposed tariffs on them, threatened to abandon them militarily, and insisted that American policy must serve American interests alone.

Since the start of his second term, the pressure has become more concrete: trade tariffs applied indiscriminately to allies and adversaries alike, often hitting the former harder; unilateral withdrawal from international agreements and agencies; threats to annex Greenland; a systematic downgrading of support for Ukraine combined with a conspicuous tilt toward Moscow.

In recent days alone, Trump declared that Keir Starmer is “unfortunately not Churchill” and that Macron “will soon have to leave his office.”

When he sought allied support for the response to the Hormuz blockade, the answers were evasive but uniformly negative.

Germany’s Defence Minister Boris Pistorius was among the most direct: “This is not our war — we did not start it.”

Austrian Chancellor Christian Stocker declared that “Europe and Austria will not be blackmailed.”

Nearly every government reminded Washington that NATO is a defensive alliance, not an instrument designed to follow whoever chooses to start a war.

The sharpest disappointments have not come from Europe alone.

Qatar — which hosts the Al Udeid air base and contributed to shooting down Iranian jets and drones — chose to cut gas production, effectively reinforcing Tehran’s strategy of compressing the global economy to force Trump to stop.

Erdoğan issues verbal warnings to Iran while blocking a Kurdish Peshmerga ground offensive, fearing the implications for Kurdish independence.

Faced with allied recalcitrance, Trump did what Trump does: he accused them of ingratitude, issued threats, then declared that the United States had always preferred to act alone anyway, that this had merely been a loyalty test, that America needs no one.

He has since added: America doesn’t even use the Strait of Hormuz — it doesn’t matter to us. “If you want it open, open it yourselves.”

Unilateralism has produced genuine isolation, and that isolation now constrains every operational move Washington makes.

Invoking NATO intervention after three weeks of bombardment confirms that the United States entered this war without a strategy and is struggling to find a way out.

Trump’s rhetorical question — “Why are we keeping the Strait of Hormuz open when it’s China and others who need it? Why don’t they do it?” — reveals how thoroughly the internal logic of the operation has unravelled.

The ayatollahs’ regime, however mutilated, is still standing, now led by a younger and more radical figure than his predecessor, in an atmosphere of total siege mentality.

One should not be mistaken: the United States and Israel may still prevail in this war, whatever prevailing ultimately means. Given the disproportion of forces, it remains the most probable outcome.

The Hormuz blockade damages Iran too — Tehran has fewer alternative resources and less external support.

The question is when, at what cost, and above all, what it will leave behind.

II — Underestimating the Iranian Regime

Believing a revolutionary regime falls with its leader

When Trump and his advisers anticipated a swift collapse of the Iranian regime, they were discounting its history.

The Islamic Republic was born from a popular revolution against the preceding monarchical order: such systems do not fall with the elimination of their leader, because they possess sufficient institutional force and social legitimacy to produce another.

After Khamenei’s death, the regime elected a new Supreme Leader. The Revolutionary Guards remained in place, as did the militias that repressed and killed thousands of protesters in January.

Rather than inducing moderation, the decapitation of the leadership drove Tehran toward a more hardline posture.

Iran plainly lacks the capacity to inflict unacceptable losses on the United States or Israel, which can now strike at will having established overwhelming air superiority.

To compensate for this military weakness, the regime has intensified the nationalist dimension of the conflict: the longer the strikes continue, the more effectively Tehran consolidates its narrative of national defence against imperial aggression.

Within that framework, the most radical voices gain ground, at the expense of those who might have been open to compromise.

The regime survives, but hardens.

Iranian cyberattacks on American and Israeli targets have begun.

Among the early victims: Stryker Corporation, a Michigan-based manufacturer of advanced medical equipment.

Analysts and diplomats consulted by the Guardian over the past ten days consider a popular uprising implausible.

For Trump, this has a direct practical implication: he will have to negotiate with the new rulers.

With a regime that has consolidated around its hardest core during the course of the war, the prospect of dialogue is unpromising.

Iran emerges from this conflict militarily weakened, its leadership decimated, increasingly resembling a militia rather than a functioning state.

But it has not disappeared — and the vacuum surrounding it is not necessarily favourable to Washington.

III — No Measurable Objectives, No Exit Strategy

Starting a war without knowing how to end it

Nate Swanson, former Iran director at the National Security Council under Biden, has published an essay in Foreign Affairs titled How America’s War on Iran Backfired. He examines several scenarios for how the conflict might end. None of them favours the United States.

Trump has rejected comparisons with Vietnam, insisting that America is winning decisively and that the regime’s military capabilities have been reduced to near zero.

And yet the sense of victory is conspicuously absent.

The president wants to “permanently degrade” Iran’s capabilities — a formulation that, more than any battlefield statistic, reveals the difficulty of defining what success actually looks like.

The most basic question remains unanswered: what is the objective?

Congressional Republicans have set three conditions for their continued support: no ground troops, a strategy for ending the conflict, and a measurable indicator of success.

The administration cannot deliver on any of the three.

The most intractable issue is nuclear.

Trump claims that without the June strikes, Iran would have had a bomb within a month.

The stated goal is now to deprive the regime of any capacity — however remote — to develop nuclear weapons or transfer material to terrorist groups.

Achieving this would require recovering enriched uranium and destroying all remnants of the programme, high-risk operations that would necessitate special forces in Isfahan.

Evidently, the programme had not been “obliterated” in June, as Trump repeatedly claimed. Pressing forward would push the end of the conflict further into the future. A ceasefire that leaves the nuclear file open would leave unresolved the very problem Trump cited to justify the war.

The administration is talking tough while its actions suggest mounting desperation.

The Treasury Secretary has announced an easing of sanctions on Iranian oil. The administration is simultaneously bombing Iran and lifting sanctions on Iran.

When the policy contains that contradiction, things are plainly not going smoothly.

Waivers on Russian oil trade are expected to be extended as well — waivers and extensions: the vocabulary of weakness.

IV — Underestimating Asymmetric Warfare

Winning the conventional conflict while losing the economic one

Despite the US Navy having developed operational plans for a Hormuz contingency over fifty years, none of those plans have been applied.

The administration underestimated the Iranian response in a structural sense: Tehran does not need military victories.

It only needs to hold shipping hostage — denying passage to tankers and cargo vessels — to move markets.

As Brian Katulis of the Middle East Institute has observed, Iran made a deliberate choice to wage an “economic conflict,” knowing that disrupting energy flows is the lever capable of sinking markets and draining global confidence.

Iran’s navy has been destroyed, its air defence systems degraded, its missile stockpiles struck — and yet blocking the strait requires nothing more than explosive dinghies and attack drones.

The symmetry between military power and economic impact has completely broken down.

Arab and Gulf states, along with Israel, have endured missile and drone barrages on a scale without precedent.

American military technology has performed, but it has proven far from impenetrable against simple weapons.

The intercept rate of Iron Dome and the Gulf’s other defensive systems has hovered around 90 per cent — a high figure that nonetheless means one projectile in ten reaches its target.

Including civilian targets, as happened on the first day in Abu Dhabi.

Jihadism has elevated asymmetric warfare to an art form.

It cannot be eradicated by military means alone: it absorbs devastating blows without suffering definitive ones.

It retreats, mutates, and resurfaces.

Without genuine de-escalation, renewed Iranian attacks on Israel, American bases, and Gulf states remains a concrete prospect.

Iran had spent years preparing for this war; its protocols called for distributing command authority to decentralised structures to prevent leadership decapitation from producing chaos.

The approach has proved effective.

One underreported element concerns the Houthis.

The Yemeni Shia militia has been conspicuously absent from the fighting — likely in a posture of deliberate dormancy, conserving their arsenal for a more propitious moment.

Any serious account of Trump’s endgame cannot afford to overlook them.

V — The Miscalculation of great power competition: China wins by watching

Turning a regional war into a strategic windfall for Beijing

The Gulf war has evolved into a strategic contest between Washington and Beijing.

The National Security Strategy published last December was unambiguous: faced with the Chinese challenge, the United States must leverage its economic and military strength, and Iran is the proving ground.

The paradox is that the proving ground is yielding results that benefit precisely the adversary it was meant to contain.

American shale oil insulates the United States from Gulf energy markets to a degree unavailable to the major Asian economies.

China is structurally exposed: up to 45% of its oil imports pass through the Strait of Hormuz. And yet it is Beijing that is gaining from the crisis.

Chinese military planners are studying with close attention the tactics, strengths, and vulnerabilities of every actor involved.

They are watching with quiet satisfaction as the United States burns through stocks of interceptor missiles and materiel, while Washington reallocates resources from the Pacific to the Middle East.

The prospect of American forces becoming bogged down once more in the Middle East — drawn away from the Indo-Pacific theatre — is a strategic outcome Beijing could not have engineered more effectively on its own.

China’s most significant advantage, however, is reputational.

The more erratic and aggressive Trump appears, the more Xi Jinping consolidates his image as a measured, multilateralist leader — a posture that seems to draw directly on a maxim from Sun Tzu: wait with composure while the enemy exhausts himself.

As John Spencer noted in the Wall Street Journal, the conflict is also a stress test of Chinese military credibility — Tehran receives technology from Chinese suppliers, including components for its missile programmes — but Beijing’s net strategic balance remains firmly positive.

The deeper dynamic is systemic.

The post-war global order held because the United States was perceived as a stabilising force. If Washington comes to be seen as a destabilising one, the legitimacy of American leadership will erode — not in a sudden collapse, but in the slow attrition that the historian Edward Gibbon identified as the true mechanism of imperial decline.

The BRICS push to reduce dependence on dollar-denominated finance, the Saudi-Iranian rapprochement brokered by Beijing in 2023, the quiet strategic diversification of the Gulf monarchies: all of these are signals of an order in the process of being redrawn.

The Hormuz crisis is accelerating them.

Five Mistakes, one question

Diplomatic isolation, the underestimation of the regime, the absence of an exit strategy, blindness to asymmetric warfare, the inadvertent windfall delivered to Beijing: taken together, these five mistakes do not look like the product of faulty calculation.

They look like the product of no calculation at all.

Great rival powers typically face a version of the prisoner’s dilemma: they must find ways to reassure one another that neither seeks the other’s destruction, on pain of provoking pre-emptive action.

Reciprocal escalation is dangerous precisely because it compels each side to raise the stakes or forfeit whatever the adversary gained in the previous round.

As the strategist Ray Dalio has written, the two things one can be most certain of in war are that it will not unfold as anticipated, and that it will be considerably worse than imagined.

Winning a war means securing what matters most without losing what matters most.

Wars that cost far more in lives and treasure than they yield in benefits are, by that measure, simply foolish.

Trump now faces the prospect of negotiating with a regime that has rallied around its hardest core. The allies he alienated will not return without political compensation. The Iranian nuclear programme has not been neutralised. And China is watching.

Today it would be premature to declare the end of American global leadership.

The United States remains the world’s foremost military power and retains a central position in global finance and technology. But hegemonic systems rarely collapse outright — they tend to weaken gradually, as confidence in the dominant power erodes.

Every world power, as Dalio reminds us, has its moment of ascendancy — shaped by the uniqueness of its circumstances and the character of its culture.

All of them, eventually, decline.

Some do so with greater grace than others, with less trauma — but decline nonetheless. Traumatic declines can produce some of the worst episodes in history, when the great struggles over wealth and power exact an extraordinary price in both treasure and human life.

The question worth asking — in Gibbon’s terms — is whether this is one of those moments when a single strategic miscalculation accelerates a process of decline already under way.

Or whether the United States retains the capacity to adapt its leadership to a world it has helped to destabilise.

The answer is not yet written.

But the coming weeks will make it considerably more legible.

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Written by Luca Salvemini
No. 153 - March 15, 2026

Mexico is the eleventh largest oil exporter in the world.

Its median age is under 30. Its economy has grown steadily for years.

It is deeply embedded in the American value chain, with bilateral trade at $900 billion.

Yet Mexico has never been absorbed.

Against the pull of the world’s dominant power, it has built an identity that resists assimilation—a cultural canon stubbornly its own.

Today, roughly 40 million Mexicans live in the United States. They are the country’s most powerful geopolitical instrument: a diaspora tuned to Mexican identity, capable of shaping American politics from within.

An emerging power with a long game.

On March 26, the first issue of Strategic Atlas examines what that game looks like.

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Choke points are straits and channels — natural or artificial — that constitute the mandatory passages of global maritime trade.

Today, ninety per cent of world trade by volume travels by sea; and a significant portion of that traffic is compelled to pass through these slivers of water, often no more than a few kilometres wide.

The capacity to control them determines the balance of power among the world’s major nations.

Their deliberate closure becomes a formidable geopolitical weapon: it strangles the flow of goods, energy and raw materials.

Beneath many of these straits run submarine fibre-optic cables as well.

From the eighteenth century onwards, one state dominated the world through sea power for more than two centuries: England — a quintessential thalassocracy, commanding the most powerful fleet on earth and maintaining colonial bases at every strategic node.

After the Second World War, that primacy passed to the United States, which today sustains approximately eight hundred military installations across more than seventy countries.

To control the choke points, for those who exercise this hegemony, is to exercise dominion over the planet.

Consider the Suez Canal and the Strait of Bab el-Mandeb.

The former, inaugurated in 1869, is an artificial waterway in Egypt that reduced the Eurasian shipping route from forty-four to twenty-six days, rendering the circumnavigation of Africa obsolete.

The Strait of Bab el-Mandeb, at the mouth of the Red Sea — approximately forty kilometres wide at its broadest point and one hundred and thirty kilometres in length — separates the Horn of Africa from the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula and serves as the southern gateway toward European ports.

In 2023, these waters carried between ten and twelve per cent of global merchandise trade, eight per cent of liquefied natural gas, and eleven per cent of crude oil and petroleum products.

From November 2023 onwards, with the Houthi attacks on container vessels bound for the Mediterranean and Israel, the area was transformed into a theatre of conflict.

According to Portwatch data, in the period between January and June 2024, the daily average of vessels transiting the Suez Canal fell to thirty-six — less than half the seventy-four recorded during the same period of the previous year.

In the Strait of Bab el-Mandeb, the figure dropped from seventy-five to twenty-nine.

Before arriving at Hormuz, it is instructive to recall a historical episode that illuminates the present with uncommon clarity.

The Dardanelles Strait conventionally marks the boundary between Europe and Asia, and the demarcation line between European and Asian Turkey.

To the north lies the Bosphorus — approximately thirty kilometres long and no more than seven hundred metres wide at its narrowest point — connecting the Sea of Marmara to the Black Sea; to the south, the Dardanelles proper — sixty-eight kilometres in length, 1.2 kilometres wide — joining the Sea of Marmara to the Aegean.

Their particular morphology renders them among the most treacherous choke points to navigate, above all for large-tonnage tankers. Over thirty-six thousand vessels transit the Bosphorus annually.

It was here that a decisive episode unfolded: the Dardanelles Campaign of 1915.

The British and French objective was straightforward in conception: force the strait, neutralise Ottoman coastal batteries, open the road to Constantinople and compel the Ottoman Empire to exit the First World War.

The plan called for a massive naval assault — battleships, then among the most powerful afloat, would bombard the coastal fortifications while civilian minesweepers cleared a corridor through the minefields.

The Allies were confident that naval supremacy would suffice.

On the night of 8 March 1915, a small Ottoman minelayer, the Nusret, executed a manoeuvre that was almost invisible yet utterly decisive.

It laid twenty-six naval mines in a line parallel to the shore in Erenköy Bay, precisely in the area where Allied battleships habitually manoeuvred to reverse course during their bombardments.

The field went undetected by the minesweepers.

On 18 March, the Allied fleet entered the strait for the decisive assault. During the turning manoeuvre, three battleships struck mines: the French Bouvet sank within minutes with hundreds of men aboard; the British HMS Irresistible was destroyed; HMS Ocean went down during the attempted tow.

Within hours, the fleet had lost a significant portion of its operational capital ships. The Admiralty concluded that the strait could not be forced by naval power alone.

Unable to proceed by sea, the Allies resolved to land troops on the Gallipoli Peninsula in April 1915.

That landing degenerated into a prolonged war of attrition against Ottoman forces led in part by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and the campaign ended in Allied withdrawal in January 1916.

An operation designed to alter the balance of a world war, undone by twenty-six mines laid by a comparatively modest vessel.

As Caitlin Talmadge of MIT has observed, in the Dardanelles as in the Strait of Hormuz, the geographical configuration allows the defending party to draw enemy vessels close to shore, where they can be engaged far more effectively. In confined waters, America’s technological advantages are substantially diminished. Drones and missiles reach their targets with greater ease.

Which brings us to the present.

In the Strait of Hormuz, the first attacks were carried out on Tuesday.

The Thai vessel Mayuree Naree was the initial target; the Liberian-flagged Express Rome followed. In the space of a few days, six ships have been struck in total, in addition to the ten hit since the war began.

The gravity of the situation is such that Western governments have authorized the largest coordinated release of strategic reserves: we are already tapping them, buying time at a steep price.

The U.S. government says its warships will escort tankers, a promise that sounds like control but is really just another slow-motion traffic accident.

It reveals that, for now, the United States controls almost nothing.

Europe has increasingly bought gas from the Middle East since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Asia is heavily dependent on oil from the Persian Gulf. Everywhere, the price of fertilizer is rising, and with it food; the price of gasoline, and thus transport; the price of energy, and thus industry.

In short, everything.

It is not only the tapping of reserves that shows how difficult the situation is.

The United States has suspended a century-old law to allow foreign tankers to navigate its inland waters. Then it authorized India to buy Russian oil.

Then it lifted sanctions on Russian oil already loaded onto ships.

Who will be next to ask to buy Russian oil again?

The strategic military exploitation of the strait was confirmed by the opening statements of the Islamic Republic’s new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, who declared that “the lever of blockading the Strait of Hormuz must absolutely continue to be employed”.

Iran has been constructing its asymmetric warfare around that fundamental asset for decades.

Since the 1980s, the Tehran regime has repeatedly threatened to close or render chaotic the passage through the thirty-three kilometres that, at their narrowest, separate the Omani peninsula from the Iranian coast.

It does so not only through direct military projection — which remains inferior to that of the United States or Israel — but above all through the activities of its proxies, most notably the Houthi militia in Yemen, and through the threat of low-cost disruption: suicide skiffs, mines and drones that cost a few thousand dollars to deploy and compel adversaries to activate defence systems costing orders of magnitude more.

The critical difference from the 1980s lies in the fact that, whereas during the Iran-Iraq War the regime sought to avoid total escalation with the United States, today the notion that Tehran might be restrained by fear of consequences appears wholly unrealistic.

For the Islamic Republic, this is, in the most fundamental sense, a war of survival.

