It turns out that for our purposes, the Venn diagram of “people qualified to lead a discussion about the Iran MOU” and “people who won’t even consider missing the Spain–Saudi Arabia match” is a circle. I was unable to convince a single prospective guest that discussing the Persian Gulf was more important than that game. What’s more, having spent the week confident that one of the people I asked was bound to accept, I didn’t prepare a symposium on another topic.

So I suggest this: Let’s meet at the usual time for a discussion of the week’s news. I have some questions for our regular attendees about a topic I’m writing about, so I’d be delighted to have a chance to talk to them. If you have questions about the week’s news, drop in and ask. If you’re working on an essay or and you’d like some editorial advice, the clinic is open. If you’re trying to understand a vexed problem in international affairs—or anything else within the ill-policed borders of our remit—bring it to the group. It will be an open editorial salon: part news roundtable, part geopolitical triage unit, part group therapy for people who still read the newspapers.

Possible topics: What the hell is Trump doing in the Gulf? Is the Iranian regime weaker than it looks, or stronger than we hope? What should we be watching in Iran, Israel, Europe, Russia, China, and Washington? What stories are over-covered, under-covered, or badly understood? What are you reading that the rest of us should read? What argument are you trying to make but haven’t quite nailed down? How do you keep your cool when the week’s news seems to have been written by someone who fed the Book of Revelation, Brent crude futures, and Trump’s Truth Social feed into a wood chipper?

Bring your questions, arguments, drafts, reading recommendations, and your best sense of what everyone else is missing. I’ll bring mine. It will be less orderly than a formal symposium, but no less fun.

As usual, the Zoom link is below the paywall.

See you at 4:30 Paris time!

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This is a copy of the show notes that accompanied the latest episode of Critical Conditions. If receiving these in duplicate is irritating, let me know and I’ll find another solution.

In April, Dan and I spoke with Nazanin Ansari of Kayhan Life. You may remember the conversation:

Dan and I were already anxious about where this was headed by then, but still willing to believe there was a non-trivial possibility that the shock to the Islamic Republic would result in something better than yet another dismal cycle of sanctions, negotiations, and repression.

I won’t say that this week obviated any remaining hope. When you listen to this podcast, you’ll hear otherwise. But hope about Iran’s future is now something more like philosophical position, or a matter of temperament, than a conclusion drawn from the evidence.

The released MOU confirms the darkest reports about it. It does indeed defer an agreement on the nuclear question, the disposition of enriched material, enrichment, the fate of the sanctions, and the implementation mechanisms to a 60-day negotiation period. Meanwhile, it immediately begins removing the US blockade, restoring commercial shipping, issuing oil-export waivers, and making frozen and restricted Iranian assets usable.

Yes, it commits the US and its allies to a reconstruction plan—a ransom payment, —of at least US$300 billion. The phrase “at least $300 billion” deserves a moment of awed silence. It makes you want to seize the American negotiators by the lapels and ask whether they’ve ever bought so much as a pistachio. One imagines them entering the bazaar, admiring a carpet, and responding to the opening price by saying, “Splendid—let’s make that the lower bound.”

Trump and Vance have since tried to deny that they’ve promised immediate sanctions relief or a US$300 billion ransom payment, but the text says precisely that. Oil waivers, blockade removal, and asset usability are not trivial future hypotheticals. As usual, the administration is counting on the public’s unwillingness or inability to read.

The most striking thing about the administration’s denials is less their audacity than their laziness. They’re assuming the public will treat the MOU as it treats most official documents, like an inert slab of bureaucratic fog. But this document is so short that even those of very limited ability can puzzle it out, and this time, they very well might. I’ve appended it below. Once read, it’s impossible to miss the difference between what the text says and what Trump and Vance say it says.

The agreement provides for the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. It promises Iran a path to sanctions relief. It promises more talks about Iran’s nuclear program. What it doesn’t address—as Nazenin immediately pointed out—is the central political fact of the Islamic Republic, to wit, its war against the Iranian people. There’s no provision for political prisoners, no protection for protesters, no mention of the arrests and the disappearances, no mention of the terror and the repression. There’s not a word about the hangings—one after another, a machine of death, every single day. As I type, prison guards are raping terrified young women in Iranian prisons to ensure there’s no chance they will accidentally execute a virgin. There’s no demand that the Islamic Republic cease exporting violence through its proxies. There’s no answer to the obvious question: Do we seriously expect this regime to change its nature because it signed a memorandum?

Seriously, JD?

Nazanin isn’t blind to this. To the contrary, she begins where any morally serious discussion must: with the Iranian people, who are absent from the agreement. She is disappointed—in Trump, in the United States, in the international institutions that blather on about human rights while accommodating Tehran. But she refuses to despair.

That refusal isn’t the same thing as optimism. It’s something more complicated. She argues that the Islamic Republic’s reprieve can’t solve its deeper problems. Money isn’t legitimacy, and sanctions relief isn’t trust. A pause in the war doesn’t mean recovery. The regime may have gained cash, diplomatic recognition, and breathing space, but it remain structurally rotten—unable to govern, unable to inspire loyalty beyond fear and patronage, and unable to escape the consequences of what it has done to Iran.

Dan pressed the case for pessimism. Iran has extracted concessions without surrendering anything concrete. The nuclear file remains unresolved. The missile program remains. The militias remain. The regime’s internal machinery of repression remains. Tehran has demonstrated that threatening the Strait of Hormuz can extract payment from a frightened world.

Nazanin answers with a longer view. The regime, she argues, has not emerged restored. Its hardline factions are angry. Its ideological core is unsettled. Its economy has been devastated by decades of corruption, militarization, sanctions, and misrule. Its own supporters must now be bribed, entertained, mobilized, and reassured. Its opponents have not disappeared. rThe Iranian people, having already shown extraordinary courage, remain the decisive unknown. All of this left us with a question we couldn’t resolve: Is this the beginning of a transformation, or just another phase of the regime’s survival?

Nazanin’s deepest point is that the Islamic Republic can survive a battlefield defeat, a diplomatic humiliation, even another round of internal purges. What it cannot easily survive is the loss of belief—not just among its enemies, but among its own people and perhaps even among its own servants.

There’s a humane difficulty in conducting an interview like this. It’s also an editorial challenge. When someone has spent years watching the brutalization of her country and says, in effect, “I won’t surrender the future,” it’s grotesque to respond as if you’re cross-examining a RAND memo. I didn’t have the heart to do it.

Dan was a bit tougher, but in places, he sounds as if he’s insisting Nazanin feel as grim as we do. In any case, I don’t think she’s actually making an optimistic argument so much as a non-fatalistic one. “This is bad, but not final” is not the same as “this is good.” The former is her real position, I think, and a stronger one.

I certainly don’t want Nazenin, or any Iranian, to abandon hope. God forbid. But my question, as you can probably hear, is what kind of hope we’re talking about. Hope can be moral, political, strategic, historical, or evidentiary. All are legitimate, but they’re not the same thing.

Nazanin’s refusal to despair suggests the question I should have asked, but only thought of after the fact: What would she count as evidence that the Islamic Republic is entering a phase of forced transformation, not just a phase of even bloodier survival?

Her best point wasn’t any kind of defense of the MOU. She’s quite clear: She’s disappointed by it. She’s appalled that the Iranian people are absent from it.

Her argument is that the deal may be both a strategic capitulation and a regime-destabilizing event. These propositions, she suggests, are not mutually exclusive. She argues that cash isn’t legitimacy, and relief isn’t recovery. Iran’s mafia-state political economy inspires no one’s trust, domestically or abroad. Even US$300 billion won’t touch Iran’s deeper structural problem. Iranian economists, she says, put the cost of rebuilding Iran closer to US$1 trillion.

All of that is true (although I haven’t looked closely at the details of the economic estimates, so I don’t know whether the specific figure of a trillion dollars is defensible. Arguendo, I defer to the expertise of the economists she cites.) Authoritarian regimes can receive windfalls and still decay. Yes, they do tend to convert windfalls into factional struggle, elite predation, subsidies to loyalists, and renewed coercion. None of this is known to be stabilizing.

But it’s not necessarily known to be destabilizing, either. If you’re willing to kill enough of your citizens—and if any regime is willing, it is that one—you can achieve quite a grim stability of total, chronic immiseration. Yes, sometimes this kind of regime collapses, surprising everyone. Just as often it doesn’t. North Korea is still hanging in there, pickled in amber and misery. Nothing ever changes in Eritrea except the name of the enemy with whom they’re at war.

When she mentioned glasnost, I wondered if there was an important development I was overlooking. But no, as she clarifies, there is no glasnost at all. Executions, arrests, censorship, intimidation, ideological theater, and hostage diplomacy are not glasnost. At most, what she described suggests an exhausted regime trying to reorganize its internal bargain after a shock.

Yes, hypothetically, that could be destabilizing. But there’s no special reason to think so. It isn’t liberalization unless we see freedom of speech, the relaxation of coercion, real pluralism, real transparency, and a public reckoning with state violence. That is not in evidence—at all.

When we pressed her on this, she retreated to something more precise: not glasnost, but perhaps an economic opening meant to ensure the regime’s survival with a kind of Venezuelan-model insider rearrangement, or oligarchic redistribution under authoritarian control. This perestroika-without-glasnost intuition is perhaps more plausible. The regime may be forced to mutate economically without liberalizing politically. Reporting in Iran International over the past few days actually supports that. The hardliners are furious, but the ruling elite appears to be closing ranks around a pragmatic, still-authoritarian survival strategy centered on Ghalibaf, the IRGC leadership, and the Supreme National Security Council.

Nazanin was using glasnost and perestroika more as mood words than analytic categories. There are certainly signs of elite strain, ideological embarrassment, hardline fury, and perhaps tactical adaptations. But those don’t add up to glasnost—and they’re not yet perestroika, either.

The evidence I see points to something much narrower. There is factional stress, for sure. Hardliners, especially around the Paydari milieu, are furious about the MOU and about the elevation of figures like Araghchi and Ghalibaf. The protests and violent rhetoric against the negotiators suggests as much. So there’s division inside the regime coalition. That’s not liberalization.

The regime may be trying to sideline the maximalist or apocalyptic factions because they’ve become too dangerous to the regime’s survival. Again, that’s not perestroika in the Soviet sense; it’s more like a cartel boss telling the arsonists to leave the room while he renegotiates the protection racket. When Nazanin said perestroika, she clarified, she didn’t mean the true restructuring of the political economy, which she agrees is impossible. She meant a temporary insider bargain to distribute sanctions relief and preserve the regime. But those are radically different things.

The intensifying repression, certainly, points to elite strain, or the elite’s terror of its own people. It suggests, as Nazanin says, that none of the regime’s problems have been solved—except for a few rather significant ones: The US military is no longer shooting at them; we’re no longer preventing them from selling their oil; and we’re no longer refusing to unfreeze their assets. I agree with Nazanin that apart from this—and that’s a mighty big “apart”—it’s not as if our concessions will turn corrupt Shiite-revolutionary governance into a viable economic model.

I’m sure she’s right that the regime has devastated the Iranian economy in a way that even the cash inflow we’re about to provide can’t fix. But corruption and economic exhaustion aren’t perestroika. They’re pressures that might someday lead to perestroika—or might lead to a coup, to collapse, or just more predation and deeper misery.

So I fear she’s overselling the idea that this points in the direction of regime collapse. I’d like to believe it, but I just don’t see it. It will happen, in the long run, yes, because in the long run, everything collapses. But I don’t see any special reason why it would happen now.

A safer formulation is that the MOU could preserve the regime in the short term while aggravating the contradictions that make it brittle in the long term. But when you add the word “could” that many times, and decorate it with a cautious “in the long term,” you’re not really saying anything.

In fact, I find the whole Soviet analogy misleading. Gorbachev wasn’t just an exhausted apparatchik presiding over a cash-flow crisis. He had a reformist vocabulary, a theory of renewal, and some willingness—initially limited, then increasingly consequential—to loosen the information order. I see no Gorbachev figure in Iran. Ghalibaf is no Gorbachev. Araghchi is no Shevardnadze. Mojtaba Khamenei (if he’s alive, and if he’s really the effective supreme authority), is certainly not the herald of democratic socialist renewal, or whatever we want to call the Soviet late-imperial fever dream.

In my view, the correct analogy is not glasnost and perestroika at all. It’s Thermidor. A revolutionary regime, wounded and discredited, trying to discipline its own zealots, preserve its security apparatus, redistribute spoils to insiders, and rebrand its survival as a victory. Yes, that might still be unstable. But it’s not liberalization. It’s regime preservation by less ecstatic means.

But even that analogy may be too hopeful. Thermidor ended the Reign of Terror. It didn’t produce liberal constitutionalism, exactly; it produced reaction, the repression of the Jacobins, corruption, elite self-protection, the Directory, and eventually Bonaparte. But it signified the cresting of the most frenzied revolutionary violence. Robespierre fell. The Committee of Public Safety lost its supremacy. The guillotine ceased to be the central instrument of political rule.

Iran isn’t even there. Or at least, nothing we can see suggests it is. If executions are increasing, if prisons are filling, if the coercive apparatus remains intact, then “Thermidor” is too optimistic. At most, the Islamic Republic may be entering a post-fanaticism phase without a post-repression phase: less ecstatic, perhaps; not less brutal. Thermidor without mercy.

Listening to the podcast, I’m sure you’ll notice Nazanin’s hope, my disappointment, and Dan’s impatience. These are not incompatible reactions. The regime has gained breathing space, it’s true. It’s also true that after months of blood, assassinations, military humiliation, and economic pain, it returned to negotiations with the United States. Domestically, the regime might describe this as heroic resistance. It could also be described—and may well be understood—as catastrophic circularity.

On public opinion inside Iran, Nazanin confirms what others are reporting. Iran International (one of the best sources for reporting on Iran) describes reactions among Iranians as a mixture of relief, bitterness, triumphalism, anxiety, hope that prices will come down, fury at Tehran for the needless suffering, fury at Trump (among both supporters and opponents of the regime, for different reasons), and rage among hardliners who view the MOU as betrayal of the “martyred Leader.”

It is hard to take the thought that people who were so warmly-disposed toward Americans at the beginning of this war now feel so betrayed.

Related News

The UK Maritime Trade Operations group has issued a new advisory stating that the Strait of Hormuz is now open and that blockade operations have ceased.

Donald Trump announced: “We expect a complete Ceasefire on all fronts, including Lebanon, Hezbollah, and Israel. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” He can expect it all he likes. Last night, after Hezbollah killed four Israeli soldiers, the IDF struck more than 80 Hezbollah command centers, terrorists, launch positions, and infrastructure sites, defying the president’s expectations.

The US-Iran talks planned for Bürgenstock today were cancelled because Tehran is demanding a halt to the fighting in Lebanon. Ghalibaf threatened a “forceful response” if the terms of the agreement were violated.

Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, or his cardboard effigy, said he authorized the signing of the MoU with the United States despite having “another view in principle.” Make of that what you will. Iran International interprets it this way:

A message attributed to Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei and the swift reactions from President Masoud Pezeshkian and chief negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf highlighted the uneasy coalition behind the agreement with the United States and the lingering doubts about it.

The intervention comes after weeks of criticism from hardline media outlets, clerics and political factions that viewed the agreement as a dangerous concession to Washington. While the ultraconservative Paydari Party is often portrayed as the main opponent of rapprochement with the United States, recent debate in Iran has highlighted a broader network of political, media and ideological actors resisting a Tehran-Washington understanding.

…. One of the most detailed assessments came from Khabar Online, which argued that resistance to the ongoing negotiations should not be viewed as ordinary criticism but as an organized campaign to undermine diplomacy, attack key officials and deepen national divisions. The report identified state television, IRIB, as the leading institutional opponent of an agreement. It cited remarks by hardline clerics who used the broadcaster’s platforms to denounce negotiations with the United States. Among them was cleric Gholamreza Ghassemian, who declared on state television that “negotiation is haram,” while arguing that those pursuing talks were acting contrary to divine principles. Another cleric, Sheikh Esmail Ramezani, insisted that relations with Washington were impossible.

Khabar Online accused IRIB of functioning as the mouthpiece of a single political faction rather than a national broadcaster and even alleged that portions of the leader’s recent warnings against discord were downplayed to preserve a hardline narrative. The report also pointed to figures associated with the late president Ebrahim Raisi’s administration, arguing that some remained more focused on domestic political rivalries than on supporting diplomacy endorsed by the state’s highest institutions.

The Paydari Party appeared third on the list. The article described it as a rigidly ideological parliamentary bloc that has used its network of lawmakers and media outlets to challenge the negotiating team and question the merits of engagement with Washington. Yet even Paydari represents only part of the opposition. In a separate interview with Rouydad24, former lawmaker and security official Mansoor Haghighatpour argued that resistance to a Tehran-Washington agreement also reflects the influence of the messianic Hojatiyeh association, whose legacy remains the subject of recurring debate in Iran.

… The divisions echo debates surrounding the 2015 nuclear agreement, when hardline factions accused negotiators of capitulation while supporters argued diplomacy was necessary to ease pressure on the country. Ghalibaf was more explicit in defending the current process, warning that those acting against the leader’s guidance “under the guise of obeying the Leadership” would face a “harsh response from the nation.” For now, however, public criticism appears to have subsided. The day after the memorandum was signed, Iranian media largely fell silent on opposition to a possible agreement. Whether that reflects a direct effort by the leadership to quiet dissent, or merely a temporary pause as political factions adjust to the new reality, may become clearer in the days ahead.

Steve Witkoff said Iran will invite the IAEA to inspect its nuclear sites and identify the locations of Tehran’s enriched material. The spokesman for parliament’s National Security Committee, however, said IAEA inspections violated an Iranian law suspending cooperation with the UN nuclear watchdog. He wrote on Twitter that parliament would resist “law breaking and capitulation.”

Articles and Analyses

The Iran deal is good for Trump, but bad for the rest of us. Are there any real winners of the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran? The global economy may benefit from renewed oil exports, while Trump could score a short-term political win if voters forget the war’s economic fallout by the midterm:

In Israel, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange had bought Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s promise of a defeated Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran and had staged a powerful wartime rally. Reality finally hit this week, with a three-day sell-off, as the details of the US-Iran agreement first emerged. Most of the anxiety seems to be concerned with the fact that the agreement leaves Iran militarily strong enough that the regional balance of power won’t be shifting in favor of Israel. But that is only half the problem. It means that the vast amounts of money Israel has spent and borrowed, and the sacrifices of lost economic growth, in wars in Gaza, Lebanon and with Iran haven’t bought it the security Netanyahu promised. … Israel will thus remain enmeshed in forever wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, and is now on its own in confronting the Iranian menace. The economy will not only be weighed down by the constant fighting and increased burden of reserve duty, but by even greater defense costs. And, from now on, the wars will almost certainly be fought without American financial and military aid.

In the Gulf, it has become clear that Trump has sold his friends and business bros down the river, first by warring with Iran and now with his 14-point agreement. Recall that it was just over a year ago that the president visited Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, signing deals to invest in the Gulf and for the Gulf countries to invest in America. Not billions, but trillions of dollars. During the war, the Gulf countries sustained some US$58 billion in direct damage from Iranian missile and drone attacks, but more importantly, their carefully cultivated image as a safe haven to invest and do business was undone. If the war had ended with an Iranian defeat, the Gulf might have been able to recover the reputational damage. The deal makes that less likely. Iran’s economy may remain in dire straits, but the regime feels powerful and knows it can intimidate its neighbors by attacking their vulnerable infrastructure and blocking the Strait of Hormuz. The Gulf oil exporters may have to pay Iran to use the strait while spending tens of billions more on building pipelines to replace what was once a free conduit.

Lebanon is a loser, too. On paper, the agreement brings an end to the Israel-Hezbollah conflict, which has caused immense human and material damage to the country. Not only will Israel be constrained from further attacks, US Vice President JD Vance also says the clause means Tehran must stop “funding violent terrorist groups.” None of that is likely to happen. Israel may feel compelled to stop bombing attacks, but it is far less likely to withdraw from South Lebanon. And, Hezbollah is just as likely to continue enjoying Iranian patronage for the simple reason that Lebanon isn’t important enough to Trump to blow up negotiations with Iran over a few hundred million dollars flowing into Hezbollah coffers or deliveries of drones. In short, Lebanon has been consigned to the mire of war and instability. The government’s hope of restoring sovereignty and attracting the foreign aid and investment it needs to begin reconstruction is not going to happen.

Are there any real winners? The world economy will enjoy the resumption of oil exports, easing prices and inflation. Trump personally may be a winner, too, at least for the short term as the cost of the war to the American economy recedes, perhaps fast enough for voters to forget by November’s mid-term elections the war’s fallout.

“Don’t bullshit us, Trump.” Netanyahu loyalists rage at “treacherous” US. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s allies said US President Donald Trump was a “loser” and Vice President JD Vance was a “scumbag,” while one prominent loyalist described both as “the modern Chamberlain.”

A fragile compact. Ambiguities that could undermine US-Iran MoU:

Built on undefined terms, deferred obligations and subjective judgments of compliance, the agreement risks becoming as much a source of future disputes as a mechanism for resolving them.

… Consider Article 1, which proclaims an “immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon,” while committing the parties to respect Lebanese sovereignty and territorial integrity. On the surface, the language appears definitive. … Key terms such as “all fronts,” “permanent,” and “territorial integrity” remain undefined. No mechanism exists for arbitration or adjudication when disagreements arise. Instead, implementation is largely deferred to future negotiations, even as early Iranian steps on nuclear issues or maritime security may unlock sanctions waivers and access to frozen assets.

This pattern of ambiguity runs throughout the document. The nuclear status quo is to be maintained pending a final agreement. Oil waivers and access to restricted assets are linked to implementation of initial commitments, yet the standard for satisfactory performance remains largely a matter of political judgment.

The sixty-day timetable for negotiating a broader agreement, which may be extended by mutual consent, creates space for diplomacy. It may also give both sides time to consolidate military, political or diplomatic leverage while negotiations continue.

US Embassy shooting probe uncovers trail leading to Tehran:

Toronto police operation targeting suspects linked to the March attack on the US Consulate has uncovered what investigators believe is a far-reaching network connecting a series of shootings across the Greater Toronto Area to actors operating beyond Canada’s borders. According to confidential information obtained by Iran International from police sources, investigators have identified a traceable logistics, supply and equipment pipeline linking suspects in the Toronto shootings to individuals and networks originating in Tehran.

Here’s a link to the article. Here’s a translation:

I say it again here, as I do every time I speak about Trump. Being neither irresponsible, nor an adept of the politics of the worst, nor ideologically hostile to America, I hope with all my soul that I am mistaken in the judgment I pass upon this man.

And nothing would please me more than to see him finally perform, in the Middle East for example, an act that is just, courageous, and equal to the challenges of our time.

But when I observe his diplomacy, his relationship with his allies, and his vision of the world as it has asserted itself over the course of a mandate and a half, one trait strikes me—or rather, two.

Betrayal, first, as system and method.

I am thinking, of course, of Denmark, one of the United States’ most constant partners, summoned to surrender Greenland as if it were a listed company, a golf course, or a hotel under racket.

Of Europeans in general, treated with less consideration than Erdoğan, Kim Jong-un, or the Chavista heiress of Maduro’s narco-regime.

Of the Ukrainians, who are being made to understand that the blood shed in defense of the very values of the American credo is worth less than a good deal, in Alaska or elsewhere, with Russia.

Of the Taiwanese, who understood, during Trump’s recent meeting with Xi Jinping, that the destiny of their island is not, for him, a question of principle but an adjustment variable.

Of the Afghans, whose fatal destiny he negotiated with the Taliban at the end of his first term, leaving Joe Biden only to seal it.

Of the Kurds of Iraq and Syria, abandoned to their executioners after having been our true boots on the ground in the war against Daesh.

And today, I am thinking, naturally, of the valiant Iranian people, who expected so much from American “help” but who are the great forgotten party in the bad agreement announced, on the anniversary of his eightieth birthday, with the butchers of Tehran—and, of course, of the Israelis, who very imprudently believed in the solidity of their alliance with Jared Kushner’s father-in-law and who now discover, horrified, that the safety of their children mattered less than the securing of an agreement at any price.

So many allies.

So many peoples who had placed boundless trust in the word of the United States.

And each time, the same refined disloyalty, the same sophistry of defection, a perversity exceeding the ordinary forms of cynicism and whose entire art consists in disavowing, sacrificing, and finally dropping one’s historic allies.

But there is worse. And what strikes one, each time, is the strange will to add humiliation to betrayal.

For betraying Zelensky is one thing—doing so in the Oval Office, before the cameras of the entire world, summoned to attend a public execution, is another.

Dropping the Israeli prime minister might be a matter of disagreement between allies whose interests have temporarily diverged—but why this contempt? These threats? These now-insulting declarations? Why, already some months ago, that session of diplomatic penance in which he was seen, before the cameras as well, forced into that surreal telephone call in which he had to present his apologies to the emir of Qatar for having dared to strike, in Doha, a Hamas leader?

No doubt there are a thousand reasons to resent the heir to the Saudi throne, responsible, among other things, for the monstrous murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi—but what was the point of that stupefying sequence, equally senseless in realpolitikal terms, in which he was told, urbi et orbi, that he was fit only to lick the boots of the master of the world?

What was the point, when abandoning the Kurds, of justifying the decision with that mad, stupid, and once again contemptuous declaration: they “did not help us in Normandy?”

What was the point, when it came to Afghanistan, of adding abasement to abandonment by explaining, in a lunar declaration, that we were leaving because those Afghan bastards were shooting American soldiers in the back after those soldiers had so kindly armed them?

And, as for the Europeans, one remembers, even before Greenland and the threat of a withdrawal from NATO, the sequence in which Trump undertook, live, to brush the dust from President Macron’s jacket, as if he were not an ally but a subordinate who needed to be put back in his place.

