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In recent days, there has been a dramatic increase in the breadth and intensity of psychological warfare (or “operations”) waged by media and governments, warning of an imminent European cataclysm. Here’s the BBC a few days ago:

If the UK suddenly found itself at war, would you know what to do? Do you know what would be expected of you? The government wants us all to start preparing for severe disruption to our lives. It wants us to stockpile canned food and drinking water, strengthen our civic resilience, and plan for the possibility of war. Work has begun on the government’s so-called “war book”, which hasn’t been updated in decades.

Last week, Bloomberg reported that German hospitals are preparing for war with Russia and “mass casualties”:

…the Bundeswehr calculated that as many as 1,000 wounded soldiers could arrive in Germany each day. As the country’s five military hospitals would quickly reach capacity — and the law requires that civilian hospitals help during wartime — the system would likely come under unprecedented strain, and could be forced to triage soldier and civilian care.

On Sunday, the Guardian reported:

European intelligence officials have raised the possibility of an imminent Russian test of Nato, with one saying a potential attack could come in a matter of “months, not years”.

Even neutral Switzerland’s Federal Government is getting in on the action, tweeting the following at the end of last week:

In response to the deteriorating security situation, 🇨🇭 has three objectives: strengthen resilience, improve protection and enhance defence capabilities.

Ben Hodges, the Commanding General of United States Army in Europe from 2014 to 2017, tweeted:

The rest of Europe has just experienced its last “peaceful” Summer.

Last Thursday, Polish PM Donald Tusk told parliament that intelligence indicating that Russia would soon attack Europe was “highly consistent and, unfortunately, persuasive.” Macron called Tusk’s ominous warnings “sound and well-documented”.

Czech, Swedish, and Latvian spy chiefs have all said that they expect Russian sabotage in Europe to intensify in the coming months.

What is striking about all of this is how fatalistic it is, how passive and resigned. You’d think European leaders were awaiting a big earthquake or storm. There is simply nothing anyone can do, they seem to be saying. War is inevitable. There is no alternative, and all we can do is stock up on canned beans and volunteer to die.

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The first ever Tirana Biennale was scheduled to open on September 15, 2001. It was to be the first low budget European biennale, and organizers sought to capitalize on Albania’s ability to draw the dark tourism crowd. One of the biennale’s Italian organizers told an interlocutor, “I’m incredibly excited by the idea of a grand exhibition in a completely desolate and anarchic place where the only form of art is survival.”1 Tirana Mayor Edi Rama, a painter himself, had worked with international partners to bring the works of 230 artists to the Albanian capital. These works were to be divided between the National Gallery and a cavernous 4,000-sq meter hangar that China had built for Enver Hoxha in the 1950s. Two weeks before the opening of the biennale, promotional materials were printed; they featured a photo by a Moroccan artist named Hamid Piccardo. The subject of the photo was Osama bin Laden, who was still relatively unknown to the general public when the pamphlets and posters went to print. Piccardo had allegedly been christened the “bearer of jihad in the art world” by bin Laden himself.

Then, four days before the biennale was to open, the twin towers fell. Karlheinz Stockhausen famously described the attacks as “the greatest work of art for the whole cosmos”. With all flights grounded in North America, the first Tirana Biennale was only lightly attended. Even within Europe, there was little appetite to fly. Osama bin Laden, the erstwhile unknown who had served as the face of the biennale, had suddenly become known to the entire world. Who, then, was the artist Hamid Piccardo? Had he really been an affiliate of al-Qaeda and bin Laden, and had he intentionally transmitted a message to the art world? Or had he sent bin Laden’s visage out into the world like a Cassandra, warning of the entire tragedy that was to come? Or was it all just an especially tragicomic coincidence? As it would turn out, the truth was just as strange. Piccardo did not exist.

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I was in Serbia the day they caught Mladić. I remember exactly where I was when I heard the news. I was sitting at the kitchen table in my Serbian ex’s small apartment off Skadarlija. We were jubilant. I was living in London then and visiting Belgrade for just a few days, and I was excited to experience history firsthand. But our happiness was tempered by the knowledge that it had been too long. Mladić had been in hiding for 16 years. The chances that the Serbian government hadn’t known where he was were next to nothing. In other words, the Serbian state had almost certainly been protecting him. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY)–a spiritual progenitor to today’s beleaguered International Criminal Court (ICC)–had issued an international arrest warrant for Mladić in 1996. He was finally captured on May 26, 2011.