Numerous analyses of the conflict have converged on a single, damning observation: the United States entered this war with striking improvisation — unprepared forces, no coordination with European allies, no passage through the United Nations, a systematic underestimation of Iranian retaliatory capabilities.

According to some independent estimates — which should be treated with appropriate caution, given the difficulty of independent verification — daily operational costs to the White House range between nine hundred million and one billion dollars.

Figures that are, over any extended timeline, unsustainable even for a power of America’s magnitude; and to which must be added the indirect costs and the mounting political liabilities.

Moscow and Beijing could furnish Tehran with the intelligence necessary to improve the precision of strikes against American assets in the Gulf.

The region’s placid monarchies, hitherto principally absorbed in the business of prospering in peace, are now on the receiving end of Iranian missiles and have begun to question whether granting the United States military basing rights on their soil was, in retrospect, prudent.

It is conceivable that Iran proves to be a paper tiger and that, after another week of sustained bombardment, it is compelled to capitulate.

But should that not be the case, Trump’s wager risks turning decisively against him.

Arriving at the November midterm elections still mired in a Gulf war — with petrol prices soaring, flag-draped coffins returning home and inflation climbing — could mark his political end.

The sociologist Ulrich Beck once distilled the passage to modernity into a formula that has lost none of its precision: before modernity transformed society, human beings expressed a single fundamental need — “I am hungry.”

Today, in a chaotic and non-inclusive modernity, the majority say instead: “I am afraid.” It is in that soil that populisms take root and democracies erode.

As Professor Giuliano Noci writes, the old ordered chessboard no longer exists.

The world today more closely resembles a vast seismic fault: tectonic plates grazing, compressing, drifting apart. Ideologies have evaporated; what remain are interests.

Global value chains have interwoven economies to such a degree that every geopolitical decision acts as pressure upon the plates.

Alliances become mobile, elastic, frequently contradictory.

The arbiter of the international system — multilateral institutions — appears increasingly incapable of containing these pressures. Geopolitics thus reverts to its most ancient grammar: that of force, of immediate interests, of naked strategic survival.

From the Dardanelles to the Strait of Hormuz, history teaches that military and technological superiority is insufficient when geography and asymmetric tactics are underestimated.

A minor obstacle — a mine, a localised incident — can alter the global equilibrium.

In an ever more interconnected world, the vulnerability of a single strategic passage may translate into economic and political consequences of the widest possible compass.

History reminds us that prudence, intimate knowledge of the terrain and the anticipation of risk remain irreplaceable instruments for those who would genuinely govern the dynamics of the world.

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Written by Luca Salvemini
No. 152 - March 8, 2026

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The world has known no respite for several years now.

My own conviction is that it all began with the hasty American withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, and the return to power of the Taliban.

The Twelve-Day War of June 2025, which marked the first direct confrontation between Israel and Iran with American involvement, proved in retrospect to be only a prelude.

What it anticipated were the joint US-Israeli strikes of 28 February against Iranian nuclear and military sites, the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and the opening of a conflict whose full dimensions most observers have yet to grasp.

What follows is an analysis, necessarily incomplete, of the most consequential contests that will play out across the Middle Eastern theatre in the days and weeks ahead.

It is a long piece, and deliberately so.

The seven sections are designed to stand on their own, so that you can read it in stages, returning to it when time allows.

1. The illusion of the surgical war

Can a war be won when its objective remains undefined?

This was the question that imposed itself during the early days of the Iranian conflict, as one read and listened to the statements issuing from the White House.

In the days immediately following the 28 February attack, the Trump administration promised a swift and controlled operation.

Speaking to Axios, Trump himself declared that he could “continue for a long time and take everything,” but could equally “wrap it up in two or three days and tell the Iranians: see you in a few years if you rebuild your nuclear programme.”

On 1 March, in a telephone conversation with the New York Times, he described the “perfect” scenario for Iran as resembling “what we did in Venezuela.”

Days later, the President was calling on Iran’s elite military forces to lay down their arms and “surrender to the people,” without explaining why the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a force of 190,000 men with every interest in protecting the regime and its economic resources, should suddenly raise a white flag.

It became apparent that Trump and his inner circle, perhaps pushed in a calculating and manipulative fashion by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, had embarked on this war without first establishing its objectives or the parameters for success.

Striking targets is not the same as winning a war; killing a leader is not the same as toppling a regime. Iran’s power structures remain intact, while the provisional government has broadened its attacks across the region, striking both Israel and the Arab states that host American military bases.

The degree of American underestimation of the Iranian dossier is, in any case, remarkable.

It is inexplicable even to invoke the “Venezuela scenario” in reference to a country of ninety million people with which the United States has had no commercial relations for 47 years, since the birth of the Islamic Republic. Iran’s security forces, unlike Venezuela’s state apparatus, are deeply embedded in the country’s social and economic institutions.

On 2 March, at a meeting at the Pentagon, General Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated that the first phase of a “difficult and attritional” operation was under way, adding that fresh forces would soon be deployed to reinforce the tens of thousands of soldiers already present in the region.

My own view is that, in this war above all others, the decisive factor for the United States will soon become one of time and the impatience of the financial markets, to which Donald Trump is notoriously attentive.

Markets feed on stability and certainty; a climate of uncertainty, extreme volatility and unpredictability produces shocks and impulsive reactions.

The absence of any concrete justification for the cost of an army deployed more than six thousand miles from America’s eastern seaboard, combined with the difficulty of defining the conditions under which Trump could declare victory, weighs enormously on the president’s political capital.

Everything suggests the final decision will depend on his instinct, rather than on any presidential conclusion reached in consultation with national security experts.

He will decide.

Not necessarily when Tehran changes regime, an eventuality that will probably never materialise. In the best case, it might be the same regime led by new and more moderate figures.

But victory could equally be declared even if nothing in Iran changed at all, and Trump simply tired of the conflict and announced to the world another presidential proclamation: we have won.

2. The asymmetry that drains the treasury

The defining novelty in contemporary theatres of war is the arrival of the drone: a relatively cheap weapon to manufacture, yet highly effective at saturating and penetrating enemy air defences.

Drones are the weapon that, since the war in Ukraine, has extended military conflicts and allowed David-like nations, outmatched on paper, to hold out far longer than expected against Goliath-like adversaries.

In the Iranian case, Tehran avoids symmetric confrontations such as ground invasions or direct aerial battles, and instead opts for “swarm attacks” using cheap drones like the Shahed-136, capable of overwhelming enemy air defences. These drones, combined with ballistic and cruise missiles, have been launched in large numbers to saturate systems such as the American Patriot and the Israeli Arrow.

Recent analyses indicate that the United States exhausted more than 800 Patriot missiles in just five days of conflict, at a cost exceeding 2.4 billion dollars, exposing the structural vulnerability of an unfavourable cost-exchange ratio.

The arithmetic is unforgiving.

Iranian drones such as the Shahed-136 cost between $20,000 and $50,000 to produce domestically. American interceptors such as the Patriot PAC-3 MSE cost at least three to four million dollars apiece.

This disparity, in which a $20,000 drone requires a $4 million missile to destroy it, is the heart of the asymmetry. Iran can launch hundreds of drones to exhaust American stockpiles, forcing cuts to production or outright withdrawal.

This would explain the Financial Times report on negotiations between Ukraine, the American defence establishment and at least one Gulf state to purchase Ukrainian-designed air defence systems capable of intercepting drones.

Zelensky has confirmed that he is already in contact with the United Arab Emirates and Qatar to discuss Ukrainian anti-drone technology.

It is a startling reversal. For years, as it resisted Russia’s large-scale invasion, the Ukrainian government was the party asking for help, dependent on the decisions of its allies.

It is now the provider of solutions.

3. The Strait of Hormuz: the world holds its breath

The Strait of Hormuz is the point at which geopolitics meets the global economy in its most direct form.

One-fifth of global liquid petroleum consumption and more than a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil trade pass through the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz.

Since the outbreak of the conflict, Iran’s threat to close the strait has already produced tangible consequences.

Before the war in Iran began, between 100 and 138 vessels passed through the Strait of Hormuz each day, of which some 60 to 70 per cent were tankers and gas carriers.

According to the latest estimates, traffic has collapsed by 94 per cent, with a daily average of at most eight ships managing to pass, almost none of them tankers.

As of 5 March 2026, approximately 1.056 million metric tonnes of LNG loaded onto 13 vessels were stranded in the Persian Gulf west of the Strait.

Qatar, which accounts for 93 per cent of all LNG traffic through the strait, has no alternative export route.

The impact of a closure, however, would not fall uniformly.

Asia is by far the most exposed: roughly 60 per cent of the oil and petrochemical raw materials consumed in the region originates from the Middle East.

As the analyst Gianclaudio Torlizzi writes, without those flows, refineries from China to South-East Asia must seek alternatives that are both costly and slow to arrive.

Oil from West Africa or the Americas takes up to two months to reach China, against approximately 25 days via Hormuz.

Japan and China hold strategic reserves, of roughly 250 and 78 days respectively, yet both remain heavily dependent on Middle Eastern crude.

Over the longer term, some Asian countries may respond by reducing the weight of gas in their energy mix and expanding the use of coal and renewables.

Meanwhile, markets are beginning to price in another scenario: an improvement in the terms of trade for energy-exporting countries. This is, in part, precisely Trump’s geopolitical wager.

The United States is a net exporter of oil, but the picture is more complex than it appears: American refineries are configured for heavy crude imported from Canada or Mexico, while domestically produced light crude is exported to Europe and Asia.

What is certain is that the United States does not face the immediate risk of energy shortages that threatens several emerging Asian economies. This resilience, combined with the central role of the dollar in commodity payments, could reinforce both the currency and American financial markets if the crisis were to persist.

Yet the margin for error remains enormous.

A chaotic collapse of the Iranian regime would shake global markets, while its survival would raise searching questions about American strategic credibility.

In either case, if the United States can weather this storm with a degree of energy and geographic insulation, Europe enjoys no such luxury.

4. Water: the true powder keg

Even before the missiles began to fall, Iran was already fighting a silent existential war, one against drought.

In November 2025, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian warned that Tehran, a metropolis of 15 million people, might be forced to confront rationing and the partial evacuation of its population, not because of missiles or revolts, but because the water reserves feeding the capital had fallen to 12 per cent of capacity.

The crisis has deep structural roots.

Iran’s renewable freshwater resources per capita have collapsed from approximately 5,845 cubic metres per year in 1961 to just 1,484 in 2019, pushing the country below the international water-stress threshold of 1,700 and towards the absolute scarcity line of 1,000.

On the opposite shore of the Gulf, the situation is a mirror image.

The countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council face severe water challenges driven by aridity, urbanisation and demographic growth, with an almost total dependence on seawater desalination.

In a conflict that targets civilian infrastructure, water becomes a weapon.

If Iran wished to inflict maximum damage, it would strike the desalination plants on which Gulf countries depend for 85 to 90 per cent of their drinking water.

The fact that it has not done so indicates that it is managing the escalation with a precise logic: to inflict sufficient pain to make the war costly for the coalition, without taking the step that would foreclose any path to an exit.

In short, Iran is using force in a calibrated manner, which is paradoxically a signal that part of the decision-making apparatus is still reasoning in political terms.

If they were to stop calibrating, if they were to strike the wells or the desalination plants, that would be the signal that the logic of survival had overwhelmed the logic of negotiation.

5. Ethnic complexity and Iranian resilience

Washington has identified Iran’s ethnic composition as a strategic lever.

Persians constitute approximately 61 per cent of the Iranian population.

The remainder comprises numerous ethnic groups: Azeris represent the largest minority, accounting for roughly one-sixth of the population; Arabs, about 6 per cent, live mainly in the oil-producing province of Khuzestan; Baluchis, around 2 per cent, inhabit the south-eastern region bordering Pakistan and Afghanistan.

According to intelligence reports, American efforts have focused not only on ethnic groups such as the Kurds and Baluchis, but also on the recruitment of figures within Iran’s regular armed forces, public personalities and local officials.

The plan carries profound risks.

In the Middle East, history matters enormously, and in this case it matters more than most.

Iranians perceive themselves as distinct and are deeply reluctant to be assimilated, whether by the United States or by the petrodollar-based economic power of Saudi Arabia.

It is not realistic to imagine transforming Iran into something resembling the Gulf states: a system founded exclusively on economic prosperity and financial wealth, along the lines of a model that would appeal to Donald Trump.

Persian nationalism is extraordinarily resilient, and has been for millennia. This is an empire that, throughout its history, has resisted every adversary, often at immense cost.

The last occasion lasted eight years, when Saddam Hussein unleashed war against Iran, convinced he could overwhelm it rapidly.

He thought he could swallow it whole. He failed.

No one can say with certainty how far the pasdaran regime has succeeded in fusing itself with traditional Iranian patriotism.

Yet one historical fact is clear: Iran is Shia, not Sunni, and this is also a form of distinction from the Arab and Muslim countries that surround it.

With American support and a weakened central authority, the most likely outcome would be a prolonged tension between the peripheries and the Persian-majority core, potentially giving rise to a fragmented political geography similar to that seen in Syria after the fall of Assad’s regime.

Many peoples, and Iranians certainly among them, rightly or wrongly, for historical reasons or out of fanaticism, continue to refuse that globalised prosperity, even in its current privatised form: a prosperity without politics. They choose instead the path of resistance.

In this sense the narrative of “Jihad vs McWorld,” the expression made famous by Benjamin Barber, continues to function, even as it transforms over time.

Consequently, an attack on this Iran risks ending as yet another futile exercise, without any decisive victory. Much will depend on the Iranians’ capacity for adaptation, and on how the regime manages to reform itself as it attempts to bind national patriotism to its own defence, particularly in the wake of Ali Khamenei’s death.

Trump has invited Iranians to rise up in the midst of the war. History, however, suggests that conflicts tend to produce the opposite effect: societies unite against an external enemy, and only afterwards settle their internal accounts.

6. The Gulf drifts away from Washington

Khalaf Ahmad Al-Habtoor is a billionaire with close ties to the Emirati establishment.

He is not an opponent of Donald Trump, but a former diplomat who had believed he could do even better business thanks to the American president.

Yet on Thursday 5 March he published a letter addressed to the White House’s occupant, full of sharp questions and observations: “Did you calculate the collateral damage before firing? You placed the Gulf countries at the heart of a danger they did not choose.” And further: “Your ‘Board of Peace’ initiatives were financed by the Gulf states,” wrote Al-Habtoor, referring to the billion dollars the administration had demanded from each of them for a seat at the table: “Where has that money gone?”

Al-Habtoor’s letter closes with the observation that “true leadership is not measured by decisions of war, but by wisdom, respect for others and the drive to achieve peace.”

This bitterness is explained by what occurred in the opening days of the war.

The latest estimates indicate that the United Arab Emirates, which had denied the United States the use of its bases to strike Iran, was targeted by Iranian forces with approximately two hundred missiles and 1,072 drones. Around twenty missiles and seventy drones penetrated the air defences, striking Dubai airport, several major hotels, two Amazon Web Services data centres and the country’s principal desalination plant.

Other Gulf centres have been less heavily targeted by comparison. Bahrain, which hosts the Fifth Fleet, sustained roughly 75 missiles and 130 drones; Qatar, home to the region’s largest American base, received around a hundred missiles and forty drones. Saudi Arabia does not publish data on attacks but, although its main refinery was struck twice, appears less exposed.

There is method in these strikes.

The Emirates are Iran’s principal target not only because, through the Abraham Accords, they recognise Israel. Bahrain does likewise and is comparatively spared. The true objective of Tehran appears rather to be the Dubai model itself, the symbol of the Gulf Arabs’ blasphemous integration into the global elites of money. And perhaps what the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps seeks is precisely the kind of reaction from Al-Habtoor, the Emirati billionaire who now accuses Trump.

As Khalid al Jaber writes in Al Jazeera, Qatar’s principal media outlet, Israel has long maintained what is known as the “Samson Option”: the idea of bringing the columns of the temple down upon oneself and one’s Philistine enemies, that is, activating nuclear weapons in an existential confrontation with Iran.

Iran itself is probably experimenting with something that moves in the same direction. It wants to push the stress on its Arab neighbours in the Gulf to the extreme, even at the risk of their retaliation, in order to drive them towards a revolt against Trump.

It is not difficult to imagine the thoughts of the absolute monarchs of Abu Dhabi, Doha and Riyadh in these days. Al-Habtoor’s question about the fate of the “Board of Peace” funds says it all. The Gulf rulers poured billions of petrodollars into Trump’s orbit and that of his family.

They thought they had the tycoon under control, that they were doing business with him, but not even the immense accumulation of money generated through the power of the White House can contain his unpredictability.

The Gulf kings enriched Trump in the expectation of controlling him. What they received in return was Iranian missiles and drones, and a war they never wanted.

Yet they had paid, and handsomely. Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi poured billions into the orbit of Trump and his family: sovereign funds into Kushner’s hedge fund, a $400 million aircraft, half a billion from the Emirates into a crypto platform launched with Witkoff. In exchange, they thought they were buying stability and influence.

What they bought was a war.

This is one of the raw nerves that the current bombardments are pressing. The Gulf today is a colossal bet on artificial intelligence, with projects worth hundreds of billions of dollars involving petromonarchies and American Big Tech. But Iran selects its targets with symbolic precision and a capacity to destabilise. The three drones that fell on data centres, two in the Emirates, a third in Bahrain, both operated by Amazon Web Services, spread uncertainty across the entire region. The timing could not be worse: the Emirates are launching Stargate, a $500 billion project involving OpenAI, Nvidia and Oracle; Microsoft has its own vast plan. Saudi Arabia and Qatar harbour similarly colossal ambitions. For all of them, this is the future, the one that will remain when oil and gas grow scarcer or less relevant. The threat of Teheran’s drones acts on that future like a paralysing poison.

The Arab sovereigns will discuss all of this with Kushner, Witkoff and the Trumps at the Future of Investment Initiative conference in Miami in twenty days’ time. They will express their anger. They will ask, once again, for guarantees. But they already know that Trump is not predictable, not even to his own family and associates in politics and business. It is therefore conceivable that the lords of the Gulf will turn to another guarantor, one capable of managing any future Iranian reaction once this war is over. They will call on the potential winner of this geopolitical earthquake: Xi Jinping’s China.

7. No one wins; everyone loses something

As the Italian philosopher Massimo Cacciari observes, the global disorder of recent years is progressively concentrating on a handful of critical nodes, arriving at ultimate questions: either a new Pact will be established among the great imperial spaces, along the lines of the one drawn up at the end of the Second World War, or no alternative will remain but catastrophe.

It is within this framework that the sum of the fragilities described here must be read.

No actor emerges unscathed.

The United States and Israel have triggered a confrontation that is unlikely to produce success and will generate unintended consequences that neither will be able to manage or contain.

Iran, already weakened before the attack, is suffering enormous military losses yet retains the capacity to wear down its adversaries economically.