Betrayal and humiliation…

It is Machiavelli read by a perverse real-estate developer.

It is Rome respecting Mithridates and crushing the Numidian princes who had placed themselves under its protection.

It is the dialogue of the Athenians and the Melians, when the former summon the latter to admit that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

It is the ancient grammar of empires, though enriched by that singular variant: the incessant flattery of enemies and the stubborn disdain for friends.

Except that America was not born of this idea.

It was great when it made fidelity to allies and to the given word a cardinal geopolitical principle.

And the Ancients, let it be said in passing, ended by discovering that an empire which honors only its adversaries and sees greatness only in force is always, in the end, defeated.

Meloni has had it with Trump:

Trump claimed that she “begged” for a photo with him during the G7 summit. The Italian foreign minister cancelled his plans to visit the US over the weekend, calling this “serious and offensive” toward Meloni and all of Italy. Meloni says:

Some things require an immediate response. Donald Trump’s statements are completely made up. I am frankly astonished. I don’t know why the president of the United States behaves this way toward his own allies. After all, this isn’t the first time this has happened. I can only say that I’m sorry he doesn’t show the same fortitude against the enemies of the West and the United States, whose leaders he treats with far greater indulgence. There is one thing he should bear in mind: Neither I nor Italy ever beg.

Trump truly doesn’t get Italian women. My brother could have warned him.

The betrayal of the Iranian people. The world has not reckoned with the violence visited on Iranians in 2026.

On the night of January 8, in the low-slung, industrial city of Karaj, just northwest of Tehran, a 17-year-old boy named Sam Afshari was killed by Iran’s security services. He and his friends were peacefully protesting when the streetlights suddenly went dark. Witnesses saw members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Basij militia on the beds of trucks charge up behind demonstrators, firing .50-caliber machine guns indiscriminately into the crowd. Sam was shot in the back, just below his kidneys, and brought to a hospital alive for surgery. He had a breathing tube in his mouth when, the family believes, IRGC agents visited the hospital and administered Sam a “finishing shot” to the back of the head.

I wish I could tell you that this was the end of the story of his family’s torment. It was not. Sam’s mother and uncle located his remains in the overflowing morgue of Behesht-e Sakineh, Karaj’s primary public cemetery. Sam’s face was mutilated beyond recognition; his mother identified him by a tattoo on his chest that read MOTHER, and promptly collapsed. The IRGC men running the morgue called her a prostitute and told her that her son was a terrorist.

Then they brought her a form to sign attesting that Sam had been a member of the Basij militia: The state would officially add him to its tally of “martyrs” killed by violent protesters, rather than honestly account for another nonviolent demonstrator killed by its own men. If she refused to sign it, they told her, they would not release the body to her for burial. They also demanded that she pay $1,400 for the bullet that killed her son. Otherwise, Sam would be buried in an unmarked mass grave, as hundreds of others collected at Behesht-e Sakineh reportedly were.

Sam’s family did what they had to do to secure his remains. Even at that, they were permitted no funeral gathering, obituary, or public notice of any kind. They found a grave site for Sam to share with just one other slain protester, rather than hundreds, in a location that the family fears to name, lest it be desecrated. I heard this story from Sam’s father, Parviz, who lives in Germany. He spent the three weeks in a hospital on suicide watch after his son’s murder.

“My brain was just sending me error messages,” he told me. “It was not just a feeling that they killed my son. It was a feeling that they killed me as well.”

Meanwhile, here’s Moscow yesterday morning:

I’m not sure I’m as excited by this as these people are:

A Note from Nazenin

After we recorded the podcast, Nazenin sent us the following email:

Subject: Data on revenue from Iran’s oil export 1965 to today +why Iran’s purchasing power has declined
Date: 18 June 2026 at 17:10:40 GMT+2

Hello both, fyi—I sought the help of AI to find out the figure for revenue generated from oil exports from 1965 to 2025. (Please note in 1963 the revenue was between $400 to $500)

For a meaningful comparison between the Pahlavi era and the Islamic Republic, it is essential to adjust for inflation. A dollar in 1974 had roughly 6.4–6.8 times the purchasing power of a dollar in 2025.

The 2011 figure of roughly $119 billion is confirmed by Iranian Central Bank data and U.S. EIA estimates. (Trading Economics)

What the comparison shows

The Shah’s oil boom was larger than it appears

When people compare:

• 1974 revenue = $21 billion

• 2024 revenue = $43 billion

it looks as if the Islamic Republic earned twice as much.

But after adjusting for inflation:

• 1974 = roughly $145 billion in 2025 dollars

• 2024 = roughly $43 billion

Thus, the Shah’s 1974 oil windfall had more than three times the purchasing power of Iran’s 2024 oil revenues.

The Islamic Republic’s peak year was 2011

The only year in which the Islamic Republic clearly exceeded the real purchasing power of the Shah’s oil boom was 2011, when oil export earnings reached approximately $118–119 billion, equivalent to roughly $160 billion in 2025 dollars. (Trading Economics)

Revenue per citizen tells an even starker story

This means that even though Iran exports substantial quantities of oil today, the oil wealth available per citizen is only a fraction of what it was during the 1974–1977 boom.

Historical perspective

The two greatest oil-revenue periods in modern Iranian history were:

1. 1974–1977 under Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, when the oil-price shock produced an unprecedented influx of wealth relative to population.

2. 2011 under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, when high oil prices briefly generated even larger nominal revenues before sanctions sharply reduced exports. (Trading Economics)

A striking conclusion is that the Islamic Republic has earned far more cumulative oil revenue than the Pahlavi state because it has existed for nearly five decades, but the peak oil wealth available to the country relative to its population and purchasing power was during the Shah’s 1974–1977 oil boom, with 2011 being the only comparable year. (Trading Economics)

Using the historical estimates discussed earlier, plus widely cited oil-revenue datasets from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, OPEC, the Iranian Central Bank, IMF studies, and historical economic research, we can produce a reasonable approximation. Because exact figures vary by source and methodology, the totals below should be viewed as order-of-magnitude estimates, not audited accounts.

Relative Comparison

What is surprising

The Islamic Republic has earned roughly 3.5 to 4 times more oil revenue in real terms than the late Pahlavi state.

However, three factors fundamentally change the picture:

1. The population almost tripled

The Islamic Republic has had far more people to support.

2. The Shah’s revenue was concentrated

Nearly half of Pahlavi-era oil income arrived during the extraordinary 1973–1978 oil boom.

Approximate annual revenues:

Thus, while the Islamic Republic earned much more in total, the late 1970s boom delivered a larger surge of wealth over a short period.

3. Revenue per citizen tells a different story

Pahlavi period (1965–1978)

• Total revenue: ~$950 billion (2025 dollars)

• Average population: ~29 million

≈ $33,000 per citizen

Islamic Republic (1979–2025)

• Total revenue: ~$3.5 trillion (midpoint estimate)

• Average population: ~67 million

≈ $52,000 per citizen

On paper, the Islamic Republic generated more oil wealth per citizen over its lifetime.

Yet living standards did not rise proportionately because a large share of that revenue was offset by:

• Eight years of war with Iraq

• Recurrent sanctions

• Capital flight

• Currency collapses

• Inflation

• Population growth

• Subsidy costs

• Military and regional expenditures

• Declining investment efficiency

The Historical Paradox

The paradox of modern Iran is that:

The Islamic Republic has likely earned more oil money than any government in Iranian history, yet many Iranians experienced declining purchasing power, currency depreciation, housing unaffordability, and economic insecurity.

In real terms, the Islamic Republic appears to have received approximately $3.5 trillion in oil-export revenues since 1979, compared with roughly $1 trillion received by the Pahlavi state between 1965 and 1978. The economic debate is therefore less about the amount of oil wealth generated and more about how effectively that wealth was converted into productivity, investment, infrastructure, and household income.

Cumulative oil export revenues

Approximate cumulative oil export revenues in 2025 dollars.

Iran’s purchasing power has declined because prices have risen far faster than incomes for many years. The deeper question is why prices have risen so persistently.

Most economists point to five interconnected factors:

1. Chronic Inflation

Iran has experienced some of the highest sustained inflation rates in the world. Inflation erodes the value of salaries, pensions, and savings. The IMF notes that high and volatile inflation has been a long-standing problem contributing to poverty and social tensions. (IMF)

For example, if wages rise 20% but prices rise 40%, households become poorer in real terms.

2. Collapse of the Rial

The Iranian rial has lost most of its value against major currencies over the past decade. A weaker currency makes imported goods, medicines, industrial equipment, food ingredients, and consumer products more expensive. Reuters reported that the rial fell from roughly 55,000 per dollar in 2018 to over 1 million per dollar by late 2025. (Reuters)

Currency depreciation is one of the strongest drivers of inflation in Iran. IMF research identifies exchange-rate depreciation as a major cause of rising prices. (IMF eLibrary)

3. Sanctions and Oil Revenue Constraints

Sanctions have reduced oil exports, restricted access to foreign currency, and complicated international banking transactions. This creates shortages, raises costs for businesses, and weakens the currency. IMF studies conclude that sanctions contribute to inflation directly through supply constraints and indirectly through exchange-rate weakness and fiscal pressures. (IMF eLibrary)

4. Budget Deficits and Money Creation

When government spending exceeds revenues, authorities often rely on borrowing from the banking system or expanding the money supply. Over time, more money chases the same amount of goods, pushing prices higher. Research on Iran consistently finds fiscal deficits and monetary expansion among the key drivers of inflation. (shareok.org)

5. Structural Economic Problems

Economists also cite:

• State dominance of major sectors

• Corruption and inefficiencies

• Multiple exchange rates

• Weak productivity growth

• Low private investment

• Capital flight and brain drain

These factors reduce economic growth and make it harder for wages to keep pace with prices. (IMF eLibrary)

Why Iranians Often Feel Poorer Despite Oil Wealth

A useful comparison:

Even when oil revenues have been substantial, they have been spread across a population nearly three times larger than in the mid-1970s. At the same time, inflation has eroded the value of household incomes. The result is that oil wealth per citizen is much lower than during the Shah’s oil boom.

The Single Biggest Reason

If one factor must be singled out, it is persistent inflation driven by a combination of currency depreciation, sanctions-related constraints, and fiscal imbalances. These forces have caused the purchasing power of the average Iranian household to decline steadily over many years. IMF research finds that exchange-rate depreciation, fiscal deficits, and sanctions are the principal drivers of inflation in both the short and long term. (IDEAS/RePEc)

This comparison is harder than it looks because Iran does not have a single consistent historical “average salary” series spanning the Shah’s era and the Islamic Republic. The best approach is to compare the purchasing power of a typical urban middle-class salary, adjusted into 2025 dollars and then compare what that salary could buy.

Estimated Average Annual Salary

In the 1970s:

• A locally assembled Paykan cost roughly 6–12 months of a middle-class salary.

• Imported European and Japanese cars were accessible to professionals.

In 2025:

• Even a domestically produced vehicle often costs several years of average wages.

Gold

One useful measure is gold because it preserves purchasing power.

Approximate annual salary expressed in ounces of gold:

This suggests that a typical salary in 1977 bought roughly four to ten times more hard assets than a typical salary today.

The Demographic Factor

A key reason is population growth.

Even when oil revenues were high, they were spread across a much larger population.

The Real Comparison

If we compare:

• Oil revenue per citizen

• Housing affordability

• Gold purchasing power

• Ability to save

then the average urban middle-class Iranian appears to have enjoyed:

1. Highest purchasing power in the late 1970s

2. A temporary improvement during the oil boom around 2005–2011

3. A substantial decline after sanctions, currency collapses, and inflation from 2012 onward

A useful illustration is that a mid-level engineer, teacher, civil servant, or bank employee in 1977 could often support a family, own a home, own a car, and save. By 2025, many similarly educated professionals struggle to achieve even one of those goals without family wealth, multiple incomes, or emigration.

The strongest evidence for declining purchasing power is not oil revenue itself but housing affordability. In most countries, housing is the largest expense. Relative to income, housing in Tehran is dramatically less affordable today than it was in the late Pahlavi period, which is why many Iranians feel poorer even when nominal salaries are far higher.

Nazenin Ansari
Publisher/ Managing Editor
www.Kayhan.London
www.KayhanLife.com
@NazeninA

The MOU

1. The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran and their allies in the ‌current war, by signing this MOU (Memorandum of Understanding), declare the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon, and undertake from now on not to initiate any war or any military operation against each other, and to refrain from the threat or use of force against each other, and ensuring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon. The final deal will confirm the permanent termination of the war on all fronts, including in Lebanon, and other provisions of this paragraph.

2. The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran undertake to respect each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and to refrain from interfering in each other’s internal affairs.

3. The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran commit to negotiating and achieving the final deal in maximum 60 days extendable with mutual consent.

4. Immediately upon the signing of this MOU, the United States of America will begin the removal of its naval blockade and any disturbances or impediments against the Islamic Republic of Iran, and will fully end the naval blockade within 30 days. During this period, ⁠the traffic of vessels will be in proportion to the numbers of pre-war traffic being restored by the Islamic Republic of Iran. The United States of America further undertakes to remove its forces from the proximity of the Islamic Republic of Iran within 30 days after the final deal.

5. Upon the signing of this MOU, the Islamic Republic of Iran will make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels with no charge for 60 days only from the Persian Gulf to the Sea of Oman and vice versa. The traffic of commercial vessels will immediately start and, considering the need for removing the technical and military obstacles and de-mining by the Islamic Republic of Iran, will be instated within 30 days. The Islamic Republic of Iran will conduct dialog with the Sultanate of Oman to define the future administration and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz, in discussion with other Persian Gulf littoral states in line with the applicable international law and the sovereign rights of coastal states of the Strait of Hormuz.

6. The United States of America undertakes with regional partners to develop a definitive, mutually agreed plan with at least USD 300 billion for the reconstruction and economic development of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The mechanism for the implementation of this plan will be finalized as part of final deal within 60 days. All required licenses, waivers, and permissions needed for the relevant financial transactions will be granted by the United States of America.

7. The United States of America undertakes to terminate all types of sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran, including the United Nations Security Council resolutions, i.e. IAEA Board of Governors resolutions, and all unilateral U.S. sanctions, primary and secondary, in an agreed upon schedule as part of the ‌final deal. The ⁠Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States of America acknowledge the critical importance of the sanctions termination issue above mentioned and express their intentions to immediately address these issues in the negotiations in order to achieve mutual agreement on them.

8. The Islamic Republic of Iran reaffirms that it shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons. The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran have agreed to resolve the disposition of stockpiled enriched material pursuant to a mechanism that will be mutually agreed upon, in accordance with the schedule mentioned in paragraph seven with the minimum methodology to be down blending on site under the supervision of the IAEA. The two parties also agreed to discuss the issue of enrichment and other mutually agreed matters related to the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear needs, based on a satisfactory framework being agreed upon in the final deal. The final deal will confirm the provisions of this paragraph. The United States of America and the ⁠Islamic Republic of Iran acknowledge the critical importance of the nuclear issues above mentioned and express their intention to immediately address these issues in the negotiations in order to achieve mutual agreement on them.

9. Pending the final deal, the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran agree to maintain the status quo. The Islamic Republic of Iran will maintain the current status quo of its nuclear program and the United States of America will not impose any new sanctions and will not deploy additional forces in the region.

10. The United States of America undertakes that immediately upon the signing of this MOU and until the termination of sanctions, ⁠U.S. Department of Treasury will issue waivers for the export of Iranian crude oil, petroleum products, and derivatives, and all associated services, including banking transactions, insurances, transportation, etc.

11. The United States of America undertakes to make fully available for use the frozen or restricted funds and assets of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Upon the implementation of this MOU, the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran will mutually agree on the procedures related to the release of these funds during the negotiation. Such funds, whether retained in the original account or transferred, shall be made fully usable ⁠for payment to any ultimate beneficiary designated by the Central Bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The United States of America undertakes to issue all necessary licenses and authorizations accordingly.

12. The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran agree that an executive mechanism will be established to monitor the successful implementation of this MOU and the future compliance of the final deal.

13. After signing this MOU, and subject to the beginning of the implementation of paragraphs 1,4,5,10 and 11 of this MOU, and the continuing implementation of these measures, the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran will start negotiations regarding the final deal exclusively on the other paragraphs.

14. The final deal will be endorsed by a binding UNSC resolution.

A clarification: Iran is not currently a member state of the UN Human Rights Council. In 2023, it chaired the the UN Human Rights Council Social Forum (a position determined through regional rotation). The Council has addressed human rights violations in Iran. Special sessions have been convened to examine this issue, and mandates for fact-finding missions and Special Rapporteurs on Iran have been extended multiple times to monitor violations. This doesn’t relieve the absurdity Nazenin observes. An Iranian diplomat now sits on the Council’s Advisory Committee. How could the Islamic Republic be anywhere near the UN’s human-rights machinery?

In April, Dan and I spoke with Nazanin Ansari of Kayhan Life. You may remember the conversation:

Dan and I were already anxious about where this was headed by then, but still willing to believe there was a non-trivial possibility that the shock to the Islamic Republic would result in something better than yet another dismal cycle of sanctions, negotiations, and repression.

I won’t say that this week obviated any remaining hope. When you listen to this podcast, you’ll hear otherwise. But hope about Iran’s future is now something more like philosophical position, or a matter of temperament, than a conclusion drawn from the evidence.

The released MOU confirms the darkest reports about it. It does indeed defer an agreement on the nuclear question, the disposition of enriched material, enrichment, the fate of the sanctions, and the implementation mechanisms to a 60-day negotiation period. Meanwhile, it immediately begins removing the US blockade, restoring commercial shipping, issuing oil-export waivers, and making frozen and restricted Iranian assets usable.

Yes, it commits the US and its allies to a reconstruction plan—a ransom payment, —of at least US$300 billion. The phrase “at least $300 billion” deserves a moment of awed silence. It makes you want to seize the American negotiators by the lapels and ask whether they’ve ever bought so much as a pistachio. One imagines them entering the bazaar, admiring a carpet, and responding to the opening price by saying, “Splendid—let’s make that the lower bound.”

Trump and Vance have since tried to deny that they’ve promised immediate sanctions relief or a US$300 billion ransom payment, but the text says precisely that. Oil waivers, blockade removal, and asset usability are not trivial future hypotheticals. As usual, the administration is counting on the public’s unwillingness or inability to read.1

The most striking thing about the administration’s denials is less their audacity than their laziness. They’re assuming the public will treat the MOU as it treats most official documents, like an inert slab of bureaucratic fog. But this document is so short that even those of very limited ability can puzzle it out, and this time, they very well might. I’ve appended it below. Once read, it’s impossible to miss the difference between what the text says and what Trump and Vance say it says.2

The agreement provides for the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. It promises Iran a path to sanctions relief. It promises more talks about Iran’s nuclear program. What it doesn’t address—as Nazenin immediately pointed out—is the central political fact of the Islamic Republic, to wit, its war against the Iranian people. There’s no provision for political prisoners, no protection for protesters, no mention of the arrests and the disappearances, no mention of the terror and the repression. There’s not a word about the hangings—one after another, a machine of death, every single day. As I type, prison guards are raping terrified young women in Iranian prisons to ensure there’s no chance they will accidentally execute a virgin. There’s no demand that the Islamic Republic cease exporting violence through its proxies. There’s no answer to the obvious question: Do we seriously expect this regime to change its nature because it signed a memorandum?

Seriously, JD?

Nazanin isn’t blind to this. To the contrary, she begins where any morally serious discussion must: with the Iranian people, who are absent from the agreement. She is disappointed—in Trump, in the United States, in the international institutions that blather on about human rights while accommodating Tehran. But she refuses to despair.

That refusal isn’t the same thing as optimism. It’s something more complicated. She argues that the Islamic Republic’s reprieve can’t solve its deeper problems. Money isn’t legitimacy, and sanctions relief isn’t trust. A pause in the war doesn’t mean recovery. The regime may have gained cash, diplomatic recognition, and breathing space, but it remain structurally rotten—unable to govern, unable to inspire loyalty beyond fear and patronage, and unable to escape the consequences of what it has done to Iran.

Dan pressed the case for pessimism. Iran has extracted concessions without surrendering anything concrete. The nuclear file remains unresolved. The missile program remains. The militias remain. The regime’s internal machinery of repression remains. Tehran has demonstrated that threatening the Strait of Hormuz can extract payment from a frightened world.

Nazanin answers with a longer view. The regime, she argues, has not emerged restored. Its hardline factions are angry. Its ideological core is unsettled. Its economy has been devastated by decades of corruption, militarization, sanctions, and misrule. Its own supporters must now be bribed, entertained, mobilized, and reassured. Its opponents have not disappeared. rThe Iranian people, having already shown extraordinary courage, remain the decisive unknown. All of this left us with a question we couldn’t resolve: Is this the beginning of a transformation, or just another phase of the regime’s survival?

Nazanin’s deepest point is that the Islamic Republic can survive a battlefield defeat, a diplomatic humiliation, even another round of internal purges. What it cannot easily survive is the loss of belief—not just among its enemies, but among its own people and perhaps even among its own servants.

There’s a humane difficulty in conducting an interview like this. It’s also an editorial challenge. When someone has spent years watching the brutalization of her country and says, in effect, “I won’t surrender the future,” it’s grotesque to respond as if you’re cross-examining a RAND memo. I didn’t have the heart to do it.

Dan was a bit tougher, but in places, he sounds as if he’s insisting Nazanin feel as grim as we do. In any case, I don’t think she’s actually making an optimistic argument so much as a non-fatalistic one. “This is bad, but not final” is not the same as “this is good.” The former is her real position, I think, and a stronger one.

I certainly don’t want Nazenin, or any Iranian, to abandon hope. God forbid. But my question, as you can probably hear, is what kind of hope we’re talking about. Hope can be moral, political, strategic, historical, or evidentiary. All are legitimate, but they’re not the same thing.

Nazanin’s refusal to despair suggests the question I should have asked, but only thought of after the fact: What would she count as evidence that the Islamic Republic is entering a phase of forced transformation, not just a phase of even bloodier survival?

Her best point wasn’t any kind of defense of the MOU. She’s quite clear: She’s disappointed by it. She’s appalled that the Iranian people are absent from it.

Her argument is that the deal may be both a strategic capitulation and a regime-destabilizing event. These propositions, she suggests, are not mutually exclusive. She argues that cash isn’t legitimacy, and relief isn’t recovery. Iran’s mafia-state political economy inspires no one’s trust, domestically or abroad. Even US$300 billion won’t touch Iran’s deeper structural problem. Iranian economists, she says, put the cost of rebuilding Iran closer to US$1 trillion.

All of that is true (although I haven’t looked closely at the details of the economic estimates, so I don’t know whether the specific figure of a trillion dollars is defensible. Arguendo, I defer to the expertise of the economists she cites.) Authoritarian regimes can receive windfalls and still decay. Yes, they do tend to convert windfalls into factional struggle, elite predation, subsidies to loyalists, and renewed coercion. None of this is known to be stabilizing.

But it’s not necessarily known to be destabilizing, either. If you’re willing to kill enough of your citizens—and if any regime is willing, it is that one—you can achieve quite a grim stability of total, chronic immiseration. Yes, sometimes this kind of regime collapses, surprising everyone. Just as often it doesn’t. North Korea is still hanging in there, pickled in amber and misery. Nothing ever changes in Eritrea except the name of the enemy with whom they’re at war.

When she mentioned glasnost, I wondered if there was an important development I was overlooking. But no, as she clarifies, there is no glasnost at all. Executions, arrests, censorship, intimidation, ideological theater, and hostage diplomacy are not glasnost. At most, what she described suggests an exhausted regime trying to reorganize its internal bargain after a shock.

Yes, hypothetically, that could be destabilizing. But there’s no special reason to think so. It isn’t liberalization unless we see freedom of speech, the relaxation of coercion, real pluralism, real transparency, and a public reckoning with state violence. That is not in evidence—at all.

When we pressed her on this, she retreated to something more precise: not glasnost, but perhaps an economic opening meant to ensure the regime’s survival with a kind of Venezuelan-model insider rearrangement, or oligarchic redistribution under authoritarian control. This perestroika-without-glasnost intuition is perhaps more plausible. The regime may be forced to mutate economically without liberalizing politically. Reporting in Iran International over the past few days actually supports that. The hardliners are furious, but the ruling elite appears to be closing ranks around a pragmatic, still-authoritarian survival strategy centered on Ghalibaf, the IRGC leadership, and the Supreme National Security Council.

Nazanin was using glasnost and perestroika more as mood words than analytic categories. There are certainly signs of elite strain, ideological embarrassment, hardline fury, and perhaps tactical adaptations. But those don’t add up to glasnost—and they’re not yet perestroika, either.

The evidence I see points to something much narrower. There is factional stress, for sure. Hardliners, especially around the Paydari milieu, are furious about the MOU and about the elevation of figures like Araghchi and Ghalibaf. The protests and violent rhetoric against the negotiators suggests as much. So there’s division inside the regime coalition. That’s not liberalization.

The regime may be trying to sideline the maximalist or apocalyptic factions because they’ve become too dangerous to the regime’s survival. Again, that’s not perestroika in the Soviet sense; it’s more like a cartel boss telling the arsonists to leave the room while he renegotiates the protection racket. When Nazanin said perestroika, she clarified, she didn’t mean the true restructuring of the political economy, which she agrees is impossible. She meant a temporary insider bargain to distribute sanctions relief and preserve the regime. But those are radically different things.

The intensifying repression, certainly, points to elite strain, or the elite’s terror of its own people. It suggests, as Nazanin says, that none of the regime’s problems have been solved—except for a few rather significant ones: The US military is no longer shooting at them; we’re no longer preventing them from selling their oil; and we’re no longer refusing to unfreeze their assets. I agree with Nazanin that apart from this—and that’s a mighty big “apart”—it’s not as if our concessions will turn corrupt Shiite-revolutionary governance into a viable economic model.