Sometime later that afternoon, we walked to Trg Republike, to the statue of Knez Mihailo on a horse. We assumed–or perhaps we had been told, I can’t remember–that there would be some kind of a protest there, and we wanted to see it. But as we approached the square, we were surprised to see that there weren’t many protesters gathered. My ex later noted this on his blog, writing that the size of the pro-Mladić protest wasn’t much bigger than a protest held in support of Gaddafi there a few weeks earlier. (May of 2011 was the height of the Arab Spring, and NATO had taken over military operations in Libya at the end of March). The New York Times picked up the reporting on his blog along with the video he’d taken of the protest, and published both on The Lede. That night, we drank a bottle of Vranac at a fish restaurant in New Belgrade to celebrate the day’s events. It all felt dizzying and exhilarating, like the future was still malleable.

It was easy to understand the international interest. It was a remarkable thing: nationalism, at last, looked like it might be in retreat in Serbia. A few weeks later, the New York Times ran a full piece titled “Nationalism Fading from Serbia’s Political Stage”. According to its author, the “once-fiery Serbian nationalism now seems strangely muted”:

With the 68-year-old General Ratko Mladić settling into his prison cell in The Hague, the relative silence with which Serbs greeted his arrest and extradition speaks volumes about the turnaround taken by the country’s leadership and the fading of nationalism as an issue from the political stage.

If it weren’t for the subject’s seriousness, you might be forgiven for laughing. (However, I should emphasize that I am absolutely not criticizing the writer of this piece.) The article continues:

The nationalism associated with Serbia — anti-Western, chauvinist, homophobic and violent — still exists among the same small portion of the population but now with one important difference.

“The political elite is not provoking it,” Mr. Bogosavljević [director at pollster Ipsos Strategic Marketing] said.

And now you could cry. Of course, the Serbian political elite does little else in public life besides stoke nationalism today.

Since Mladić died two weeks ago, I’ve been thinking a lot about that brief, optimistic moment in time. Yesterday, Mladić was given a hero’s funeral in Belgrade. President Vučić’s son Danilo was there, as was Serbia’s Defence Minister Bratislav Gašić and the Minister of Justice Nenad Vujić. The funeral was led by the Patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church. While much of Serbian society is more apathetic than enthusiastic about Mladić, there’s no question as to what the political elite thinks.

In the lead up to this appalling spectacle, I have been asking myself: could it have been different? What could have and should have happened then that didn’t? The question took on an even heavier quality on Sunday, when the far-right AfD won the election in Germany’s eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt by a landslide. For a lot of people, Germany is the gold standard for what Adorno called “coming to terms with the past”. Serbia’s neighbors have often lamented that Serbia did not follow Germany in its forging of a memory culture and contrition for war crimes and crimes against humanity. But the massive victory of the AfD indicates that Germany has not vanquished its far-right after all; perhaps it was laying dormant all along. Of course, there are important differences between the AfD and the Nazi Party: the AfD does not appear interested in rapacious eastward expansion, for one. That'’s different, and it would be hysterical to suggest otherwise. But the party’s rise still begs discomfiting questions about German society.

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I am trying to write about the Balkans less, but I am also leaving room for exceptions. As such, I have a new piece out in the New Statesman this weekend, this time on everyone’s favorite Spring/Summer 2026 Balkan subject: Jared Kushner’s planned development projects in Albania, and the huge popular backlash to them. The piece also gets into Kushner’s designs on Belgrade, which were thwarted by popular resistance last year–a success that I don’t think gets talked about enough. On the topic of Balkan protest I can vacillate between extravagant optimism and total despair, sometimes in the space of an hour. But sustained popular opposition to Kushner’s plans really did force his firm to reconsider, so these protests can yield the desired results.

I’m especially thankful for insights from Celik Rruplli, who has a Substack where he covers IR, social and cultural issues. An important read for anyone interested in Albania.

Finally, for those who read Albanian, the independent publication Lapsi has already translated it with impressive speed.

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Dear readers, since I received a lot of new paid subscribers from my Lindsay Clancy essay about the state of psychiatry under MAHA/RFK Jr./Trump, I decided to continue in that vein this week with another post on thoughts inspired by the Clancy trial. The second half is behind a paywall, so consider becoming a paid subscriber today. It only costs $5 and I am grateful to each and every one of my subscribers for their support and encouragement.