The Gulf countries, dragged into a conflict they never wanted, are reassessing their alliances. The bill for this war will be paid by all, in ways and on timescales that no one fully controls.

Iran is not Iraq, it is not comparable to other Middle Eastern states: it is a middle empire, with a millenary history, capable of determining the balance of an entire region.

To discredit its power means striking in a decisive way at the comprehensive cooperation that had been maturing between Iran, China and Russia, an alignment that could have extended, beyond the economic and commercial sphere, to other regional powers such as Pakistan.

In a world in which new economic powers are emerging at a pace unsustainable for the West, generating autonomous alignments and alliances, the United States cannot willingly accept an Iran strategically allied with China and Russia, exercising joint control over all energy routes.

Here lies the fundamental problem: either the world’s leaderships understand that they have reached a fatal threshold, acknowledge each other’s legitimate interests and construct around those interests a compromise pact, the only peace available to mortal beings, or the avalanche will be unstoppable.

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Written by Luca Salvemini
No. 151 - March 1, 2026

The capture of El Mencho, the most powerful Mexican drug lord, closes an era. But the scene tells something larger: Washington tightening its grip on the Western hemisphere, determined to seal the southern border, block fentanyl, stop migrants. Mexico at the center, as always.

It is a country with a unique position in the world. It shares over 3,000 kilometers of border with the hegemon. It holds the largest emigrant community in the United States — millions of Spanish-speaking people, viscerally attached to their homeland and attuned to the rhetoric of President Claudia Sheinbaum. It has a commercial and industrial interconnection with Washington that few other countries in the world can match.

It is, in short, a knife pressed against the star-spangled underbelly. And it knows it.

This is why I have spent weeks studying Mexico: its history, its geography, its trajectory. The work will take shape in the first issue of Strategic Atlas, the new monthly column reserved for subscribers. It arrives on March 23rd.

Details on how to subscribe are at the bottom of this email.

The news emerging from Iran is nothing short of extraordinary and historically consequential.

I am seeking to cover it in my column First Light Brief, and this coming Sunday I will devote a full issue to the dramatic turn of events unfolding in these hours, including the joint attack by Israel and the United States and the reported death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Today, however, I intend to turn to another issue of immense significance that has surfaced in recent days, and I would like to begin from the following statement.

“Disagreeing with the government is the most American thing in the world.”

This is the closing line of the interview — worth listening to — that Dario Amodei, founder and CEO of Anthropic, one of the leading artificial intelligence companies, gave to CBS following his recent confrontation with the Pentagon and the American administration.

For those still unfamiliar with it, Anthropic is a company founded by a group of former OpenAI employees, beginning with the Italian-born siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei.

From the outset, it distinguished itself within the American big tech landscape through a positioning that reflects the dilemmas of the age of political capitalism.

Anthropic was the first AI company to sign contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars with the Pentagon for the management of classified documents tied to national security. Its systems are now used by numerous US military contractors, integrated directly into their services or deployed to develop them.

As Alessandro Aresu has noted, Amodei places himself in direct opposition to the techno-political current represented by Jensen Huang’s stance on China. He insists on the need to maintain and strengthen export controls — identifying his company’s interests with American interests — in contrast to the equally self-interested dovish position of the NVIDIA chief.

The rivalry has generated sharp polemics, though it has not prevented the two from doing business together.

At the same time, Anthropic confronts a crucial dilemma of the national security era.

It claims to preserve, more than OpenAI, the mission of an artificial intelligence that is not entirely subordinated to commercial and political constraints, but rather “constitutional” in nature.

This dilemma connects to a broader thesis that has gained traction in the United States in response to the controversy between Google and the deep state over Project Maven: the thesis of a new military-industrial complex, embodied by companies such as Palantir and Anduril, among others.

It is within this dynamic that the recent and bitter dispute between Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Dario Amodei must be understood.

In brief: Hegseth wants to integrate the company’s AI systems into military defense programs without restrictions.

Anthropic has instead demanded guarantees and safeguards on their use, imposing two red lines — a prohibition on using its systems to develop fully autonomous weapons, and a prohibition on building and implementing mass surveillance programs.

The Pentagon’s pressure over the past two weeks has become suffocating. Hegseth issued Anthropic an ultimatum, demanding a definitive answer by 5:01 PM on Friday, February 27th.

Anthropic, through its founder, chose not to yield.

It published a statement on its website declaring that it would not grant access to its artificial intelligence systems, given the absence of any guarantee that they would not be used for mass surveillance or for the development of weapons entirely beyond human control.

In the statement, Amodei addresses several decisive points in the debate on artificial intelligence: the guardrails that must be established, and how these must necessarily derive from legislation that today, moving too slowly and paralyzed by competing vetoes, cannot keep pace with technological advancement.

“The use of these systems for domestic mass surveillance is incompatible with democratic values.

To the extent that such surveillance is currently legal, that is only because the law has not yet kept pace with the rapidly growing capabilities of AI.”

Under existing legislation, the government may purchase from public sources detailed records of the movements, web browsing, and associations of American citizens without obtaining a warrant.

A powerful AI makes it possible to assemble these scattered, individually innocuous data points into a comprehensive picture of any person’s life, automatically and at massive scale.

Amodei’s statement also reaffirms that “today’s frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons.”

The Pentagon’s reaction has been severe and unprecedented.

All of Anthropic’s contracts with federal government agencies have been revoked, and the company has been classified as a “supply chain risk” — a designation previously reserved exclusively for foreign entities, predominantly Russian and Chinese, and never before applied to an American company.

At the same time, in a troubling display of contradictory logic, Hegseth announced he is considering invoking the Defense Production Act of 1950 to compel the company’s operations on grounds of national defense and security.

A company is first punished, stripped of all federal contracts and branded a risky supplier, then subjected to coercion on the grounds that it is an essential provider for national security.

A complete hysteria.

Meanwhile, on Truth Social, Trump labeled the company “far-left and woke” and called its refusal to comply a “disastrous mistake.”

The central point is that Anthropic is not, by any reasonable measure, a company of radical leftists.

It holds a contract worth approximately 200 million dollars with the Department of Defense and is currently — to the extent that is publicly known — the foremost frontier model developer to have supplied its technology, including the Claude model, to Washington’s classified and secret digital networks, contributing capabilities in simulation, operational planning, and offensive cyber operations.

This role was invoked in connection with the raid that led to the capture of Maduro.

Here lies the paradox of national security: it is no longer a question of technological capabilities, but of who commands those capabilities.

The Anthropic case, still unfolding, illuminates once more the tensions between technology, commercial development, and national security that will continue to define the age of artificial intelligence.

In an era of intensifying geopolitical competition, Silicon Valley faces difficult choices, far removed from the optimism that accompanied the rise of social networks and the promise of global human interconnection.

Technology is becoming an instrument of military power and is steadily ceasing to function as a medium of disintermediation and neutrality.

The Big Tech companies, through the pervasiveness of AI, have acquired a new power of mediation: in the realm of knowledge and in the realm of defense alike.

On the opposing side from Anthropic stand companies such as X, Palantir Technologies, Anduril Industries, and OpenAI, selected precisely as the replacement provider.

These companies display more explicit political support for the Trump administration, accompanied by a broad and substantially unconditional willingness to deploy their artificial intelligence systems within the operations of the American military.

The most emblematic case is Palantir. Its Gotham software enables the analysis and cross-referencing of vast heterogeneous datasets, up to the construction of high-precision individual profiles.

ICE paid the company 30 million dollars for “ImmigrationOS,” a system designed to monitor undocumented immigrants and select individuals for deportation.

The criticisms directed at Palantir concern the absence of transparency and the risk that predictive tools, built on big data and artificial intelligence, end up flagging individuals on the basis of ethnic or religious characteristics.

In recent months, the company has deepened its relationships with the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, the Social Security Administration, and the Internal Revenue Service, all of which will use its Foundry platform to optimize their processes.

It has also secured a ten-billion-dollar, decade-long contract with the United States Army.

CEO Alex Karp claims a “consistently pro-Western vision” and the defense of a Western way of life he considers superior.

It is a declaration that clarifies the ideological framework: technology and national security as a single, unified horizon.

On one side, then, a model emerges in which technological advancement is entirely functional to the consolidation of state power. In exchange for a laissez-faire regulatory environment, companies develop increasingly powerful systems destined to flow without barriers into the public arsenal. The consequence is transparent: in a loosened normative context, the state asserts the role of the primary user of AI.

Technologies cease to be the exclusive patrimony of the company that developed them and become instruments permanently embedded in the national security apparatus.

On the other side stand Dario Amodei and Anthropic, and with them a sensibility closely aligned with the European approach: artificial intelligence must remain under human governance, subject to limits and safeguards, and must not be automatically available for military or coercive applications.

The theoretical crux emerges here: is a power truly sovereign if a private company can restrict access to a technology that may prove decisive on the military plane?

The Pentagon answers in the negative.

As Mike Froman of the Council on Foreign Relations observes, the dispute arises within a market economy, where companies are free to determine the conditions under which they supply their products.

But it unfolds equally within a constitutional republic, in which the state holds, by democratic mandate, the monopoly on the use of force.

Even if the Anthropic case were to reach a resolution, the structural question remains: must private companies limit themselves to producing reliable tools, leaving the government full discretionary power over their use, or can they shape the very definition of legitimate applications?

The paradox is this: when a technology becomes strategic, it ceases to be a market product and is absorbed into the sphere of sovereignty. It no longer belongs to Silicon Valley. It belongs to the state.

The question, however, does not exhaust itself in the state’s claim to unrestricted access.

If sovereignty implies the capacity to deploy the most powerful models without constraint, who exercises control over that power?

A democracy rests on the legitimate monopoly of force, and equally on its limitation. If artificial intelligence becomes a potentially unlimited multiplier of coercive capacity, the boundary between security and domination thins until it becomes opaque.

The problem, then, is not only whether the United States can call itself sovereign without full access to the most advanced models.

It is whether citizens can continue to call themselves sovereign when those same models are deployed without effective counterweights in the name of their protection.

This is where sovereignty, in the age of artificial intelligence, risks inverting into its own opposite.

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Written by Luca Salvemini
No. 150 - February 22, 2026

Dear readers,

On Thursday 26 March I will publish the first issue of Strategic Atlas, a new monthly series reserved exclusively for paid subscribers.

Each edition will offer a structured, in-depth analysis of a single country, examining its geography, internal power architecture, economic drivers, and strategic positioning within the evolving global order.

The inaugural report is dedicated to Mexico, a country where trade, migration, energy and security converge in a single, highly sensitive geopolitical space

This special issue will be available only to paying subscribers. If you are not yet among them, this is the right moment to step inside.

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Four years ago, Vladimir Putin ordered his army into Ukraine, in the most dramatic violation of Europe’s security order since the Second World War.

Four years ago, many of the convictions embedded in European chancelleries, many of the assessments produced by European, British and American intelligence agencies, and even many of the principles upon which each of us had built our understanding of the world, suffered an irreparable shock.

Shaun Walker, one of The Guardian’s finest correspondents, has reconstructed the phases preceding the preparation and execution of the Russian invasion through more than a hundred interviews conducted over the past year with intelligence officers, diplomats and military officials from the United States, Britain, Ukraine and across Europe.

It is a body of work worth examining in its essential passages, for it illuminates the contradictions and false assumptions in which that conflict was born.

The longform piece demonstrates how both the CIA and MI6 already knew, by autumn 2021, the precise contours of Putin’s plan for a large-scale invasion: a multi-directional offensive, the seizure of Hostomel, lists prepared for repression, and even plans to eliminate Zelensky.

It is an important story to tell because it crystallises, on one hand, a spectacular intelligence success, while on the other exposing several failures of both intelligence and political strategy.

First, for the CIA and MI6, which correctly identified the invasion scenario but failed to anticipate its outcome, assuming a rapid Russian takeover was a foregone conclusion. More profoundly, for the European services, which refused to believe that large-scale war in Europe was possible in the twenty-first century.

In the words of many ambassadors and European intelligence officials, particularly French and German, the memory was still raw of two decades earlier, when the Americans had used the pretence of weapons of mass destruction, later proven fictitious, to justify the invasion of Iraq.

According to multiple sources and reconstructions, the preparation of the “Special Operation” began in the first half of 2020. During those months, Putin approved constitutional amendments ensuring he could remain in power beyond 2024.

Then, isolated for months during the pandemic, he immersed himself in books on Russian history and contemplated his place within it. Over the summer, the brutal suppression of a protest movement in neighbouring Belarus left President Alexander Lukashenko weaker and more dependent on the Kremlin than ever before. The possibility emerged of compelling Lukashenko to allow Belarusian territory to serve as a launching ground for the invasion.

In the spring of 2021, Russian troops began massing along Ukraine’s borders and in occupied Crimea, ostensibly for training exercises.

Around the same time, Putin published a lengthy and rambling essay on Ukrainian history, reaching back to the ninth century to argue that “the true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia.”

By mid-November 2021, at the annual gathering of NATO intelligence chiefs in Brussels, the American position was already clear: there was a genuine possibility of a massive Russian invasion of Ukraine. Richard Moore, the head of MI6, concurred.

As part of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, Britain had access to the bulk of what the United States had gathered, and possessed its own channels pointing toward the same conclusion.

The primary response from the other NATO representatives, however, was scepticism. Some dismissed the idea of an invasion outright. Others expressed concern that a robust NATO posture in response could prove counterproductive, provoking precisely the scenario the Americans claimed to fear.

Scepticism was not confined to European chancelleries. The Ukrainians themselves shared it, a factor that, as would become clear, proved decisive in the opening weeks of the war.

In October, two American officials flew to Kyiv, where they briefed two senior Ukrainian counterparts on Washington’s fears and on the CIA’s conversations with certain Russian military figures.

The message delivered to the Ukrainians was unambiguous. “This is not a normal warning. It is genuinely serious. Trust us” said Eric Green, one of the American officials.

As an illustration of Ukrainian scepticism and underestimation, The Guardian’s report recounts how, in November 2021, Zelensky dispatched one of his most senior security officials on a top-secret mission to a European capital, tasked with delivering a message to political leaders through intelligence channels: “the fear of war is fabricated, and concerns only the United States seeking leverage over Russia.”

Ukraine had been fighting Russian proxy forces in the Donbas for eight years, but the idea of large-scale war, with missile strikes, armoured columns and a march on Kyiv, seemed unthinkable.

Ten weeks before the invasion, in December 2021, the United States and Britain had achieved reasonable clarity on what Putin’s war plan might look like.

In Paris and Berlin, as in Kyiv, intelligence agencies interpreted the military build-up not as a war plan but as a bluff, designed to exert pressure on Ukraine.

As John Foreman, the British defence attaché in Russia, recalled in a recent interview, “the reluctance to trust us was very much a legacy of Iraq”. He and an American colleague made largely fruitless attempts to persuade their European counterparts that the threat was real. “If you show people things and they still don’t believe you, you have a problem”, he said.

The errors of judgement surrounding the war in Ukraine can be observed from multiple angles.

On the European side, there was an enormous failure of assessment by intelligence agencies convinced they could interpret Putin’s actions through the prism of rational calculation, and therefore deeply sceptical that he would embark on a course they believed was likely to fail.

At the same time, British and American forecasts, though timely in identifying Russian intentions, failed to anticipate both the scale of the invasion and the resilience of the Ukrainian army. “Right up until the day of the invasion, there had been an assumption that this would not last very long”, said one British defence intelligence official. “We thought they would be west of Kyiv very quickly, at which point they would say: ‘Job done, we have these, someone else deal with those, thanks for watching.’”

On the Russian side, Moscow calculated that only ten per cent of Ukrainians would resist an invasion, while the rest would actively support or reluctantly acquiesce in a Russian takeover: an assessment so wildly optimistic as to border on the surreal, and one that testifies to the extraordinary insularity of Putin and his narrow circle of political and military advisers.

Finally, on the Ukrainian side, one cannot ignore the misreading of the imminent danger and the tardiness of any countermeasures. As late as January 2022, a month before the invasion, Zelensky was releasing video appeals urging Ukrainians not to heed those predicting conflict. Come summer, Ukrainians would be grilling meat on their barbecues as usual, he said, insisting he “sincerely believed” there would be no major war in 2022. “Breathe deeply, calm down, and do not rush to stockpile food and matches”, he told the population.

It was a catastrophic piece of advice, given that many thousands of people would soon find themselves trapped in active conflict zones or under Russian occupation.

Other analyses suggest that Zelensky’s refusal to sound the alarm, even if not deliberate, may have been what saved Ukraine. “If he had started talking about an imminent war, told everyone to prepare, society would have panicked and millions would have fled” said one senior HUR general. “The country would most likely have fallen.”

By mid-February 2022, two weeks before the invasion, the British and American embassies, along with several others, had evacuated Kyiv, destroying sensitive equipment before departing.

Macron and Scholz still believed Putin could be dissuaded from an attack, and both travelled to Moscow in February for a final diplomatic effort.

After six hours of talks at the Kremlin, Macron announced with some pride that he had “obtained an assurance” from Putin that Russia would not escalate tensions.

The prevailing narrative, embraced in Kyiv as well, was that Russia operated in the grey and deniable zone of hybrid warfare and would not opt for a large-scale, dramatic invasion that would irrevocably sever its relations with the West.

On 21 February 2022, Putin convened his Security Council in one of the Kremlin’s great marble halls. He sat alone at a desk while his courtiers were assembled on chairs across the room, at an awkward remove. One by one, Putin summoned them to a podium to declare their support. Formally, the council was debating whether to recognise the “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk, occupied by Russia de facto since 2014, as independent states.

But the subtext was unmistakable. It was a war council.

A Russian insider recounted that the mood in the room evoked historical accounts of the atmosphere in the Kremlin in the spring of 1941, when Stalin’s intelligence chiefs attempted to warn the leader that Nazi Germany was preparing to invade the Soviet Union, yet feared pressing too hard against his firm conviction that it would not happen.

Two days before the invasion, on 22 February, the Ukrainian Security Council convened in Kyiv.

The commander-in-chief of the armed forces, Zaluzhnyi, intended to persuade Zelensky to impose martial law, which would finally allow him to begin moving troops into position. He was met with the President’s resistance: Zelensky feared sowing panic. The council rejected martial law, settling instead for the lesser measure of a state of emergency.

Bartosz Cichocki, the Polish ambassador to Ukraine, has recently described how, on 23 February, he received a classified telegram from Warsaw. It was a concise, single-paragraph text stating that the invasion would begin that night.

This was the final confirmation that the attack was imminent. It was among the last telegrams the embassy received; shortly afterwards, the walls would shake for several hours as a Polish intelligence officer still in Kyiv destroyed cryptographic equipment with a heavy hammer, ensuring it could not fall into Russian hands.