I’m sure she’s right that the regime has devastated the Iranian economy in a way that even the cash inflow we’re about to provide can’t fix. But corruption and economic exhaustion aren’t perestroika. They’re pressures that might someday lead to perestroika—or might lead to a coup, to collapse, or just more predation and deeper misery.

So I fear she’s overselling the idea that this points in the direction of regime collapse. I’d like to believe it, but I just don’t see it. It will happen, in the long run, yes, because in the long run, everything collapses. But I don’t see any special reason why it would happen now.

A safer formulation is that the MOU could preserve the regime in the short term while aggravating the contradictions that make it brittle in the long term. But when you add the word “could” that many times, and decorate it with a cautious “in the long term,” you’re not really saying anything.

In fact, I find the whole Soviet analogy misleading. Gorbachev wasn’t just an exhausted apparatchik presiding over a cash-flow crisis. He had a reformist vocabulary, a theory of renewal, and some willingness—initially limited, then increasingly consequential—to loosen the information order. I see no Gorbachev figure in Iran. Ghalibaf is no Gorbachev. Araghchi is no Shevardnadze. Mojtaba Khamenei (if he’s alive, and if he’s really the effective supreme authority), is certainly not the herald of democratic socialist renewal, or whatever we want to call the Soviet late-imperial fever dream.

In my view, the correct analogy is not glasnost and perestroika at all. It’s Thermidor. A revolutionary regime, wounded and discredited, trying to discipline its own zealots, preserve its security apparatus, redistribute spoils to insiders, and rebrand its survival as a victory. Yes, that might still be unstable. But it’s not liberalization. It’s regime preservation by less ecstatic means.

But even that analogy may be too hopeful. Thermidor ended the Reign of Terror. It didn’t produce liberal constitutionalism, exactly; it produced reaction, the repression of the Jacobins, corruption, elite self-protection, the Directory, and eventually Bonaparte. But it signified the cresting of the most frenzied revolutionary violence. Robespierre fell. The Committee of Public Safety lost its supremacy. The guillotine ceased to be the central instrument of political rule.

Iran isn’t even there. Or at least, nothing we can see suggests it is. If executions are increasing, if prisons are filling, if the coercive apparatus remains intact, then “Thermidor” is too optimistic. At most, the Islamic Republic may be entering a post-fanaticism phase without a post-repression phase: less ecstatic, perhaps; not less brutal. Thermidor without mercy.

Listening to the podcast, I’m sure you’ll notice Nazanin’s hope, my disappointment, and Dan’s impatience. These are not incompatible reactions. The regime has gained breathing space, it’s true. It’s also true that after months of blood, assassinations, military humiliation, and economic pain, it returned to negotiations with the United States. Domestically, the regime might describe this as heroic resistance. It could also be described—and may well be understood—as catastrophic circularity.

On public opinion inside Iran, Nazanin confirms what others are reporting. Iran International (one of the best sources for reporting on Iran) describes reactions among Iranians as a mixture of relief, bitterness, triumphalism, anxiety, hope that prices will come down, fury at Tehran for the needless suffering, fury at Trump (among both supporters and opponents of the regime, for different reasons), and rage among hardliners who view the MOU as betrayal of the “martyred Leader.”

It is hard to take the thought that people who were so warmly-disposed toward Americans at the beginning of this war now feel so betrayed.

Related News

The UK Maritime Trade Operations group has issued a new advisory stating that the Strait of Hormuz is now open and that blockade operations have ceased.

Donald Trump announced: “We expect a complete Ceasefire on all fronts, including Lebanon, Hezbollah, and Israel. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” He can expect it all he likes. Last night, after Hezbollah killed four Israeli soldiers, the IDF struck more than 80 Hezbollah command centers, terrorists, launch positions, and infrastructure sites, defying the president’s expectations.

The US-Iran talks planned for Bürgenstock today were cancelled because Tehran is demanding a halt to the fighting in Lebanon. Ghalibaf threatened a “forceful response” if the terms of the agreement were violated.

Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, or his cardboard effigy, said he authorized the signing of the MoU with the United States despite having “another view in principle.” Make of that what you will. Iran International interprets it this way:

A message attributed to Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei and the swift reactions from President Masoud Pezeshkian and chief negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf highlighted the uneasy coalition behind the agreement with the United States and the lingering doubts about it.

The intervention comes after weeks of criticism from hardline media outlets, clerics and political factions that viewed the agreement as a dangerous concession to Washington. While the ultraconservative Paydari Party is often portrayed as the main opponent of rapprochement with the United States, recent debate in Iran has highlighted a broader network of political, media and ideological actors resisting a Tehran-Washington understanding.

…. One of the most detailed assessments came from Khabar Online, which argued that resistance to the ongoing negotiations should not be viewed as ordinary criticism but as an organized campaign to undermine diplomacy, attack key officials and deepen national divisions. The report identified state television, IRIB, as the leading institutional opponent of an agreement. It cited remarks by hardline clerics who used the broadcaster’s platforms to denounce negotiations with the United States. Among them was cleric Gholamreza Ghassemian, who declared on state television that “negotiation is haram,” while arguing that those pursuing talks were acting contrary to divine principles. Another cleric, Sheikh Esmail Ramezani, insisted that relations with Washington were impossible.

Khabar Online accused IRIB of functioning as the mouthpiece of a single political faction rather than a national broadcaster and even alleged that portions of the leader’s recent warnings against discord were downplayed to preserve a hardline narrative. The report also pointed to figures associated with the late president Ebrahim Raisi’s administration, arguing that some remained more focused on domestic political rivalries than on supporting diplomacy endorsed by the state’s highest institutions.

The Paydari Party appeared third on the list. The article described it as a rigidly ideological parliamentary bloc that has used its network of lawmakers and media outlets to challenge the negotiating team and question the merits of engagement with Washington. Yet even Paydari represents only part of the opposition. In a separate interview with Rouydad24, former lawmaker and security official Mansoor Haghighatpour argued that resistance to a Tehran-Washington agreement also reflects the influence of the messianic Hojatiyeh association, whose legacy remains the subject of recurring debate in Iran.

… The divisions echo debates surrounding the 2015 nuclear agreement, when hardline factions accused negotiators of capitulation while supporters argued diplomacy was necessary to ease pressure on the country. Ghalibaf was more explicit in defending the current process, warning that those acting against the leader’s guidance “under the guise of obeying the Leadership” would face a “harsh response from the nation.” For now, however, public criticism appears to have subsided. The day after the memorandum was signed, Iranian media largely fell silent on opposition to a possible agreement. Whether that reflects a direct effort by the leadership to quiet dissent, or merely a temporary pause as political factions adjust to the new reality, may become clearer in the days ahead.

Steve Witkoff said Iran will invite the IAEA to inspect its nuclear sites and identify the locations of Tehran’s enriched material. The spokesman for parliament’s National Security Committee, however, said IAEA inspections violated an Iranian law suspending cooperation with the UN nuclear watchdog. He wrote on Twitter that parliament would resist “law breaking and capitulation.”

Articles and Analyses

The Iran deal is good for Trump, but bad for the rest of us. Are there any real winners of the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran? The global economy may benefit from renewed oil exports, while Trump could score a short-term political win if voters forget the war's economic fallout by the midterm:

In Israel, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange had bought Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s promise of a defeated Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran and had staged a powerful wartime rally. Reality finally hit this week, with a three-day sell-off, as the details of the US-Iran agreement first emerged. Most of the anxiety seems to be concerned with the fact that the agreement leaves Iran militarily strong enough that the regional balance of power won’t be shifting in favor of Israel. But that is only half the problem. It means that the vast amounts of money Israel has spent and borrowed, and the sacrifices of lost economic growth, in wars in Gaza, Lebanon and with Iran haven’t bought it the security Netanyahu promised. … Israel will thus remain enmeshed in forever wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, and is now on its own in confronting the Iranian menace. The economy will not only be weighed down by the constant fighting and increased burden of reserve duty, but by even greater defense costs. And, from now on, the wars will almost certainly be fought without American financial and military aid.

In the Gulf, it has become clear that Trump has sold his friends and business bros down the river, first by warring with Iran and now with his 14-point agreement. Recall that it was just over a year ago that the president visited Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, signing deals to invest in the Gulf and for the Gulf countries to invest in America. Not billions, but trillions of dollars. During the war, the Gulf countries sustained some US$58 billion in direct damage from Iranian missile and drone attacks, but more importantly, their carefully cultivated image as a safe haven to invest and do business was undone. If the war had ended with an Iranian defeat, the Gulf might have been able to recover the reputational damage. The deal makes that less likely. Iran’s economy may remain in dire straits, but the regime feels powerful and knows it can intimidate its neighbors by attacking their vulnerable infrastructure and blocking the Strait of Hormuz. The Gulf oil exporters may have to pay Iran to use the strait while spending tens of billions more on building pipelines to replace what was once a free conduit.

Lebanon is a loser, too. On paper, the agreement brings an end to the Israel-Hezbollah conflict, which has caused immense human and material damage to the country. Not only will Israel be constrained from further attacks, US Vice President JD Vance also says the clause means Tehran must stop “funding violent terrorist groups.” None of that is likely to happen. Israel may feel compelled to stop bombing attacks, but it is far less likely to withdraw from South Lebanon. And, Hezbollah is just as likely to continue enjoying Iranian patronage for the simple reason that Lebanon isn’t important enough to Trump to blow up negotiations with Iran over a few hundred million dollars flowing into Hezbollah coffers or deliveries of drones. In short, Lebanon has been consigned to the mire of war and instability. The government’s hope of restoring sovereignty and attracting the foreign aid and investment it needs to begin reconstruction is not going to happen.

Are there any real winners? The world economy will enjoy the resumption of oil exports, easing prices and inflation. Trump personally may be a winner, too, at least for the short term as the cost of the war to the American economy recedes, perhaps fast enough for voters to forget by November’s mid-term elections the war’s fallout.

“Don’t bullshit us, Trump.” Netanyahu loyalists rage at “treacherous” US. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s allies said US President Donald Trump was a “loser” and Vice President JD Vance was a “scumbag,” while one prominent loyalist described both as “the modern Chamberlain.”

A fragile compact. Ambiguities that could undermine US-Iran MoU:

Built on undefined terms, deferred obligations and subjective judgments of compliance, the agreement risks becoming as much a source of future disputes as a mechanism for resolving them.

… Consider Article 1, which proclaims an “immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon,” while committing the parties to respect Lebanese sovereignty and territorial integrity. On the surface, the language appears definitive. … Key terms such as “all fronts,” “permanent,” and “territorial integrity” remain undefined. No mechanism exists for arbitration or adjudication when disagreements arise. Instead, implementation is largely deferred to future negotiations, even as early Iranian steps on nuclear issues or maritime security may unlock sanctions waivers and access to frozen assets.

This pattern of ambiguity runs throughout the document. The nuclear status quo is to be maintained pending a final agreement. Oil waivers and access to restricted assets are linked to implementation of initial commitments, yet the standard for satisfactory performance remains largely a matter of political judgment.

The sixty-day timetable for negotiating a broader agreement, which may be extended by mutual consent, creates space for diplomacy. It may also give both sides time to consolidate military, political or diplomatic leverage while negotiations continue.

US Embassy shooting probe uncovers trail leading to Tehran:

Toronto police operation targeting suspects linked to the March attack on the US Consulate has uncovered what investigators believe is a far-reaching network connecting a series of shootings across the Greater Toronto Area to actors operating beyond Canada’s borders. According to confidential information obtained by Iran International from police sources, investigators have identified a traceable logistics, supply and equipment pipeline linking suspects in the Toronto shootings to individuals and networks originating in Tehran.

Here’s a link to the article. Here’s a translation:

I say it again here, as I do every time I speak about Trump. Being neither irresponsible, nor an adept of the politics of the worst, nor ideologically hostile to America, I hope with all my soul that I am mistaken in the judgment I pass upon this man.

And nothing would please me more than to see him finally perform, in the Middle East for example, an act that is just, courageous, and equal to the challenges of our time.

But when I observe his diplomacy, his relationship with his allies, and his vision of the world as it has asserted itself over the course of a mandate and a half, one trait strikes me—or rather, two.

Betrayal, first, as system and method.

I am thinking, of course, of Denmark, one of the United States’ most constant partners, summoned to surrender Greenland as if it were a listed company, a golf course, or a hotel under racket.

Of Europeans in general, treated with less consideration than Erdoğan, Kim Jong-un, or the Chavista heiress of Maduro’s narco-regime.

Of the Ukrainians, who are being made to understand that the blood shed in defense of the very values of the American credo is worth less than a good deal, in Alaska or elsewhere, with Russia.

Of the Taiwanese, who understood, during Trump’s recent meeting with Xi Jinping, that the destiny of their island is not, for him, a question of principle but an adjustment variable.

Of the Afghans, whose fatal destiny he negotiated with the Taliban at the end of his first term, leaving Joe Biden only to seal it.

Of the Kurds of Iraq and Syria, abandoned to their executioners after having been our true boots on the ground in the war against Daesh.

And today, I am thinking, naturally, of the valiant Iranian people, who expected so much from American “help” but who are the great forgotten party in the bad agreement announced, on the anniversary of his eightieth birthday, with the butchers of Tehran—and, of course, of the Israelis, who very imprudently believed in the solidity of their alliance with Jared Kushner’s father-in-law and who now discover, horrified, that the safety of their children mattered less than the securing of an agreement at any price.

So many allies.

So many peoples who had placed boundless trust in the word of the United States.

And each time, the same refined disloyalty, the same sophistry of defection, a perversity exceeding the ordinary forms of cynicism and whose entire art consists in disavowing, sacrificing, and finally dropping one’s historic allies.

But there is worse. And what strikes one, each time, is the strange will to add humiliation to betrayal.

For betraying Zelensky is one thing—doing so in the Oval Office, before the cameras of the entire world, summoned to attend a public execution, is another.

Dropping the Israeli prime minister might be a matter of disagreement between allies whose interests have temporarily diverged—but why this contempt? These threats? These now-insulting declarations? Why, already some months ago, that session of diplomatic penance in which he was seen, before the cameras as well, forced into that surreal telephone call in which he had to present his apologies to the emir of Qatar for having dared to strike, in Doha, a Hamas leader?

No doubt there are a thousand reasons to resent the heir to the Saudi throne, responsible, among other things, for the monstrous murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi—but what was the point of that stupefying sequence, equally senseless in realpolitikal terms, in which he was told, urbi et orbi, that he was fit only to lick the boots of the master of the world?

What was the point, when abandoning the Kurds, of justifying the decision with that mad, stupid, and once again contemptuous declaration: they “did not help us in Normandy?”

What was the point, when it came to Afghanistan, of adding abasement to abandonment by explaining, in a lunar declaration, that we were leaving because those Afghan bastards were shooting American soldiers in the back after those soldiers had so kindly armed them?

And, as for the Europeans, one remembers, even before Greenland and the threat of a withdrawal from NATO, the sequence in which Trump undertook, live, to brush the dust from President Macron’s jacket, as if he were not an ally but a subordinate who needed to be put back in his place.

Betrayal and humiliation…

It is Machiavelli read by a perverse real-estate developer.

It is Rome respecting Mithridates and crushing the Numidian princes who had placed themselves under its protection.

It is the dialogue of the Athenians and the Melians, when the former summon the latter to admit that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

It is the ancient grammar of empires, though enriched by that singular variant: the incessant flattery of enemies and the stubborn disdain for friends.

Except that America was not born of this idea.

It was great when it made fidelity to allies and to the given word a cardinal geopolitical principle.

And the Ancients, let it be said in passing, ended by discovering that an empire which honors only its adversaries and sees greatness only in force is always, in the end, defeated.

Meloni has had it with Trump:

Trump claimed that she “begged” for a photo with him during the G7 summit. The Italian foreign minister cancelled his plans to visit the US over the weekend, calling this “serious and offensive” toward Meloni and all of Italy. Meloni says:

Some things require an immediate response. Donald Trump’s statements are completely made up. I am frankly astonished. I don't know why the president of the United States behaves this way toward his own allies. After all, this isn't the first time this has happened. I can only say that I’m sorry he doesn’t show the same fortitude against the enemies of the West and the United States, whose leaders he treats with far greater indulgence. There is one thing he should bear in mind: Neither I nor Italy ever beg.

Trump truly doesn’t get Italian women. My brother could have warned him.

The betrayal of the Iranian people. The world has not reckoned with the violence visited on Iranians in 2026.

On the night of January 8, in the low-slung, industrial city of Karaj, just northwest of Tehran, a 17-year-old boy named Sam Afshari was killed by Iran’s security services. He and his friends were peacefully protesting when the streetlights suddenly went dark. Witnesses saw members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Basij militia on the beds of trucks charge up behind demonstrators, firing .50-caliber machine guns indiscriminately into the crowd. Sam was shot in the back, just below his kidneys, and brought to a hospital alive for surgery. He had a breathing tube in his mouth when, the family believes, IRGC agents visited the hospital and administered Sam a “finishing shot” to the back of the head.

I wish I could tell you that this was the end of the story of his family’s torment. It was not. Sam’s mother and uncle located his remains in the overflowing morgue of Behesht-e Sakineh, Karaj’s primary public cemetery. Sam’s face was mutilated beyond recognition; his mother identified him by a tattoo on his chest that read MOTHER, and promptly collapsed. The IRGC men running the morgue called her a prostitute and told her that her son was a terrorist.

Then they brought her a form to sign attesting that Sam had been a member of the Basij militia: The state would officially add him to its tally of “martyrs” killed by violent protesters, rather than honestly account for another nonviolent demonstrator killed by its own men. If she refused to sign it, they told her, they would not release the body to her for burial. They also demanded that she pay $1,400 for the bullet that killed her son. Otherwise, Sam would be buried in an unmarked mass grave, as hundreds of others collected at Behesht-e Sakineh reportedly were.

Sam’s family did what they had to do to secure his remains. Even at that, they were permitted no funeral gathering, obituary, or public notice of any kind. They found a grave site for Sam to share with just one other slain protester, rather than hundreds, in a location that the family fears to name, lest it be desecrated. I heard this story from Sam’s father, Parviz, who lives in Germany. He spent the three weeks in a hospital on suicide watch after his son’s murder.

“My brain was just sending me error messages,” he told me. “It was not just a feeling that they killed my son. It was a feeling that they killed me as well.”

Meanwhile, here’s Moscow yesterday morning:

I’m not sure I’m as excited by this as these people are:

A Note from Nazenin

After we recorded the podcast, Nazenin sent us the following email:

Subject: Data on revenue from Iran’s oil export 1965 to today +why Iran’s purchasing power has declined
Date: 18 June 2026 at 17:10:40 GMT+2

Hello both, fyi—I sought the help of AI to find out the figure for revenue generated from oil exports from 1965 to 2025. (Please note in 1963 the revenue was between $400 to $500)

For a meaningful comparison between the Pahlavi era and the Islamic Republic, it is essential to adjust for inflation. A dollar in 1974 had roughly 6.4–6.8 times the purchasing power of a dollar in 2025.

The 2011 figure of roughly $119 billion is confirmed by Iranian Central Bank data and U.S. EIA estimates. (Trading Economics)

What the comparison shows

The Shah’s oil boom was larger than it appears

When people compare:

• 1974 revenue = $21 billion

• 2024 revenue = $43 billion

it looks as if the Islamic Republic earned twice as much.

But after adjusting for inflation:

• 1974 = roughly $145 billion in 2025 dollars

• 2024 = roughly $43 billion

Thus, the Shah’s 1974 oil windfall had more than three times the purchasing power of Iran’s 2024 oil revenues.

The Islamic Republic’s peak year was 2011

The only year in which the Islamic Republic clearly exceeded the real purchasing power of the Shah’s oil boom was 2011, when oil export earnings reached approximately $118–119 billion, equivalent to roughly $160 billion in 2025 dollars. (Trading Economics)

Revenue per citizen tells an even starker story

This means that even though Iran exports substantial quantities of oil today, the oil wealth available per citizen is only a fraction of what it was during the 1974–1977 boom.

Historical perspective

The two greatest oil-revenue periods in modern Iranian history were:

1. 1974–1977 under Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, when the oil-price shock produced an unprecedented influx of wealth relative to population.

2. 2011 under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, when high oil prices briefly generated even larger nominal revenues before sanctions sharply reduced exports. (Trading Economics)

A striking conclusion is that the Islamic Republic has earned far more cumulative oil revenue than the Pahlavi state because it has existed for nearly five decades, but the peak oil wealth available to the country relative to its population and purchasing power was during the Shah’s 1974–1977 oil boom, with 2011 being the only comparable year. (Trading Economics)

Using the historical estimates discussed earlier, plus widely cited oil-revenue datasets from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, OPEC, the Iranian Central Bank, IMF studies, and historical economic research, we can produce a reasonable approximation. Because exact figures vary by source and methodology, the totals below should be viewed as order-of-magnitude estimates, not audited accounts.

Relative Comparison

What is surprising

The Islamic Republic has earned roughly 3.5 to 4 times more oil revenue in real terms than the late Pahlavi state.

However, three factors fundamentally change the picture:

1. The population almost tripled

The Islamic Republic has had far more people to support.

2. The Shah’s revenue was concentrated

Nearly half of Pahlavi-era oil income arrived during the extraordinary 1973–1978 oil boom.

Approximate annual revenues:

Thus, while the Islamic Republic earned much more in total, the late 1970s boom delivered a larger surge of wealth over a short period.

3. Revenue per citizen tells a different story

Pahlavi period (1965–1978)

• Total revenue: ~$950 billion (2025 dollars)

• Average population: ~29 million

≈ $33,000 per citizen

Islamic Republic (1979–2025)

• Total revenue: ~$3.5 trillion (midpoint estimate)

• Average population: ~67 million

≈ $52,000 per citizen

On paper, the Islamic Republic generated more oil wealth per citizen over its lifetime.

Yet living standards did not rise proportionately because a large share of that revenue was offset by:

• Eight years of war with Iraq

• Recurrent sanctions

• Capital flight

• Currency collapses

• Inflation

• Population growth

• Subsidy costs

• Military and regional expenditures

• Declining investment efficiency

The Historical Paradox

The paradox of modern Iran is that:

The Islamic Republic has likely earned more oil money than any government in Iranian history, yet many Iranians experienced declining purchasing power, currency depreciation, housing unaffordability, and economic insecurity.

In real terms, the Islamic Republic appears to have received approximately $3.5 trillion in oil-export revenues since 1979, compared with roughly $1 trillion received by the Pahlavi state between 1965 and 1978. The economic debate is therefore less about the amount of oil wealth generated and more about how effectively that wealth was converted into productivity, investment, infrastructure, and household income.

Cumulative oil export revenues

Approximate cumulative oil export revenues in 2025 dollars.

Iran’s purchasing power has declined because prices have risen far faster than incomes for many years. The deeper question is why prices have risen so persistently.

Most economists point to five interconnected factors:

1. Chronic Inflation

Iran has experienced some of the highest sustained inflation rates in the world. Inflation erodes the value of salaries, pensions, and savings. The IMF notes that high and volatile inflation has been a long-standing problem contributing to poverty and social tensions. (IMF)

For example, if wages rise 20% but prices rise 40%, households become poorer in real terms.

2. Collapse of the Rial

The Iranian rial has lost most of its value against major currencies over the past decade. A weaker currency makes imported goods, medicines, industrial equipment, food ingredients, and consumer products more expensive. Reuters reported that the rial fell from roughly 55,000 per dollar in 2018 to over 1 million per dollar by late 2025. (Reuters)

Currency depreciation is one of the strongest drivers of inflation in Iran. IMF research identifies exchange-rate depreciation as a major cause of rising prices. (IMF eLibrary)

3. Sanctions and Oil Revenue Constraints

Sanctions have reduced oil exports, restricted access to foreign currency, and complicated international banking transactions. This creates shortages, raises costs for businesses, and weakens the currency. IMF studies conclude that sanctions contribute to inflation directly through supply constraints and indirectly through exchange-rate weakness and fiscal pressures. (IMF eLibrary)

4. Budget Deficits and Money Creation

When government spending exceeds revenues, authorities often rely on borrowing from the banking system or expanding the money supply. Over time, more money chases the same amount of goods, pushing prices higher. Research on Iran consistently finds fiscal deficits and monetary expansion among the key drivers of inflation. (shareok.org)

5. Structural Economic Problems

Economists also cite:

• State dominance of major sectors

• Corruption and inefficiencies

• Multiple exchange rates

• Weak productivity growth

• Low private investment

• Capital flight and brain drain

These factors reduce economic growth and make it harder for wages to keep pace with prices. (IMF eLibrary)

Why Iranians Often Feel Poorer Despite Oil Wealth

A useful comparison:

Even when oil revenues have been substantial, they have been spread across a population nearly three times larger than in the mid-1970s. At the same time, inflation has eroded the value of household incomes. The result is that oil wealth per citizen is much lower than during the Shah’s oil boom.

The Single Biggest Reason

If one factor must be singled out, it is persistent inflation driven by a combination of currency depreciation, sanctions-related constraints, and fiscal imbalances. These forces have caused the purchasing power of the average Iranian household to decline steadily over many years. IMF research finds that exchange-rate depreciation, fiscal deficits, and sanctions are the principal drivers of inflation in both the short and long term. (IDEAS/RePEc)

This comparison is harder than it looks because Iran does not have a single consistent historical “average salary” series spanning the Shah’s era and the Islamic Republic. The best approach is to compare the purchasing power of a typical urban middle-class salary, adjusted into 2025 dollars and then compare what that salary could buy.

Estimated Average Annual Salary

In the 1970s:

• A locally assembled Paykan cost roughly 6–12 months of a middle-class salary.

• Imported European and Japanese cars were accessible to professionals.

In 2025:

• Even a domestically produced vehicle often costs several years of average wages.

Gold

One useful measure is gold because it preserves purchasing power.