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During the early 1970s, dead infants started appearing in coin-operated lockers at train stations in Japan. Autopsies revealed that most of the babies had been suffocated or strangled to death. The number of “coin locker incidents” increased dramatically through the early years of the decade. The New York Times reported that in 1970, there were just two such cases. But by 1973, a dead infant was being found in a locker every ten days. Police investigations soon confirmed the truth behind the horrific discoveries: the infants were being murdered by their own mothers. The coin-operated locker infanticides have been attributed in part to the post-war decline in multigenerational households. In the post-war Japanese home, the father dedicated himself to the role of “company man” while women were expected to take care of the children. Japanese media described the apparent increase in maternal filicide–mothers who kill their own children–as emblematic of broader cultural changes. As scholar Alessandro Castellini has written, “major Japanese newspapers described the 1970s as the ‘era of the loss of motherhood’ and lamented the disappearance of a maternal instinct in women.”

These were the years immediately following the student protests of 1968. Out of that tumult emerged various movements of the New Left, including Japan’s own women’s liberation movement, ribu. As Castellini has written, the movement took a highly controversial approach to the subject of maternal filicide. Ribu depicted the phenomenon as a destructive but ultimately relatable and the natural result of the oppressive gendered expectations that women experienced in the patriarchal family. As one activist put it, “‘filicide [was] located at the climax of the circumstances in which all women [were] placed’.” Another ribu member asserted that “[b]etween the holy mother and the mother who kills her child there’s a paper-thin difference”. Maternal filicide was viewed as a rejection of women’s only socially sanctioned role. However, ribu activists did not view maternal filicide as something to be celebrated, but rather understood.

Some ribu groups engaged in street protests for the cause. As Castellini writes in his book Translating Maternal Violence: The Discursive Construction of Filicide in 1970s Japan:

On May 8, 1971, ribu cells in Tokyo organized a rally “in solidarity with women who kill their children”. Held on the occasion of Mother’s Day, this demonstration saw the participation of around 100 people, with women and children marching in the rain with marguerites in their hands…. Numerous demonstrations and meetings were held on that day in support of these criminalized mothers, triggering spontaneous forms of activism across the country such as the call to organize a rally in solidarity with filicidal mothers that was circulated in Hokkaido (Japan’s northernmost prefecture) by a ribu group called Metropolitan…

In their embrace of the criminal and despised, ribu’s approach to killer mothers has some parallels with the pro-pedophile activism that flourished in Germany during the same period. Both movements were New Left mutations that emerged in the defeated axis powers, and I do not think it’s a coincidence that the most extreme rejections of societal expectations were found there. Pedophile activism in Germany was rooted in the belief that the suppression of children’s sexuality within the patriarchal family led to authoritarianism. Pedophilia was therefore seen by some activists as the antidote to a new Hitler. Adherents of this belief found inspiration in the work of Austrian psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich and his book The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933). “The authoritarian state gains an enormous interest in the authoritarian family: It becomes the factory in which the state’s structure and ideology are molded,” Reich wrote. Ribu likewise viewed the family system as the site of social discipline and control.

The Lindsay Clancy murder trial in America has produced a torrent of public sympathy for the accused, particularly among women. This has taken various forms and degrees, from the belief that Clancy was suffering from a terrifying episode of postpartum psychosis, to inane TikTok conspiracy theories that Lindsay’s husband Patrick really did it. Most luridly, female Clancy supporters have amassed outside the courthouse in Massachusetts for weeks now, dressed in their trademark pink. These displays have been described by the right-wing commentariat as an indictment of “our society”, of “fourth wave feminism”, of “Western women today” and of “modern women”. They have been seized upon by the online right to advance notions of societal decay and modern women’s supposed depravity. But as the example of ribu in 1970s Japan suggests, sympathy for filicidal mothers is nothing new. In fact, it’s built into the very foundations of the law in some Western countries. And while in the admittedly extreme example of ribu this impulse veered into apologia, at other moments in history, it was an expression of civilization and mercy.

Indeed, support for mothers who kill their children–and calls for leniency and mercy for them–dates back centuries.

