The US and Iran exchanged fire again after a month-long lull. Neither can win; neither can safely stop. Russia can’t subjugate Ukraine at an acceptable price, but it can make Ukrainian survival hideously expensive. Ukraine can punish Russia, but can’t compel it to abandon the war without support its allies remain unwilling to guarantee.
Why, Dan and I ask in this podcast, do contemporary wars so often settle into this condition—no victory, no peace, with periodic violence punctuating an uneasy stalemate? Why did the term “forever war” enter the lexicon in this century, but not before?
Also: Iceland declines to continue its EU accession negotiations; Google Maps performs an act of cartographic subservience; and Dan asks whether comforting falsehoods are preferable to painful truths.
Note: This was yesterday’s episode of Critical Conditions, which I couldn’t upload yesterday evening. (I kept getting a “network error” message, even though the network otherwise seemed fine.) I decided to go to bed and see if it fixed itself overnight, and Lo, that is exactly what happened.
A few updates:
1. Since we recorded this, Trump threatened to attack Iran again: “We’re going to hit them hard” and “There will be a response.” He insisted, however, that this didn’t mean a return to full-scale war. (How to reconcile this? Your guess is as good as mine.) Iran, for its part, characterized the exchange as “limited and contained,” but warned that another US strike would provoke a harsh response. So both sides are now explicitly describing the mechanism we identified in the podcast: retaliation calibrated to maintain the confrontation without—one hopes—allowing it to escape its bounds.
Three more points:
The Iranian media is reporting that three people were killed in the US strike on Larak Island, two of them members of the IRGC Navy.
Trump posted two AI-generated videos purporting to show Kharg Island being “blown to smithereens.” No such attack occurred. No one was at all surprised that the President of the United States fabricated a presidential announcement of an attack on critical oil infrastructure. JD Vance explained that Trump “likes to switch it up on social media a little bit.”
The president of Iran said Iran still wants a negotiated settlement because continuing the war is in no one’s interest.
That combination—threatening further retaliation and manufacturing images of escalation that never happened, all while signaling a desire for negotiation—is a laboratory demonstration of violence being used to manage a stalemate, not obtain a victory.
2. This is how you pronounce Þorgerður Katrín Gunnarsdóttir, Iceland’s Foreign Minister. (Press the loudspeaker icon below the name, on the left.) She said, after we recorded this, that Iceland must now seek closer cooperation with the EU and EEA and bilateral arrangements with Finland, Norway, Canada, and Japan, because: “We didn’t vote away the geopolitical situation.”
This reinforces my interpretation. The vote wasn’t a rejection of European integration; Iceland just has an unusually advantageous integration deal right now and given this, saw the benefits of full membership as marginal.
It definitely wasn’t a Brexit-style revolt. The Guardian’s Jon Henley is right about this:
… Iceland’s rejection handed Eurosceptics another stick with which to beat the bloc. France’s Marine Le Pen said the result showed the appeal of a Europe of “free, sovereign nations” rather than closer integration, while Reform UK’s Nigel Farage congratulated Icelanders on “voting to keep their independence”.
But Iceland is a very special case. Its situation bears precious little relation to Brexit or even to a broader EU-critical movement. Icelanders did not vote to isolate themselves from the EU, tear up any treaties or “take back control”, they voted to preserve a close, customized and largely successful relationship. … As part of the European Economic Area (EEA) and Schengen passport-free travel area, Iceland is already solidly within the European fold. It accepts free movement of goods, capital, services and people. Its markets—financial services, energy, transport—are EU-regulated and its social and environmental standards are those of the EU. That means it adopts roughly 75 percent of EU law and directives into domestic law and there is no question of changing that. Icelandic citizens already enjoy full EU single-market rights without full EU membership, and that, a narrow majority decided, was, on balance, good enough.
… Opposition to full membership was focused heavily on the country’s fishing industry, which accounts for 15 percent of its GDP and 40 percent of export revenues and which the no campaign claimed would inevitably be threatened …
3. Dan was right and I was wrong. The British Museum says that Thiel isn’t a donor and that neither he nor his businesses gave the museum money.
That said, I still don’t care, and I still don’t see anything wrong with it. My mother was the music director of the Seattle Chamber Music Festival. If someone with that kind of money had wanted a private performance of the scherzo from Schubert’s Trout Quintet played by an itinerant mariachi band, you’d better believe she would have moved heaven and earth to give him the finest mariachi Trout in musical history, followed by a rousing chorus of La Cucaracha.