Approximate annual salary expressed in ounces of gold:

This suggests that a typical salary in 1977 bought roughly four to ten times more hard assets than a typical salary today.

The Demographic Factor

A key reason is population growth.

Even when oil revenues were high, they were spread across a much larger population.

The Real Comparison

If we compare:

• Oil revenue per citizen

• Housing affordability

• Gold purchasing power

• Ability to save

then the average urban middle-class Iranian appears to have enjoyed:

1. Highest purchasing power in the late 1970s

2. A temporary improvement during the oil boom around 2005–2011

3. A substantial decline after sanctions, currency collapses, and inflation from 2012 onward

A useful illustration is that a mid-level engineer, teacher, civil servant, or bank employee in 1977 could often support a family, own a home, own a car, and save. By 2025, many similarly educated professionals struggle to achieve even one of those goals without family wealth, multiple incomes, or emigration.

The strongest evidence for declining purchasing power is not oil revenue itself but housing affordability. In most countries, housing is the largest expense. Relative to income, housing in Tehran is dramatically less affordable today than it was in the late Pahlavi period, which is why many Iranians feel poorer even when nominal salaries are far higher.

Nazenin Ansari
Publisher/ Managing Editor
www.Kayhan.London
www.KayhanLife.com
@NazeninA

The MOU

1. The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran and their allies in the ‌current war, by signing this MOU (Memorandum of Understanding), declare the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon, and undertake from now on not to initiate any war or any military operation against each other, and to refrain from the threat or use of force against each other, and ensuring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon. The final deal will confirm the permanent termination of the war on all fronts, including in Lebanon, and other provisions of this paragraph.

2. The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran undertake to respect each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and to refrain from interfering in each other’s internal affairs.

3. The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran commit to negotiating and achieving the final deal in maximum 60 days extendable with mutual consent.

4. Immediately upon the signing of this MOU, the United States of America will begin the removal of its naval blockade and any disturbances or impediments against the Islamic Republic of Iran, and will fully end the naval blockade within 30 days. During this period, ⁠the traffic of vessels will be in proportion to the numbers of pre-war traffic being restored by the Islamic Republic of Iran. The United States of America further undertakes to remove its forces from the proximity of the Islamic Republic of Iran within 30 days after the final deal.

5. Upon the signing of this MOU, the Islamic Republic of Iran will make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels with no charge for 60 days only from the Persian Gulf to the Sea of Oman and vice versa. The traffic of commercial vessels will immediately start and, considering the need for removing the technical and military obstacles and de-mining by the Islamic Republic of Iran, will be instated within 30 days. The Islamic Republic of Iran will conduct dialog with the Sultanate of Oman to define the future administration and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz, in discussion with other Persian Gulf littoral states in line with the applicable international law and the sovereign rights of coastal states of the Strait of Hormuz.

6. The United States of America undertakes with regional partners to develop a definitive, mutually agreed plan with at least USD 300 billion for the reconstruction and economic development of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The mechanism for the implementation of this plan will be finalized as part of final deal within 60 days. All required licenses, waivers, and permissions needed for the relevant financial transactions will be granted by the United States of America.

7. The United States of America undertakes to terminate all types of sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran, including the United Nations Security Council resolutions, i.e. IAEA Board of Governors resolutions, and all unilateral U.S. sanctions, primary and secondary, in an agreed upon schedule as part of the ‌final deal. The ⁠Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States of America acknowledge the critical importance of the sanctions termination issue above mentioned and express their intentions to immediately address these issues in the negotiations in order to achieve mutual agreement on them.

8. The Islamic Republic of Iran reaffirms that it shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons. The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran have agreed to resolve the disposition of stockpiled enriched material pursuant to a mechanism that will be mutually agreed upon, in accordance with the schedule mentioned in paragraph seven with the minimum methodology to be down blending on site under the supervision of the IAEA. The two parties also agreed to discuss the issue of enrichment and other mutually agreed matters related to the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear needs, based on a satisfactory framework being agreed upon in the final deal. The final deal will confirm the provisions of this paragraph. The United States of America and the ⁠Islamic Republic of Iran acknowledge the critical importance of the nuclear issues above mentioned and express their intention to immediately address these issues in the negotiations in order to achieve mutual agreement on them.

9. Pending the final deal, the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran agree to maintain the status quo. The Islamic Republic of Iran will maintain the current status quo of its nuclear program and the United States of America will not impose any new sanctions and will not deploy additional forces in the region.

10. The United States of America undertakes that immediately upon the signing of this MOU and until the termination of sanctions, ⁠U.S. Department of Treasury will issue waivers for the export of Iranian crude oil, petroleum products, and derivatives, and all associated services, including banking transactions, insurances, transportation, etc.

11. The United States of America undertakes to make fully available for use the frozen or restricted funds and assets of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Upon the implementation of this MOU, the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran will mutually agree on the procedures related to the release of these funds during the negotiation. Such funds, whether retained in the original account or transferred, shall be made fully usable ⁠for payment to any ultimate beneficiary designated by the Central Bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The United States of America undertakes to issue all necessary licenses and authorizations accordingly.

12. The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran agree that an executive mechanism will be established to monitor the successful implementation of this MOU and the future compliance of the final deal.

13. After signing this MOU, and subject to the beginning of the implementation of paragraphs 1,4,5,10 and 11 of this MOU, and the continuing implementation of these measures, the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran will start negotiations regarding the final deal exclusively on the other paragraphs.

14. The final deal will be endorsed by a binding UNSC resolution.

A clarification: Iran is not currently a member state of the UN Human Rights Council. In 2023, it chaired the the UN Human Rights Council Social Forum (a position determined through regional rotation). The Council has addressed human rights violations in Iran. Special sessions have been convened to examine this issue, and mandates for fact-finding missions and Special Rapporteurs on Iran have been extended multiple times to monitor violations. This doesn’t relieve the absurdity Nazenin observes. An Iranian diplomat now sits on the Council’s Advisory Committee. How could the Islamic Republic be anywhere near the UN’s human-rights machinery?

Note: This is a duplicate of the show notes attached to the latest episode of Critical Conditions. I’m copying them for the benefit of readers who use the Substack app, where the show notes are easy to overlook.

I’ve again written extensive show notes. I had more to say than we were able to cover. We couldn’t do justice to all the ramifications of this news in fifteen minutes (though I challenge you to find another pair of podcasters who does as much justice to it as we did do to this news in fifteen minutes). I’ll once again send the show notes below as a separate email to make sure everyone receives them.

After we wrapped, Dan and I said to each other that we thought this an unusually good podcast.1 In addition to discussing the obvious news of the day, we also talked about Dan’s recent trip to Kosovo and Vienna, and in particular, we spoke of Vienna’s eerie lack of Jews. Here are the links to the articles Dan wrote about his trip:

Ask Questions Later

Vienna Waits for You

I recall waiting impatiently in line at a Würstelstand, well past midnight, anticipating my favorite sausage in the world: eine Kasekrainer mit viel scharfem Senf (filled with cheese, spicy mustard, surrounded on all sides by bread). Before me three young toughs were arguing; they had only enough money among them for two sausages…

Read more

7 days ago · 18 likes · 3 comments · Dan Perry

Ask Questions Later

Kosovo Diary

What makes a country? Is it language? Ethnicity? A common history? Geography? Is it easier to justify nationhood on an island, where the sea itself creates a border, than on a contested patch of land where every village contains an argument with the past? Or is a country simply a people determined to govern themselves and fend off others…

Read more

9 days ago · 19 likes · 10 comments · Dan Perry

I’m writing this on the basis of what’s publicly known as of this—Monday— evening. A major caveat: the text of the agreement has not yet been published. Israeli, American, Iranian, and Persian-language reports are describing overlapping but not identical versions of it. That ambiguity is itself one of the most important facts.

It is perhaps too glib to say, “America surrendered everything.” The more defensible thesis, if I’m analytically precise, is that the United States appears to have converted a war whose stated purpose was to coerce Iran into irreversible strategic concessions into a bargain for the reopening of Hormuz, while postponing the nuclear question, extracting no concessions on Iran’s missiles and proxies, and legitimating Iran’s wartime leverage over the world’s most important energy chokepoint. That’s devastating enough. No need to gild the apocalypse.

We discussed my main strategic intuitions in the podcast: Hormuz, the missing provisions on missiles and proxies, the demoralization of the Iranian people, the US-Israeli rupture, the destruction of American credibility, and the central political absurdity: Trump went to war with maximalist rhetoric and would appear to have accepted a minimalist exit. But there are several important details we left out or only touched lightly.

First, the deal is not really a final deal. It’s been billed as a deal to begin another negotiation. Reporting suggests the current agreement is best understood as a memorandum of understanding, or a framework, not a definitive nuclear settlement. It appears to create a 60-day period in which the parties have committed to negotiate the final nuclear terms and sanctions architecture. From what we understand so far, the deal leaves many critical questions unanswered, including the fate of Iran’s uranium stockpile. The conflicting American and Iranian interpretations are, clearly, a major risk.

If my argument is that we have staged our own unconditional surrender, this divergence strengthens my case in one respect and weakens it in another. It strengthens it because the United States seems to have accepted an off-ramp before securing the nuclear concessions that justified the war. It weakens the most absolute version of the claim because the administration can still say: “This is Phase One; the real concessions come in Phase Two.” But Phase Two would be doing a heroic amount of work here. As I suggested to Dan, it’s the diplomatic equivalent of “the check is in the mail.”

The US and Iran are describing different deals. In Washington’s version, the deal is conditioned on Iran’s performance: Iran dismantles nuclear sites, removes or destroys its highly enriched uranium, accepts inspections, and only then receives broad relief. In Tehran’s version, the release of frozen funds, sanctions relief, and payment for “services” in Hormuz are integral to the deal. So the agreement may well contain the seeds of its collapse. Trump and his entourage need to sell the deal as coercive diplomacy. The Iranians need to sell it as muqawama diplomacy. If both publics are being told mutually incompatible things, its implementation will become a hostage to both countries’ domestic politics. But what if it collapses? Does anyone now imagine we will enforce it? Once our military leaves, I do not expect Trump—or any imaginable successor—ever to send it back.

Hormuz is not merely “opened” or “closed.” As we said in the podcast, the fight is over sovereignty-by-administration. Dan was right to focus on “permissioning.” Trump says Hormuz will open without fees or tariffs, while Iranian officials say Iran and Oman will jointly administer it under the agreement. The Guardian’s diplomatic editor, Patrick Wintour, has the most detailed account of this I’ve found. The text apparently refers to “future administration of maritime services” by Iran and Oman. Mehdi Mohammadi, an adviser to Iran’s chief negotiator, Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, suggested that it would be normal for Iran to charge fees: “The navy will do the same thing it is doing now. We are currently providing services in the strait of Hormuz: safety services, navigation services, and security services. It is clear that services are not free anywhere in the world and there is a fee for these services.”

So there won’t be a toll in the old-fashioned, pirate-with-a-clipboard sense. It will be slightly (but only slightly) more subtle: routing rules, compulsory “services,” spurious environmental and safety inspections, delays in anchoring, harassment, and the effect all of this will have on insurance rates. Iran doesn’t need to close Hormuz violently again to make of it a weapon and a cash cow. It needs only to make everyone price in the possibility.

This means the consequences for energy markets are structural, not temporary. Even if the strait reopens, the taboo has been broken. Iran showed it could throttle a fifth of the world’s flow of oil, along with LNG and all of the vital chemical byproducts. Shippers will be reluctant fully to return if insurance costs and security anxieties stay elevated, which they will. Transit won’t be returning to its prewar peak anytime soon. It may stabilize at a lower point for months or years. The deal, therefore—if it holds—will end the immediate shock even as it confirms the long-term risk premium. That’s a far worse outcome than “prices fall, therefore peace.”

The uranium issue is much murkier than the administration is implying. Their line is that the agreement “leads to” the destruction, removal, or down-blending of highly enriched uranium. But the mechanism is unresolved, or at least, unreported. Trump said the US would “go in” and downblend or destroy the material. An Iranian official said Iran would do the diluting. It seems clear there’s no agreed mechanism.

Wintour’s account is even more significant. The US, he writes, appears to have abandoned the demand that all uranium stockpiles be exported. The talks may now include downblending 60 percent uranium to 3.67 percent in Iran, with any future domestic enrichment at civilian levels. That’s a massive shift. If correct, it means the war’s central objective has migrated from “dismantlement and removal” to “monitoring, dilution, and deferred bargaining.”

The missiles and proxies aren’t side issues. These are the architecture of Iranian coercion. The agreement seems to contain no restrictions on ballistic missiles and no rollback of Iran’s proxy forces—even though the war itself demonstrated their centrality. This isn’t just an Israeli complaint. If Iran’s strategic portfolio is “nuclear latency plus missiles plus drones plus proxies plus maritime coercion,” a deal that addresses only a nuclear negotiation—to take place some time in the future—leaves intact most of the assets that made the crisis possible.

Dan and I discussed Lebanon, but this point should be sharply underlined: Iran insisted that a ceasefire in Lebanon—protecting Hezbollah—was integral to the deal, and Trump accepted this. The agreement thus internationalizes the Israel-Hezbollah front without resolving who controls Hezbollah’s behavior. Israel utterly rejects conditions that would require the IDF to withdraw or constrain Israeli operations, and it has to: It can’t allow Hezbollah to make northern Israel uninhabitable, and won’t allow southern Lebanon to be the staging ground for the next October 7. This means Lebanon is a tripwire. If Hezbollah fires, does Washington say Iran violated the deal? If Israel strikes Hezbollah, will Washington say Israel endangered the deal? That’s one of the few questions that’s been resolved, actually: Trump is already saying this.

The Hebrew-language press is, rightly, treating the deal as a security disaster and a political crisis for Netanyahu. As Dan pointed out, it’s not just that Trump betrayed Israel, it’s that Netanyahu built his political brand around his unique qualification to manage the American relationship and his unusual skill as a Trump-whisperer. Trump has now exposed both claims as empty.

Persian-language outlets are reporting that the deal includes the suspension of oil and petrochemical sanctions, a US$300 billion reconstruction plan, 60 days of talks toward a final nuclear and sanctions agreement, and the release of US$24 billion in blocked funds during the 60-day period. Dear God. But amazingly—again according to Patrick Wintour—this is not being uniformly celebrated in Iran: “Iranian hardliners,” he writes, “have mounted a rearguard rejection of a deal with the US as as they say it does not guarantee sanctions relief, compensation or control of the strait of Hormuz.”

“The fact that they say we won and America has retreated is a blatant lie,” said the Iranian MP Kamran Ghazanfari. Meysam Nili, the managing director of Rajanews and brother-in-law of the hardline former president Ebrahim Raisi, called the deal on the table a catastrophic capitulation. He urged Iranians not to sit quietly.

Faced with the onslaught, Iranian officials led by Mehdi Mohammadi, an adviser to the head of the negotiating team, Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, mounted a detailed rebuttal in an audio message insisting the deal would end the war, including Israel’s offensive in Lebanon, and that Tehran has not been required to make any new commitments on its nuclear program, leaving the means of disposal of its highly enriched uranium—including down-blending inside Iran—to future discussions lasting 60 days.

So Trump and Tehran need the same document to mean opposite things.

As Dan said, the nauseating plan to pay Iran US$300 billion in tribute does seem to be real. It’s being called a fund for “reconstruction and economic development.” Tehran, of course, is billing it as reparations. The Iranian media certainly thinks it’s a done deal. The only thing that comforts me in this is that it’s Trump who agreed to pay it, and he probably intends to handle this as he does all of his creditors.

This is a weaker deal than the JCPOA—weaker on inspections, stockpile removal, sunset confidence, and sanctions sequencing. The only advantage over the JCPOA is that unlike in 2015, when the JCPOA was signed, we’ve just done major damage to Iran’s leadership, military, and nuclear infrastructure. I don’t know how much Iran’s missile and drone capabilities, defense industrial base, navy, and air force have truly been degraded. It’s less than Trump claims, it’s safe to say, but I can’t imagine that we failed to do a hell of a lot of damage. When our military puts its mind to it, it breaks things with great efficiency. That said, the setback to their military has to be weighed against the new Hormuz problem. So it’s not quite right to describe this as “JCPOA versus worse JCPOA.” The more precise formulation is that it’s a worse diplomatic instrument imposed on a more damaged Iran.

The best argument against despair—the only one—is that the regime might yet be mortally weakened. It’s gained leverage through Hormuz and attacks on Gulf energy infrastructure, but it’s also suffered profound military, industrial, economic, and leadership losses. If the shooting stops, it loses the excuse of war; it will have to confront the same problems it confronted before the war, only more so: domestic decay, unemployment, currency collapse, water shortages and blackouts, the cost of rebuilding its military machine, and a public that loathes it. So in the most optimistic reading, the deal may look like an Iranian victory while leaving Iran strategically exhausted. That doesn’t make the deal good. It means the appearance and the underlying balance may diverge. That said, this is a regime that’s willing to kill as many of its own people as required to stay in power—how much does it matter, really, if it’s weakened?

This war was devastating for the prestige of the US military. It has been shown to be manifestly ill-adapted to the age of cheap, persistent, deniable, and distributed coercion against infrastructure and commerce. We found it impossible, or too costly, to reassure commercial shipping and our Gulf allies that we could protect them from Iran’s mines, drones, fast boats, and missiles. No one will forget that.

We went to war claiming we would end Iran’s nuclear threat, break Iranian coercion, and restore deterrence. Instead, we’ve accepted a deal that will at best restore the prewar flow of shipping—one that left all of the decisive strategic questions unresolved. The Islamic Republic remains in power. Iranian political prisoners have not been helped. To the contrary, the regime is on a historic execution binge. Iran may well receive sanctions relief, oil revenue, frozen assets, and the prospect of a vast reconstruction package. It has demonstrated its ability to take the entire world hostage with the Strait of Hormuz. The US-led order rested on the premise that maritime commerce through international chokepoints is not subject to revisionist rent-seeking by regional powers. Iran has exposed that premise as hollow.

We have humiliated our allies. Israel fought alongside the United States only to have Trump blithely negotiate away its security and make a deal, over its head, that would limit its actions in Lebanon. The Gulf states were attacked, then left to live beside a damaged but enraged and emboldened Iran: the worst-case scenario. Europe wasn’t even consulted beforehand. Shippers and energy markets learned that the US Navy can’t just wave a trident and restore confidence.

But the ugliest part is our betrayal of the Iranian people. Trump said, “Help is on its way.” He began the war by telling Iranians to take back their country. He ended it by giving their torturers and murderers money, oil revenue, diplomatic legitimacy, and breathing space.

The political psychology is disastrous. Trump demanded unconditional surrender, then settled for this. Trump represents the United States, like it or not. Every American is implicated in this deal, like it or not. He boasted of victory while accepting “future talks.” He withdrew from the JCPOA, fought a war, and is now accepting a deal less restrictive than the one he destroyed. I did not think it possible to excel our exit from Afghanistan in humiliation, but here we are.

If only it were just a matter of humiliation, though. It’s hard to imagine a more dangerous provocation than a display of American weakness like this. The lesson that has been confirmed for Beijing, Moscow, Pyongyang, and every militia with drones is that America can be provoked, bled, economically pressured, negotiated down, and ultimately driven off. Trump is not the first American president to impart this lesson. But he has made it so clear that it is hard to imagine any of our ambitious rivals will now pause to ask, “Is it smart to test that proposition?”

That question—that pause—kept the peace. This is a point Trump cannot grasp. He may think he is ending a war. To the contrary, he is starting one. We have touched off a global scramble to replace the United States in every part of the world where once we provided some measure of order.

Trump just celebrated his 80th birthday with a cheerful cage match at the White House:

Mr. Trump sat ringside beside his wife, Melania Trump, as fighters whaled on one another inches away inside an eight-sided cage wrapped in cryptocurrency advertisements. All five of his children and nearly all his grandchildren sat around him.

Thousands more were there on the lawn beneath a 600-ton steel-arch contraption called the Claw. The White House loomed dramatically over a fighting pit packed with billionaires, cabinet members and Republican lawmakers.

The consequences of Trump’s decisions—our decisions, because Trump represents us, like it or not—will be cataclysmic.

Trump himself, of course, will not live to see them.

After we wrapped, Dan and I said to each other that we thought this an unusually good podcast.1 In addition to discussing the obvious news of the day, we also talked about Dan’s recent trip to Kosovo and Vienna, and in particular, we spoke of Vienna’s eerie lack of Jews. Here are the links to the articles Dan wrote about his trip:

Ask Questions Later

Vienna Waits for You

I recall waiting impatiently in line at a Würstelstand, well past midnight, anticipating my favorite sausage in the world: eine Kasekrainer mit viel scharfem Senf (filled with cheese, spicy mustard, surrounded on all sides by bread). Before me three young toughs were arguing; they had only enough money among them for two sausages…

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6 days ago · 18 likes · 3 comments · Dan Perry

Ask Questions Later

Kosovo Diary

What makes a country? Is it language? Ethnicity? A common history? Geography? Is it easier to justify nationhood on an island, where the sea itself creates a border, than on a contested patch of land where every village contains an argument with the past? Or is a country simply a people determined to govern themselves and fend off others…

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8 days ago · 19 likes · 10 comments · Dan Perry

I’m writing this on the basis of what’s publicly known as of this—Monday— evening. A major caveat: the text of the agreement has not yet been published. Israeli, American, Iranian, and Persian-language reports are describing overlapping but not identical versions of it. That ambiguity is itself one of the most important facts.

It is perhaps too glib to say, “America surrendered everything.” The more defensible thesis, if I’m analytically precise, is that the United States appears to have converted a war whose stated purpose was to coerce Iran into irreversible strategic concessions into a bargain for the reopening of Hormuz, while postponing the nuclear question, extracting no concessions on Iran’s missiles and proxies, and legitimating Iran’s wartime leverage over the world’s most important energy chokepoint. That’s devastating enough. No need to gild the apocalypse.

We discussed my main strategic intuitions in the podcast: Hormuz, the missing provisions on missiles and proxies, the demoralization of the Iranian people, the US-Israeli rupture, the destruction of American credibility, and the central political absurdity: Trump went to war with maximalist rhetoric and would appear to have accepted a minimalist exit. But there are several important details we left out or only touched lightly.

First, the deal is not really a final deal. It’s been billed as a deal to begin another negotiation. Reporting suggests the current agreement is best understood as a memorandum of understanding, or a framework, not a definitive nuclear settlement. It appears to create a 60-day period in which the parties have committed to negotiate the final nuclear terms and sanctions architecture. From what we understand so far, the deal leaves many critical questions unanswered, including the fate of Iran’s uranium stockpile. The conflicting American and Iranian interpretations are, clearly, a major risk.

If my argument is that we have staged our own unconditional surrender, this divergence strengthens my case in one respect and weakens it in another. It strengthens it because the United States seems to have accepted an off-ramp before securing the nuclear concessions that justified the war. It weakens the most absolute version of the claim because the administration can still say: “This is Phase One; the real concessions come in Phase Two.” But Phase Two would be doing a heroic amount of work here. As I suggested to Dan, it’s the diplomatic equivalent of “the check is in the mail.”

The US and Iran are describing different deals. In Washington’s version, the deal is conditioned on Iran’s performance: Iran dismantles nuclear sites, removes or destroys its highly enriched uranium, accepts inspections, and only then receives broad relief. In Tehran’s version, the release of frozen funds, sanctions relief, and payment for “services” in Hormuz are integral to the deal. So the agreement may well contain the seeds of its collapse. Trump and his entourage need to sell the deal as coercive diplomacy. The Iranians need to sell it as muqawama diplomacy. If both publics are being told mutually incompatible things, its implementation will become a hostage to both countries’ domestic politics. But what if it collapses? Does anyone now imagine we will enforce it? Once our military leaves, I do not expect Trump—or any imaginable successor—ever to send it back.

Hormuz is not merely “opened” or “closed.” As we said in the podcast, the fight is over sovereignty-by-administration. Dan was right to focus on “permissioning.” Trump says Hormuz will open without fees or tariffs, while Iranian officials say Iran and Oman will jointly administer it under the agreement. The Guardian’s diplomatic editor, Patrick Wintour, has the most detailed account of this I’ve found. The text apparently refers to “future administration of maritime services” by Iran and Oman. Mehdi Mohammadi, an adviser to Iran’s chief negotiator, Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, suggested that it would be normal for Iran to charge fees: “The navy will do the same thing it is doing now. We are currently providing services in the strait of Hormuz: safety services, navigation services, and security services. It is clear that services are not free anywhere in the world and there is a fee for these services.”

So there won’t be a toll in the old-fashioned, pirate-with-a-clipboard sense. It will be slightly (but only slightly) more subtle: routing rules, compulsory “services,” spurious environmental and safety inspections, delays in anchoring, harassment, and the effect all of this will have on insurance rates. Iran doesn’t need to close Hormuz violently again to make of it a weapon and a cash cow. It needs only to make everyone price in the possibility.

This means the consequences for energy markets are structural, not temporary. Even if the strait reopens, the taboo has been broken. Iran showed it could throttle a fifth of the world’s flow of oil, along with LNG and all of the vital chemical byproducts. Shippers will be reluctant fully to return if insurance costs and security anxieties stay elevated, which they will. Transit won’t be returning to its prewar peak anytime soon. It may stabilize at a lower point for months or years. The deal, therefore—if it holds—will end the immediate shock even as it confirms the long-term risk premium. That’s a far worse outcome than “prices fall, therefore peace.”

The uranium issue is much murkier than the administration is implying. Their line is that the agreement “leads to” the destruction, removal, or down-blending of highly enriched uranium. But the mechanism is unresolved, or at least, unreported. Trump said the US would “go in” and downblend or destroy the material. An Iranian official said Iran would do the diluting. It seems clear there’s no agreed mechanism.