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On the evening of January 24th 2023, Lindsay Clancy sent her husband Patrick out to run a few errands. He was gone for less than an hour. During that time, Lindsay strangled her three young children to death with exercise bands. She then slashed her own neck and wrists before jumping out of her second-story bedroom window. The fall left her paralyzed from the waist down. She later claimed that she’d experienced an auditory command hallucination; a man’s voice had instructed her to kill her children, and she obeyed.

This suburban horror story has become the American courtroom drama of the moment; the trial, which began last month, is a TikTok phenomenon. True Crime influencers and “forensic astrologers” have become merchants of viral conspiracies and misinformation. A subreddit dedicated to the tragedy now gets more than 300K visitors weekly. The murders have become a fixture of social media discourse and a lightning rod for some of the most contentious issues at the dark, shriveled heart of American life: SSRIs, personal responsibility, mental illness, culture war gender politics, and the abysmal state of American medicine, psychiatry in particular.

The case was probably destined to become an object of perverse interest. The telegenic Clancy family lived in a colonial-style house in Duxbury, Massachusetts, a well-to-do suburb of Boston that locals jokingly refer to as “Luxbury”. The Clancy’s three children–Cora, age 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months–were periodically cared for by a nanny. Patrick worked for Microsoft, and Lindsay was a delivery room nurse. Photos posted to social media revealed a seemingly enviable life typical of the coastal blue state middle class.

But in the months leading up to the murders, Lindsay’s mental health started to deteriorate, and she sought psychiatric help for anxiety and insomnia. In an initial telehealth appointment in September 2022, a young psychiatrist named Jennifer Tufts wrote Lindsay a prescription for the anti-depressant Zoloft, a Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI). The Zoloft reportedly made her worse. Over the next few months, Lindsay was prescribed 13 more psychiatric drugs. By the end of the year, she was experiencing suicidal ideation, and she checked herself into McLean hospital. A few weeks after being discharged, she killed her children. Lindsay has pleaded not guilty, arguing lack of responsibility–the legal term for the insanity defense in Massachusetts. Her defense rests on the assertion that she was suffering from post-partum psychosis at the time of the murders, and that her condition was exacerbated by psychiatric drugs. Both Lindsay and Patrick have also filed separate lawsuits against her psychiatric team.

When Dr. Tufts took the stand earlier this month, the entire field of psychiatry was on trial. The young doctor fumbled over her notes and struggled to provide answers to Lindsay’s defense attorney, who sometimes demanded that she answer for the entire profession and its increasingly shoddy practices, including telehealth and digitized medical notes. Observing the exchange, some in the mental health field worried that patients would be even more reluctant to take SSRIs. Others have asserted that the case has set the field of psychiatry back “decades”.

Meanwhile, psychiatry has already been under sustained attack since Trump appointed Robert Kennedy Jr. Health Secretary last year. SSRIs in particular have become emblematic of everything the right hates: they are disproportionately used by women, who take them about twice as much as men. They sap patients of “vitality” by promoting weight gain and tanking the libido. When they work, they are seen as the “easy” way out, a short cut that deprives people of supposedly ennobling suffering. In recent years, Kennedy has repeatedly said that SSRIs contribute to school shootings. The administration now formally champions “deprescribing”–patient withdrawal from psychiatric drugs, which Kennedy says is harder than quitting heroin. In May, he hosted a “Mental Health and Overmedicalization Summit” where he said “we will no longer treat [psychiatric medications] as the default.” Popular YouTube psychiatrist Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring, an associate of Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) initiative, has launched something called the Taper Clinic to wean patients off psychiatric drugs; rates for this service begin at $30,000. Big Pharma is a racket but there is clearly money to be made in the emergent deprescribing industry too.

The anti-SSRI campaign is just one part of a broader offensive.

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I have to apologize for the inexcusably light posting. I am at a residency in Finland, rethinking my approach to writing, including this project. When I’m back in September, I hope to return to a more regular posting schedule, with some thematic and other adjustments. In the meantime, I wanted to share a few things I’ve published recently.

In the new Tribune, edited by the great Oliver Eagleton, I have a piece out about populism in Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania. I began with a question that some might consider provocative: what are the real conditions that supporters of the region’s “right-wing populists” are responding to? My answer was by no means an original one, but essential, I think, for understanding recent regional politics: that supporters of Orbán, Fico, and Georgescu (along with other Romanian populists, of which there are many) are responding in part to disappointments with liberal democracy. For the region’s industrial workers, the post-1989 transition to capitalism and democracy did not usher in a new era of prosperity but rather immiseration and a loss of status. They therefore nursed resentment towards liberalism and often, its administrators in the EU. Of course, I don’t claim that post-communist resentment is the only element at play here, but I think it’s important and real.