After reading the telegram several times, Cichocki stepped outside for air. He saw the people of Kyiv going about their lives on a winter evening, a scene of unsettling normality given what he knew.

People were studying the playbill of a theatre across the street, and part of him wanted to run, shouting, to tell them that war was coming and there would be no more performances. Instead, he walked home in silence, his mind full of thoughts about how the world was about to change.

At 4.50 in the morning, Kyiv time, on 24 February 2022, Putin announced the beginning of a “special military operation.”

Minutes later, Russia launched a series of missile strikes against targets around the capital.

Before dawn, Zelensky arrived at the presidential compound on Bankova Street, where his first foreign call was to Boris Johnson. “I want to ask you, Boris, as a friend of my country. Call him directly and tell him to stop the war”, Zelensky said, his voice hoarse. Further calls followed, to Paris and Washington, along with a meeting with security officials.

Martial law was finally declared in a hastily convened session of parliament.

Zelensky recovered his composure as the morning progressed, his disorientation giving way to resolve and anger. During a meeting with political leaders, his security detail burst into the room and led him away: there were reports of air strikes targeting the presidential offices, they said, and possibly assassination teams in the vicinity.

He reappeared later, already having completed the transition from a stunned politician in a suit to a wartime leader in military fatigues.

That same day, hours after the announcement, Putin received Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan at the Kremlin for a long-scheduled diplomatic visit. At a certain point, Khan raised the elephant in the room: the war Putin had unleashed only hours before.

“Don’t worry about that,” said Putin. “It will be over in a few weeks.”

Four years on, the war continues.

An estimated 400,000 Russian soldiers have been killed, in exchange for control of thirteen per cent more Ukrainian territory than Russia held at the start of 2022.

Four years on, the lessons to be drawn are numerous and, above all, deeply painful.

First, in light of the events recounted in The Guardian’s investigation, urgent attention must be paid to how intelligence is gathered and assessed. Perhaps the most pertinent lesson, at a moment when the world appears more unpredictable than at any point in recent memory, is that it is dangerous to dismiss a scenario simply because it appears to fall outside the bounds of the rational or the possible.

Huw Dylan, an intelligence historian at King’s College London, has observed that “there is a long history of intelligence analysts being reluctant to predict that future events will create a dramatic break with the past. People could not imagine what a large-scale land war in Europe would look like in the twenty-first century, so they assumed it was unlikely to happen.”

The Ukrainian failure has begun to change that. As one German official admitted to The Guardian: “The main thing we have taken from all of this is that we need to work with worst-case scenarios far more than we did before.”

Today, as the world has entered a new era of uncertainty, the worst-case scenarios multiply. European military exercises are increasingly focused on how to maintain order following massive attacks on energy and communications infrastructure causing civilian unrest.

For the first time in a century, Canada is modelling potential responses to an American invasion.

Yet the Russian invasion of Ukraine has torn away other veils, ones sustained for a quarter of a century by a combination of ingenuousness, insufficient understanding of the present, and an insufficiently lucid vision of the future.

It has buried what might be called the “Russian illusion”: the wager, primarily European and above all German, with Washington’s acquiescence, that Moscow could be absorbed into the international political and economic order following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

A steady rapprochement that, by 2021, had allowed the European Union to import forty-five per cent of its natural gas from Russia, amounting to more than 380 million cubic metres per day by pipeline, or roughly 140 billion cubic metres annually (source: IEA), with a further fifteen billion cubic metres delivered as liquefied natural gas. Germany alone was sourcing approximately sixty-five per cent of its gas from Russia, equivalent to 42.6 billion cubic metres.

Another illusion that collapsed on 24 February 2022 was the assumption, prevailing since the post-war settlement, that trade and economic exchange between states could guarantee a period of peace and mutual stability.

It was the principle articulated by the French economist and philosopher Frédéric Bastiat, who wrote that where goods do not cross borders, soldiers will. Integrating Russia into international commerce had been part of a broader Western design to build relations between nations grounded in free exchange.

Through deep and reciprocal economic ties, as countries became mutually dependent, the risk of war would inevitably diminish, since it was above all protectionism and trade barriers that generated tensions and armed conflict. Wars were, quite simply, uneconomical. It was far more profitable to sign trade agreements, even with states that did not share one’s political values.

That promise has been shattered entirely.

And in its collapse, it has taken with it the notion that states, and therefore politics in its broadest and most elevated sense, could afford to abdicate the responsibilities and obligations assigned to them.

The essential message reaching us from the disorder of our present moment is that the state must return to its role as an efficient and effective guardian of the collective interest, beginning with the defence and security of its own people.

From East to West, from left to right, the state has reasserted itself in the minds of most people as the institution to which falls the genuine possibility of improving lives, or at least of making them more secure.

From the deregulation of the nineteen-eighties to the Third Way of the nineties, the shared assumption was that the market could substitute for politics. Figures such as Thatcher and Reagan had reduced the state’s role to a minimum. From the left, Clinton and Blair equally championed the idea that free markets could unite peoples and enrich individuals.

Without rehearsing everything that intervened, from September 11 to the financial crisis of 2008, the pandemic, the rise of China, and the wars themselves, the liberal settlement of those decades has been entirely overturned, and the war in Ukraine has sealed its definitive end.

Since then, the weight of the state has grown steadily.

From the United States, where tariffs and the use of force are two symptoms of an increasingly assertive state, to Europe, the liberal window appears to have closed.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the global destabilisation that followed, has compelled states back onto the field of play, confirming that economic power alone is insufficient to win the game.

It is with this in mind that the image of Bartosz Cichocki returns: the Polish ambassador, on the evening of 23 February, walking alone through the streets of Kyiv, carrying a secret the world did not want to hear.

War was coming. He knew it. The Americans knew it. The British knew it. And yet the city was calm, the theatres open, the people unhurried.

Because a scenario of that kind seemed, quite simply, impossible.

Four years on, that silent walk should stay with us whenever we are tempted to dismiss a scenario as too extreme, too irrational, too remote from what we regard as normal. The world we are navigating today, more unstable, more unpredictable, more dangerous, no longer permits that luxury.

The least we owe to those who have fallen in Ukraine is this: that we do not rule things out in advance, simply because they frighten us.

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Written by Luca Salvemini
No. 148 - February 15, 2026

Dear readers, soon - in March - I’ll be launching a new monthly series.

It’s called “Strategic Atlas“ and it will be a focused report dedicated to a single country, different each time, with three analytical drivers that will help you decode the geopolitical dynamics that truly matter.

For each country I’ll analyze:

• Geography and strategic resources - what structurally determines its choices

• Power architecture - who really holds power and what the internal fractures are

• International positioning - where it stands on the global chessboard

The first issue will focus on a major South American country that is redefining its role on the continent and in global power rivalries.

This series will be exclusively reserved for paid subscribers.

If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, now is the right time.

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I have always been fascinated by the liturgies of international diplomacy.

The care taken in rendering declarations, the words doled out and selected one by one, the gestures and photos taken on the margins of international summits.

All of this contributes to building a State’s projection abroad, its ethos, its statement on the international situation in which it moves.

The ensemble of these details provides observers, analysts, and journalists with a photograph of the state of the world. A thermometer of how things are truly going.

To appreciate and evaluate these and other nuances, I was awaiting the annual Security Conference that opened in Munich on February 13th.

Many observers emphasized its importance in light of what happened last year, on the margins of the same Conference.

Last year, as we discussed in this newsletter, the stage was dominated by the harsh reprimand from the then freshly appointed American Vice President J. D. Vance toward European states.

It was that speech, to remain on the theme of declarations and messages, that anticipated what would become the new American administration’s posture toward the rest of the world, especially toward its historic European allies.

“The threat I fear most when it comes to Europe is not Russia. It’s not China. It’s not any external actor. What I fear most is the threat from within.”

Through twenty minutes of discourse, Vance and the American entourage chose the authoritative stage of the Munich Security Conference, the strategic and geographic heart of the Atlantic alliance, to harshly criticize European censorship of freedom of expression, the weakness of democratic principles due to the prohibition on certain far right parties from participating in elections, as well as the absence of limits on migratory phenomena which would have determined an inevitable fragility in the social fabric of European countries.

Vance’s “provocative” speech served as a shock to the audience but above all inaugurated the profound deterioration in transatlantic relations under Trump, with emphasis on cultural and values based divergences as well as geopolitical ones.

That was February 2025. Fast forward to today.

Behind the scenes accounts tell us that, precisely in light of the speech Vance delivered last year, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz had requested, and obtained, to be the first to speak at this year’s Conference.

The reason for this request was soon understood.

Merz’s speech was of unusual harshness and frankness, compared to the usual lexical parsimony of diplomatic jargon, and had as its principal objective the American President, Donald Trump.

Merz’s words are particularly important because it is from Germany that a tendency is consolidating itself, one that is increasingly taking hold among European states regarding the management of their relations with their historic American ally.

Merz is the leader of a center right party and until a few months ago had shown himself conciliatory toward Trump, in an attempt to maintain good relations. Recently he had begun to criticize him more often.

In Munich, Merz stated that “the international order based on rights and rules is currently being destroyed. This order, however imperfect it may have been even in its best times, no longer exists in that form.”

He added that Trump’s policies have called into question the United States’ leadership position and have caused a “profound fracture” with Europe, historically their ally.

“The culture wars of the United States are not ours. And we do not believe in tariffs and protectionism, but in free trade.”

In his speech, Merz did not spare even the European Union and its member countries, for example for not having done enough to strengthen their own security and to grow the economy independently of the United States: “Our freedom can no longer simply be taken for granted. It is threatened.”

While using harsh and critical tones toward the United States, Merz nevertheless insisted on the necessity that the European Union and United States continue to collaborate, also through NATO, the military alliance of which almost all Western countries are members.

Although in his own way he gave the impression of not wanting to completely break the alliance, even in this case the tones were not conciliatory: “In the era of great power rivalry, not even the United States will be powerful enough to act alone,” he said.

And it is precisely on the themes of security and defense that I found interesting, given Germany’s peculiar history, given the delicacy with which it has always considered its rearmament and investments in its own defensive capabilities, the passage in which Merz stated:

“We will make the Bundeswehr the strongest conventional army in Europe as soon as we can.”

To fully evaluate this statement, it is indispensable to consider the chronology and choice of words and tones.

These are speeches prepared for weeks, this is not improvisation.

The German Chancellor, in the same speech in which he announces the destruction of the world order as we have known it until today, informs the global audience that Germany, a country with a considerable post Nazi “pacifist culture” and with an enormous historic taboo on aggressive rearmament, will equip itself, “as soon as we can” with the strongest conventional army in Europe.

Germany has approved a package of reforms that will allow it to invest a core budget for defense (Bundeswehr) equal to €82.7 billion in 2026, with an increase of €20.2 billion compared to 2025 (growth of approximately 32%).

In percentage terms of GDP, we are talking about approximately 2.5 to 2.83% in 2026, with the goal of reaching 3.5% by 2029.

This represents a historic record since the end of the Cold War.

In parallel, the same Merz has confirmed conducting, for over a year, confidential talks with French President Macron who has long advanced the proposal to “Europeanize” the French Force de Frappe (France’s independent nuclear deterrence). The objective is to develop a European nuclear deterrence as a complement to the American umbrella (according to French sources, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, and the Baltic countries also participate in the dialogue).

Merz’s Munich speech confirms that tendency that has been increasingly delineating itself in recent weeks: European states are attempting to respond to the proclaimed isolationism, the American disinterest toward the European continent.

Further examples in this direction have been the signing of two agreements like Mercosur and the free trade agreement signed between the European Union and India.

These are two agreements that, beyond the economic and political aspects of significant relevance, carry with them a strong symbolism.

On one hand, MERCOSUR (EU plus Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay; Bolivia will be able to join in the future) creates one of the world’s largest free trade zones (approximately 700 to 800 million people, approximately 20 to 30% of global GDP) and aims to eliminate or in any case strongly reduce tariffs on over 90% of products and services (for example, automobiles, machinery, agri food from the EU; meat, soy, ethanol from Mercosur).

On the other side, the agreement signed between the European Union and India is even more important as it is exemplary of a true autonomous European commercial policy, independent of Washington’s wishes and which will allow, moving toward complete implementation, the creation of the world’s largest free trade zone with over 2 billion people involved, equal to approximately 25% of global GDP.

Both negotiations for the two agreements had been initiated many years ago, Mercosur actually 25 years ago, the agreement with India 20 years ago, but there is no doubt whatsoever that the uncertainties emerging from the new posture of the United States, the resurgence of conflicts and increasingly unstable scenarios, have induced the European Union to accelerate and conclude the first true dual attempt at commercial diversification.

Thus the pieces of this intricate puzzle begin to complete themselves and interlock.

Merz’s speech, German and European rearmament, the signing of two gigantic commercial agreements, and today the tones of European leaders toward the American administration significantly harsher compared to a year ago.

All these elements signal the emergence of a healthy principle of realism and geopolitical flexibility that European leaders are beginning to make their own and put into practice.

After the end of the Cold War, with the affirmation of American unipolarity, the European Union was the place where it was factually demonstrated how free trade, the free flow of people and capital, appropriate regulation that protected and made predictable the relations among people, businesses and states, international law, were by far more economically advantageous compared to the use of force and arms to settle disputes among states.

This model foresaw the total delegation of European defense to the charge of the military and warfighting capabilities of the United States.

An asymmetric model, totally unbalanced, with many European states that never reached or respected the budget objectives on defense investments required by the treaty for NATO membership (2% of GDP).

This model, as Merz declared in Munich but also the Canadian Prime Minister himself at Davos, is today in a phase of strong transformation.

I do not believe it is yet completely archived, provided that European states continue to persevere in defending principles such as the rule of law, the separation of powers, vigilance over conflicts of interest, and the existence of independent authorities.

Irony of fate, these are the elements that led to the economic success of the United States itself, then becoming a model for much of the world.

Having occupied Germany after World War II, the United States imposed on the newborn Federal Republic of Germany the creation of two institutions: first, the Deutsche Bundesbank, an independent central bank modeled on the Federal Reserve System, conceived to avoid the repetition of the hyperinflation that had contributed to the rise of Nazism.

Second, the Bundeskartellamt, a competition authority modeled on the Federal Trade Commission and the Antitrust Division of the American Department of Justice, endowed with the powers necessary to prevent the reappearance of cartels and trusts in heavy industry, another factor that had contributed to triggering Hitler’s aggression and the beginning of World War II. Subsequently, at the request of Germany itself, and on the basis of its democratic and economic rebirth, these two institutions were transposed to the level of the European Union.

The writer Antonio Scurati has written that, after World War II, Europe accomplished a true “renuntiatio ab imperio” (renunciation of empire), relegating any imperial ambition to the USA and leaving Europe as a “continent without qualities” (Peter Sloterdijk), an empty stage of violent conquests.

Today Merz’s words - even the rapprochement of great countries like the United Kingdom which, in fact, has initiated a concrete U turn to return to the European table, “we are not the Britain of the Brexit years any more” the British Prime Minister said in Munich - signal not a rediscovered imperial aspiration on the part of European states, but rather a rediscovered awareness, a reinvigorated political pride.

There is still an enormous amount to build, simplify, implement to obtain a true political union among European member states that would render them capable of competing geopolitically with Russia, China, and the United States.

However, Merz’s speech, his indispensable leadership, and the jolt coming from the German country allow us at least to be moderately optimistic about the survival of a brilliant idea called Europe.

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Written by Luca Salvemini
No. 148 - February 8, 2026

Dear reader,

I have dedicated weeks to revisiting Fukuyama’s work through the lens of contemporary crises: the war in Ukraine, the persistence of authoritarian capitalism in China and Russia, the struggles for recognition that animate global movements, and the philosophical confusion that undermines democracies from within.

The question is simple yet devastating: has history truly ended, or have we simply paused before its dramatic resumption?

To purchase the pamphlet and support my editorial project, click here.

Get it here!

On Thursday, the last remaining nuclear arms control treaty between the United States and Russia expired.

For the first time since 1972, the two superpowers face no constraints on the size and structure of their arsenals, precisely at a moment when both are designing new generations of nuclear weapons and new evasive delivery systems for lethal warheads.

When President Trump was asked in January why he had not accepted President Vladimir V. Putin’s offer of an informal one year extension, he shrugged.

“If it expires, it expires,” Trump told The New York Times in an interview. “We will make a better deal” after the expiration, he insisted, adding that China, which possesses the fastest growing nuclear arsenal in the world, and “other parties” should be included in any future agreement.

China has already made clear that it has no interest in doing so.

On Thursday afternoon, following the expiration of the New START treaty, Trump reiterated his call for a new agreement, denouncing the previous one as “a badly negotiated deal” and declaring on social media that “we should have our nuclear experts work on a new, improved and modernized treaty that can endure well into the future.”

He said nothing, however, about the arrangement with Putin to freeze American and Russian arsenals at current levels, thereby leaving open the prospect of a renewed arms race.

As David E. Sanger and William J. Broad write in The New York Times, the United States is preparing for that possibility, and the Navy is already moving to deploy additional nuclear warheads on its largest submarines.

Meanwhile, Russia and China are testing new types and configurations of nuclear weapons that few had anticipated when the Senate narrowly ratified New START in 2010.

It is worth recalling that when President Richard M. Nixon signed the first arms limitation treaty with the Soviet Union, newspaper headlines heralded a new era in which even the most hostile Cold War rivals recognized the danger of allowing the arms race to spiral out of control.

Those early efforts contained so many loopholes that Soviet and American arsenals grew rapidly, reaching a peak of approximately sixty two thousand nuclear weapons by the late nineteen eighties.

Thereafter, the numbers declined, treaty after treaty.

In 2009, President Barack Obama, speaking in Prague to sustained applause, pledged to pursue “a world without nuclear weapons,” while acknowledging that abolition might not occur within his lifetime.

As Vipin Narang and Pranay Vaddi, two of the country’s leading nuclear strategists who both served in the Biden administration, recently wrote, “Nuclear weapons have returned with a vengeance.”

And while the United States and Russia have reduced their stockpiles, other countries are expanding theirs.

The evidence is everywhere, from Putin’s plans for underwater and space based nuclear weapons to Xi Jinping’s decision to abandon China’s doctrine of minimal deterrence and build an arsenal clearly designed to rival those of Washington and Moscow.

Trump’s first term effort to disarm North Korea pushed the isolated nation in the opposite direction, and his confrontations with Europe during his second term have led its leaders to question whether they can continue to rely on America’s nuclear umbrella, namely the promise that Washington would come to the defense of non nuclear allies if they were attacked with nuclear weapons.

It is therefore unsurprising that discussions have emerged about the creation of independent nuclear forces outside Washington’s control.