Wintour’s account is even more significant. The US, he writes, appears to have abandoned the demand that all uranium stockpiles be exported. The talks may now include downblending 60 percent uranium to 3.67 percent in Iran, with any future domestic enrichment at civilian levels. That’s a massive shift. If correct, it means the war’s central objective has migrated from “dismantlement and removal” to “monitoring, dilution, and deferred bargaining.”

The missiles and proxies aren’t side issues. These are the architecture of Iranian coercion. The agreement seems to contain no restrictions on ballistic missiles and no rollback of Iran’s proxy forces—even though the war itself demonstrated their centrality. This isn’t just an Israeli complaint. If Iran’s strategic portfolio is “nuclear latency plus missiles plus drones plus proxies plus maritime coercion,” a deal that addresses only a nuclear negotiation—to take place some time in the future—leaves intact most of the assets that made the crisis possible.

Dan and I discussed Lebanon, but this point should be sharply underlined: Iran insisted that a ceasefire in Lebanon—protecting Hezbollah—was integral to the deal, and Trump accepted this. The agreement thus internationalizes the Israel-Hezbollah front without resolving who controls Hezbollah’s behavior. Israel utterly rejects conditions that would require the IDF to withdraw or constrain Israeli operations, and it has to: It can’t allow Hezbollah to make northern Israel uninhabitable, and won’t allow southern Lebanon to be the staging ground for the next October 7. This means Lebanon is a tripwire. If Hezbollah fires, does Washington say Iran violated the deal? If Israel strikes Hezbollah, will Washington say Israel endangered the deal? That’s one of the few questions that’s been resolved, actually: Trump is already saying this.

The Hebrew-language press is, rightly, treating the deal as a security disaster and a political crisis for Netanyahu. As Dan pointed out, it’s not just that Trump betrayed Israel, it’s that Netanyahu built his political brand around his unique qualification to manage the American relationship and his unusual skill as a Trump-whisperer. Trump has now exposed both claims as empty.

Persian-language outlets are reporting that the deal includes the suspension of oil and petrochemical sanctions, a US$300 billion reconstruction plan, 60 days of talks toward a final nuclear and sanctions agreement, and the release of US$24 billion in blocked funds during the 60-day period. Dear God. But amazingly—again according to Patrick Wintour—this is not being uniformly celebrated in Iran: “Iranian hardliners,” he writes, “have mounted a rearguard rejection of a deal with the US as as they say it does not guarantee sanctions relief, compensation or control of the strait of Hormuz.”

“The fact that they say we won and America has retreated is a blatant lie,” said the Iranian MP Kamran Ghazanfari. Meysam Nili, the managing director of Rajanews and brother-in-law of the hardline former president Ebrahim Raisi, called the deal on the table a catastrophic capitulation. He urged Iranians not to sit quietly.

Faced with the onslaught, Iranian officials led by Mehdi Mohammadi, an adviser to the head of the negotiating team, Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, mounted a detailed rebuttal in an audio message insisting the deal would end the war, including Israel’s offensive in Lebanon, and that Tehran has not been required to make any new commitments on its nuclear program, leaving the means of disposal of its highly enriched uranium—including down-blending inside Iran—to future discussions lasting 60 days.

So Trump and Tehran need the same document to mean opposite things.

As Dan said, the nauseating plan to pay Iran US$300 billion in tribute does seem to be real. It’s being called a fund for “reconstruction and economic development.” Tehran, of course, is billing it as reparations. The Iranian media certainly thinks it’s a done deal. The only thing that comforts me in this is that it’s Trump who agreed to pay it, and he probably intends to handle this as he does all of his creditors.

This is a weaker deal than the JCPOA—weaker on inspections, stockpile removal, sunset confidence, and sanctions sequencing. The only advantage over the JCPOA is that unlike in 2015, when the JCPOA was signed, we’ve just done major damage to Iran’s leadership, military, and nuclear infrastructure. I don’t know how much Iran’s missile and drone capabilities, defense industrial base, navy, and air force have truly been degraded. It’s less than Trump claims, it’s safe to say, but I can’t imagine that we failed to do a hell of a lot of damage. When our military puts its mind to it, it breaks things with great efficiency. That said, the setback to their military has to be weighed against the new Hormuz problem. So it’s not quite right to describe this as “JCPOA versus worse JCPOA.” The more precise formulation is that it’s a worse diplomatic instrument imposed on a more damaged Iran.

The best argument against despair—the only one—is that the regime might yet be mortally weakened. It’s gained leverage through Hormuz and attacks on Gulf energy infrastructure, but it’s also suffered profound military, industrial, economic, and leadership losses. If the shooting stops, it loses the excuse of war; it will have to confront the same problems it confronted before the war, only more so: domestic decay, unemployment, currency collapse, water shortages and blackouts, the cost of rebuilding its military machine, and a public that loathes it. So in the most optimistic reading, the deal may look like an Iranian victory while leaving Iran strategically exhausted. That doesn’t make the deal good. It means the appearance and the underlying balance may diverge. That said, this is a regime that’s willing to kill as many of its own people as required to stay in power—how much does it matter, really, if it’s weakened?

This war was devastating for the prestige of the US military. It has been shown to be manifestly ill-adapted to the age of cheap, persistent, deniable, and distributed coercion against infrastructure and commerce. We found it impossible, or too costly, to reassure commercial shipping and our Gulf allies that we could protect them from Iran’s mines, drones, fast boats, and missiles. No one will forget that.

We went to war claiming we would end Iran’s nuclear threat, break Iranian coercion, and restore deterrence. Instead, we’ve accepted a deal that will at best restore the prewar flow of shipping—one that left all of the decisive strategic questions unresolved. The Islamic Republic remains in power. Iranian political prisoners have not been helped. To the contrary, the regime is on a historic execution binge. Iran may well receive sanctions relief, oil revenue, frozen assets, and the prospect of a vast reconstruction package. It has demonstrated its ability to take the entire world hostage with the Strait of Hormuz. The US-led order rested on the premise that maritime commerce through international chokepoints is not subject to revisionist rent-seeking by regional powers. Iran has exposed that premise as hollow.

We have humiliated our allies. Israel fought alongside the United States only to have Trump blithely negotiate away its security and make a deal, over its head, that would limit its actions in Lebanon. The Gulf states were attacked, then left to live beside a damaged but enraged and emboldened Iran: the worst-case scenario. Europe wasn’t even consulted beforehand. Shippers and energy markets learned that the US Navy can’t just wave a trident and restore confidence.

But the ugliest part is our betrayal of the Iranian people. Trump said, “Help is on its way.” He began the war by telling Iranians to take back their country. He ended it by giving their torturers and murderers money, oil revenue, diplomatic legitimacy, and breathing space.

The political psychology is disastrous. Trump demanded unconditional surrender, then settled for this. Trump represents the United States, like it or not. Every American is implicated in this deal, like it or not. He boasted of victory while accepting “future talks.” He withdrew from the JCPOA, fought a war, and is now accepting a deal less restrictive than the one he destroyed. I did not think it possible to excel our exit from Afghanistan in humiliation, but here we are.

If only it were just a matter of humiliation, though. It’s hard to imagine a more dangerous provocation than a display of American weakness like this. The lesson that has been confirmed for Beijing, Moscow, Pyongyang, and every militia with drones is that America can be provoked, bled, economically pressured, negotiated down, and ultimately driven off. Trump is not the first American president to impart this lesson. But he has made it so clear that it is hard to imagine any of our ambitious rivals will now pause to ask, “Is it smart to test that proposition?”

That question—that pause—kept the peace. This is a point Trump cannot grasp. He may think he is ending a war. To the contrary, he is starting one. We have touched off a global scramble to replace the United States in every part of the world where once we provided some measure of order.

Trump just celebrated his 80th birthday with a cheerful cage match at the White House:

Mr. Trump sat ringside beside his wife, Melania Trump, as fighters whaled on one another inches away inside an eight-sided cage wrapped in cryptocurrency advertisements. All five of his children and nearly all his grandchildren sat around him.

Thousands more were there on the lawn beneath a 600-ton steel-arch contraption called the Claw. The White House loomed dramatically over a fighting pit packed with billionaires, cabinet members and Republican lawmakers.

The consequences of Trump’s decisions—our decisions, because Trump represents us, like it or not—will be cataclysmic.

Trump himself, of course, will not live to see them.

I wasn’t even tempted.

So I expect to see all of you there, no matter how spectacularly beautiful a weekend day it is and no matter how nice it might be to go outside and enjoy it. (Honestly, this will be so good that you won’t regret it. No worries if you want to tune in from your garden or from a nice park, though. In fact, why not enjoy both?)

The link is below the paywall.

See you soon!

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For those of you who couldn’t make it, this video accompanies the reading I sent out with the invitation. It will make no sense without it. I’ve copied it below for easy reference.

Here’s a preview of the conversation:

With this, almost all of the videos are posted. I’m holding on to the two that remain—our cognitive warfare symposium and our conversation with the Cohens, père and fille—because I’m experimenting with the editing. I’m trying to figure out what can now be done with AI, and whether there’s a relatively simple way to make the recording of our Zoom calls more like a documentary—that’s to say, clearer and more visually engaging to watch, if you weren’t lucky enough to be there. I’ll either succeed in the next day or two or I’ll give up and just post them. I really want these videos to be as engaging as the symposia themselves: The gatherings are always just terrific, but the way a recorded Zoom call looks and sounds is less terrific: It reminds everyone of Covid.

I want these videos to look like a slick, expensively-produced documentary, with sound to match. The content absolutely merits it. I believe it should be possible to get that look, using AI; I just need to figure out how to prompt it. And maybe I need to wait another month or two. The software may not quite be there yet, but at the rate AI is improving, we will be soon.

So stay tuned for those, and meanwhile, enjoy the discussion.

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Sergei Cristo will be our guest this coming Sunday, June 14, at the usual time: 16:30 Paris time. As always, the Zoom link is below the paywall.

📚 ❗️I’m copying and pasting the introduction to Sergei that I sent to you a few days ago (when I sent you a note asking if you might be free to meet on a weekday). But please keep reading anyway, because I’ve also added Sergei’s reading list and his study questions.

Sergei is known, among other things, as the star of the podcast Sergei & the Westminster Spy Ring, in which he helped to expose Russia’s interference in British politics.

Here’s a review of that podcast from the Guardian:

The indomitable Carole Cadwalladr of this parish and the equally dogged Peter Jukes of Byline Times have joined forces to make the new podcast Sergei & the Westminster Spy Ring, an investigative series that tells a modern tale of Russian influence in and on the UK. The blurb informs us that “not since the reach of the Cambridge spy ring … has the Kremlin been so successful in penetrating the highest echelons of British intelligence.” Yep, we’re talking spies. But this is no all-action Bond tale; instead, it concerns Russia’s gradual infiltration of the UK’s political hierarchy.

The story is built around Sergei Cristo, a Russian-born British citizen who came to the UK in the 90s and worked as a fundraiser/activist for the Conservative party. About 15 years ago, Cristo met diplomat Sergey Nalobin, whose father had been in the KGB. Nalobin seemed keen to find out if any politicians might be interested in forming a Conservatives for Russia group. Suspicious, Cristo gave him nothing but watched as Nalobin gradually parlayed his way into making Tory friends and influencing people.

By episode two, Cristo is seriously worried but can’t seem to get either the Metropolitan police or MI5 interested. The Conservative Friends of Russia group is launched with a big party and bad jokes about Pussy Riot. But it’s in the third episode, released last Tuesday, that things properly get going. It’s 2012, and political bloggers and strategists, as well as politicians themselves, are busily wooed by Nalobin and friends. Russia wants to know how to use the internet for election campaigning. “They basically opened up all their learnings to Russia,” says one person who was there. This is soft power with hard consequences (episode 4 will cover Brexit), and Sergei & the Westminster Spy Ring, though a little slow at times, does a great job of unpicking sexy Russian obfuscation and Tory and MI5 slackness to reveal what’s actually been in plain sight for years. Recommended.

(I didn’t think it was slow at times. I thought it was riveting the whole way through, and I’d heard the whole story before, too. It’s really well done.)

Following his encounter with Nalobin, Sergei decided that he wanted to understand this phenomenon in depth. He’s now getting a Ph.D. in Security and Intelligence Studies at Buckingham University. His research focuses on the way Western capital supports authoritarian regimes, ultimately undermining the liberal democracies whose openness gave investors the opportunity to acquire so much capital in the first place.

His research has already exposed the way so-called “sustainable” funds poured into Russia in the run-up to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. A few highlights from the paper he published about this, titled “When Green Turns Red: Security Implications of “Sustainable” Investments in Russia.”

… This research has uncovered enough empirical evidence to highlight at least three serious problems. First, the funds invested in Russia in the run-up to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine ran counter to the spirit and letter of sustainable investing commitments.

Second, several of the top ten European asset managers (the largest, most reputable and trusted fiduciaries of ordinary people’s savings and pensions) effectively misused their sustainable funds to help equip Putin’s war machine in various ways. It is far from a mere rhetorical point. As explained below, most of the European “sustainable” assets come from pension funds and people’s savings, and that their funded Russian investee entities enabled the Kremlin’s ambitions not only indirectly (major revenue earners for the regime and its elites) but in many cases directly (suppliers to military manufacturers, sponsors of military units, parts of state propaganda and disinformation, bankers of covert military operations abroad). Moreover, the way those entities fit within the oppressive regime was well known long before the war began in 2022, as this research illustrates.

And third, that the regulatory investment sustainability framework remains not only largely ineffective and unenforceable, but also largely unresponsive to geopolitical realities. This framework of the European Union (EU) continues to be in force, given that the European Commission effectively postponed SFDR reforms till 2027 despite accepting much criticism that it was not fit for purpose.

These points relate to the societal significance of this research. As mentioned above, much of the money that has supported oppression in Russia and around the world did not come from some evil anonymous source. It came from the savings and investments of ordinary people. It is our money. In these sustainability-conscious times, most Europeans want their investments to be used to improve the life on this planet, and not damage it. Moreover, the question of whether sustainable funds should be allowed to invest in oppressive regimes is particularly important, as the European Commission has de-prioritized its SFDR reforms initially expected in 2025, and is shelving them until at least 2027.

Sergei just launched what’s shaping up to be a great new Substack, too, focused on Russia’s subversion of Western democracies.

Russian Interference

Sergei Cristo is a former BBC journalist, asset management specialist and Conservative Party fundraiser turned whistleblower against the Russian interference in British politics.

By Sergei Cristo

📌📚 READING

On “sustainable” funds equipping oppressive regimes:

• Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation and how Green Funds ignored Russian red flags, by Sergei Cristo.

• How European ESG investors helped Putin fund his war on Ukraine, a podcast with Sergei Cristo hosted by Simoney Kyriakou of the Financial Times.

• When Green Turns Red: Security Implications of “Sustainable” Investments in Russia, by Sergei Cristo, published by the Center for Security and Intelligence Studies at the University of Buckingham

On the call for a full public inquiry into the Russian interference in British politics:

• Russian interference in British politics: Questions that must be answered by Sergei Cristo and Mark Kieran.

• “Why have we let Putin get away with it for so long?” by Paul Mason.

STUDY QUESTIONS

Russian influence and British Politics:

• Is the UK’s failure to investigate Russian interference mainly a problem of secrecy, political embarrassment, institutional fragmentation, regulatory weakness, or something deeper?

• Can the UK investigate Russian interference in the 2016 referendum without reopening the Brexit wound? How should the terms of reference be drawn to avoid that trap?

• How should democracies think about proof in cases o foreign influence and interference? Is the evidentiary bar for proving foreign interference so high that hostile states can meddle successfully while the leaders of the countries they target intone, “There’s no evidence that foreign interference changed the outcome of the election?”

• What, precisely, is the difference between espionage, influence, and subversion?
  In the case described in Sergei & the Westminster Spy Ring, where should we locate Nalobin’s activities on that spectrum, and why does that distinction matter?

• Why are liberal democracies especially vulnerable to this kind of penetration?
  To what extent are openness, pluralism, weak gatekeeping, and a preference for informal elite networks structural advantages for hostile powers?

• What does the story suggest about the role of social class, prestige, and social aspiration in foreign influence operations? Was the Kremlin’s success in Britain mainly a matter of ideology, corruption, naiveté, vanity? Some combination of all four?

• Why do institutions so often fail to respond to early warnings? Why might the Metropolitan Police and MI5 have shown so little interest in Sergei’s warnings? Bureaucratic inertia? Evidentiary thresholds? Political caution? Class deference? Strategic myopia?

• How should we understand the significance of “Conservative Friends of Russia”?
  Was it just a networking vehicle, or was it part of a broader strategy of legitimacy laundering and access-building?

• If Russian actors were learning from British political operatives how to use the internet for election campaigning, what does that tell us about the transferability of democratic techniques into authoritarian toolkits?

On finance, ESG, and authoritarianism:

• Should a fund be marketed as “sustainable” if it takes into account carbon metrics but doesn’t calculate the risk of supporting dictators, kleptocracy, censorship, surveillance, and wars?

• What does Sergei’s research reveal about the political blind spots of ESG and “sustainable” investing? Why are so many investors apparently incapable of seeing regime risk?

• Can investment in authoritarian regimes ever qualify as “sustainable”?

• Is this just a technical regulatory problem, or does it expose a deeper incoherence in the concept of sustainable finance?

• Who bears moral responsibility when ordinary people’s savings help to sustain repressive regimes? Asset managers? Regulators? Pension funds? Retail investors? Is the responsibility too diffuse to be meaningfully assigned?

• Is divestment from oppressive regimes a pointless act of moral preening?

• What are the limits of regulations like the SFDR? Does Sergei’s work suggest that transparency regimes are too weak to handle geopolitical and security realities, and if so, what would a more serious framework look like?

• As Sergei’s research shows, liberal democracies generate pools of capital that are then deployed in ways that weaken those very democracies. Is this a paradox, an accident, or a problem inherent to capitalism and globalization?

• What remedies to these problems are imaginable and practical? Public inquiries? Intelligence reform? Political transparency rules? Financial regulation? Civic education? All of the above?

Want to join us? Not a subscriber? Why not take advantage of the free week-long trial? Come, check it out, and see if you like it:

Subscribe now

Read more

I wrote the below as show notes for the most recent episode of Critical Conditions. I’m reproducing them here because people using the Substack app often don’t see the show notes.

Dan recorded our podcast on two hours of sleep. He’s once again dashing in and out of his shelter because once again, Iran is trying to kill him. So we quickly discussed the latest events in Israel and Iran, then proceeded to discuss what we’d meant to talk about—the murder of Henry Nowak and JD Vance’s determination to insert himself where he is neither welcome nor wanted.

After Dan and I wrapped up, I decided to look at the police statements, the sentencing remarks, and contemporaneous reporting so I could figure out what had actually happened. There is simply no support for the idea that the police handcuffed the victim because they were woke. The much-better-supported account is far more prosaic. The murderer successfully fed the arriving officers a false narrative in a chaotic scene, and they misidentified the dying victim as the suspect before they recognized the medical reality.

The story: On the night of December 3, 2025, in Southampton, Vickrum Singh Digwa, a 23-year-old Sikh—who was born in the UK and who is a British citizen—encountered the 18-year-old British student, Henry Nowak, also a British citizen. Nowak—described by the judge as “the first in his family to go to university … careful and principled, full of humor, warmth and promise”—had been walking home alone after a night out with friends.

It is unclear what happened, exactly, before Digwa stabbed Nowak, but just beforehand, Nowak began filming Digwa with his phone. Digwa, the court determined, grabbed Nowak’s phone to stop him from recording, leading to a physical struggle. There were no eyewitnesses to the stabbing.

Digwa’s brother arrived on the scene very shortly after the attack. Digwa filmed Nowak desperately trying to get away from him—somehow scaling a fence onto a trash bin, before landing on a car. Rather than calling the police or an ambulance right away, Digwa for some reason continued to film his victim. He told his brother that he had been attacked, and when asked by his brother whether he’d been the victim of racist violence, claimed that Nowak had called him a “Paki.” (In the UK, this is considered a serious racial slur.)

It was Digwa’s brother who called the police, claiming that Digwa, not Nowak, had been assaulted. Digwa’s parents arrived on the scene before the police arrived. Digwa told his mother to take away the murder weapon, which she did. He did not tell his father what had really happened.

When the police arrived, Digwa falsely accused Nowak of assaulting and racially abusing him. The police, as a result, handcuffed Nowak. Bodycam footage shows Nowak saying he had been stabbed and couldn’t breathe. An officer responds, “I don’t think you have, mate.” As soon as officers realized Nowak was seriously injured, a minute later, they uncuffed him and began CPR. But Nowak lost consciousness and died on the scene. Subsequently, the Constabulary referred itself to the Independent Office for Police Conduct for investigation.

The court later heard that Nowak was bleeding internally in a way that was difficult to see. Although blood was visible, there was not, as Dan thought, “blood all over.” The chest wound cut a major vein behind the collarbone; the pathologist found more than two pints of blood in his chest cavity. In other words, he was bleeding to death inwardly, not producing a great arterial fountain on the pavement. Nowak was wearing a dark shirt, and it was dark out. The judge said the entry damage through the clothing “would not have been obvious.” The knife passed through several layers of clothing, including the dark top, and the visible cut in the fabric was not necessarily easy to spot at the scene.

The sentencing remarks say: “Whilst there was visible blood on Henry, it would not have clearly been seen coming from that wound.” The clearly visible facial wound, meanwhile, was not life-threatening. So it makes sense that an officer could see blood without grasping that Nowak had suffered a catastrophic chest injury.

The judge accepted that Digwa’s lies, not woke presumptions, misled the police. Police “honestly believed” there were reasonable grounds to suspect Henry had committed an offense, so they arrested and handcuffed him.

Their confusion is not what cost Nowak his life, however. The pathologist testified that no emergency treatment would have given them access to the bleeding vein. Nowak could not have survived such a wound, however quickly he had received first aid or CPR. The Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary has nonetheless apologized for their conduct.

The judge did not suggest the police deserved opprobrium. “It is the experience of the criminal courts,” said the judge, “that sometimes, someone arrested and handcuffed will feign injury in the hope they may be released. These police officers were faced with having to make quick decisions in pressurized circumstances about the best way to act. The genuine shock to the particular police officer, when he realized that he had been giving CPR to Henry when he had a serious chest wound, tends to show that he was doing his best in a very difficult situation.”

Recently, on May 28, a jury convicted Digwa of murder. Digwa’s mother was convicted of assisting the crime by hiding the murder weapon. The judge rejected Digwa’s accusations that Nowak had physically assaulted or racially abused him. Digwa received a life sentence, which carries a minimum 21-year term.

Opportunists, as is sadly typical, exploited the murder. “We’re living in a two-tier culture in this country where the rights and privileges of white people matter less than those of ethnic minorities,” said Nigel Farage. The Labour government rejected the charges.

When the video of Nowak being handcuffed as he lay dying was released, riots broke out in Southampton. Many police officers were injured. A police officer with no connection to the case was misidentified online and subjected to death threats. He was forced to relocate to protect his family. Sikhs in Southampton have been harassed. They are terrified.

Stephen Pollard wrote, in the Sun, that “woke robot cops” assumed Nowak’s killer “was a victim because he’s not white.”

No incident could more clearly demonstrate the impact of the poisonous ideology which has infected the police—along with many other public sector organizations. Officers have been taught that the single most important factor in society is racism, and that it is their role as the police to counter that. So-called Critical Race Theory holds that white people are inherently racist and so society is itself racist. To be anti-racist, you must start from the recognition that all white people are racist and all non-whites are victims of racism.

That helps explain why the police officers who attended the scene after Henry Nowak was stabbed behaved like woke robots—immediately assuming that his murderer was the victim, because as a non-white he said he was. Despite the evidence of their own eyes, with Henry dying on the ground in front of them. Hampshire Constabulary’s Race Action Plan (the murder took place in Southampton) has forced officers to undergo race training to “educate the workforce on organizational culture, biases, banter, microaggressions, privilege and the importance of being an ally.” This is classic Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion jargon, the parallel ideology which sits alongside CRT.

Similarly, the College of Policing mandates officers to “respond positively to allegations, signs and perceptions of hostility and hate … officers and staff should not challenge this initial perception.” Acting in accord with these new principles is “mandatory” for officers and is now “linked to pay progression.” The proponents of CRT and DEI are Maoist in their insistence that no questioning or disagreement is permitted—and is itself evidence of racism. … Raise these issues and you are dismissed not only as racist but as pushing “culture wars.” But the video of Henry Nowak’s dying minutes shows how vital it is that these grotesque ideologies are rooted out.

This was obviously a policing failure. But “woke policing killed Nowak” is a phony and opportunistic political narrative layered on top of the known facts, not a fact proved by the record. It’s reasonable to conclude that officers were influenced by Digwa’s false accusations. We don’t know whether that influence reflected ideological overcorrection, ordinary confusion between the suspect and the victim, poor scene control, inadequate medical assessment, excessive deference to the first coherent complainant, or some combination of these. This is what the IOPC investigation is supposed to determine.

In the wake of Digwa’s sentencing, Nowak’s father stood outside the courthouse and made a simple, unambiguous request. “We do not want Henry’s murder to be used to create further hatred, division or tension.”

The sentencing judge described the torment of Nowak’s family thus:

He speaks of the horror of losing his son in such violent circumstances, the trauma of identifying his body, and the lasting torment of imagining Henry’s final moments. He describes overwhelming grief, guilt, helplessness, and the pain of seeing Henry’s mother, siblings, and wider family broken by the loss. Mr Nowak says that the family has effectively been given “a life sentence,” with the pain affecting every aspect of their lives and every significant family occasion, and that nothing will ever fill the permanent void left by Henry’s death.

It is unbearable to imagine. Nothing could be more vile than exploiting this family’s agony for political aims, except for exploiting this family’s agony for loathsome political aims: to divide British society, scapegoat British minorities, and harm Britain’s democratic institutions. The only way to be more vile than that is to do this even though you’re not British and it is simply none of your business.