I know some of you who’ve been reading my Substack for a while might look at this piece and think, “but Lily, I thought you said that populism was dead?” Well, that’s not really what I said. I was straw manned by a few people who claimed I said that populism had been vanquished. To be fair, it kind of serves me right, since I gave a post the title “Requiem for a Populist Decade”. Honestly, I just liked the way it sounded. What I actually said was that Orban’s loss in the most recent Hungarian elections hinted at a fatigue with MAGA populism, and that Trump was becoming an albatross for the European right (this in the wake of his threats to annex Greenland and the start of the war on Iran). I wrote that populism, as a strategy, tends to produce diminishing returns over time, and must mutate to survive.

However, it’s not only the “populists” who’ve mutated. In this week’s excellent Ideas Letter, my colleague Hans Kundnani has an essay titled “Obfuscations of Populism”. Kundnani argues that the center-right has adopted many of the far-right’s policy positions (e.g. on immigration), and has mobilized the “populist” label to differentiate and distance themselves from the far-right. This has allowed for the mainstreaming of far-right politics under the guise of “sensible” centrist technocracy. I think this is a great intervention into the discussion of populism.

The second piece I’m sharing was produced after attending this year’s NATO summit in Ankara. These very expensive annual meetings are now held largely to ensure that Trump remains onside and to rally the dejected troops into a sense of transient unity. The latter entails disseminating talking points to journalists who are then expected to repeat them without much critical thought.

At this year’s summit, I sat in the basement of Erdoğan’s vast Presidential Complex and listened as a senior NATO official described alleged cracks in the Kremlin matrix. The new line was that spectacular Ukrainian drone strikes inside Russian territory had not only “turned the tide” in Ukraine’s favor, but were probably prompting segments of the Russian elite to turn away from Putin. I found this fascinating. I don’t discount the spectacular nature of Ukrainian drone strikes, or doubt at all that there is fatigue with the war in Russia. But the fundamentals of the conflict have not changed–Russia has Ukraine vastly outmanned–and the idea that Putin might be overthrown soon struck me as completely delusional. I wrote about my discomfort with the narrative for New Left Review’s Sidecar, with generous support from the Alameda Institute (special shout out to Benjamin Fogel). The other point I made was that while Kremlinologist types look for fissures in the Russian elite, there were very serious divisions opening up in Ukraine.

This became impossible to ignore with Zelenskyy’s dismissal of Palantir-backed tech wunderkind Mykhailo Fedorov from the position of defense minister last month. The decision triggered protests in major cities and calls for Fedorov’s reinstatement. Earlier this week, Fedorov went so far as to demand elections, provoking backlash from erstwhile supporters who say that it would be impossible to organize a vote in wartime Ukraine…

…Anyway, I suppose I should just let you read them for yourself. See you in September.

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After the frenzied NATO summit in Ankara, I had to log off and take my brain offline for a few days. Therefore, I’m a bit late in sharing my piece for UnHerd from the summit, which is about the Trump administration’s new concept of “NATO 3.0”. This was one of the summit’s main themes, at least as far as the Americans were concerned. NATO 3.0 is an attempt to move beyond the “long 1990s” of “NATO 2.0”–liberal internationalism, humanitarian intervention, out-of-area operations, democracy promotion and so forth. I was a bit surprised at how ideologically-driven the concept of “NATO 3.0” is. I’ll admit that I’m often so distracted by the sheer chaos and unseriousness of Trump that I’ve periodically lost sight of the fact that there are other people in the administration thinking about US foreign policy in terms of grand strategy. It probably won’t surprise many to learn that the author of the NATO 3.0 idea is Elbridge Colby, Under Secretary of War for Policy, who is reviled by many Atlanticists for being a conservative realist/”restrainer”.