Even the Pentagon’s annual report on Chinese military power cites Beijing’s massive expansion, estimated by United States intelligence to stand at six hundred weapons and projected to exceed one thousand by 2030, while downplaying a more immediate danger, namely Putin’s repeated and barely veiled threats to use nuclear weapons on the battlefield in Ukraine.

As Beijing and Moscow move in an uneasy cooperation to challenge the United States, a growing number of experts argue that the two nuclear superpowers could coordinate their nuclear strategies, compelling Washington to deploy hundreds of additional weapons.

Earlier this week, Obama, who championed New START, warned that the United States was poised to “needlessly erase decades of diplomacy and could unleash another arms race.”

What stands out most in Thursday’s expiration of the New START treaty, however, is the absence of a public debate on the optimal path forward for American strategy, in stark contrast to the era when nuclear issues dominated presidential debates, policy arguments, newspaper headlines and Hollywood films.

From the nineteen fifties through the early nineteen nineties, every serious national politician was expected to master the subject. Henry Kissinger’s Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy was a best seller. Dr. Strangelove captured the nation’s deepest anxieties.

Ultimately, there is little public discussion today as to whether the Trump administration is countering the renewed nuclear threat or actively exacerbating it.

Within the arms control community, however, many agree with elements of Trump’s argument, namely that New START has aged poorly and that any new treaty must include additional participants.

“One would not negotiate the same treaty again,” said Rafael Grossi, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations nuclear inspection body, in an interview at the agency’s headquarters in Vienna. “There are new technologies not covered by the treaty, including hypersonic missiles, underwater nuclear weapons and space based weapons.”

There are also many other countries that, for one reason or another, believe they require their own nuclear arsenals.

Japan, South Korea, Turkey and Poland are among the non nuclear states now debating whether to change course.

The United States itself is doubling down. Washington is spending eighty seven billion dollars this year on nuclear weapons, including warhead modernization and the extraordinarily costly replacement of aging missiles and bombers.

When Trump announced a new class of warship known as the Trump class, he immediately added that the vessels would be armed with nuclear capable cruise missiles, similar to weapons under development by China and Russia.

In late 1945, only months after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, J. Robert Oppenheimer issued a warning based on a lesson learned while designing those atomic bombs for the Manhattan Project.

“They are not terribly difficult to make,” the physicist told his colleagues at Los Alamos, the New Mexico laboratory that built the weapons. “They will be universal if people want them to be.”

Oppenheimer’s worst fears did not materialize, nor did President John F. Kennedy’s grim prediction that by 1975 there could be as many as twenty nuclear armed states.

There are several reasons those forecasts proved overly pessimistic, but a central factor was the American nuclear umbrella. While the United States assisted two close allies, Britain and France, in developing small nuclear arsenals, the strategy of extended deterrence prevented most American allies from building their own.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, more than a dozen Central and Eastern European states joined the NATO alliance, thereby obtaining the protection of the American nuclear umbrella. Taken together, in presence or in absence, it covered nearly forty nations.

To the surprise of catastrophists, this policy helped preserve peace.

Graham Allison, a Harvard political scientist who authored the first major book on the Cuban Missile Crisis, the moment when the Soviet Union and the United States came closest to nuclear exchange, observed that “if in 1945 you had told someone we would live eighty years without another use of nuclear weapons in war, people would have said you were out of your mind.”

Equally remarkable, he noted, is that the world today has only nine nuclear armed states, the result not only of the umbrella but also of a global nonproliferation system overseen by Grossi’s atomic agency, which allows states to develop peaceful nuclear energy on the condition that they never produce atomic weapons.

Of those nine, four refused to sign or withdrew from the Non Proliferation Treaty in order to build their arsenals, namely India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea.

The remaining five were the original nuclear powers, the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France.

In 1987, a New York real estate magnate named Donald J. Trump decided to challenge a core principle of American foreign policy.

America’s allies, he wrote in full page advertisements published in The New York Times and other newspapers, should “pay for the protection we provide.” The financial result, he added, would eliminate deficits, cut taxes and “allow the American economy to grow without the need to defend wealthy foreigners.”

Four decades later, those nationalist ideas appear to have hardened. And while Trump frequently speaks of the fearsome power of nuclear weapons, he has presided over the dismantling of several key nuclear constraints that, with some near misses, have largely functioned for eight decades.

As in those advertisements, Trump continues to depict allies as free riders and has made clear that in an America First world, American security and prosperity take precedence over the defense of others.

His national security strategy states it bluntly: “The days of the United States shouldering the entire global order like Atlas are over.”

A few days after the widely watched Oval Office confrontation between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last February, French President Emmanuel Macron warned that Europe must prepare for an American withdrawal from its traditional defense commitments and rethink how to confront an aggressive Russia.

Macron expressed willingness to discuss extending the protection of France’s nuclear arsenal to European allies, and Germany’s new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, welcomed the possibility.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk engaged in similar discussions and stated that his country must dramatically expand its armed forces and even “seek opportunities related to nuclear weapons.”

Early last month, as Trump’s threats to seize Greenland intensified, Stockholm’s leading daily newspaper called for a shared Nordic nuclear arsenal independent of the United States.

Experts contend that as many as forty nations possess the technical capacity, and in some cases the material, to build a bomb.

The question is whether they possess the political will.

Gideon Rose, a foreign policy expert at Columbia University and the Council on Foreign Relations, recently observed that the psychological barriers restraining proliferation “may already have fallen.”

There are already indications that the Trump administration is planning to exceed the numerical limits of New START, not dramatically, but in ways that could easily ignite a new arms race.

Meanwhile, the most lethal element of the American arsenal is set to become even more lethal.

This expansion centers on the Ohio class submarines. Fourteen in total, they are the largest in the American fleet. Each measures five hundred sixty feet in length, exceeding the height of the Washington Monument.

Each submarine is equipped with twenty four launch tubes, each missile carrying up to eight nuclear warheads, some of which are thirty times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

To comply with New START limits, the Navy deactivated four tubes on each submarine. Now freed from those constraints, it is considering reopening them, allowing four additional missiles per submarine.

Across the Ohio fleet, this would amount to fifty six additional missiles and potentially hundreds of additional warheads, each capable of being directed at a different target.

Trump has never publicly discussed this plan, nor has he delivered a speech outlining his nuclear strategy, though he has signed an executive order to create a Golden Dome defense system intended to intercept rockets and missiles.

When he addresses nuclear weapons, he emphasizes his determination to ensure continued American dominance. According to his security strategy, the nation must possess “the strongest, most credible and most modern nuclear deterrent in the world.”

The One Big Beautiful Bill, Trump’s domestic legislation, includes the Ohio submarine modernization program, specifying that the allocated funds should not be spent before March first, little more than three weeks after New START expired.

For Trump administration officials, this planned increase in deployed weapons signals to adversaries that any nuclear attack would provoke retaliation on a scale not seen in years.

The counterargument, however, is that America’s deployment of new weapons, along with the Golden Dome should it ever materialize, could fuel an arms race in which spiraling actions and reactions increase the global risk of miscalculation and nuclear war.

Monica Duffy Toft, director of the Center for Strategic Studies at Tufts University, recently noted that when one state seeks to increase its security, “others often feel less secure and respond in ways that leave everyone worse off.” Arms control agreements, she added, “were created precisely to dampen this dynamic.”

When New START was negotiated, it covered only traditional strategic weapons deliverable across the globe by bombers, submarines and land based missiles, and it had only two signatories, the United States and Russia. China was viewed as such a minor player, with fewer than two hundred weapons, that it was scarcely discussed in the Senate.

Today, the world looks very different.

Russia is testing, and claims to be preparing to deploy, what experts describe as new types of super weapons that Putin first unveiled in 2018 during Trump’s first term.

In October, Russia announced the successful test of Poseidon, an underwater drone capable of crossing oceans, detonating a thermonuclear warhead and generating a radioactive tsunami powerful enough to destroy a coastal city.

According to Pentagon analysts, Poseidon’s compact nuclear reactor gives it a range of six thousand miles and a speed exceeding sixty miles per hour, far faster than any submarine. The weapon appears to be real, as do its test launches in preparation for placing a nuclear weapon in space, a plan about which the Biden administration quietly warned Congress two years ago.

Both weapons could serve the same purpose, namely defeating Trump’s Golden Dome.

Other concerns regarding Russia stem from Putin’s repeated threats to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, eroding the taboo against nuclear use in a non nuclear conflict.

The most acute fears arose in October 2022, when the Biden administration gathered intelligence indicating preparations for such an attack. Subsequent accounts suggest the decision came far closer than officials acknowledged at the time.

China is also developing new weapons.

In 2021, it launched a hypersonic missile into orbit that circled the globe, passing over the continental United States, before deploying a maneuverable glide vehicle capable of delivering a nuclear weapon anywhere on Earth. General Mark A. Milley, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described the test as “very close” to a Sputnik moment for the United States.

For now, however, it is the speed at which China’s conventional nuclear forces are expanding that has captured Washington’s attention. A December Pentagon report highlighted not only the growth of long range weapons capable of reaching the United States, but also highly precise theater weapons that could be used in a conflict over Taiwan, particularly to keep American forces at bay.

Every attempt by the Trump administration to engage China in discussions about its nuclear capabilities has been rebuffed, just as Beijing refused to discuss the issue with Biden administration officials.

This leaves the United States with a choice. It can proceed with larger arsenals and new specialized weapons to keep pace with Beijing and Moscow, or it can negotiate a broader agreement of the kind Trump discussed last month.

To give such talks a chance, “Trump should agree with Putin on a strategic pause, possibly extending it for two or three years,” Matthew Bunn of Harvard’s Belfer Center recently wrote. “He should also press Putin to include inspections.”

There is no evidence this will occur. Instead, strategists foresee an impending wave of actions and reactions worldwide that could trigger a crisis.

Richard L. Garwin, a nuclear expert who advised thirteen presidents, summarized the danger succinctly shortly before his death last year at the age of ninety seven.

“It is the number of nuclear weapons,” he said in an interview. “The danger arises when you have so many of them.”

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In my latest newsletter, I announced the publication of my new pamphlet, End of History or Dawn of Disillusionment?

This pamphlet is the result of several months of research and analysis.

Starting from Francis Fukuyama’s seminal book, it seeks to challenge his theses in light of developments over the past thirty years, up to the present day and the geopolitical tensions we discuss here every Sunday.

With this brief foray, I would like to share an excerpt from Chapter One, The Weakness of the Democratic State and the Crisis of Authoritarian Regimes.

If you find it of interest, you can purchase the full pamphlet at the link below.

Get it here!

1 | The Weakness of the Democratic State and the Crisis of Authoritarian Regimes

In a liberal democracy, the state is weak by definition: the preservation of a sphere of individual rights means, in fact, a precise limitation of its power.

Authoritarian regimes, conversely, have sought to use the state to violate and control the private sphere for various purposes. These, however, collapsed due to a lack of legitimacy, that is to say primarily due to an ideological crisis.

Today China and Russia demonstrate that authoritarian regimes can maintain stability over time, despite invasive control over the private sphere.

Nevertheless, recent protests in Iran, Russia’s internal difficulties during the war in Ukraine, and social tensions in China - with new generations beginning to claim, in unprecedented ways, greater attention to their private sphere - show how the “crisis of legitimacy” evoked by Fukuyama remains an active variable, even if postponed.

In Europe, by contrast, the apparent “weakness” of the State is now compensated by growing legitimation obtained through the concession of more extensive civil rights and broader social welfare.

Alternative schools of thought reflect on the possibility of models of political, economic, and social organization that are neither liberal democratic nor autarchic.

Some among these models propose a redefinition of social relations, economic policies, and international relations capable of reducing contradictions and “the competition of ideas,” writes the German sociologist Armin Nassehi, citing an ancient Chinese concept, tianxia (meaning “all under heaven”), and the modern interpretation proposed by the Chinese philosopher Zhao Tingyang in the 2000s.

In 2018, Zhao described it as a political system based on mutual respect, coexistence, and collective interest placed above personal interest.

A system he considers a preferable world order, more stable than the liberal one and opposed to the state of nature theorized by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, in which mistrust, hostility, and imitation of others’ behavior for the purpose of obtaining dominion would prevail.

In certain academic contexts, China - itself a political model not devoid of contradictions and often considered from the perspective of liberal democracies an example of authoritarianism - is sometimes proposed as an example of international cooperation and tolerance inspired by tianxia.

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Written by Luca Salvemini
No. 147 - February 1, 2026

Dear reader,

thirty years ago, Francis Fukuyama declared “the end of history”: liberal democracy as humanity’s final form of government. Today, as authoritarianism resurges, wars return to Europe, and identity politics fragments the liberal consensus, that thesis requires urgent reconsideration.

I have dedicated weeks to revisiting Fukuyama’s work through the lens of contemporary crises: the war in Ukraine, the persistence of authoritarian capitalism in China and Russia, the struggles for recognition that animate global movements, and the philosophical confusion that undermines democracies from within.

The question is simple yet devastating: has history truly ended, or have we simply paused before its dramatic resumption?

From today, my first pamphlet is available on Amazon.

By purchasing this work at a symbolic price, you will contribute to supporting this and other editorial projects, as well as to building an independent platform for serious investigation of the forces that are reshaping our world.

Every media outlet, podcast, or news site dedicates ample space at least once a day to exploring developments related to artificial intelligence.

They analyze new product launches, the quarterly reports of big tech companies trying to justify the profitability of the money they have invested (money that must largely be returned to investors), the biographies and stories of the tech gurus who lead them, the war for talent to secure the best engineers and AI champions.

Try counting how many Davos talks have had AI as their main topic.

The current technological challenge being played out between Washington and Beijing unfolds around the technological advancement of the two sides, wagering on which of the two will manage to secure technological and therefore military primacy.

But then weeks like the one just concluded arrive and it becomes evident how the entire global economy, even today, is founded on the availability, use, and extraction of raw materials present in the subsoil.

Oil, gold, silver, copper, rare earths, gas, water.

Despite the now total financialization of any economic activity, raw materials and terrestrial resources remain fundamental, decisive, the fulcrum of disputes and global geopolitical equilibria.

Their presence in a given territory almost automatically determines its desirability by dominant powers. Recent examples are Greenland, Venezuela (and Guyana), but we could also cite Ukraine itself with its enormous availability of rare earths.

Let us take some more specific examples.

Arizona, for instance, is located in the famous “copper triangle”.

In this American state, they began digging in the nineteenth century. Here, Resolution Copper has excavated to depths of more than two kilometers beneath the scrubland. The work for this copper mine has required an overall expenditure of two billion dollars, including permits and site development.

Resolution, as reported by a Financial Times investigation, expects the large deposit to produce enough metal to satisfy a quarter of American demand for at least forty years.

Today, copper demand is sustained by the construction of new networks for the energy transition and by the requirements of data processing centers for artificial intelligence.

Vineet Mehra, chief executive officer of Irh Global Trading, a company that trades in minerals, has stated that copper is the “new gold” and maintains that current prices are destined to last due to the imbalance between supply and demand.

In December, the White House added copper to a list of minerals indispensable to the national economy.

Since October, copper has surpassed a series of records. The London Metal Exchange benchmark price has exceeded thirteen thousand dollars per ton, whereas two years ago it was approximately 8,500 dollars.

According to the mining company Grupo México, these centers require between 27 and 33 tons of copper per megawatt of power, more than double compared to traditional ones. BHP, the world’s largest mining group by market value and a shareholder in Resolution, estimates that the quantity of copper used in centers will grow “sixfold by 2050.”

China is also the largest consumer of copper: in 2025 it represented 58 percent of demand. In the last two years, according to the IEA, the main driver of demand has been the rapid expansion of the Chinese energy grid.

In coming years, even if Chinese growth were to slow down, global copper demand will be sustained by India and other emerging Asian economies.

We have noticed the same dynamic this week with gold and silver.

After increasing its value by 67% in 2025, gold began the year with a 16% rise that led it to surpass 5,000 dollars per ounce for the first time. Record levels also for silver, which rose 13.6% to 117 dollars per ounce, registering the largest leap forward since 2008 and bringing the gain over the last 12 months to 282%.

Their purchase, unlike copper, is driven primarily by global geopolitical uncertainty that is pushing investors to seek refuge in the safe haven asset par excellence.

In the last week, moreover, tensions over Japanese public debt and rumors of a Federal Reserve USA intervention in support of the yen have led to a further weakening of the dollar, normally associated with a strengthening of gold.

It must also be emphasized that central banks have also begun buying it by the handful since 2022, the year of the beginning of the war in Ukraine.

From January to November 2025, monetary authorities have added 297 tons of gold to their coffers in the effort to diversify their reserves away from the dollar which, for geopolitical and financial reasons, is considered increasingly unreliable.

How can we not mention rare earths?

According to a Financial Times leak, the US administration would be planning an investment of 1.6 billion dollars in an American rare earths company. At the center of the operation would be the acquisition of a 10% stake in USA Rare Earth, a publicly traded company that controls important national rare earth deposits.

It would be the largest investment in the sector, so as to ensure a supply of strategic minerals and show muscles to Beijing.

“The Middle East has oil, we have rare earths” affirmed Deng Xiaoping in 1992, emphasizing his country’s potential to become a leader in this field.

Rare earths today are the most powerful weapon in Beijing’s hands in the trade war with Washington. Xi Jinping is well aware of this and does not intend to give it up.

They are fundamental for the automotive, aerospace, semiconductor, green technology sectors, medical equipment, and military equipment. But also for making our mobile phones work.

China controls approximately 70% of rare earth extraction, 90% of processing, and 93% of magnet production (source Financial Times).

A dominance it intends to exploit.

But the American countermove comes from the Western Hemisphere, in full Monroe Doctrine. In fact, while China has estimated rare earth reserves of 1.44 million tons, Brazil has 1.21 million and India has a full 7 million.

And it is precisely from the South American giant that the main supply for the American push on AI could come.

Brazil possesses the world’s largest reserves of graphite, niobium, and nickel, that is, the new gold, frankincense, and myrrh of the technological era. All raw materials useful for defense but also for green energy: add manganese, iron ore and bauxite, vanadium, copper, lithium and you will have practically the promised land for companies in the sector.

Finally, two elements cannot be missing from this list: oil and water.

First, the return of oil, which the most radical proponents of the green movement had declared to be on its way out.

Energy alternatives, thanks to technological development, have spread, but not with the timing and to the extent hypothesized.

Thus oil has returned to the forefront.

According to the International Energy Agency, IEA, global oil demand will increase by 700 thousand barrels per day in 2026. Compared to 2025, this is a contained growth, equal to 0.7 percent, but it is still an increase in consumption. Furthermore, the IEA predicts that the growth trend will continue beyond 2030 and then stabilize thanks to the electrification of road transport.

No real emancipation from oil in sight.

The spectacular anti-Maduro operation decided by Trump was certainly also determined by the fact that the country, with approximately 300 billion barrels of oil, holds 17 percent of global oil reserves. This is low-grade oil, nicknamed “devil’s excrement,” which China largely supplied itself with at a low price.