So we should not be surprised that this is exactly what JD Vance has done. Seeing another opportunity to disgrace the United States and insert himself where he doesn’t belong, JD Vance posted this on Twitter:

This comment is grotesque, absurd, and disgraceful. It is also supremely stupid, because homicides in Britain have gone down, not up, in the era of mass immigration.

The best single source on British homicide rates is Manuel Eisner’s “History of Homicide Database,” especially the 2014 synthesis, “From Swords to Words,” now conveniently available through the Our World in Data’s long-run homicide dataset. Our World in Data’s version explicitly says that all pre-1950 homicide estimates in its long-run chart come from Table 4 of Eisner, 2014.

English coroner evidence goes almost all the way back to the Domesday book. The coroner as a royal official dates from the late twelfth century, and the usable homicide evidence comes mainly from thirteenth- and fourteenth-century coroners’ rolls, eyre records, gaol delivery rolls, and later judicial archives. Cambridge’s Medieval Murder Map explains the coroners’ rolls as records of sudden and unnatural deaths—suicides, accidents, homicides—and notes that London has nine surviving rolls from the first half of the fourteenth century. Barbara Hanawalt’s medieval English crime data, for example, used gaol delivery rolls from eight counties, with coroners’ rolls classified separately in the National Archives.

Here is the cleanest usable per-century reconstruction, in homicides per 100,000 people per year, excluding war deaths in the ordinary sense. (Treat the pre-1800 figures as “best available scholarly estimates,” not national statistics.)

The big picture is robust; the fine-grained medieval numbers are not. It’s safe to say that lethal interpersonal violence in England fell by roughly an order of magnitude from the high-medieval/late-medieval world to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and then reached historically extraordinary lows in the twentieth century. (It’s not safe to say, “the English homicide rate in 1275 was exactly x.” That would be giving a coroners’ roll a job it never applied for.)

There is simply no doubt about this proposition: England was vastly more homicidal before modern immigration, multiculturalism, DEI, “woke policing,” or whatever devil Vance has found in the wallpaper. During the decades in which Britain became much more foreign-born, not only did the homicide rate not rise in parallel; after an early-2000s peak, it fell.

Between 1964 and 1983, the UK experienced almost continuous net emigration. Immigration and emigration were roughly balanced until the mid-1990s. Since 1994, immigration has exceeded emigration every year, and exceeded emigration by more than 100,000 every year from 1998 to 2019. Net migration peaked at 944,000 in the year ending March 2023 before falling. The Migration Advisory Committee gives useful decade averages: net migration averaged 223,000 in the 2000s and 260,000 in the 2010s, while the post-2021 levels were unusually high.

At the 2021/22 census, 16 percent of the UK population, about 10.7 million people, was foreign-born. The foreign-born population rose rapidly between 2004 and 2021, from 9 percent to 16 percent. In England and Wales specifically, there were 10 million foreign-born residents in 2021, a rise of 16.8 percent up from 8.9 percent in 2001.

Homicide in England and Wales is now extremely low by any long-run standard. ONS reports 522 homicide victims in the year ending March 2025 and a rate of 8.6 per million, the lowest since 1977. Homicide, mind you, is a rare crime and the rate fluctuates year to year; single events can distort the series. So, for example, when the Hillsborough disaster was reclassified as a mass homicide in 2016, the rate soared; the Manchester Arena and London Bridge terrorist attacks in 2017 and 2018 respectively also caused the overall rate to soar, as did the Essex lorry deaths in 2019.

I’m not claiming that immigration reduces homicide. That would be absurd, unless every immigrant was a Quaker. Homicide rates are affected by age structure, male youth cohorts, alcohol, drug markets, domestic violence, emergency medicine, policing, weapon availability, gang dynamics, urban concentration, deprivation, and statistical rules. But Vance’s claim is cruder than that. He is not offering a multivariate model. He’s offering manipulative, ignorant melodrama. The basic historical record is brutal to his claim. So Vance’s comment wasn’t just unwelcome and indecorous; it was historically illiterate. And if he knew anything about the civilization he claims to defend, he would know all of this.

UK homicide statistics are tabulated by ethnicity, age, sex, nationality, and relationship—not by religion—so it’s hard to say whether Sikhs are disproportionately homicidal. ONS is explicit in a 2025 FOI response: it “does not hold data on the ethnicity and religion of perpetrators of crime” and generally publishes crime data as experienced by victims or recorded by police, while the Ministry of Justice handles offender data; another ONS FOI says homicide data include victim and principal-suspect ethnic appearance, not religion.

Sikhs are roughly 0.9 percent of the England and Wales population, so a population-proportionate share of 522 homicides would be roughly 4–5 homicide cases per year. That’s far too small a denominator for confident year-by-year inference. One case, such as Henry Nowak’s murder, is already a large fraction of the expected annual total. This means the base rate is so tiny that a single atrocity can be made to look like a trend.

The closest official offender-side religion data are prison-wide, not homicide-specific. HMPPS publishes some prisoner religion statistics, but not a clean homicide-offender-by-religion table. In the 2023/24 HMPPS offender equalities report, Sikh prisoners appear in general prison-management breakdowns; notably, prisoners reporting Hindu, Sikh, or “any other religion” had among the lowest proportions on the lowest prison incentive status, while Sikh prisoners had above-average “enhanced” incentive status. That’s not a homicide statistic, but it’s wholly inconsistent with any lurid picture of Sikhs as an unusually violent prison subgroup.

What about immigrants generally? Or, as Dan suggests, people who are dark-skinned enough to hurl plausible charges of racism at the man they’ve just murdered? For homicide specifically, the public UK data don’t allow us to answer this by “immigrant” status—not in the way I’d want if I were making a serious claim about foreign-born people, asylum seekers, recent arrivals, or non-citizens.

What I can say, with confidence, is narrower but still useful: There is no good public evidence that immigrants generally commit a disproportionate share of homicides in England and Wales. The official homicide series doesn’t publish principal suspects by birthplace, nationality, immigration status, asylum status, or religion. It does publish suspect information by age, sex, ethnicity, relationship to victim, and circumstances. ONS’s 2025 homicide report says that between 2022-2025, convicted principal suspects were 61 percent white, 24 percent black, and 8 percent Asian, while explicitly warning that these differences are likely affected by age, region, and socioeconomic factors not controlled for in the raw comparison.

In the UK, “Asian” refers to those whose origins are in the Indian subcontinent. So the category would include Sikhs, but also Indians of other religions—as well as Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, and Sri Lankans. It’s useless for isolating Sikhs. In the latest Ministry of Justice ethnicity-and-CJS release, 9 percent of convicted principal homicide suspects were Asian. Roughly 9 percent of the UK’s population was Asian according to the 2021 Census. The same release says 65 percent of the homicide suspects were white and 20 percent black. So the broad “Asian” category is not overrepresented among homicide suspects.

Again, annual homicide numbers are small. Broad ethnic categories conceal age, sex, class, region, urban concentration, gang dynamics, and within-category heterogeneity.

The ONS doesn’t keep breakdowns of crime by asylum seeker or migrant status. Offender, prosecution, and conviction data are mainly a Ministry of Justice matter. So if someone claims, “immigrants commit x percent of UK homicides,” your first question should be: Where exactly did that number come from? If it’s not a bespoke Home Office or Ministry of Justice extract from linked administrative records, it’s probably not a national homicide statistic.

The best adjacent evidence is from the Migration Observatory’s 2025 analysis of non-UK citizens in the criminal-justice system. In June 2025, 12.4 percent of the prison population were non-UK nationals. About 13 percent of cautions and convictions in 2024 went to non-citizens, excluding cases where there’s no mention of nationality. The observatory notes that the 2024 Annual Population Survey suggested roughly 12 percent of people over the age of 16 were non-citizens, though that may be an underestimate. On the crude headline comparison, then, non-citizens are not whatsoever wildly overrepresented in criminal convictions or prison overall.

The Migration Observatory also emphasizes that age and sex matter enormously: Migrants and non-citizens are more likely to be young adults, and young adult men are the high-risk demographic for most crime. Once age and sex are taken into account, the Observatory finds that non-citizens were (slightly) less likely to be in prison than UK citizens. That’s not a homicide-specific result, but it militates severely against the “foreigners commit a disproportionate number of homicides” story.

For violence specifically, older but still important work by Bell, Fasani, and Machin, summarized by the Migration Observatory, found that increases in the local share of asylum seekers and migrants were not associated with statistically significant changes in violent crime in England and Wales between 2002 and 2009. The asylum-seeker share was associated with a small rise in property crime.

Vance’s insinuation is wholly unsupported by the data. It’s possible that some specific migrant subgroups are overrepresented in some specific offense categories, or underrepresented in others. That kind of claim requires careful denominator work, age-sex standardization, and offense-specific data. But for homicide, the public evidence simply doesn’t sustain his claim—at all.

It was a single, terrible killing. The family of the victim begged that it not be politically exploited. But that is exactly what our vice-president did. He did so for loathsome reasons.

The effect of this will not be what he hopes.

I know I shouldn’t put whole essays in the show notes, since many people don’t see them. So in a few seconds, you’ll also receive the extended show notes, in duplicate, as a regular newsletter. I’m sorry about clogging up your mailbox, but I can’t see a better solution.

Dan recorded this podcast on two hours of sleep. He’s once again dashing in and out of his shelter because once again, Iran is trying to kill him. So we quickly discussed the latest events in Israel and Iran, then proceeded to discuss what we’d meant to talk about—the murder of Henry Nowak and JD Vance’s determination to insert himself where he is neither welcome nor wanted.

After Dan and I wrapped up, I decided to look at the police statements, the sentencing remarks, and contemporaneous reporting so I could figure out what had actually happened. There is simply no support for the idea that the police handcuffed the victim because they were woke. The much-better-supported account is far more prosaic. The murderer successfully fed the arriving officers a false narrative in a chaotic scene, and they misidentified the dying victim as the suspect before they recognized the medical reality.

The story: On the night of December 3, 2025, in Southampton, Vickrum Singh Digwa, a 23-year-old Sikh—who was born in the UK and who is a British citizen—encountered the 18-year-old British student, Henry Nowak, also a British citizen. Nowak—described by the judge as “the first in his family to go to university … careful and principled, full of humor, warmth and promise”—had been walking home alone after a night out with friends.

It is unclear what happened, exactly, before Digwa stabbed Nowak, but just beforehand, Nowak began filming Digwa with his phone. Digwa, the court determined, grabbed Nowak’s phone to stop him from recording, leading to a physical struggle. There were no eyewitnesses to the stabbing.

Digwa’s brother arrived on the scene very shortly after the attack. Digwa filmed Nowak desperately trying to get away from him—somehow scaling a fence onto a trash bin, before landing on a car. Rather than calling the police or an ambulance right away, Digwa for some reason continued to film his victim. He told his brother that he had been attacked, and when asked by his brother whether he’d been the victim of racist violence, claimed that Nowak had called him a “Paki.” (In the UK, this is considered a serious racial slur.)

It was Digwa’s brother who called the police, claiming that Digwa, not Nowak, had been assaulted. Digwa’s parents arrived on the scene before the police arrived. Digwa told his mother to take away the murder weapon, which she did. He did not tell his father what had really happened.

When the police arrived, Digwa falsely accused Nowak of assaulting and racially abusing him. The police, as a result, handcuffed Nowak. Bodycam footage shows Nowak saying he had been stabbed and couldn’t breathe. An officer responds, “I don’t think you have, mate.” As soon as officers realized Nowak was seriously injured, a minute later, they uncuffed him and began CPR. But Nowak lost consciousness and died on the scene. Subsequently, the Constabulary referred itself to the Independent Office for Police Conduct for investigation.

The court later heard that Nowak was bleeding internally in a way that was difficult to see. Although blood was visible, there was not, as Dan thought, “blood all over.” The chest wound cut a major vein behind the collarbone; the pathologist found more than two pints of blood in his chest cavity. In other words, he was bleeding to death inwardly, not producing a great arterial fountain on the pavement. Nowak was wearing a dark shirt, and it was dark out. The judge said the entry damage through the clothing “would not have been obvious.” The knife passed through several layers of clothing, including the dark top, and the visible cut in the fabric was not necessarily easy to spot at the scene.

The sentencing remarks say: “Whilst there was visible blood on Henry, it would not have clearly been seen coming from that wound.” The clearly visible facial wound, meanwhile, was not life-threatening. So it makes sense that an officer could see blood without grasping that Nowak had suffered a catastrophic chest injury.

The judge accepted that Digwa’s lies, not woke presumptions, misled the police. Police “honestly believed” there were reasonable grounds to suspect Henry had committed an offense, so they arrested and handcuffed him.

Their confusion is not what cost Nowak his life, however. The pathologist testified that no emergency treatment would have given them access to the bleeding vein. Nowak could not have survived such a wound, however quickly he had received first aid or CPR. The Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary has nonetheless apologized for their conduct.

The judge did not suggest the police deserved opprobrium. “It is the experience of the criminal courts,” said the judge, “that sometimes, someone arrested and handcuffed will feign injury in the hope they may be released. These police officers were faced with having to make quick decisions in pressurized circumstances about the best way to act. The genuine shock to the particular police officer, when he realized that he had been giving CPR to Henry when he had a serious chest wound, tends to show that he was doing his best in a very difficult situation.”

Recently, on May 28, a jury convicted Digwa of murder. Digwa’s mother was convicted of assisting the crime by hiding the murder weapon. The judge rejected Digwa’s accusations that Nowak had physically assaulted or racially abused him. Digwa received a life sentence, which carries a minimum 21-year term.

Opportunists, as is sadly typical, exploited the murder. “We’re living in a two-tier culture in this country where the rights and privileges of white people matter less than those of ethnic minorities,” said Nigel Farage. The Labour government rejected the charges.

When the video of Nowak being handcuffed as he lay dying was released, riots broke out in Southampton. Many police officers were injured. A police officer with no connection to the case was misidentified online and subjected to death threats. He was forced to relocate to protect his family. Sikhs in Southampton have been harassed. They are terrified.

Stephen Pollard wrote, in the Sun, that “woke robot cops” assumed Nowak’s killer “was a victim because he’s not white.”

No incident could more clearly demonstrate the impact of the poisonous ideology which has infected the police—along with many other public sector organizations. Officers have been taught that the single most important factor in society is racism, and that it is their role as the police to counter that. So-called Critical Race Theory holds that white people are inherently racist and so society is itself racist. To be anti-racist, you must start from the recognition that all white people are racist and all non-whites are victims of racism.

That helps explain why the police officers who attended the scene after Henry Nowak was stabbed behaved like woke robots—immediately assuming that his murderer was the victim, because as a non-white he said he was. Despite the evidence of their own eyes, with Henry dying on the ground in front of them. Hampshire Constabulary’s Race Action Plan (the murder took place in Southampton) has forced officers to undergo race training to “educate the workforce on organizational culture, biases, banter, microaggressions, privilege and the importance of being an ally.” This is classic Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion jargon, the parallel ideology which sits alongside CRT.

Similarly, the College of Policing mandates officers to “respond positively to allegations, signs and perceptions of hostility and hate … officers and staff should not challenge this initial perception.” Acting in accord with these new principles is “mandatory” for officers and is now “linked to pay progression.” The proponents of CRT and DEI are Maoist in their insistence that no questioning or disagreement is permitted—and is itself evidence of racism. … Raise these issues and you are dismissed not only as racist but as pushing “culture wars.” But the video of Henry Nowak’s dying minutes shows how vital it is that these grotesque ideologies are rooted out.

This was obviously a policing failure. But “woke policing killed Nowak” is a phony and opportunistic political narrative layered on top of the known facts, not a fact proved by the record. It’s reasonable to conclude that officers were influenced by Digwa’s false accusations. We don’t know whether that influence reflected ideological overcorrection, ordinary confusion between the suspect and the victim, poor scene control, inadequate medical assessment, excessive deference to the first coherent complainant, or some combination of these. This is what the IOPC investigation is supposed to determine.

In the wake of Digwa’s sentencing, Nowak’s father stood outside the courthouse and made an unambiguous request. “We do not want Henry’s murder to be used to create further hatred, division or tension.”

The sentencing judge described the torment of Nowak’s family thus:

He speaks of the horror of losing his son in such violent circumstances, the trauma of identifying his body, and the lasting torment of imagining Henry’s final moments. He describes overwhelming grief, guilt, helplessness, and the pain of seeing Henry’s mother, siblings, and wider family broken by the loss. Mr Nowak says that the family has effectively been given “a life sentence,” with the pain affecting every aspect of their lives and every significant family occasion, and that nothing will ever fill the permanent void left by Henry’s death.

It is unbearable to imagine. Nothing could be more vile than exploiting this family’s agony for political aims, except for exploiting this family’s agony for loathsome political aims, to wit, to divide British society, scapegoat British minorities, and harm Britain’s democratic institutions. The only way to be more vile than that is to do this even though you’re not British and it is simply none of your business.

So we should not be surprised that this is exactly what JD Vance has done. Seeing yet another opportunity to disgrace the United States and insert himself where he doesn’t belong, JD Vance posted this on Twitter:

This comment is grotesque, absurd, and disgraceful. It is also supremely stupid, because homicides in Britain have gone down, not up, in the era of mass immigration.

The best single source on British homicide rates is Manuel Eisner’s “History of Homicide Database,” especially the 2014 synthesis, “From Swords to Words,” now conveniently available through the Our World in Data’s long-run homicide dataset. Our World in Data’s version explicitly says that all pre-1950 homicide estimates in its long-run chart come from Table 4 of Eisner, 2014.

English coroner evidence goes almost all the way back to the Domesday book. The coroner as a royal official dates from the late twelfth century, and the usable homicide evidence comes mainly from thirteenth- and fourteenth-century coroners’ rolls, eyre records, gaol delivery rolls, and later judicial archives. Cambridge’s Medieval Murder Map explains the coroners’ rolls as records of sudden and unnatural deaths—suicides, accidents, homicides—and notes that London has nine surviving rolls from the first half of the fourteenth century. Barbara Hanawalt’s medieval English crime data, for example, used gaol delivery rolls from eight counties, with coroners’ rolls classified separately in the National Archives.

Here is the cleanest usable per-century reconstruction, in homicides per 100,000 people per year, excluding war deaths in the ordinary sense. (Treat the pre-1800 figures as “best available scholarly estimates,” not national statistics.)

The big picture is robust; the fine-grained medieval numbers are not. It’s safe to say that lethal interpersonal violence in England fell by roughly an order of magnitude from the high-medieval/late-medieval world to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and then reached historically extraordinary lows in the twentieth century. (It’s not safe to say, “the English homicide rate in 1275 was exactly X.” That would be giving a coroners’ roll a job it never applied for.)

There is simply no doubt about this proposition: England was vastly more homicidal before modern immigration, multiculturalism, DEI, “woke policing,” or whatever devil Vance has found in the wallpaper. During the decades in which Britain became much more foreign-born, not only did the homicide rate did not rise in parallel, after an early-2000s peak, it fell.

Between 1964 and 1983, the UK experienced almost continuous net emigration. Immigration and emigration were roughly balanced until the mid-1990s. Since 1994, immigration has exceeded emigration every year, and exceeded emigration by more than 100,000 every year from 1998 to 2019. Net migration peaked at 944,000 in the year ending March 2023 before falling. The Migration Advisory Committee gives useful decade averages: net migration averaged 223,000 in the 2000s and 260,000 in the 2010s, while the post-2021 levels were unusually high.

At the 2021/22 census, 16 percent of the UK population, about 10.7 million people, was foreign-born. The foreign-born population rose rapidly between 2004 and 2021, from 9 percent to 16 percent. In England and Wales specifically, there were 10 million foreign-born residents in 2021, a rise of 16.8 percent up from 8.9 percent in 2001.

Homicide in England and Wales is now extremely low by any long-run standard. ONS reports 522 homicide victims in the year ending March 2025 and a rate of 8.6 per million, the lowest since 1977. Homicide, mind you, is a rare crime and the rate fluctuates year to year; single events can distort the series. So, for example, when the Hillsborough disaster was reclassified as a mass homicide in 2016, the rate soared; the Manchester Arena and London Bridge terrorist attacks in 2017 and 2018 respectively also caused the overall rate to soar, as did the Essex lorry deaths in 2019.

I’m not claiming that immigration reduces homicide. That would be absurd, unless every immigrant was a Quaker. Homicide rates are affected by age structure, male youth cohorts, alcohol, drug markets, domestic violence, emergency medicine, policing, weapon availability, gang dynamics, urban concentration, deprivation, and statistical rules. But Vance’s claim is cruder than that. He is not offering a multivariate model. He’s offering manipulative, ignorant melodrama. The basic historical record is brutal to his claim. So Vance’s comment wasn’t just unwelcome and indecorous; it was historically illiterate. And if he knew anything about the civilization he claims to defend, he would know all of this.

UK homicide statistics are tabulated by ethnicity, age, sex, nationality, and relationship—not by religion—so it’s hard to say whether Sikhs are disproportionately homicidal. ONS is explicit in a 2025 FOI response: it “does not hold data on the ethnicity and religion of perpetrators of crime” and generally publishes crime data as experienced by victims or recorded by police, while the Ministry of Justice handles offender data; another ONS FOI says homicide data include victim and principal-suspect ethnic appearance, not religion.

Sikhs are roughly 0.9 percent of the England and Wales population, so a population-proportionate share of 522 homicides would be roughly 4–5 homicide cases per year. That’s far too small a denominator for confident year-by-year inference. One case, such as Henry Nowak’s murder, is already a large fraction of the expected annual total. This means the base rate is tiny that so a single atrocity can be made to look like a trend.

The closest official offender-side religion data are prison-wide, not homicide-specific. HMPPS publishes some prisoner religion statistics, but not a clean homicide-offender-by-religion table. In the 2023/24, HMPPS offender equalities report, Sikh prisoners appear in general prison-management breakdowns; notably, prisoners reporting Hindu, Sikh, or “any other religion” had among the lowest proportions on the lowest prison incentive status, while Sikh prisoners had above-average “enhanced” incentive status. That’s not a homicide statistic, but it’s wholly inconsistent with any lurid picture of Sikhs as an unusually violent prison subgroup.

What about immigrants generally? Or, as Dan suggests, people who are dark-skinned enough to hurl plausible charges of racism at the man they’ve just murdered? For homicide specifically, the public UK data don’t allow us to answer this by “immigrant” status—not in the way I’d want if I were making a serious claim about foreign-born people, asylum seekers, recent arrivals, or non-citizens.

What I can say, with confidence, is narrower but still useful: There is no good public evidence that immigrants generally commit a disproportionate share of homicides in England and Wales. The official homicide series doesn’t publish principal suspects by birthplace, nationality, immigration status, asylum status, or religion. It does publish suspect information by age, sex, ethnicity, relationship to victim, and circumstances. ONS’s 2025 homicide report says that between 2022-2025, convicted principal suspects were 61 percent white, 24 percent black, and 8 percent Asian, while explicitly warning that these differences are likely affected by age, region, and socioeconomic factors not controlled for in the raw comparison.

In the UK, “Asian” refers to those whose origins are in the Indian subcontinent. So the category would include Sikhs, but also Indians of other religions— Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans. It’s useless for isolating Sikhs. In the latest Ministry of Justice ethnicity-and-CJS release, 9 percent of convicted principal homicide suspects were Asian. Roughly 9 percent of the UK’s population was Asian according to the 2021 Census. The same release says 65 percent of the homicide suspects were white and 20 percent black. So the broad “Asian” category is not overrepresented among homicide suspects.

Again, annual homicide numbers are small. Broad ethnic categories conceal age, sex, class, region, urban concentration, gang dynamics, and within-category heterogeneity.

The ONS doesn’t keep breakdowns of crime by asylum seeker or migrant status. Offender, prosecution, and conviction data are mainly a Ministry of Justice matter. So if someone claims, “immigrants commit x percent of UK homicides,” your first question should be: Where exactly did that number come from? If it’s not a bespoke Home Office or Ministry of Justice extract from linked administrative records, it’s probably not a national homicide statistic.

The best adjacent evidence is from the Migration Observatory’s 2025 analysis of non-UK citizens in the criminal-justice system. In June 2025, 12.4 percent of the prison population were non-UK nationals. About 13 percent of cautions and convictions in 2024 went to non-citizens, excluding cases where there’s no mention of nationality. The observatory notes that the 2024 Annual Population Survey suggested roughly 12 percent of people over the age of 16 were non-citizens, though that may be an underestimate. On the crude headline comparison, then, non-citizens are not whatsoever wildly overrepresented in criminal convictions or prison overall.

The Migration Observatory also emphasizes that age and sex matter enormously: Migrants and non-citizens are more likely to be young adults, and young adult men are the high-risk demographic for most crime. Once age and sex are taken into account, the Observatory finds that non-citizens were (slightly) less likely to be in prison than UK citizens. That’s not a homicide-specific result, but it militates severely against the “foreigners commit a disproportionate number of homicides” story.

For violence specifically, older but still important work by Bell, Fasani, and Machin, summarized by the Migration Observatory, found that increases in the local share of asylum seekers and migrants were not associated with statistically significant changes in violent crime in England and Wales between 2002 and 2009. The asylum-seeker share was associated with a small rise in property crime.

Vance’s insinuation is wholly unsupported by the data. It’s possible that some specific migrant subgroups are overrepresented in some specific offense categories, or underrepresented in others. That kind of claim requires careful denominator work, age-sex standardization, and offense-specific data. But for homicide, the public evidence simply doesn’t sustain his claim—at all.

It was a single, terrible killing. The family of the victim begged that it not be politically exploited. But that is exactly what our vice-president did. He did so for loathsome reasons.

The effect of this will not be what he hopes.

Very few of you are free to meet Sergei Cristo at the times I suggested, so here’s what we’ll do. I’ll invite Sergei to join us not tomorrow, but on the following Sunday—June 14—at the usual time, via Zoom. Meanwhile, I’ll record a podcast with Sergei while he’s in Paris, which I’ll post in advance of the symposium along with the reading.