The relationship between money and the arts is as old as money and art. Rich citizens funded Athenian drama and monuments. Maecenas supported Virgil and Horace. The Medici funded Botticelli and Michelangelo. The Gonzaga supported Monteverdi. Haydn spent most of his career in the service of the Esterházys. Beethoven was funded by Prince Lichnowsky and Archduke Rudolf.
Renaissance Florence did not have an impeccably egalitarian grants procedure. Renaissance banking dynasties commissioned the architecture, painting, and music that now constitute Europe’s common inheritance. Dan argues in the podcast that this inheritance should be far more meaningful to Luxembourgish Europeans than their Luxembourg citizenships. Rich people paid for all of it.
Modern museums, orchestras, and festivals have institutionalized an ancient bargain. Instead of the prince’s household, they have boards, development offices, donor circles, and discreetly bestowed privileges. I know quite a bit about how things like chamber music festivals are financed. I grew up watching my mother scheme to persuade wealthy people to fund chamber music: She is still fundraising for her festival from the long adagio beyond. I can assure Dan that were it not for moneyed patrons, there would be no arts. Whether Thiel gave the museum money or not, I am certain they were thinking, “He might!” It would be a failure of museum management not to have courted him as a prospective donor.
Patronage has always involved vanity, status, and social access every bit as much as the disinterested love of beauty. Fortunately, great art is no less great because those who paid for it hoped to purchase status. If museums declined to cultivate rich people until their motives had been certified as spiritually pure, they would soon possess clean consciences, empty galleries, and no money to turn on the lights.
Dan’s objection confuses democratic access to public collections with an obligation to treat every visitor identically under every circumstance. The decisive fact is this: The visit took nothing from the public. No ticket-holder was displaced. The exhibition wasn’t closed to accommodate a wealthy person. The Guardian reports that the tapestry was already being shown privately to selected “stakeholders” before the public opening.
Dan’s objection, therefore, is that the museum’s director of development cultivated an immensely wealthy potential benefactor by giving him privileged access. This is, precisely, the job description of a director of development, and it doesn’t matter whether Thiel was already a donor. You court prospective patrons before they become patrons.
As for Dan’s argument that Thiel just pretends to like art because he’s a snob, first, that’s unfalsifiable, but more importantly—so what? Snobbish patronage keeps art and music alive. I know—for sure—that there would be no more classical music without it. If you think classical music is a tradition that should survive, and if you’ve ever enjoyed it, you can thank the wealthy snobs.
I don’t know if the Bayeux tapestries are truly great art. I’ve never seen them. But the thing about great art is that whether or not you understand what you’re seeing or hearing, it ennobles you. Seeing it cultivates your taste. So even if he doesn’t truly like art, as Dan suspects, after a few more visits, he’ll acquire a taste for it. The Guardian’s snooty phrase, “no known interest in the museum” is also feeble: Going to the trouble of arranging a private encounter with the Bayeux Tapestry is clear evidence of interest in the tapestry.
Finally, who would Dan prefer pay for the upkeep of those tapestries—billionaire donors, or taxpayers? Because it’s one or the other (and almost certainly both). Ticket sales don’t remotely cover the costs of running a museum like that.
“But ordinary people have to wait in line” is a maddening argument, socialist in spirit, and it’s why socialists ruin everything. Yes, it’s good to be rich. You can buy a lot of things that poor people can’t. That’s why people want to be rich—because money buys lots of nice things. In a capitalist economy, some people will be rich and some will be poor. We know, from extensive historical experience, that trying to make everyone equal just leaves everyone poor. The demand that everyone suffer equally is rooted in envy and resentment, not a sound theory of economic development and material progress. The impulse leads to nothing good.
There are some things rich people ought not to be able to buy. Politicians, for instance. That is a good reason to object to the way Thiel spends his money—although in purchasing himself a senator and later a vice-president, he was doing nothing illegal, and the fault is as much a system that allows the wealthy to buy politicians as it is the wealthy themselves. All things considered, I’d far prefer that Thiel spend his money on visiting museums instead of purchasing politicians. In fact, I encourage him to do more of it. Cultivating an interest in the arts is what we want wealthy people to do.
Wealthy people must not be allowed to subvert democracies or deprive others of their rights. If you object to Thiel, the destruction of Gawker and his role in putting Trump in office are the right places to aim your criticism—not his interest in the arts or his ability to buy a private viewing of a gallery. (Whether he actually paid for it or not, it certainly wouldn’t have happened had he not been rich.)