On oil, it is worth highlighting an alert for European states: given the current close interconnection of global economies, the green decisions and arguments coming from Brussels are certainly legitimate and appropriate, but must take into account these projections on the energy future and the needs of their own production system.

The era of the “Brussels effect” is now exhausted and it is time to acknowledge that measures cannot concern and be effective in only one continent.

Finally, water.

Just over a year ago, a court in Santiago, Chile, revoked Google’s authorization for the construction of a large data center near the city.

The servers, that is, the computers it would have housed inside, would have been used to train the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) models, but the project had raised great concerns about water consumption due to cooling systems, in an area affected by approximately fifteen consecutive years of drought.

Data on the water impact of AI is scarce and sometimes contradictory, and in this ambiguity two very different narratives have developed between those who maintain that water consumption is not a problem and those who instead define it as alarming.

The powerful processors and other components inside the servers used to train and use AI generate large quantities of heat, and must be cooled to prevent high temperatures from damaging them.

Some data centers use closed-loop systems, with water flowing inside pipes and being cooled in cooling towers or through heat exchangers, minimizing the amount of water consumed.

Other facilities employ evaporative cooling techniques, where a portion of the water is nebulized and evaporated to lower the temperature, with its consequent loss to the atmosphere. The share of water consumed therefore varies greatly from facility to facility.

In many calculations and estimates, the water consumed directly by data centers is not the only water taken into consideration. Water is in fact also consumed in the processes of producing electrical energy, especially in the case of power plants that use it to cool their equipment and produce the steam that drives the turbines.

According to some estimates, indirect water use for data centers dedicated to AI constitutes approximately 80 percent of the sector’s total water consumption.

Despite measurement difficulties, some recent research has attempted to estimate the global water consumption of data centers dedicated to AI, obtaining values ranging from a few hundred to over 600 billion liters annually. These figures, however, are based on different models and assumptions and do not receive unanimous consensus.

There are analysts such as Andy Masley, an American analyst who has been passionate about the issue for some time, who believe that the problem of water consumption for AI has been exaggerated.

According to his calculations, in 2023 all data centers in the United States would have represented approximately 0.2 percent of national freshwater consumption, and that the share attributable to data centers for AI is around 0.04 percent (data centers serve many other purposes, including making the Internet and the page you are reading right now work).

Masley has also published rather optimistic analyses on water consumption for a single prompt (a request to a chatbot) estimating it to be in the order of 2 milliliters, and that to equal the water used to produce a pair of jeans one would have to send approximately 5.4 million prompts.

What is most worrying is certified by an in-depth Bloomberg report that nevertheless noted that approximately two thirds of new data centers built starting from 2022 are located in areas affected by drought or other water stress, with fluctuating water availability for communities living in those areas.

In the last three years in the United States, over 160 data centers have been built, or their construction has been initiated, in areas with water scarcity, with a 70 percent increase compared to the three previous years.

The phenomenon does not only concern the United States. In arid areas such as the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, the concentration of data centers for AI is increasing, with water or air cooling systems, exploiting the possibility of producing electricity at low cost with the fossil fuels abundantly available in those areas.

Something similar is happening in India and China, with many data centers built in dry areas where the population often struggles to have drinking water all year round.

Making accurate estimates on water consumption is not only difficult due to the large number of variables, but also due to the lack of transparency on the part of large AI companies such as Google, Meta, and OpenAI.

These companies do not disseminate precise data on the energy and water consumption of their most popular models, and an analysis reported that 84 percent of the use of language models (LLM) concerned systems with no declaration about their environmental impact.

Consequently, the vast majority of people use tools whose impact on the planet is almost completely unknown.

The examples we have recounted today demonstrate a global economy that, despite the explosion of its financialization, is still based to a very large extent on the concept of extractivism - coined in 1996 to describe the exploitation for profit of forest resources in Brazil -, centered on “the extraction of a country’s or locality’s natural resources and their export to other places, without any local processing or with minimal processing.”

Today we find ourselves in a neo-extractivism composed of increasingly interventionist states in the economic field, assertive in regulating the allocation of resources and related revenues, inclined to promote state ownership of companies and raw materials, while simultaneously selecting friendly interlocutors with whom to sign concession and sale licenses and, at the same time, imposing or increasing duties and taxes on exports to non-allied countries or competitors.

All with enormous geopolitical and social implications.

From the geopolitical point of view, it is interesting to read a PwC report, Brazil in the age of critical minerals, published last November, which explains how “Mineral security is power.”

I quote a brief passage:

“Rather than being simple commodity suppliers, nations that possess raw materials and minerals have the opportunity to position themselves as relevant geopolitical actors, offering a secure supply, respecting ESG standards, environmental, social and governance, and building long-term partnerships for the green economy.”

Today in an electric car there are up to 200 kg of minerals such as lithium, nickel, cobalt, and graphite, essential for the battery to have a long life and excellent charge and discharge capabilities. Then there are wind turbines, for which as many as 600 kg of rare earths per turbine are actually needed. And even energy storage, a sort of mega-battery that accumulates electrical current to keep the distribution network stable, needs lithium, vanadium, or sodium.

Well, by 2040 the demand for lithium will rise by 42 times, that for nickel between 20 and 25 times, the same for cobalt. Overall demand will quadruple and, for rare earths, demand will be more than triple due to wind turbines and electric motors.

Imagine the business and geopolitical importance connected.

In other words, if in 1973 the OPEC countries, the Arab oil cartel, discovered that with the price of a barrel of crude oil they could strangle the West, tomorrow Brazil or some other producing country will only need to limit the extraction of niobium, which for example can be used for superconductors, high-power magnets, medicines against obesity and coatings for chemical plants, but also as an insulator or to produce capacitors.

From the social point of view, the impact is fundamentally ignored. The opinion of those who live in resource-rich regions, almost never happy to have a mine or a smelter near their home, is not the object of consideration in the planning of a data center or a mine.

However, this disinterest ends up producing slowdowns or even stops to works and infrastructure worth millions of dollars.

In Serbia, persistent opposition to the project to dig a lithium mine forced Rio Tinto to shelve the plan, in which it had already invested millions of dollars.

In Arizona, part of the Apache community of the San Carlos reservation opposed Resolution, taking it to court and blocking the project.

As recognized by the theses of the 2024 Nobel Prize winners in Economics, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson, extractive institutions, designed to favor only a small elite, hinder long-term economic growth by exploiting the population. On the contrary, inclusive institutions, which allow broader political and economic participation, promote sustainable and prosperous development for all.

Perhaps, in the end, the issue is all here.

In an economy that for its functioning still draws abundantly today from the subsoil, strong and assertive political institutions become decisive, balancing on the one hand the strategic and geopolitical role of the nations they govern and on the other the listening to and satisfaction of the demands arising from their own population.

The balance of power, or conversely of weakness, in which this dialogue between public and private takes place, ultimately determines the poverty or prosperity of a country.

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Written by Luca Salvemini
No. 146 - January 25, 2026

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The Canadian Armed Forces have recently drawn up an emergency scenario envisaging an American invasion of Canada and modelling a national response that would include tactics similar to those employed in Afghanistan, first by the mujahideen against the Soviet Union and later by the Taliban against the United States.

This was revealed by the Globe and Mail, which reports that this is the first time in a century that Ottawa’s General Staff has created a war game based on a potential United States attack against the North American nation, a founding member of NATO and a close ally of Washington in the air defence of the Western Hemisphere as well.

The fact that Canadian military planners are formulating a conceptual and theoretical framework, albeit not an actual operational military plan, for this eventuality gives the measure of how seriously the Ottawa government is discussing the level of threat posed by the Trump Administration and its utter unpredictability.

In the scenario, the US invasion would come from the south and, according to Ottawa’s planners, American forces would be capable of occupying strategic Canadian positions within a week at most, and possibly within a couple of days. Canada does not possess a sufficiently large army nor the sophisticated weapons systems necessary to repel a conventional attack by the powerful US Army.

For this reason, Canadian strategists envisage resistance in the form of guerrilla warfare, based on small irregular groups of military personnel and civilians who would resort to ambushes, acts of sabotage, drone strikes and hit-and-run tactics.

Just as the Afghan mujahideen did in the 1979-1989 decade against the Soviets and, after 2001, the Taliban in the twenty-year war against the US and its allies, among them Canada, which between 2001 and 2014 lost 158 soldiers killed, the objective would be to inflict the maximum number of casualties on the invader, rendering the human and political cost of the operation unsustainable.

The collapse of the defence agreement, according to the war game, would also push the country to seek military assistance from France and the United Kingdom, the two allied states possessing nuclear weapons.

As retired General David Fraser, who led Canadian troops in Afghanistan for a period, tells the Globe and Mail, Canada is convinced it can count on the support of other European countries, as well as Japan and South Korea.

Science fiction?

After the week just past, I would say no.

Let us remain a moment on Canada.

The most relaunched and reshared speech from Davos was undoubtedly that of Mark Carney, Canada’s Prime Minister. Carney outlined in realistic and pragmatic fashion the current framework and the scenario in which we are operating.

The time of fiction, that is to say the primacy of international law and the indissoluble alliance with the United States, has come to an end. Now we need to rethink strategies, alliances and governance unthinkable until yesterday.

His were not merely words.

As we recounted in our last newsletter, Carney has impressed an authentic turning point on Canada’s foreign and trade policy. Towards America’s arch-enemy, China.

After diplomatic tensions between the two countries, official relations between the two nations having been interrupted in 2017, last October, on the occasion of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit (APEC), Carney declared himself ready to resume relations with the Chinese market to diversify trade partners in light of American unreliability.

From words to deeds.

On 16th January of this year, Carney announced agreements with China on reciprocal customs duties and on the importation of electric cars. He did so during an official visit to Beijing.

The North American country will authorise the entry of 49,000 electric cars produced in China, with tariffs of 6.1 per cent, the level in force before a series of retaliatory measures decided by Ottawa and Beijing.

In exchange, China has promised to remove or reduce tariffs on Canadian food products (such as rapeseed, peas and lobsters) from 84% to 15% by 1st March, and to permit the entry into the country of Canadian visitors without visas.

The aspect to emphasise concerns what Carney himself declared on the margins of the agreement when he highlighted the necessity, for Canada, of reducing dependence on the United States, doubling exports to third countries by 2035.

What Canada is implementing, as we discussed India in the last newsletter, is yet another implementation of a pragmatic political-economic model of de-risking with respect to a completely changed global scenario, starting from the principal certainty crystallised this week: the total loss of reliability of the United States of America.

As Martin Wolf writes in the Financial Times, “the United States has put at risk the rule of law, fiscal stability, central bank independence and trust in science”.

At the international level they have declared war on any institution, particularly the European Union; they have rendered the World Trade Organisation irrelevant and have destroyed cooperation on climate and health.

Not by chance have they decided to withdraw from 66 organisations, among them 31 United Nations agencies.”

Donald Trump’s return to the White House has upended and destroyed the old world order, tearing up all alliances, preferring the force of blackmail and economic and military threats to collaboration and international law.

This has pushed Canada, and I am certain will soon push many other countries, starting with European ones, to move closer to countries like China, which certainly do not represent an ideal ally, given its objectives of power and dominion in the political and economic spheres.

To conclude on Canada, it is worth citing a passage from Carney’s speech that is highly emblematic and significant. This one:

“For decades countries like Canada have prospered under the so-called rules-based international order. It participated in its institutions, it shared its principles.

We knew that the story of the international order was partly false, that the strongest could always escape the law, that the rules of trade were applied unequally depending on who was the accused or the strength of the victim.

But that fiction was useful, because American hegemony guaranteed things like free sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and mechanisms for resolving disputes.

All of this is no more. We are witnessing a rupture, not a transition.”

The rupture of which Carney speaks is confirmed by certain data published in recent days by Bloomberg. These concern the investment flows circulating around the two principal world powers, the United States and China.

Whilst the American government withdraws from the world, attracting investments and factories to its territory, Beijing seeks to insert itself into the void left by the Americans.

The numbers are evident: according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), in the first half of 2025 the value of Chinese investments towards the rest of the world surpassed those coming from the United States, reaching 10 per cent of the global total; at the same time the United States absorbed a fifth of all incoming investments.

The European Union bears the brunt of all this: the OECD indeed estimates that the area registered a decline in incoming investments of 45 per cent compared to the last semester of 2024.

All this demonstrates how the global order that prevailed until a few years ago has been transformed to such a degree that even a large economy like Canada’s can no longer rely on traditional partners, yet cannot think it can be completely self-sufficient either: recognition of the Asian power as a commercial interlocutor is a passage rendered obligatory by circumstances, however much it entails a greater diplomatic effort than usual.

And so what is the solution to the new global disorder? Breaking with the United States and with Donald Trump’s threats? It is not so simple.

It is true that since Trump first entered office in 2017, America’s system of global alliances, forged 75 years ago at the start of the Cold War, has been in a slow-burning crisis. And it is equally true that the state of crisis in which American international relations now find themselves, after the declared intention to seize Greenland, a Danish territory, has reached its worst levels since the Suez crisis 70 years ago.

As The Economist writes, Trump appears on the verge of losing a continent to gain an island.

“If the United States decides to militarily attack another NATO country, then everything would stop” argued Mette Frederiksen, Denmark’s prime minister, at the beginning of this month. “That includes NATO and therefore post-Second World War security”.

However, the United States represents the political and military backbone of NATO.

Since the inception of the alliance, 75 years ago, an American general has always served as Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR). NATO’s defence plans for Europe, including Greenland, were written by the previous SACEUR, Chris Cavoli, and presuppose a high degree of American involvement.

American military officers sit atop and are embedded throughout every facet of the alliance. Without American air power and intelligence, NATO forces would find it much harder and more expensive to deter Russian aggression.

Donald Trump’s umpteenth TACO on the forced acquisition of Greenland has unveiled, however fragile, the equilibrium and interdependence of commercial and military relations between Europe and the United States.

On one hand, the European Parliament, for instance, has not even obliquely placed under observation the suspension of the Turnberry Agreement, a trade deal the EU signed with America last year under which Europe accepted a 15% tariff without reciprocity. Consequently, European tariffs were set to come into force at the beginning of February on approximately €93 billion ($108 billion) worth of American goods.

But there is more.

French President Emmanuel Macron has suggested that the EU invoke its most powerful economic weapon, the anti-coercion instrument (ACI). This mechanism, which has never been used, would have allowed the EU not simply to adopt matching tariffs in response to America’s, but to resort to completely different forms of retaliation, from cancelling banking licences to restricting exports of the machines used to make advanced computer chips (a business in which ASML of the Netherlands has a monopoly).

Such steps would have been almost certain to prompt further escalation from America, which would have had ample means to respond. The dominance of the dollar and the American financial system could have been used against European banks and businesses. Digital retaliation could have exploited Europe’s reliance on American cloud providers and so forth.

Fortunately, Trump’s retreat has interrupted this destructive spiral.

But the rift remains and compels contemplation of the unthinkable.

Europe, for instance, has also considered its military leverage over America. It would be much harder for America to project military power into Africa and the Middle East without access to European bases such as Ramstein, a sprawling medical and logistical hub in Germany, or Souda Bay in Greece, a deep-water port. America’s seizure of a Venezuelan-linked oil tanker on 7th January depended on access to British airfields and bases, for instance, as well as unspecified support from Denmark.

America’s ability to monitor and counter threats in the Arctic, ostensibly what drove its pursuit of Greenland, depends on cooperation with Britain, Iceland, Greenland and Norway, among other NATO allies.

The Golden Dome missile defence project, which Trump has cited as a reason why America must possess Greenland, depends not only on early-warning radars in Greenland, which have been there for decades, but also on sites such as RAF Fylingdales in the north of England.

At the same time, many European air forces would not be able to operate properly an F-35, the most advanced warplane, without access to American communications, targeting data and munitions. Britain’s intelligence apparatus, its nuclear deterrent and its future submarine force would all be in jeopardy.

The search for pressure points, in short, makes clear how militarily intertwined America and Europe are and therefore how troubling the erosion of trust between them is.

Beyond this forced interdependence, something enormous is stirring.

Britain and France are deepening their cooperation on nuclear weapons policy. Last summer they announced that their nuclear forces would be “coordinated” for the first time, a major step for France, which has historically kept its nuclear cards close to its chest. In recent weeks several Swedish newspapers and the editor of the Social Democratic party magazine have asked whether Northern Europe should develop its own nuclear deterrent. “A taboo on discussing this publicly is being broken now,” says a Swedish expert.

Anglo-French planning for a “coalition of the willing” as well, ostensibly to help beef up Ukraine’s defences after a ceasefire, could in substance represent a modest precursor for a Europe-led military force including non-EU members such as Britain, Canada and Turkey.

Here, ultimately, Greenland, Donald Trump’s restlessness and Mark Carney’s speech in Davos express the same message: the fiction has lasted too long already, now we return to reality.

And returning to reality today means practising pragmatism, investing in variable alliances and policies (from critical minerals to food, from defence to semiconductors) that require independence and autonomy.

In a world heading towards high rates of unpredictability and violated rules, the end of international law as the fundamental rule for disciplining relations among states, you must be ready to defend yourself alone.

As Giuliano Noci writes, “the global system is navigating in open sea without lighthouses, with nautical charts drawn for an ocean that no longer exists and with commanders arguing about precedence whilst the current changes direction beneath the keel.”

The breaking point has a precise name: Donald Trump.

With him the course has not been changed, the map has been torn up. International law has become a negotiable option, the law of the strongest a custom, unpredictability a deliberate strategy.

For decades the United States has been the safe harbour par excellence: predictable institutions, reliable debt, the dollar a refuge currency. Today that harbour is not closed, but it is no longer reassuring.

What makes everything more perilous is an unprecedented level of interdependence.

A wave departing from Washington arrives in Tokyo passing through Jakarta, amplifying itself at every passage. The sea does not wait for compromises, does not reward ambiguities and does not grant extensions.

Those who do not decide their route suffer it.

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Written by Luca Salvemini
No. 145 - January 18, 2025

In the early 1950s, India exploited American concern over the “loss” of China to the communist bloc to solicit economic and food assistance.

The country resulting from the partition of British India in 1947 was preparing to define its foreign policy at the dawn of the nuclear era and the advent of fierce competition between the United States and the Soviet Union.

The objective of the leaders of independent India, wary of inviting new forms of colonial domination, was self-sufficiency.

But they rapidly realized that procuring military supplies, economic aid, and technical assistance required partnership or dependence on other countries.

They feared, however, that an alliance with the Soviet bloc or the American one would be a straitjacket rather than a security blanket. New Delhi hoped that multiple partnerships would preserve Indian autonomy by preventing any country or bloc from being able to compel India to submit to its preferences.