As for tomorrow’s symposium—which will be held at our customary hour, 4:30 pm Paris time—we’ll be joined by a guest I could hardly be more delighted to welcome: My Pop. Or as you may know him, David Berlinski: mathematician, essayist, novelist, polemicist, philosopher of science, and ornament of civilization.

If you’re not familiar with my father, this interview will fill in the background:

This isn’t a symposium about why everyone ought to read more. Everyone knows he should read more, just as everyone knows he should floss after meals and stop looking at the Internet in bed. The question isn’t whether reading is good for us. It’s much more interesting: What does it mean to read well?

Even educated adults are never really taught this. They’re taught to decode words, pass examinations, extract themes, underline sentences, take notes, and dutifully produce the kind of lifelessly correct observation that makes English teachers wonder whether accountancy might have been the braver life. Reading well is not the same thing as extracting “the main idea.” Nor is a matter of agreeing or disagreeing with the author. It’s not even the same as finishing the book.

Reading well is a way of noticing: structure, rhythm, implication, irony, proportion, motive, evasion, beauty, vulgarity, force, fraudulence, charm. It involves knowing when to slow down and when to skim; when a sentence is carrying the argument and when it’s just carrying water; when a character is saying what he means and when the author is saying something behind his back; when the prose is merely pretty and when it comes alive.

It’s a dying art. I don’t need to rehearse the reasons for this—or the consequences of it. We’ve discussed them many times. We live in the age of TikTok videos and automated prose. The Internet hasn’t abolished the written word, precisely, but it’s replaced it with a form of language that has little to do with reading: one that’s fast, reactive, tribal, performative, dumb, and artless. Against this, reading—really reading—is almost eccentric. But it’s the last defense of the independent human mind.

Years ago, my father, brother, and I had spoken of writing a book together called How to Read. Not some pious defense of the Great Books or a list of improving assignments. We wanted to write something more practical: a guide to the habits of mind by which good readers actually read. How should you approach a short story? An essay? A novel? A difficult argument? A paragraph that seems simple but isn’t? A book that’s much better than its reputation? A book that’s much worse than its reputation?

Then, as often happens to our excellent ideas, we forgot all about it. Or rather, I vaguely remember it; my father claims not to. But he’s agreed to talk about it all the same.

For this week’s reading, I’ve appended, below the paywall, two texts. The first is one of my father’s own short stories. The second is a very different thing—it’s Abraham Lincoln’s Lyceum Address, delivered in 1838 by a very young man in a very young republic.

We’ll use these texts as occasions to ask what a good reader notices. How does a text work? Where is the pressure in the prose? What does it disclose directly, and what does it disclose obliquely? What’s the relation between style and meaning? What does a story know that its characters may not? What does a political speech know that its audience may not wish to know? What does the reader have to supply?

The two texts differ almost completely in genre, occasion, scale, and voice. One is private, retrospective, and fictional; the other is public, prophetic, and political. One looks back across a life; the other looks forward into the dangers facing a republic. One moves through the American West; the other through the American inheritance.

But they are related.

As you read, notice the distances: between youth and age, promise and possession, inheritance and understanding, America imagined and America encountered. Ask yourself what each text knows at the end that could not quite have been known at the beginning.

Feel free, if you like, to bring any sample of prose that interests or vexes you to the discussion. We can discuss any text that causes you to think you’d like to understand it better.

This will be a delightful conversation. We’ll talk about books, words, sentences, intelligence, and the habits of mind that make civilization possible. It will be a nice break from talking about the Strait of Hormuz, war, Donald Trump, and the death of liberal democracy.

As usual, the Zoom link is below the paywall.

See you tomorrow! I’m especially looking forward to this.

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Here’s the original invitation:

Frida joined CNN in its earliest days. She covered Moscow in the last days of the USSR, Bosnia, Somalia, Gaza, Latin America, the Amazon, the Gulf, and much more. Western coverage of the war, she points out, has been missing a lot. She used this conversation to round out the picture.

I was taken aback when I realized this symposium took place on May 3. I owe everyone an apology for taking so long to post this. Fortunately, the delay didn’t make the conversation stale. If anything, it’s now even more apt. The details of the news from the Middle East may have changed (though not as much as you might expect), but this conversation remains all too topical.

We talked about Hezbollah, Lebanon, the UAE, Israel, the Strait of Hormuz, oil, fertilizer, drones, missiles, and the dismaying spectacle of a superpower trying to conduct coercive diplomacy through a president who seems to think his adversaries must be like the contractors he used to stiff in Queens. We talked about journalism, strategy, and the failures of American statecraft; We took a grim tour of global supply chains.

The trouble with covering any event involving Donald Trump is that Donald Trump immediately becomes the story: He is a gravitational force field unto himself. So discussions of the war in Iran inevitably to turn into discussions of Trump’s psychology, Trump’s motives, Trump’s polling, Trump’s donors, Trump’s generals, Trump’s television habits, Trump’s latest all-night lunatic posting spree on Truth Social.

As this conversation makes clear, however, the war is larger than Trump. It’s larger than Washington, larger than Netanyahu, and larger than the American argument about whether this is yet another disastrous war of choice or a belated strike against a regime that’s spent decades preparing to make itself untouchable.

This symposium was about widening the lens.

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Some of you will remember my friend Sergei Cristo from previous podcasts and discussions. Among other things, he was the star of the podcast Sergei & the Westminster Spy Ring, in which he helped to expose Russia’s interference in British politics.

Here’s a review of that podcast from the Guardian:

The indomitable Carole Cadwalladr of this parish and the equally dogged Peter Jukes of Byline Times have joined forces to make the new podcast Sergei & the Westminster Spy Ring, an investigative series that tells a modern tale of Russian influence in and on the UK. The blurb informs us that “not since the reach of the Cambridge spy ring … has the Kremlin been so successful in penetrating the highest echelons of British intelligence.” Yep, we’re talking spies. But this is no all-action Bond tale; instead, it concerns Russia’s gradual infiltration of the UK’s political hierarchy.

The story is built around Sergei Cristo, a Russian-born British citizen who came to the UK in the 90s and worked as a fundraiser/activist for the Conservative party. About 15 years ago, Cristo met diplomat Sergey Nalobin, whose father had been in the KGB. Nalobin seemed keen to find out if any politicians might be interested in forming a Conservatives for Russia group. Suspicious, Cristo gave him nothing but watched as Nalobin gradually parlayed his way into making Tory friends and influencing people.

By episode two, Cristo is seriously worried but can’t seem to get either the Metropolitan police or MI5 interested. The Conservative Friends of Russia group is launched with a big party and bad jokes about Pussy Riot. But it’s in the third episode, released last Tuesday, that things properly get going. It’s 2012, and political bloggers and strategists, as well as politicians themselves, are busily wooed by Nalobin and friends. Russia wants to know how to use the internet for election campaigning. “They basically opened up all their learnings to Russia,” says one person who was there. This is soft power with hard consequences (episode 4 will cover Brexit), and Sergei & the Westminster Spy Ring, though a little slow at times, does a great job of unpicking sexy Russian obfuscation and Tory and MI5 slackness to reveal what’s actually been in plain sight for years. Recommended.

(I didn’t think it was slow at times. I thought it was riveting the whole way through, and I’d heard the whole story before, too. It’s really well done.)

Following his encounter with Nalobin, Sergei decided that he wanted to understand this phenomenon in depth. He’s now getting a Ph.D. in Security and Intelligence Studies at Buckingham University. His research focuses on the way Western capital supports authoritarian regimes, ultimately undermining the liberal democracies whose openness gave investors the opportunity to acquire so much capital in the first place.

His research has already exposed the way so-called “sustainable” funds poured into Russia in the run-up to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. A few highlights from the paper he published about this, titled “When Green Turns Red: Security Implications of “Sustainable” Investments in Russia.”

… This research has uncovered enough empirical evidence to highlight at least three serious problems. First, the funds invested in Russia in the run-up to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine ran counter to the spirit and letter of sustainable investing commitments.

Second, several of the top ten European asset managers (the largest, most reputable and trusted fiduciaries of ordinary people’s savings and pensions) effectively misused their sustainable funds to help equip Putin’s war machine in various ways. It is far from a mere rhetorical point. As explained below, most of the European “sustainable” assets come from pension funds and people’s savings, and that their funded Russian investee entities enabled the Kremlin’s ambitions not only indirectly (major revenue earners for the regime and its elites) but in many cases directly (suppliers to military manufacturers, sponsors of military units, parts of state propaganda and disinformation, bankers of covert military operations abroad). Moreover, the way those entities fit within the oppressive regime was well known long before the war began in 2022, as this research illustrates.

And third, that the regulatory investment sustainability framework remains not only largely ineffective and unenforceable, but also largely unresponsive to geopolitical realities. This framework of the European Union (EU) continues to be in force, given that the European Commission effectively postponed SFDR reforms till 2027 despite accepting much criticism that it was not fit for purpose.

These points relate to the societal significance of this research. As mentioned above, much of the money that has supported oppression in Russia and around the world did not come from some evil anonymous source. It came from the savings and investments of ordinary people. It is our money. In these sustainability-conscious times, most Europeans want their investments to be used to improve the life on this planet, and not damage it. Moreover, the question of whether sustainable funds should be allowed to invest in oppressive regimes is particularly important, as the European Commission has de-prioritized its SFDR reforms initially expected in 2025, and is shelving them until at least 2027.

Sergei just launched what’s shaping up to be a great new Substack, too, focused on Russia’s subversion of Western democracies.

Russian Interference

Sergei Cristo is a former BBC journalist, asset management specialist and Conservative Party fundraiser turned whistleblower against the Russian interference in British politics.

By Sergei Cristo

Sergei is at the Oslo Freedom Forum right now, and on his way back, he’s stopping in Paris.

I thought this would be a great opportunity to have him join our symposium. I had two ideas in mind for a topic, in particular:

1. Is your retirement fund kidnapping Ukrainian children?

2. Why won’t the UK conduct a proper inquiry into Russia’s role in Brexit?

Unfortunately, his flight doesn’t get in until 18:45, Paris time, on Sunday. He suggested doing it on Monday, instead, but I don’t know how many of you would be free on Monday. He wouldn’t be free during the day (in Paris) on Monday, so if we did that, it would be at about 5 pm Paris time, which is close to our usual time.

How many of you would join if we held the symposium on Monday afternoon?

How many would join if we held it later on Sunday evening (in Paris), which for many of you would be Sunday afternoon? I don’t know if Sergei will be up for that—he’ll have just flown in after a demanding weekend, and he may be tired—but if it’s the only time people can make it, I’ll ask him. If more than a dozen of you say you could do one or the other, I’ll invite him. Show of hands?

You can say “yes” to both. You can also suggest a time that suits you better in the comments, assuming the constraints above:

⏰ WORLD CLOCK: TIME ZONE CONVERTER⏰

By the way, if it turns out that we have some flexibility with our scheduling, a few guests whom I’ve wanted to invite are never free on Sundays. They have church or family obligations that make the day impossible for them. If we could occasionally meet on another day, I could, for example, invite the biotech entrepreneur Yuri Deigin—who was one of the first to say that the zoonotic theory of Covid’s origins wasn’t nearly as strong as purported—to talk to us about how far we might be from functional immortality:

(He could also discuss the origin of Covid. Both would be super-interesting.)

Other guests have also said to me that Sundays are categorically bad for them. So even if neither of the times I’ve suggested above work for you, if there’s another day or time that generally would work, let me know in the comments.

If the times above don’t work for anyone this week, I’ll be looking for a guest for Sunday at the last minute. Is there a topic you’d particularly like to discuss? That would help me to narrow it down.

Let me know.

Yet the down side of Trump—and the risk, to Israel, of being close to him, and being seen to be close to him—seemed to me so obvious and so overwhelming that I couldn’t figure out why Israelis weren’t more worried about it. How could they think it was a good idea to hitch their wagon to a man so palpably psychiatrically unwell, so manifestly untrustworthy, so entirely without principles, and so widely reviled?

You’ve probably read the news about the Trump-Bibi shouting match about Lebanon, which Dan and I talked about today. Trump, apparently, erupted when Netanyahu told him that Israel planned fresh strikes in Beirut, f…

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But I’m putting this one up first, unedited, because Blake wanted a copy, and because it’s not that long.

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By Vivek Y. Kelkar

The Indo-Pacific’s anxieties were on display last week. In New Delhi, the Quad announced initiatives to build Pacific infrastructure, integrate the surveillance capabilities of the Quad countries, strengthen supply chains for critical minerals, and build regional resilience. Days later, at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth warned that China was becoming more assertive. He urged Asian partners to strengthen their collective deterrence. Beijing answered by accusing Washington of promoting bloc politics and trying to contain China’s rise.

Together, the two meetings illustrated the concern now shaping strategy across Asia: how to manage a more assertive China while hedging against an unpredictable United States. Can governments across Asia still rely on Washington as the principal guarantor of regional stability? The doubt is no longer theoretical. The United States remains militarily powerful, but it is also overstretched, polarized, transactional, and inconsistent toward its allies. Meanwhile, China is no longer merely a rising power seeking influence. Beijing is now trying to shape the future of the Indo-Pacific’s maritime, technological, and economic order.

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(We’re a non-negligible percentage of humankind. Leave us alone.)

We also talked some about yesterday’s symposium, which was especially good, albeit deeply disturbing.1 Toward the end, when we talk about the economic consequences of the Hormuz crisis, you’ll hear another place where something I’m saying just doesn’t compute.

David Gordon, one of our regular symposium attendees, has been arguing that people just don’t realize how bad the economic crisis ahead is going to be. They’re unprepared for it, physically and psychologically. After talking to Dan—who doesn’t think it will be that bad—I think David’s probably right.

As for the crisis ahead, read Miles Taylor’s recent piece:

DEFIANCE.News

Trump is about to do something no president has done: cause a "permanent" recession.

Donald Trump’s war, gas prices, and taxes on goods are conspiring to create a terrible recession. But it’s worse than people think. This one might be “permanent…

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a month ago · 1181 likes · 30 comments · Miles Taylor

Miles …

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Note: I have, I think, finished going through all my email and picking out the most urgent. I think that if you sent me an urgent message, I’ve at least sent you a sign of life. If I’m wrong about that, I apologize: Please let me know right away.

On Sunday, we’ll be joined by Dr. Ariel Cohen and Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor—a father-daughter duo.

Here’s Ariel’s Wikipedia bio:

Ariel Cohen is a political scientist focusing on political risk, international security and energy policy, and the rule of law. Cohen currently serves as the managing director of the Energy, Growth, and Security Program at the International Tax and Investment Center, an independent, nonprofit research and education organization founded in 1993 to promote tax reform and public-private initiatives to improve the investment climate in transition and developing economies.

He is also a nonresident senior fellow in the Eurasia Center at the Atlantic Council. Until July 2014, Cohen was a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. He specializes in Russia, Eurasia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East.

Cohen was born in Yalta, Soviet Union. In 1986, he graduated Bar-Ilan University‘s law school in Tel Aviv, Israel with an L.L.B. He received a M.A. in Law and Diplomacy in 1989, and a Ph.D. from Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in 1993.

Cohen has testified before committees of the US Congress, including the Senate and House Foreign Relations Committees, the House Armed Services Committee, the House Judiciary Committee, and the Helsinki Commission. He served as a policy adviser with the National Institute for Public Policy’s Center for Deterrence Analysis. Cohen has consulted for USAID, the World Bank, and the Pentagon.

With a bio like that, imagine how busy he’s been recently.

I also discovered from Wikipedia that Ariel was once named one of the “top ten most influential people from former [sic] USSR who currently live in the US,” along with Mikhail Baryshnikov, Anna Kournikova, Leon Aron, and Elena Bonner. Sergei Brin came in just shy of the votes to make it the top ten. (I didn’t know you were that influential, Ariel!)

This, meanwhile, is the company bio of his equally high-achieving daughter, Tal-Or:

Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor is the founder and CEO of CyberWell—an independent nonprofit organization that develops antisemitism compliance solutions for social media companies and big tech. In 2022, Tal-Or founded and launched CyberWell, the first ever open database of online antisemitism in multiple languages—available at app.cyberwell.org. Today, CyberWell is a Trusted Partner of all major social media platforms, leveraging data and technology to in order to close enforcement and policy gaps online and in digital platforms.

Tal-Or has led a variety of open-source intelligence research projects in the space, utilizing the latest methodologies and technologies in big data management, machine learning, and lexicon development,. She holds expertise in online antisemitism, social media hate speech policies, extremism, and hate crime legislation.

Tal-Or has spoken at prominent conferences and forums, including the US State Department’s Symposium on Collaborative Action against Online Antisemitism, the Inter-Parliamentary Task Force to Combat Online Antisemitism, the Eradicate Hate Global Summit, the IAC National Summit, Tel Aviv University’s Cyber Week, and more. She has also written op-eds for USA Today, the Algemeiner, and the Jerusalem Post and been featured in global publications such as Politifact, Wired, Axios, the Telegraph, Rolling Stone, Medium, and the National Post.

In 2025 Tal-Or was the Loebenberg Illuminate and Advocate Award Recipient, honored by the Florida Holocaust Museum for her work with CyberWell.

A Reichman University (IDC Herzliya) magna cum laude graduate of Government and Law and a member of the Israel Bar Association, Tal-Or worked in the business and web intelligence space at a boutique consulting firm in Tel Aviv prior to launching CyberWell in 2022.

With a bio like that, imagine how busy she’s been recently.

When I spoke to Ariel about the possibility of them joining us, I asked him what the title of the symposium should be. I wanted something that would unite their expertise under a single heading, but I wasn’t sure quite how. “Authoritarian geopolitics and strategic influence?” “Antisemitism, Authoritarianism, and the Information War?” “Propaganda and the Crisis of the West?” Together, they know far more than we could possibly discuss in a single symposium. Where should we focus?

But Ariel couldn’t quite think of the perfect hook either. I suggested that perhaps we should hold back-to-back symposia—one with Ariel, the other with Tal-Or. But they both liked the idea of doing this as a father-daughter team.

Stumped, I suggested: “The Great Crisis: The Convergence of Everything.” Ariel thought that sounded just about right.

Having thought it over, my suggestion is that we focus on these topics:

1. Why has antisemitism risen as these global crises have proliferated? What’s the connection, exactly?

2. Are we doomed?

Here’s some reading they sent me to give you a sense of where to focus. (Since I’m only giving you a day to read it, it’s a very short list. But it follows on much of the reading we’ve done already for these symposia and for ME 101 and 201, so regular participants will already be well-prepared.)

From Tal-Or:

• Iran, Incitement, and the Internet | How Geopolitical Conflict Reflects Online Antisemitism (She writes: “short read, but relevant!”)

• The State of Online Antisemitism 2025

• AI-Generated Antisemitism (She writes: “Optional but great read, at least the executive summary—our latest research.”)

Ariel, meanwhile, sent his most recent op-ed, which I’m reproducing here:

By Ariel Cohen

The strategic map of the Middle East is shifting yet again—as American influence appears to be declining. President Donald Trump has announced he is close to striking a deal with Tehran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most critical energy chokepoint. To some, this may sound like a diplomatic breakthrough. To those who have spent decades studying the region, it looks more like snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

At stake is the credibility of American power.

As articulated by the president and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, America’s objectives for the current conflict were clear: deny Iran nuclear weapons, degrade its ballistic missile capabilities, and dismantle or weaken the proxy network that Tehran has cultivated to control the Middle East—from Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, to the Houthis in Yemen. Those goals were ambitious, but strategically vital. Yet the emerging framework agreement appears to meet none of the necessary conditions for a durable peace. Instead, it risks becoming another temporary political patch masking a deeper strategic failure.

The Gordian knot remains Iran’s nuclear program. Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency announced that “Iran has not yet accepted any action on its nuclear program.” That alone should set off alarm bells in every Western and Arab capital. Any agreement must secure the surrender of Tehran’s nuclear stockpiles, the dismantlement of its centrifuge cascades, and the destruction of its heavy-water production facilities. So far, there is little indication that any such measures are actually agreed upon.

Without addressing the fate of the nuclear infrastructure, Washington will leave Iran capable of racing toward weaponization whenever its leadership chooses, as was the case in the summer of 2025. That is not conflict resolution. It is merely kicking the can down the road before the next crisis, JCPOA style.

Equally troubling is the survival of Iran’s broader power-projection architecture: its ballistic missile force and poisonous proxy network. Missing: a commitment to missile disarmament, let alone an enforceable mechanism to halt the transfer of Iranian funds, weapons, and trainers to its armed proxies.

Indeed, as Trump was signaling the impending release of a Memorandum of Understanding concerning the conflict, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi reaffirmed Tehran’s unwavering support for the Hezbollah terrorists. Hezbollah’s chief threatened a coup and continuously demands that Lebanon stop peace talks with Israel. The Iranian regime has not moderated its strategic ambitions. It is simply buying time.

The logic behind this apparent US retreat is painfully obvious. The Trump Administration is deeply concerned about inflationary pressures ahead of the midterms, particularly rising oil and LNG prices, as well as shipping and insurance costs tied to instability in the Gulf. But substituting economic anxieties for strategic discipline has historically been a losing formula when dealing with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the oppressive clerical dictatorship it protects.

Iran has spent years perfecting sanctions evasion, asymmetric warfare, and concealed underground missile cities. Backed by its expanding alignments with Moscow and Beijing, Tehran no longer behaves like an isolated regional actor. It is a part of a broader anti-Western coalition threatening American global posture.

Next, there is a threat to global commons. Allowing Iran to retain de facto leverage over the Strait of Hormuz would establish a dangerous precedent for the international system. The Strait is not simply a regional waterway; it is part of the global commons. Tehran has weaponized geography to extract concessions from the US. If it succeeds, other revisionist powers will watch and learn.

Today, Hormuz. Tomorrow Bab el-Mandeb, the Bosphorus, or the Strait of Malacca.

The consequences would be profound: permanently militarized shipping lanes, higher global inflation, chronic energy insecurity, and further erosion of the rules-based order that has underpinned international commerce since 1945.

The message that all this can send to Beijing may be the most dangerous consequence of all. Strategic vacuums rarely remain empty for long, and deterrence is psychological as much as it is military. Once perceptions of weakness take hold, adversaries move aggressively to exploit them.

Meanwhile, America’s broader alliance structure is also under strain. Washington entered this latest Gulf crisis without aligning its NATO and European partners, while allowing avoidable tensions over Ukraine and Greenland to fester. The cumulative effect is damaging.

This is not an isolated diplomatic setback. It is part of a sad, longer trajectory—one that encompasses the ineffective Western response to Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008, the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and more. Great powers lose credibility incrementally, then suddenly.

If Washington now backs away from fully neutralizing Tehran’s coercive capabilities, allies and adversaries alike will understand: America can no longer say no and really mean it.

True stability in the Gulf requires eliminating Iran’s ability to threaten global commerce, coerce its neighbors, and hold energy markets hostage. Anything less is not peace—it is only a pause before a far more dangerous confrontation.

The US still has the capacity to lead. But leadership requires strategic clarity, political resolve, and the willingness to draw red lines and make them stick.

STUDY QUESTIONS

(Since the reading is so light, these are really more like “discussion questions.”)

1. What’s the connection between geopolitical crises and antisemitism? Antisemitism surges during periods of disorder, war, inflation, institutional distrust, and social humiliation. Is this because Jews are still imagined as the hidden authors of events? Because antisemitism offers a ready-made explanatory system when reality becomes too complex to bear? Or because of something else?

2. Is modern antisemitism best understood as ancient hatred, modern ideology, or networked information warfare? How much of what we are seeing is continuous with older religious and racial antisemitism, and how much is genuinely new—shaped by platforms, algorithms, AI, and geopolitical influence operations?

3. Why is antisemitism so ideologically promiscuous? It appears on the far right, parts of the far left, Islamist networks, conspiracist subcultures, “anti-imperialist” discourse, and authoritarian propaganda channels. What allows the same motifs to travel so easily across otherwise hostile political tribes?

4. What role do authoritarian states play in amplifying antisemitism? Do Russia, Iran, China, and their aligned media ecosystems use antisemitic themes because they believe them, because they find them useful, or because they understand that antisemitism is one of the most efficient solvents of liberal-democratic trust?

5. Is online antisemitism a reflection of offline hatred, or does it create political reality? Are platforms revealing sentiments that already existed, or are they changing the scale, speed, emotional intensity, and social acceptability of these sentiments?

6. What does the post–October 7 information environment reveal about the condition of the West? Did October 7 create a new crisis, or did it expose a preexisting collapse in moral judgment, institutional confidence, and historical literacy?

7. How should we think about Iran’s role in the convergence of these crises?
   Iran is not only a regional power but a revolutionary regime, a sponsor of proxies, a cyber actor, an energy-market disruptor, and an ideological entrepreneur. Are Western policymakers connecting these domains? Or are they treating them as separate problems?

8. What would a serious strategy against Iran’s coercive power actually require? If the goal isn’t just to pause the next crisis but to change Iran’s ability to threaten global commerce, arm proxies, and approach nuclear breakout, what tools are necessary—military, economic, diplomatic, informational, covert? Could support for any of this be coaxed out of the American public right now?

9. Can liberal democracies fight antisemitism without empowering censorship regimes or illiberal speech controls? What’s the proper division of responsibility among governments, civil society, platforms, researchers, and users? Would enforcing existing platform rules against antisemitic filth be sufficient, or do we need to create new machinery, and if the latter, how can we protect it from being abused?

10. How should social-media platforms be judged? By their stated policies, their enforcement rates, their transparency, their responsiveness to trusted flaggers, their treatment of non-English content, their willingness to redesign systems that reward rage and conspiracy?

11. What does AI change? Does generative AI just make propaganda cheaper and faster, or does it alter the epistemic environment more fundamentally by producing infinite synthetic evidence, pseudo-scholarship, fake images, deepfakes, bot swarms, and automated ideological laundering?

12. Are we doomed? If not, what would “not doomed” require?
    What would the practical grounds for hope look like—better intelligence, better enforcement, better education, better deterrence, stronger alliances, civil-society resilience, Jewish institutional adaptation, a renewed willingness to defend liberal civilization without embarrassment? Because none of these seem to be on the horizon.

As always, the Zoom link is below the paywall.

See you on Sunday! This will—obviously—be a good discussion.

Read more

The Orange technician arrived yesterday, exactly on time, which ruined everything.

He was friendly and competent. He accepted the lemonade I offered him with the surprised gratitude of a man accustomed to being greeted by customers of the white-eyed conviction that the absence of Wi-Fi is medically indistinguishable from cardiac arrest. He soon confirmed that the fiberoptic cable had, as I suspected, been damaged by years of proximity to eleven urinating, scratching, shedding, chewing cats. He had it fixed in less than half an hour.

I should have been relieved. Instead, I felt the gates of paradise closing.

A dôme de chaleur has settled over the Île-de-France, provoking the earliest canicule since record-keeping began. Typically, heat waves like this in Paris put me in a state of operatic grievance. I live under a zinc roof, in a fifth-floor walkup. When the mercury rises, it is infernal.1

On my first days without the Internet, I was frantic. I had already taken off more than a week to clean my apartment, and I was beginning to suspect that rather than organizing my life, I might be causing it to collapse. If you’re in my line of work, the arrangement is fairly simple: If you don’t work, you don’t eat. A few days off is one thing. Weeks at a stretch would tax the patience of even the most indulgent reader. I tried to host a Zoom symposium through my cell connection, which went about as well as you’d expect, and I dragged myself from café to café in the heat, willing myself to write and edit despite the distracting babble all around me, which is, for me, nearly impossible. To write so much as a sentence, I require the quiet of a monastery—one without monks.

Parisian cafés aren’t meant for this. Those with wifi don’t necessarily have good wifi, and after an hour over a single cup of coffee, you begin to sense that the waiters are wondering whether you plan either to order lunch or die somewhere else. Sitting outside solves the problem of interior heat, but introduces the problem of motor scooters, cigarette smoke, delivery vans, and tourists asking one another whether this is the place they saw on TikTok. I managed to edit and post a single podcast. I couldn’t manage to finish the piece I was writing about the putative Iran deal, perhaps because I did not wish to read about the putative Iran deal, or write about the putative Iran deal, or think about the putative Iran deal, or indeed contemplate the existence of the putative Iran deal in any form whatsoever.

The next morning, I called Orange. I told them sternly that I needed a physical technician, not a phone call. I was put on hold, routed to someone more senior, asked the same questions again, and marched once more through the whole sacramental ritual of diagnostics.

Had I restarted the box?

Yes.

Had I unplugged it?

Yes.

Had I plugged it back in?

Yes.

Had I considered whether the problem might be that I was an elderly French person who couldn’t tell a router from a Moulinex?

Not in so many words, but I felt this question hovering in the air.

At last the man on the phone conceded that it was impossible to do a full diagnostic with me because I had no cell coverage in my apartment and therefore could not open the link he had sent to my phone, which would have allowed him to turn my phone into a remote camera so that he could inspect my wall and cable socket himself. (This was clever, in principle. But it did suggest that somewhere in the architecture of Orange customer service, no one had quite considered that if the customer has no Internet, the customer may be unable to participate in an Internet-dependent diagnostic of the Internet.)

Finally, he agreed that yes, in principle, I needed a technician. But the technician could not possibly come until Thursday.

Thursday.

I considered exploding. I could scream at him, I thought. I could tell him that you can’t go without the Internet for four days in the year 2026. That this situation was insupportable. Why, Orange is subjecting me to a controlled experiment in civil death! I will sue!

But another part of me realized it would do no good at all, and the guy on the other end of the line wasn’t responsible for the number of technicians available to make house calls. Besides, his job—coaching elderly, tech-illiterate, crabby French people through the setup of their Internet—is a punishment that even the medieval theologians could not imagine. “Eh bien, maintenant on redémarre …”

And so, with the bleak resignation of a woman who has accepted civil death, I said, “Bon. Jeudi.” At least they promised to come in the morning.

I hung up and contemplated a week without modern telecommunications. I imagined all the messages piling up invisibly. I imagined the people who would be offended with me by the end of the week. I mentally composed my fifth charming email explaining why I had not answered, and reflected that charm, like battery power, declines sharply with repeated use.

The heat was rising. The exertion of explaining the situation yet again had left me covered in sweat. I thought about ordering cold things to drink for the apartment during the canicule, then remembered that I couldn’t, because I had no Internet. I live in a fifth-floor walkup. If I wanted cold things, I’d have to go out to buy them, then haul them up the stairs. I decided tap water would be okay.

I sat there glumly for about an hour, willing myself to get up and trudge off to a café.

Then the doorbell rang.

You know Temu, right? It’s the addictive Chinese site where you can buy all manner of clever, cheap objects for much less than they would cost in France (in money, that is; but frankly, the CCP can have my data). We could have a separate conversation about the economics and ethics of Temu, and doubtless should. But I love it. It’s an amazing company in the same way that a casino is an amazing company. The website is extraordinarily well-designed: It is fiendishly attractive and addictive. I can spend hours hunting for bargains, knowing perfectly well that this is not how I should be using my time, but also knowing that a pair of two-euro earbuds is a good thing to have in a world where expensive earbuds vanish into the ether within six weeks. Also, my cats now recognize a Temu bag: They go nuts with excitement, associating it correctly with a new toy, one they’ll play with for three hours, with maniac enthusiasm, then either destroy it or get so bored with it they never touch it again. I’m not paying 20 euros for that kind of toy, but for a euro? Well worth it.

The stuff takes forever to arrive, though, so if you go on a little spree, you can forget you’ve done it. Weeks later, a Temu bag shows up, containing nice hair bands, a space-saving clothes-hanger, an electronic lizard, and several things I no longer understand well enough to identify. Temu is so cheap that if you spend fifty euros, it results in a delivery of almost imperial proportions. It’s like receiving a surprise bag of presents from your previous self, who appears to have been both extravagant and insane.

This time, I’d completely forgotten that I had ordered art supplies.

I had a project in mind. After a cat dies, they send you home with what looks like a cardboard cylinder. That’s all that remains of a twenty-year relationship. All the life in a cat—all the warmth and purring and pouncing, all the imperious complaint—reduced to a plain container that looks as if it belongs in a warehouse.

All seven of my cats from Istanbul now sat on my bookshelf, in a row, like cardboard monuments to sadness. I hated the way looking at them made me feel, but I couldn’t bear to part with them. I had vaguely thought that one day I would take them back to the mosque in Istanbul where I found them, as orphaned kittens, and scatter them in the Bosphorus. But not until Tayyip Erdoğa was gone and I was sure I wouldn’t be arrested on my return, which is not an imaginary concern for journalists on his bad side. I’m definitely on his bad side, or was. So the cats stayed on the shelf, making me sad every time I looked at them.2

At some point, I had thought: Perhaps I could decorate the urns. Paint them beautiful colors. Encrust them with jewels, like the jewels they were. Make something beautiful out of them, so they wouldn’t be sitting there in the sadness of unadorned cardboard.

I couldn’t justify ordering expensive art supplies from Sennelier, but for a project like this, cheap supplies from Temu were surely just as good. Temu sometimes delivers objects of remarkably good quality. Just as often, it doesn’t. This is part of the addictiveness: random reinforcement, at a price point so low that disappointment leaves no bitterness.

I sat down in the living room and opened the bag. A cornucopia spilled out.

Four packs of air-dry clay. Two kinds of varnish. Stencils. Acrylic paints, in tiny tubes, like eyedroppers, in gorgeous colors: ultramarine, cerulean, royal blue, Alexander blue, cobalt, cadmium red, crimson, Venetian iron oxide, titanium white, absinthe green, anise green, emerald. And what was this? A little vial of indigo liquid, with a warning in broken English to be careful not to spill it, because one drop was “incredibly powerful.” Gesso. Gouaches. A small watercolor set, the size of a matchbox, in the prettiest shades of glittering pastel. I almost hadn’t ordered it, the memory came back to me, because people in the comments complained it was so small it was a “ripoff.” But it was adorable. Like a shimmering little magic kit. I loved it instantly. Glue. Resin. Mica powder in a half dozen shades of pastel: goldish cream, blush-colored, peachy cream, all shimmering. Diamonds, rubies, emeralds, pearls, garnets, and opals convincing enough that I sure wouldn’t know the difference. A plastic box with little compartments to organize all these gems (clever of me to think of that, I thought, admiring my rare foresight.) Gold leaves. Modeling paste. Sculpting tools. Decoupage napkins in chinoiserie patterns. Crackle medium. Antiquing powder. Patina paste. Satin ribbon. Gold lace. Opalescent tulle. Colored tiles. A palette for mixing paints.

Had I really ordered all this? I checked. Indeed, I had. The bill for all of it had been less than forty-five euros.

And then there was one more thing.

It looked like a poster. I didn’t open it immediately, because I thought it might get crumpled and was safer rolled up. But I was curious, so I checked my order. Ah, yes. It was a picture I thought might look nice in the bathroom: something Roman-looking, a woman in a toga standing between two columns. The colors were neutral—sooty marble-grey and terracotta—and I’d figured I couldn’t go too wrong with “Greco-Roman” as a design choice.

I wondered what the Chinese merchant who had industriously plagiarized this design from an expensive Western interior decorator made of the tastes of the Western bourgeoisie. How could the visual language of “distressed Roman villa by way of boutique-hotel bathroom, rescued from a Tuscan estate, priced by someone named Séverine” make any kind of sense to someone whose idea of aspirational décor probably involved glossy tile, bright LEDs, prosperity red, and a perfectly dustless showroom orchid? But they know Western women go cuckoo for the excavated, limewashed, faintly ruined things they see on Pinterest, and they’re prepared to sell them to us for a price so cheap you’d think they were the real thing.

I looked at my cornucopia of delight and felt abject. I had to ignore it all and trudge off to a café in the heat to cough up an essay about Iran and answer all the email piling up in my inbox. By then I figured it contained at least five people mildly peeved with me and two who were seriously mad or deeply offended. There was no way I could simply say “to hell with it” and ignore my responsibilities. I had been doing that already for going on two weeks.

I decided not even to open the paints and clays and potions and varnishes. Maybe when I got back from the café I could play with them, though by then I would probably be too tired from the heat and noise. Ambient noise when I’m working exhausts me—I seem to use twice as much energy simply to block it out. I’d just put up the poster, I decided, and then I would go out and begin the day.

The good thing about having spent the previous week in a cleaning frenzy is that I could now instantly find the scissors. I cut off the cellophane and began unrolling the poster.

Except it wasn’t a poster.

What the hell was this?

First, it was two posters. Thick ones. Then it kept unrolling. It went on forever. As I unrolled, I realized it was the image I had ordered, but the thing itself wasn’t poster-sized. It was massive—a floor-to-ceiling mural. The thing was the size of a bedsheet designed by Augustus: a wall full of Roman woman, standing between two columns.

I have no idea from whom they stole the design, but the reproduction was perfect. The colors were perfect. The scale was preposterous. Where on earth was I supposed to put this? I don’t have room for a Roman wall mural the size of a house: This is something you’re supposed to discover behind plaster, not receive from Temu.

I looked around the apartment. If I took all the pictures off the wall, I supposed I could put it there, but that would change the whole living room. The pictures on that wall aren’t fine art, but they’re sentimental: a portrait of me painted by my best friend, one that makes me look twenty years younger and just enough better-looking that I like to think I look that way, although someone once asked whether it was Elizabeth Taylor, which suggests I don’t. A print of a Latin manuscript that hung in my childhood living room. Photos of my mother, including the one she loved of herself in a lesson with Leonard Rose. The apartment is on the roof, so the walls are slanted. Pictures don’t hang well. They want to fall off. They always look slightly odd. The Roman mural, I realized, would solve that problem.

I was worried about the time. Hanging it would be a project, not something I could slap on the wall. I made a bargain with myself: I could take down the pictures and tape it up, just to see how it would look. No big wallpapering production. Just a test. I grabbed the fan and trained it on the living room, took down the paintings (without braining myself or dropping them, for which I congratulated myself) and took the books off my ladder so that I could tape the mural high enough to see the effect.

At the top of the ladder, with the mural in hand, I realized the thing was self-adhesive. The back peeled off like a sticker. No wallpaper glue. No paste. No bucket. I was already at the top of the ladder. The two voices duked it out in my head.

You cannot do this. You have to work.

You are already at the top of the damned ladder with half a Roman mural in your hand. You may as well do it now.

You do not even know how it will look.

You will find out.

Where will you put all the other pictures?

You will figure it out.

You know you want to.

You can guess who won.

I peeled the backing from the top of the right side and unrolled it slowly. To my amazement, it stuck perfectly, and straight, on the first try. But I couldn’t leave only the right side up, could I? The left side would be trickier; it had to match the right exactly. But in for a penny …

I climbed down, got the left side, went back up the ladder, and began again, prepared for the thing to get stuck on itself, or for the columns not to align, or for the whole enterprise to become one of those things that begins in hope and ends with me on the floor, trapped in an adhesive Roman ruin.

But no. It matched perfectly. The first time.

I stepped back.

It was magnificent.

I could not believe how good it looked. It looked as if I had painted it. Or rather, as if a much more talented painter had painted it. It had a marvelous trompe-l’oeil quality. It changed the room completely. The apartment had, somehow, been waiting for this Roman woman all along.

I stared at it in aesthetic rapture. Then I looked at the paints, the varnishes, the clay, the little boxes of fake gems. I looked at my computer, which without the Internet was about as useful to me as a brick. And I said, “Fuck it.”

No one could reach me. By any modality. The apartment was beautiful. It was a billion degrees outside. The Internet outage was an act of God. I was dying to open—and paint, sculpt, and play with—every single unguent, gel, wax, powder, jewel, and potion in that box.

And just as I thought this, the doorbell rang again.

The delivery man was pouring with sweat. Fifth-floor walkup. He was holding a box marked FRAGILE and THIS WAY UP upside down. Clots of dirt were falling out of it. This time, I knew exactly what it was.

The night before, I had seen that Willemse was running a discount on geraniums. Two euros a pot. Can’t beat that, right? I had ordered some for the window boxes, but I hadn’t expected them to arrive quite so soon. Garden centers, when discounting, usually take their sweet time. These had arrived the next day. I thanked the delivery man, wondering whether the geraniums had survived the journey, and opened the box.

They had survived, but barely. The box was full of soil and exposed roots. The plants had been tossed out of their pots, and if I didn’t get them back into soil and water immediately, they would clearly die in the heat.

That settled it. I was not going out. I was going to stay home, garden, and paint.

Something in me lifted.

And that is how I spent three full days: cut off from modern telecommunications, incommunicado, in my apartment, painting and sculpting and gardening in my underwear and a pair of cut-offs, with two fans running. The heat, which normally turns me into a liturgical object of complaint, ceased to bother me at all. I was completely absorbed. I knew I was telling the world to piss off and there would be hell to pay for it later. I didn’t care. I was so happy.

I was so happy that I forgot to eat. Everything I did gave me pleasure: the gorgeous colors of the paints; the project of making something beautiful where once there had been only cardboard and sadness; the satisfaction of finally giving my cats a beautiful place to rest; the discovery that every bit of this ridiculous Temu treasure worked; the geraniums, the smell of soil, the pleasure of flowers in their window boxes; the softness of my living cats’ fur as they drifted in and out of the room like little domestic gods; even the heat, which went from maddening to dreamy and sensuous.

I painted and sculpted everything that came to mind. Inspired by my new wall, I turned one urn into a Roman column—Ionic, I believe—and painted it pale aqua and apricot, making it look antique with crackle medium and terra-cotta glaze, then encrusting it with peacock-feather gems. I painted another crimson and decorated it with gold leaves and rubies. For another, I tried the indigo dye, which is indeed powerful beyond your wildest imagination. It produced a blue so rich and deep—like lapis lazuli from the Aegean at night—that you’d think it had been mined, not mixed. The intensity of that blue gave me a pleasure I did not know could be associated with a color. It’s certainly not a pleasure I had ever associated with Orange, although by then I had begun to think their customer service might deserve its good reputation, though not for the reason they imagined.

With every hour away from the Internet, my calm deepened. In fact, I didn’t know it was possible to be so calm. I’d come to think of the state of mind in which I usually live as “my personality.” It’s been so long since I was truly free of the Internet that I didn’t realize the degree to which it had altered my baseline consciousness.

For the first time in years, I didn’t feel something I hadn’t even consciously known I was feeling: not anxiety, exactly, but a low-level agitation, a state of being perpetually interruptible. Constantly awaiting summons. Alerts, news, email, tasks, things clamoring for attention. The absence of that pressure felt so good that it wouldn’t be wrong to call it euphoria.

But even euphoria isn’t quite the word. It was more like the restoration of a faculty I’d forgotten I possessed: the ability to experience pleasure intensely, without simultaneously narrating, monetizing, postponing, defending, or explaining it. If anhedonia is the hallmark of depression, what is the word for its opposite? Not “happiness,” exactly. Not pleasure itself, but a heightened capacity for pleasure. A widened aperture. I’d bet it’s an observable brain state. Had you put me in an MRI, I suspect you would have seen something unusual: a woman under a zinc roof in a heat wave, covered in paint, clay, and gold leaf, having apparently mistaken craft supplies for divine revelation.

I’ve read artists’ memoirs in which painters go into raptures about color, but until now I’d had no idea what they meant. I had no experience by which to understand them. Now I did. The colors were the thing: mixing them, watching what happened when I painted them over gesso, after a second coat, under varnish, beneath resin. I’d seen colors this intensely before, but mostly under the influence of hallucinogens. This time I was sober, though I felt drugged by the pleasure of it all.

I made several important discoveries. First, the secret to gilding—why did no one tell me this at Oxford?—is to dust your hands lightly with talcum powder before handling the gold leaf. Gold leaf is light as a cat’s breath. You can’t really position it. You have to let it be carried by the air and hope it settles where you want it, because if you touch it too much, it disintegrates. (Even this struck me as pleasurable—the lightness and delicacy of the leaves, like nymph-wings.) With talcum powder on your hands, you have a better chance of getting it to land in the right place.

I discovered that if you put cornstarch in the silicone molds, even the most delicate clay adornments—ribbons, tiny blossoms—come out intact. I discovered that yes, you can use epoxy resin to glaze pottery. I had no Internet, so I couldn’t look it up. I had to wing it. The result, especially over the indigo, was spectacular.

At some point, with paint on my arms, soil on the floor, gold leaf stuck to places gold leaf was not intended to be, and the Roman woman standing between her columns with the serene indifference of a fresco that had survived worse civilizations, it occurred to me that I might be having one of the happiest days of my life. I searched my mind for a happier day. There have been days that exceeded it in specific joys, yes. But for pure aesthetic pleasure and calm? I could not think of one.

The fact that no one could reach me was part of it. The solitariness was exquisite. I don’t think I had many days like this even before the Internet, because my yearning for solitude developed later in life. As young people do, I wanted to spend my time with friends and boyfriends. I didn’t crave total aloneness the way I do now. That desire has grown more acute year by year, especially since the arrival of the Internet. Now it’s the only way my soul can be at peace. When the phone rings, or emits one of the other noises signaling a demand, I react the way I remember my grandmother reacting—at the time, to me, completely inscrutable. She would flinch, and her expression would instantly sour. “What is that?” she would say in her German-accented English. Not “who. “What.”

The phone did ring during these seventy-two hours. Orange called me twice to conduct a customer-service enquête. By then I had come to see Orange as the kind of spiritual guide said to cross the student’s path only when he’s ready, but even so, each ring felt like an invasion of space on the order of a traveling clown act with a horn crashing a wedding ceremony.

I wanted each of those days to last forever. All I wanted was more hours. I didn’t think about the wider world even once. I thought about my family, and about telling them how marvelous life without the Internet was. I thought, too, about writing this essay, because I realized I had discovered something profound—if also so obvious as to sound like every Atlantic essay ever written by a man with a cabin in Maine.

We all know the Internet is driving us mad. We say it constantly. We piously inform one another that we “take time off” from the Internet every Sabbath, or every evening before bed, or during dinner, or while communing with the trees with the radiant smugness of people who’ve just discovered birds.

But most of us can’t really do what I just did. Not anymore. Life, now, is impossible without the Internet. We exist on it, in a meaningful sense. Work, banking, travel, health care, publishing, friendship, taxes, repairs, groceries, love, logistics, news, bills, tickets, maps, passwords, identity, memory: it’s all there. To leave it is not to take a wholesome little break, but to step outside the social and economic order.

What startled me wasn’t that I enjoyed a few days away from the Internet. Everyone knows, in the abstract, that the Internet is bad for your peace of mind, just as everyone knows, in the abstract, that exercise is good and sleep is important and eating an entire wheel of Brie while reading the comments section isn’t a mental-health strategy endorsed by the Académie de Médecine. What startled me was the scale of the difference.

I can’t prove that everyone would be as happy as I was during those three days. I can’t even prove that I’d be as happy if I did it again. Perhaps the beauty of it depended on a series of accidents—the heat, the outage, the Roman wall, the dying geraniums, the cats, the colors. But the significance of what I experienced hasn’t escaped me. This wasn’t a gentle reduction in screen time and a minor improvement in mood. It was like jumping into a clear blue pool.

And if I’m at the far edge of the bell curve in my reaction—because of my professional tethering to the Internet and to nonstop news, because of temperament, because of some genetic susceptibility to agitation—so what? If other people are being driven even a fraction as mad by this machine as I’ve been, it would explain quite a lot.

We talk a great deal about what the Internet is doing to adolescent girls. But I now see that it has a profound effect on this adult woman as well. I don’t experience depression or clinical anxiety because of it, at least not in ways the Hamilton scale would recognize. But perhaps adults are simply better at managing, which is to say suppressing, the emotional effects of constant interruption?

The problem isn’t my readers. It isn’t work, or obligations. It’s not even technology, exactly. The problem is that the economic and social machinery of modern life has colonized every aperture through which quiet used to enter. The machine doesn’t just deliver an incessant stream of tasks, it collapses all categories of experience into one channel. Banking, war, gossip, friendship, taxes, shopping, publication, medical appointments, reader mail, breaking news, invoices, pornography, recipes, family photographs, customer service, professional humiliation, praise, catastrophe, and the weather all arrive through the same glowing rectangle. You can’t turn off the bad part. There is no bad part. There’s only the channel, and the channel is life. We haven’t just become too online; we’ve built a civilization in which solitude is no longer a default condition of consciousness. To experience it requires a technical failure.

To be unreachable now requires an accident, a vast personal fortune, illness, wilderness, inhuman discipline, or infrastructure collapse. Most of us can’t choose it without paying a price. And because we can’t choose it, we don’t properly assess what’s been taken from us, which is not leisure precisely, nor rest, but the possibility of sustained absorption in a world that’s physically present.

There’s a difference between procrastination and absorption, though from the outside they may look similar. Procrastination is guilty, twitchy, and furtive, with one eye on the clock and the other on the thing you’re avoiding. Absorption abolishes the clock.

For three days, I was as happy as I’ve been in years—in the room, in the heat, in the colors, in the soil, in the memory of the cats I lost and the living bodies of the cats now with me, deeply immersed in the task of creating something whose object was not publication, persuasion, profit, or performance. Just beauty.

Then the technician came.

He fixed the cable. The little lights blinked. The system reconnected. The world returned. He laughed when I told him that I planned to tell my boss that the putain de technicien had been late, then spend the rest of the day skiving off. I didn’t explain that my boss is me.

But just knowing the Internet was back spoiled the mood. It wasn’t that anyone had reached me yet: it was that they could. The possibility returned me to ordinary consciousness: that slightly wired, slightly braced, slightly summoned state that I thought was just the way I was.

And here I am.

I’m glad the Internet is back, because I have to work. My life, like everyone’s life, is lashed to the machine in a million practical ways. I can’t support myself by gilding cat urns under a Roman wall mural while geraniums revive on the windowsill, even if this would be my preferred economic model.

But I can’t return, either. Because now I know. I know now that there’s another state of mind available to me: quieter, stranger, more sensuous, more absorbed. I didn’t lose it because I was weak, lazy, undisciplined, or insufficiently mindful. I lost it because the conditions of modern life make it nearly impossible to find.

The machine went silent, and for three days that ghastly, multi-tentacled octopus was off my back. I could hear myself think. No—scratch that. For three days I could hear myself not thinking. I could feel myself looking, touching, making, tending, loving, remembering. I could feel the way life feels no one can reach you.

I don’t know what to do with this knowledge.

But I know it is knowledge.

Note: As soon as I publish this, I’ll send out the invitation to our symposium this Sunday with Ariel Cohen and Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor, which will be terrific. Then I’ll get to my email and my messages—which I still haven’t read. I’m sure they’ve piled up. So if you’ve been trying to reach me, don’t despair: I’ll reply this evening. I’m sorry for the delay.

Also note: I will make this up to my paying subscribers. I don’t expect you to pay to hear nothing from me for days. I’ll post my suggestion tomorrow. For now, please don’t cancel your subscription, okay?

Further note: I’ve gone back to correct typos and a confusing sentence, so this essay is slightly different from the one you received in your email.

I shouldn’t push my luck by hanging out in this nice lobby all day, though. No one appreciates it when someone sits down, orders a coffee, and proceeds to use the Internet for hours without buying anything else. But I wanted to be sure you got this, at least.

While I was editing this, news of an important development in this story came clattering over the transom. From Dan’s show notes:

Trump is now demanding that Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Pakistan normalize relations with Israel and sign the deal with Iran. On the one hand, this is open …

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