It was in that historical period, very similar to the current one, while transformative technologies and great power competition were disrupting existing global dynamics, that India’s foreign policy orientation was forged.

The geopolitical changes of the mid-1950s gave New Delhi more room for maneuver.

India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, believed that if India had better relations with the Soviet Union, the United States would take India more seriously. Indeed, the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations chose to strengthen ties with India.

The United States became interested in ensuring that democratic India did not fail while communist China succeeded.

India’s foreign policy approach in the twenty-first century has remained coherent regardless of which parties have held power in New Delhi.

In 2003, the foreign minister in the coalition government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party noted a “desire for balance, for non-interference, and for independence of action” as motivation for India’s strategy.

India also joined groups based on specific issues, including the Quad, with Australia, Japan, and the United States, and BRICS, together with Brazil, Russia, China, and South Africa.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in power since 2014, has sought diverse partners for diplomatic support, defensive equipment, markets for Indian goods and services, raw materials (including energy and critical minerals), investments, jobs, and technology. Like his predecessors, the current government has also actively sought to reduce excessive dependence on a single partner in key sectors.

For example, Russia went from being the source of 76 percent of Indian defense imports in terms of value between 2000 and 2004 to 36 percent between 2020 and 2024.

To balance the growing weight of the West in its partner portfolio, New Delhi has also explored opportunities throughout the developing world.

India, for example, has sold anti-ship missiles to the Philippines, signed an economic agreement to increase trade with the United Arab Emirates, and is working to obtain critical minerals such as lithium from Argentina.

India believes that this diversification has paid off.

Being able to choose from a menu of countries has helped it counter rivals and extract benefits from partners. It has also allowed India to protect itself against the risk of excessive dependence when a partner’s foreign policy priorities change.

Policymakers have learned that this approach requires being pragmatic rather than perfectionist regarding autonomy.

India’s foreign policy approach moreover does not completely exempt it from choosing which side to take. True, diversification is a high-maintenance strategy and India’s leaders must constantly evaluate how each of the country’s relationships influences its other partnerships.

While the United States reassesses its own global commitments and questions the existing international order, America’s longtime allies and partners are seeking alternatives to foreign policy strategies that rely heavily on Washington.

In this scenario, India’s example is illuminating and is exemplary for many others, as we shall see.

Canada, South Korea, and the European Union are all in the process of building ties with a broader range of countries.

Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates are protecting themselves against American unpredictability by consolidating other partnerships; the Saudis, for example, have recently concluded a security agreement with Pakistan.

Such efforts aim to make countries less vulnerable to sudden changes in any single bilateral relationship and to give them more options and greater autonomy in foreign policy decision-making.

As Tanvi Madan (Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution) writes, today diversified foreign policies have become the new global norm and India’s experience allows one to observe—and draw lessons—on how to move in a scenario no longer shaped by American unipolarity.

New Delhi’s pursuit of multiple partnerships has helped India maximize its autonomy amid the superpower politics of the Cold War and has continued to do so in the United States-led order that has dominated since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

However, policymakers throughout the world who are considering diversifying their foreign ties must also understand the challenges of such a strategy.

Without learning from India’s experiences, countries that now find themselves trying to adopt a similar strategy might end up simply exchanging excessive reliance on one country with excessive reliance on many.

In an article published by the New York Times, Sarang Shidore (Director of the Global South program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft) emphasized the - overall - measured, unsurprised reaction that the globe had to the announcement of customs tariffs introduced by the Trump administration before it turned its attention to Venezuela and Greenland.

Practically no one, apart from China and Canada, reacted with retaliation. Instead, many countries lined up to sign agreements with the United States, often placing themselves in a position of disadvantage.

Some, such as Malaysia and Cambodia, even accepted intrusive clauses that regulated their economic relations with other countries.

This apparent capitulation conceals a deeper development.

Although the United States remains very powerful and capable of bending others to its own will, the days of its unipolar supremacy are now past.

As America’s global reign fades, a new world is taking shape—whether Washington likes it or not. New patterns of interaction are becoming visible in the fog.

The rest of the world—especially the countries of the Global South—is continuing and even deepening trade integration.

There are exceptions, such as Mexico, but in 2025 new bilateral trade pacts have been signed by countries as diverse as Canada, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, and Peru.

Regional blocs have also been active.

China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations have deepened their longstanding free trade agreement to cover the digital and green sectors.

The European Union has initiated integration negotiations with a major trans-Pacific bloc and has brought nearly to approval a historic trade agreement with Mercosur, the principal South American bloc.

Globalization might now be a dirty word in America. But for most of the world, it is still very much alive.

Defying the idea of mutually advantageous trade, the United States has imposed asymmetric agreements on critical minerals, limiting the autonomy of some resource-rich countries.

But American coercion is far from the entire story.

Taking example from the success of Chile and Indonesia in developing the rich reserves of lithium and nickel, Vietnam and Zimbabwe have intensified a similar effort on their minerals. The countries of the Sahel have even nationalized Western-owned mining assets.

America’s hostility toward the energy transition has also been met primarily with indifference.

China is now the undisputed giant of renewable energies and the Global South is following its lead in adopting green technologies. Nepal, Singapore, Thailand, Uruguay, Vietnam, and others are leaving the United States in the dust regarding electric vehicle sales.

Africa and South Asia, for their part, are registering surges in solar installations.

The most interesting developments are occurring in Asia. Balancing between China and the United States, many Asian countries continue to welcome Beijing in regional efforts to find solutions to conflicts.

I believe that this picture, while still emerging, is neither a resurrection of the old order nor the construction of a completely new one.

It is rather the advent of a less top-down and more self-organized world, driven more by pragmatism than by ideology.

As Timothy Garton Ash writes, we are in a new world, a post-Western world, lacking a coherent geopolitical West, marked by an illiberal international disorder.

The task that today falls to liberal democracies, to Europe in particular, is twofold: to see this world for what it is and to understand what we intend to do about it.

What is needed is a new internationalism, more rapid, flexible, and resolute. To refuse the use of force, but to know how to exercise power.

Not to fixate on existing structures and alliances, but to identify, case by case, a broader range of partners. To care less about rules and more about results, less procedures, more progress.

Many countries beyond India are strengthening and building foreign policies that allow them to protect themselves without fencing themselves in.

They would do well to study India’s successes in playing partners against one another to improve its national security, accelerate its national development, and address partner unreliability.

But they should also analyze the potential weaknesses of diversification, including how it can leave a country exposed to the changing priorities of multiple partners, lose opportunities for cooperation to give priority to autonomy, and limit deterrence compared to a strong and secure alliance.

Countries that wish to diversify their foreign policy strategies will probably find themselves in a situation similar to India’s. Rather than decoupling from the United States, whose power and influence remain significant, these countries can reduce risk and improve their resilience by developing closer relations with a variety of partners and accelerating efforts to build their own economic and security capacities.

But countries that adopt this strategy not only face the promises and disadvantages of a diversified approach; they also make the entire network of international relations exponentially more intertwined.

Any geopolitical change could trigger a chain reaction of consequences as countries simultaneously rebalance their carefully calibrated partner portfolios.

When these countries move beyond alliances toward multi-alignment, how effectively they manage their multiple relationships will determine whether a diversified world will tend toward security and stability or be cast into periods of upheaval.

The reconfiguration of the world beyond the United States will not be without hitches, of course.

There will be many twists and turns along the way, including conflicts and instability. But the emergence of a new order has rarely been orderly.

Why should this time be different?

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Written by Luca Salvemini
No. 144 - January 11, 2025

“The year 2026 will also be a year of women and men called upon to make decisive choices for the destiny of their countries, at every latitude”.

The capacity of international actors to adapt to change and always seek new ways of organizing human ingenuity to understand and improve the world will define not only the year about to begin, but also the future equilibria of an increasingly uncertain world.”

This was how I closed my final newsletter of 2025.

And indeed, looking at the first ten days of the new year, that hope for flexibility in the face of change has become even more urgent, indeed indispensable, considering the rapidity with which events succeed one another.

Maduro’s “forced withdrawal”, the threats concerning Greenland (it is estimated that the melting of permafrost and extraction of minerals lying beneath could cover between 15 and 25 per cent of global demand in coming years), the Donroe doctrine, the near capitulation of the ayatollah regime in Iran, advances in negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, to cite only the most essential.

The sense is that this year we shall witness increasingly rapid upheavals of the geopolitical landscape, essentially determined by the unpredictability of the American actor. In an interview this week with the New York Times, Donald Trump asserted that respect for international law is not indispensable; the only limit guiding his action “is his morality”.

Now, beyond any judgement of the politician and American administration, what truly interests me is grasping the turning point being revealed before our eyes: the transformation from a “predictable” world insofar as it was disciplined and governed by international law to a wholly “unpredictable” scenario because it is determined by impulsive actions and logics of power or deterrence completely archived and buried after the end of the Second World War.

The idea that creating a system of shared rules at international level could reduce violence and conflict has existed for centuries. In the seventeenth century the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius spoke of the necessity of creating a universal and rational law to regulate relations between states and manage controversies. In the eighteenth century the philosopher Immanuel Kant proposed creating a “society of nations” to prevent wars.

As Giuliano da Empoli affirms in his latest book “The Hour of the Predators”, we are traversing an epoch in which making war has become, in many circumstances, more convenient than not making it.

This results in a reduction of the effectiveness of international law, which functions only insofar as the cost of its violation exceeds the benefit derived from it.

The aspect that interests me in this first newsletter of 2026 is attempting to understand the future that awaits us.

There could be a return to the division of the world into “spheres of influence”, in which the strongest countries will dominate the weakest and in which, as Stephen Miller, Donald Trump’s principal adviser, says, the world will be governed by power: those who hold it will have freedom of action, those who cannot defend themselves will be forced to submit.

This was, with due differences, the manner in which the world was ordered in the nineteenth century, when the great colonial powers divided predominance amongst themselves and periodically entered into conflict if their interests clashed.

In this world international law loses value, because there is no longer anyone to apply it, and indeed: those who should have applied it violate it with impunity.

Still with the aim of understanding what awaits us in the near future, this week I was greatly interested by an analysis published in Foreign Affairs - the world’s most important geopolitics journal, from which this project humbly draws inspiration -, written by Stephen Kotkin (Kleinheinz Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University), which describes the principal characteristics and weaknesses of autocratic systems.

It is an analysis I find highly topical and which allows me to outline, as the first exercise of this new year, a picture of the situation and geopolitical context in which we find ourselves.

1 | Security

The first dimension is perhaps the most obvious: no authoritarian regime could survive without security police forces and military capable of internal repression.

Compared to funds allocated to their social spending or economic investments, authoritarian regimes spend vastly more on financing agencies, equipment and training of forces necessary to implement massive repression of opposition and dissidents.

Often authoritarian regimes, out of fear of conspiratorial plots or pure paranoia, incessantly reorganise their repressive apparatus, and deliberately assign to other private agencies tasks of control and monitoring over regular armies.

Such agencies engage in sabotage against one another, since officials consider going on the offensive as the best defence against colleagues ready to attack them.

In Communist China, the power struggle for supremacy between the security police and the People’s Liberation Army has sometimes been decisive in power struggles.

In Russia, the civilian repressive apparatus persecutes the military, who seize every occasion for revenge.

The professionals of repression, whilst on one hand guaranteeing the regime’s survival, on the other represent its greatest threat.

One of the most recent examples we can cite in this regard refers to August 2023 and the attempted coup organised by the Russian mercenary army known as “Wagner Group”. A coup suppressed in blood, with the killing of its chief, Yevgeny Prigozhin.

Xi Jinping himself recently purged 27 officers, more than half, amongst commanders, generals and admirals. One of the largest purges in recent years in Chinese armed forces, accused of corruption and other crimes. An operation that has led China to be described as “externally strong, internally fragile”.

Thus autocracies, requiring massive and extensive use of force across the entire population, utilising regular and irregular armies, expose themselves to profound internal fragility.

A vulnerability that nestles in the ambition and greed for power of the human being, united with frustrated ambitions and offended patriotism.

2 | Funds

The second dimension of an authoritarian regime is the nature of its revenue flows.

All governments require sources of financing, naturally, and most obtain them through a broad range of taxes. However, taxes make governments dependent on their people, and although authoritarian regimes have no qualms about obtaining revenue in that manner, they are reluctant to depend on the consent of the people if they can get away without doing so.

Many can, having alternative sources of revenue, often gushing directly from the soil.

One of the most frequent misconceptions about authoritarian regimes concerns the idea that these are founded on a de facto social contract, whereby regimes raise living standards and in exchange the people renounce their own freedom.

This is simply not true.

Whilst authoritarians may be gratified in making the population’s economic conditions better, it is especially true that they do not desperately need this and feel no imperative to satisfy the material aspirations of ordinary people.

Take China as an example.

It is the authoritarian country where such a contract is most frequently asserted to exist, but looking closely, those conditions have never materialised for broad segments of society. The Chinese people know the true contract under which they live: if they keep disillusions and doubts largely to themselves and publicly profess loyalty, then the authorities might not persecute them.

Kotkin himself in Foreign Affairs highlights how authoritarian regimes can survive with little or no economic growth, thanks to the threat of the use of force. At the same time it is impossible for them to survive without constant cash flows, whose best source comes from material that nature deposited in the earth hundreds of millions of years ago, which can be sold on world markets for hard currency.

The most evident current example is Venezuela or the Saudi kingdom, but we could obviously cite Russia. Precisely in the case of Putin’s Russia, oil and gas exports help finance the regime, such that these revenues have covered up to a quarter of the costs of the war against Ukraine. China, India and Turkey together have purchased almost 400 billion dollars of Russian oil since 2023, sometimes to consume it, sometimes to resell it at a profit margin.

But autocracies have also found new ways to generate cash flows. North Korea once counterfeited US 100-dollar notes on a large scale. Then it innovated, discovering it could hack foreign central bank accounts and cryptocurrency exchanges.

Today the regime also rakes in cash, especially in foreign currencies, in the traditional way: sending soldiers and workers abroad for compensation.

On this aspect, democracies, starting from Washington and its partners, would have the leverage to adopt a serious sanctions policy to apply to oil refineries in China, India and Turkey, increasing those countries’ costs and lowering Russia’s revenues whilst helping coordinate alternative sources.

A new draft EU proposal would permit member states to stop and detain shadow fleet tankers, which are already under sanctions.

On this point too the most recent current affairs comes to our aid: this week the United States Coast Guard boarded and seized in the Atlantic Ocean the Russian tanker Bella 1, which it had been pursuing for weeks.

Such actions, together with identical operations conducted by the American navy on Venezuelan tankers, demonstrate how it is possible, effectively, to place autocracies in serious economic difficulty, intervening on the vital ganglia that permit their sustenance and financing (see what is happening in Iran).

3 | Storytelling

The third dimension of authoritarianism is the stories a regime tells about itself, its people, its history and its place in the world.

Authoritarians always seek to suppress stories they do not want their people to see.

Their objective is to spread fear to strengthen national cohesion, presenting the collusion of internal and external enemies: ethnic, religious and sexual minorities, labelled as terrorists; elites, intellectuals, democrats; the International Monetary Fund, Jews, George Soros, foreigners; the Great Satan (the United States), the Little Satan (Israel).

Authoritarian narratives also evoke a period of national greatness in the past that was destroyed by hostile forces but will be restored as soon as today’s enemies are defeated by the nation’s sole saviour: the regime and the current ruler.

China continually hammers away at stories of what it calls its “century of humiliation” begun in the 1800s. At the same time various historical reconstructions recount how for more than half a century there has been self-humiliation under Chinese Communist Party rule: the CCP has killed many more Chinese people than foreign interventions ever did.

To refute these narratives, democracies should invest more in penetrating communications and persuasive content.

However, even in this field, the hybrid war of disinformation sees propaganda spread by autocracies largely prevail, reactive in exploiting a profound and rooted crisis of authoritativeness that strikes a large part of traditional democratic media (the latest example of the BBC and its legal affair with Donald Trump is a resounding blow to the credibility of a historic medium considered the most authoritative in the world).

At the same time today it has become difficult to maintain virtual private networks (VPNs) that allow people to evade internet restrictions in countries like China.

Meanwhile the Chinese Communist Party controls the functioning of TikTok’s algorithm, the app that serves as the dominant news source for nearly half of Americans under 30.

4 | Decision-making Power

The fourth dimension of authoritarianism is the control a regime exercises over life opportunities: the way the state penetrates deeply into the lives of its subjects.

The more the state functions as the principal employer, the more difficult it is for people to refuse to praise it, let alone speak against it.

In the regime’s hands, housing becomes a weapon, whether through state ownership, licences to register property, or residence permits, as in the Chinese urban family registration system hukou.

State-controlled education means that authorities can deny children admission to school if a parent or family refuses to execute whatever political task may be required of them.

The more the state controls your life opportunities, the more power the state has over you and the less power you have.

The private sector can, in theory, provide a vital antidote.

If you can start your own business, join others in doing so, or move freely from one private employer to another on the basis of your qualifications and hard work, you are less subject to state control.

The same applies to one’s capacity to purchase or rent private housing, attend non-state schools or form non-governmental organisations.

But authoritarian regimes can exercise massive influence on the private economy, and particularly on major employers, when a single person or small group sometimes owns the business (or housing stock).

5 | The Global Context

The fifth and final dimension of authoritarianism is not a characteristic of a regime per se but the geopolitical environment in which it exists. A global order can be favourable or corrosive for authoritarian regimes.

This is the aspect I consider most interesting and most critical currently.

The US-led world order has been for a long time remarkably favourable to authoritarian regimes.

Consider, for example, the fact that such regimes usually require mass transfers of technology, since they have generally lagged behind the world’s most advanced economies, which are democracies. The latter have been more than happy to have their private sectors supply non-democracies, including Putin’s Russia and Communist China, with what they needed to develop.

Authoritarian regimes also desperately need access to lucrative Western markets to sell their raw materials and finished products.

The decisive American domestic market was opened to Communist China in 1980 and to Russia in 1992, when they were respectively granted “most favoured nation” trade status.

Both were also admitted to the World Trade Organisation without having to satisfy all the conditions required for admission and without being part of the US security order.

A most serious error.

Authoritarians were permitted to make free use of the global financial system and receive foreign direct investment, which in China’s case was often routed through British-governed Hong Kong.

As for European countries, particularly Germany, they became crucial customers of Russian energy products, which could be developed on a large scale only in cooperation with major Western oil companies and service enterprises.

In this regard, however, the United States is the principal culprit.

The deliberate transfer of American production and critical supply chains to a country governed by a communist monopoly regime was one of the most breathtaking gifts ever made to an authoritarian country, greater even than the generosity with which advanced American and European technologies were shared and transmitted to Stalin’s Soviet Union.

The wealth generated by Western technology transfers has enabled China to become the world’s largest trading nation without a true navy. China relied on the US Navy to guarantee global maritime routes. Beijing then used the proceeds to build its own navy, which is now eclipsing the American one.

The intention, however, was never to sustain authoritarianism but to undermine it or at least soften it. To implement what West Germans called Wandel durch Handel, or “change through trade”.

However, the Eurasian continental landmass empires have been obstinately autocratic for almost their entire existence, despite repeated attempts at democratic revolutions. They have refused to bend to the West, even whilst borrowing technologies and ideas from it, and proudly maintain their civilisations as superior.

Today democracies have some important levers to seriously weaken the autocratic conglomerate. Russia’s oil and gas exports and China’s manufactured product exports remain their lifelines.

China can increase its purchases of Russian oil and gas, for example, but cannot compensate for all the revenue Russia would lose if Europe succeeded in weaning itself off Russian energy imports. And Russia can buy more finished products from China, but cannot compensate for all the revenue China would lose if the United States and European countries significantly reduced their own imports of such goods.

Despite the clarity of these vulnerabilities, the United States and its friends cannot decide whether (and how) to “de-risk” their relations with China or effect a rapprochement or even some sort of grand bargain.

At the same time, Washington has turned against its allies for their security parasitism and shortcomings in trade reciprocity, both of which the United States itself had partly encouraged. The failure of the West’s great wager on the corrosion of the great Eurasian authoritarians has, for the moment, turned the West against itself.

Anti-Western and particularly anti-American sentiment retains a perennial attraction in all corners of the globe (and even in the United States), because of the very real stories of European and American imperialism and the sheer preponderance of American power.

This ideology provides considerable opportunities to authoritarian regimes, even though many of the people living under them continue to be attracted to Western ideals, institutions and lifestyles.

A successful democratic example with good governance, high living standards, social mobility and freedom will always be the most corrosive force against authoritarianism.

But the United States is perhaps as far from this, in various ways, as it was in the 1970s.

And so?

Having attempted to outline the principal characteristics and weaknesses of autocracies, we must now ask ourselves what their adversaries, namely the presumed democracies, can do to counter the rise of the former.

But first of all we must ask ourselves whether this is truly their intention.

We have often cited the most important actor, namely the United States. Whilst abstaining from all political judgement, it is evident that they are tending more towards resembling an autocracy, rather than strengthening democratic and liberal governance principles.

It is precisely from the United States that the most decisive example emerges of a new “politics of the strongest” as the principal mode of regulating conflicts and relations between states. Mediation, multilateralism is progressively relegated to the background.

But what truly threatens the role of the United States as a gravitational force is the profound loss of a shared sense of national identity and purpose. Together with the erosion of basic governmental performance and severely diminished public trust in institutions.

This is occurring not only in the United States, but in various European states (Italy, Spain, Hungary, soon perhaps France) where the rise of populist governments has eroded a good part of institutional credibility and worsened the solidity of a truly functioning democratic model for resolving individual and collective problems.

Fighting authoritarianism requires patience and determination, but above all a functioning and effective counterbalance.

If democratic regimes of governance are the first to show their cracks, their contradictions, the ineffectiveness or extreme slowness of decision-making processes instrumental to resolving individual and collective problems, it will be increasingly arduous to export this model compared to the swifter, monocratic and direct one offered by autocracies.

Given the ineffectiveness and devastating effects produced by various regime change attempts by the United States and various European alliances around the world, today the most pragmatic objective should be shaping a global context that makes authoritarian regimes even less confident in their continued existence and, therefore, more preoccupied with their internal affairs and less capable of risking acting coercively abroad.

The desired result is proactive multi-domain competition and occasional cooperation.

In other words, cold war instead of hot war.

The postwar US-led order has not failed. It has succeeded. It aimed to facilitate “the rise of the rest”, and it did so, spectacularly.

Now the global order must be updated for a new era, one in which China, a supreme beneficiary of the existing order, possesses the means, and not merely the ambition, to attempt to supplant it.

Whilst the United States necessarily (albeit erratically) rebalances its global posture to address new circumstances, it is possible to see the advent of what might be called “horizontalism of middle powers”: deeper economic and security cooperation, especially amongst countries of Northern Europe and the Indo-Pacific.

This is a highly encouraging development, partly galvanised by Trump, a sort of lattice of additional integration that does not entail displacing the United States but enhancing their capacity to lead.

This will be the work of a generation.

The future can still be shaped, and the open and secure global common good can be reinvented for another long run.

The United States can neither eliminate nor transform the Eurasian authoritarians, but it can reinvigorate itself and, in the process, make it more difficult for authoritarians to mobilise their strengths and easier for their weaknesses to restrain them.

The American experiment has always had to confront waves of disorder, disorganisation and doubt. But the United States has also periodically rediscovered and renewed itself, sometimes in profound ways, and must do so again.

Its authoritarian adversaries are showing audacity and determination, but the nature of their regimes always presents an opportunity: their loyalists are their true internal enemies.

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Written by Luca Salvemini
No. 143 - December 28, 2025

It would be far too simple to single out the most important moment of the year drawing to a close.

Donald Trump’s return to the White House for his second term.

Taking office in January, the Republican president literally sent shockwaves through international relations with initiatives on multiple fronts: from the tariff war to efforts to claim credit for peace agreements of varying solidity, from the Middle East to Ukraine, including a more assertive neighborhood policy in the Western Hemisphere compared to his predecessors.

The return of “hurricane Trump” has produced effects at various latitudes.

On one hand, the “rest of the world” has become more cohesive, as demonstrated by the choreographed Tianjin summit, while the Euro-Atlantic system finds itself under greater pressure than ever, as does multilateralism more broadly.

Europe must reckon with a new reality: its principal ally, exactly 80 years after the end of World War II, is no longer as reliable as it once was.

The year 2025 was also marked by humanitarian crises, such as those in Sudan and Gaza, but also by the rise of new leaders: Sanae Takaichi became the first woman to lead Japan, Robert Francis Prevost ascended to the Papal throne as Leo XIV, while Ahmed al-Sharaa, rehabilitated on the international stage by Trump himself, leads Syria one year after the fall of Bashar al-Assad, in a climate marked by both hope and uncertainty about the future.

Let us attempt, then, through five annotated photographs to revisit 2025 and offer some predictions for 2026 in the second part.

1. | Liberation Day

April 2, 2025, will be remembered as “Liberation Day” for the United States, but probably also as a new “D-Day” for Europe. On that day, Trump announced the imposition of tariffs of up to 25 percent on products imported into the USA, reviving protectionism at levels unseen for nearly a century, seriously threatening European industry and exports.

In the months that followed, various countries hit by the tariff squeeze, as well as the EU as a whole, came to terms with the New York tycoon, who also used tariffs as leverage in certain dossiers, such as digital technology and AI.

In July, the European Commission accepted, not without some grumbling, that the 15 percent base tariff on many European exports would fall partially on Union producers: a price deemed sustainable in the name of a more orderly and predictable transatlantic relationship.

What does all this mean?

It is certainly an epochal change from the recent past: from the end of World War II until now, the United States has represented both the vanguard and the principal sponsors of international free trade, making tariff reduction between countries and the globalization of value chains the cornerstone of the current global economic system.

Now Trump is reversing course, turning back the clock nearly a century and sanctioning the return to a logic of power, at the expense of multilateralism, in which the strongest impose their weight on the weakest.

As Mario del Pero, ISPI researcher and expert on the United States, writes, if we were to define the categories of Trumpian foreign policy, we could call it sovereigntist, neo-imperial, transactional, and patrimonialist. It is driven by the assertion of the necessity, and the possibility, of recovering spaces of sovereignty, and therefore freedom, which are claimed to have been deliberately sacrificed.

The aspect I personally find most interesting to observe is the reorientation of global value chains, with decoupling from China practically impossible regarding the rare earths needed to fuel the gigantic American AI revolution and the quest for energy self-sufficiency (with the abandonment of multilateral agreements on combating climate change).

Staying in the United States and with Donald Trump, the other fundamental aspect to consider, which we discussed at length in a newsletter some time ago, is the affordability issue. Donald Trump won precisely on issues like the high cost of living, but victories like Mamdani’s in New York signal that the problem is far from resolved and remains at the top of Americans’ concerns.

In this regard, it will be interesting to observe the effect of tariffs on prices and therefore on inflation.

2. | Ukraine in the Balance

During the campaign, Trump repeatedly declared that he would quickly end the conflict in Ukraine.

A crisis that, according to him, would not even have begun if he had been in the White House instead of Democrat Joe Biden.

However, things went very differently.

After the stormy February confrontation in Washington with Volodymyr Zelensky, bullied before the world by the tycoon and his vice president JD Vance, Trump also met the Ukrainian leader in the Vatican on the sidelines of Pope Francis’s funeral, who died on April 21, and then received Vladimir Putin in Alaska in August.

Nevertheless, as the year draws to a close, peace still seems very distant and many knots remain to be untied to reach an agreement, while the divide between the USA and Europe deepens further.

The heart of the peace debate focuses on two fundamental questions: security guarantees and the territorial concessions required of Kyiv.

On one hand, Russia expresses strong reluctance toward any form of meaningful security guarantee that could prevent Kyiv from being attacked again in the future.

Russian leadership wants to maintain an instrument of pressure on Kyiv, making it difficult for Ukraine to build a strong army fully integrated into Euro-Atlantic security structures.

A strengthened army would in fact run counter to Moscow’s declared strategic objective of maintaining long-term influence and a coercion option.

This is why enjoying solid security guarantees that can exercise credible deterrence is vitally important for Ukraine.

Today, speaking of “just peace” must necessarily reflect a compromise that can deter future aggression and guarantee long-term security.

Ukraine can and is already making very painful concessions, but it must also insist that certain minimum requirements be met.

In the absence of credible security guarantees, a peace “at any cost” might satisfy immediate political needs but fail to protect Ukraine’s fundamental interests and consolidate a lasting European and international order.

3. | The Rest of the World

While the old continent scrambles to find its footing in the face of Trump’s disruptive second presidency, the strategic adversaries of the Euro-Atlantic system seek to demonstrate cohesion and the ability to influence global dynamics.

The concrete demonstration of this objective came in the Chinese port city of Tianjin, south of Beijing, where in early September Chinese President Xi Jinping welcomed the Heads of State of Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran, and 22 other (non-Western) countries on the occasion of the 25th summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

What emerges is the image of a multipolar world, yes, but with extremely variable geometries.

In 2026, China will need to maintain credible its candidacy as leader of the Global South reforming international governance. Credible means two things: the capacity to offer public goods (finance, infrastructure, technology, market access) after years of grand proclamations, and narrative coherence (shared development, not mercantilist predation).

Two appointments could become litmus tests.

The first is the meeting (to date, anticipated and politically sensitive) between Xi and Trump during Trump’s visit to China scheduled for April 2026: an opportunity to freeze tariff escalations, but also to measure how much real space there is for a stabilization that is not just a tactical truce.

The second is the G20 in Miami (December 14-15, 2026), where the confrontation over international governance will inevitably be more political and will determine future development lines on trade rules, economic security, value chains, and finance in an era of strategic rivalry.

On the more strictly Chinese front, 2025 was another “record year” in terms of de facto violations of Taiwan’s airspace by China.

According to Taiwanese sources, from January to September 2025, Taipei recorded over 4,000 Chinese incursions into its Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ).

It follows that Taiwan’s air defense is constantly on alert, setting the stage for a possible disaster, and that a military clash, intentional or otherwise, in Taiwanese airspace is not at all excluded.

Then there are the Chinese military exercises in the Taiwan Strait, which will continue in 2026.

In November 2025, the Taiwanese government approved an additional defense budget of 40 billion dollars. The funds will be allocated from 2026 to 2033 and, if all goes according to plan, will bring Taiwan to spend 5 percent of its GDP on defense in coming years.

However, Taiwan’s armed forces, currently numbering 230,000 units, will face a significant personnel shortage in coming years, with troop numbers below authorized levels: a coverage rate of 75 to 80 percent, that is, between 25 and 30 percent less than the units actually needed to defend the country.

The causes are the low birth rate, lack of financial incentives, and early discharges, in a context of imminent threat from China.

Analysts are virtually unanimous in believing that the absolute minimum number of soldiers Taipei needs to have at least a chance of (temporarily) repelling the landing of hundreds of thousands of People’s Liberation Army soldiers on Taiwan’s heavily fortified coasts is between 230,000 and 250,000 units.

Regarding China, however, attention should be paid to this data collected by Michael Beckley in an article that appeared in Foreign Affairs Magazine entitled “The Stagnant Order and The End of the Rising Powers”.

While between 2000 and 2010 the theory of Chinese overtaking seemed quite well founded (in that decade, the People’s Republic’s GDP measured in dollars jumped from 12 percent to 41 percent of American GDP), in the following decade China’s GDP strongly slowed until dropping from 70 percent to 64 percent compared to American GDP: the gap between the two superpowers thus widened again.

In conclusion, the true and most important security guarantee for Taiwan, yesterday as tomorrow, will continue to be American technological and military supremacy over Chinese adversaries.

One piece of data before closing the chapter on the Global South. This, without any comment.

4. | Syria, Country of the Year

It took just eleven days to topple a regime that had lasted half a century.

To rebuild a country after dictatorship, however, could take years.

The year 2025 was certainly marked by the rise of Ahmed al-Sharaa (also known by his nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Jolani), who came to power after the fall of Bashar al-Assad on December 8, 2024, at the end of a lightning offensive.

The current president spent the following 365 days trying to strengthen his control over post-Baathist Syria and relaunch the country on the international stage.

From this point of view, his main success was creating a new alliance with the USA, sealed by his visit to the White House in November, with the removal of sanctions and Damascus’s entry into the anti-ISIS coalition.

With Russia, pragmatic ties have been maintained through a reduced Moscow presence on the coast and agreements in various areas.

At the domestic level, several issues remain open.

First, tensions involving Alawites (victims of sectarian violence) and Druze (divided between integration and autonomy), and subsequently the uncertain integration of the Kurdish SDF, despite the March 10, 2025 agreement, complicated by the Turkish role.

The year 2026, in all likelihood, will be the year of the proof of facts.

Will al-Sharaa succeed in holding the country together, despite the international influences shaking it from outside and the centrifugal forces agitating it from within?

As Syrian analyst Hassan Hassan emphasizes, the complexity of the political and geopolitical picture should not lead to underestimating the resilience capacity of the new Syrian course.

Introducing the concept of “revolutionary anxiety” the scholar reminds us of a point that often seems to escape Western analyses: the new Syrian ruling class is, or at least considers itself, heir to the Revolution that began in 2011. This implies that the current government, however centralizing and authoritarian it may be, is tolerated or openly supported by virtue of two elements: the comparison with the past, extremely grim, and hope for a better future.

5. | Gen Z Takes Center Stage

From Morocco to Indonesia, from Peru to Madagascar.

In 2025, Gen Z protests (young people born between the late 1990s and early 2000s) spread across various low-income countries, giving voice to increasingly pressing social and political demands.

Without recognized leaders or party structures, young people between 15 and 25 took to the field with smartphones in hand and a rage with common features, creating a global map of mobilization that crosses continents.

Digital natives by definition, they contest corruption, inequalities, and the inability of political elites, and demand job opportunities, rights, and dignity.

Organization is horizontal: there are no hierarchies, while strategies, appointments, and narratives circulate online on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Discord, and Telegram.

Symbols, slogans, and languages replicate from one country to another, especially in contexts where the population is on average very young.

In 2026, elections will be held in both Nepal and Bangladesh, two particularly significant electoral appointments because they will come after profound political change, making them decisive votes to watch carefully.

On the other hand, as Derek Thompson notes in his newsletter, young Americans are becoming more disconnected from the economy.

Many young people, especially men, spend a historically unusual amount of time alone while gambling online on sports, meme coins, and other fluctuating assets.

The share of people between 20 and 24 who are not in a job, or seeking work, or in school, or raising a child has nearly doubled in the last quarter century in both the UK and the US.

Focus: Crises to Watch

Venezuela - USA

Since last September, the United States has sunk over 20 vessels suspected of transporting drugs, causing the deaths of approximately 90 people.

Official US statements continue to indicate the fight against drug trafficking as the purpose, but some recent initiatives seem more consistent with the intent to overthrow Maduro’s regime and favor the establishment of a government politically closer to the Trump administration.

Maduro’s exit would make highly probable the rise of a government led by María Corina Machado and Edmundo González Urrutia, and thus the establishment of an executive favorable to the United States.

Venezuela, extremely rich in strategic raw materials and holder of the world’s largest estimated oil reserves, would thus become another country in the Western Hemisphere ideologically aligned with Trump’s United States.

The American strategy, which aims to strike illicit trafficking and oil exports to reduce the regime’s financial resources, will most likely require considerable time before decisively weakening it.

A crucial question therefore remains: how long will President Trump be willing to maintain against Maduro’s Venezuela the most imposing US military deployment in the region in recent decades?

Israel - Palestine

The plan exists, but peace is still distant in Gaza.

The October ceasefire, which launched the first phase of American President Donald Trump’s twenty-point plan and allowed the release of Israeli hostages still alive, remains fragile.

In Gaza, 80 percent of buildings have been destroyed or severely damaged, and the United Nations estimates reconstruction costs at 70 billion dollars.

Despite all the uncertainties related to concrete implementation and all its limitations, the Trump plan is today the only one on the table and the only one to have gathered almost unanimous consensus from the international community.

Only Russia and China abstained in the Security Council, unable to openly concede a victory to the United States.

But consensus alone is not enough and must be translated into concrete support and constant pressure to avoid a failure that would play into the hands of those who do not want peace, thus reopening the path to enduring conflict.

The year drawing to a close has clearly shown that regarding war and peace in the Middle East, the United States maintains a central role and that no other international actor is currently able to replace them.

Adapting to change or remaining at the mercy of events.

Ultimately, these are the two paths the world faces in 2026.

It has been a year that has demonstrated, on various occasions, how force seems to count more than rules.

Competition among powers is no longer limited to traditional geography but extends to new fields of confrontation: from the challenge for space to the rivalry over artificial intelligence.

This will generate ruptures of current equilibria and fractures in the social contract signed between the population and those who govern them.

In 1929, George Sylvester Viereck published a lengthy interview with Albert Einstein in the Saturday Evening Post.

During the conversation, Einstein gave his best, with his usual charm and brilliant aphoristic ability. When Viereck asked him if he relied “more on his imagination than his knowledge” the scientist replied:

“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”

The year 2026 will also be a year of women and men called upon to make decisive choices for the destiny of their countries, at every latitude.

The capacity of international actors to adapt to change and always seek new ways of organizing human ingenuity to understand and improve the world will define not only the year about to begin, but also the future equilibria of an increasingly uncertain world.

We will continue to chronicle it.

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