The administration has repeatedly pitched NATO 3.0 as a partial return to “NATO 1.0”, i.e. the Cold War-era NATO whose main purpose was to deter the Soviet Union (and crush internal left-wing subversion, but we’ll leave that for another time). As such, “NATO 1.0” had right-wing authoritarianism built into its very foundations. For example, Salazar’s Portugal was a founding member of NATO; the country employed a brutal secret police and banned all opposition parties. But it had immense strategic value and was ideologically aligned, so it was embraced. The idea that NATO is an “alliance of democracies” was therefore always a polite liberal fiction. I think the Trump administration’s concept of “NATO 3.0”–as a reboot of NATO 1.0–asks us to look at Cold War continuities, which is what I tried to do in my piece. I’m sure liberal Atlanticists will hate it, so I must apologize in advance. A final point I tried to drive home in my piece, and which I will repeat here, is that the administration surely sees European acceptance of NATO 3.0 as a rare win at a time when it’s losing on other fronts.

More about the summit over the next few weeks…

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I was recently invited on the Istituto Affari Internazionali’s (IAI) InCLUDE podcast, a huge honor. It’s the latest episode and it’s titled The Theory of Change: Is the Trump Administration Making It Harder for Countries in the Western Balkans to Join the EU? I thought it was a great discussion, and it was nicely framed by host Dušan Reljić’s first question: is the US now a malign influencer in the Western Balkans? Of course, when people use the term “malign” in the Balkans they are most often referring to countries like Russia, China, and perhaps Turkey. I really liked the provocation and I thought it was entirely warranted. We went on to discuss a range of Trumpian interventions in the region, from Jared Kushner’s garish real estate projects to the transient resurrection of the dreaded “land swap” proposal for Kosovo that everyone hates, to the Trump administration’s lectures about personal responsibility (“solve your own problems”) and how Turkey’s concept of “regional ownership” attempts to answer it. There’s a lot of competition and tension in the US-EU relationship that gets expressed in the Balkans, so I think the conversation might be of interest to anyone following the evolving state of trans-Atlantic relations.

Thanks so much to Dušan, Matteo Bonomi and everyone at IAI and Open Society Foundations Western Balkans for the opportunity to have this discussion.

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At a hallucinatory rally in Belgrade this weekend, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić told supporters that he would resign “within weeks”. It was widely reported as breaking news, but it’s actually something he’s been promising for months. If Vučić does resign as president–big emphasis on the word “if”–it does not mean it’s the end of his political career. It means that he intends to become prime minister again, a role he already served in from April 2014 to May 2017. The rotating dance between president and prime minister, an executive shuffle favored by leaders in this corner of Europe, would thus continue on.

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Trump’s self-destructive war is supposedly over. Last night, the US and Iran announced that a peace deal had been reached, though it leaves the most difficult questions for the weeks and months ahead. The so-called “memorandum of understanding” allocates the next 60 days for intensive negotiations on the fate of the Iranian nuclear program, effectively kicking the can down the road in much the same way that the April 8th ceasefire did. The MoU therefore represents another reprieve more than a decisive peace, the termination of the current battle within a much longer campaign.

Despite the remaining questions and lack of finality, it’s worth taking stock of the past 107 or so days since the war began. Even by the debauched standards of the Trump administration, wherein inflicting short-term shock and awe and sending ratings and stocks soaring matter more than any durable strategic objectives, the war achieved less than nothing. There’s no question that Iran’s military and nuclear program have been hobbled somewhat, but they can be rebuilt. And having been attacked twice by the US and Israel in the middle of peace talks now, they’ll have much more incentive to do so than ever before.

Trump recently described the war as having achieved a regime change “of sorts” owing to the numerous murders of high-level Iranian officials by the US and Israel during the conflict. But such a claim will not satisfy the dejected regime change fanatics in Israel, nor the truly loathsome Pahlavists in the Iranian diaspora, the latter who’ve now permanently discredited themselves before the eyes of the world.

It’s also possible that by picking off individual Iranians one-by-one, Trump again achieved less than zero: rather than a simple return to status quo ante, what Trump has actually done is far more damaging. The US and Israel assassinated diplomats who, with zen-like calm, had recently given interviews to CNN; they killed moderate philosophy PhDs and Islamic scholars and religious leaders. Even critics of the current Iranian leadership could see that there was something abhorrent here, something cowardly that made the skin crawl. The surprisingly erudite representatives of the Islamic Republic, who’d entered the war looking like leaders of yet another sclerotic, repressive regime, grew comparatively sympathetic to many observers in the conflict’s first weeks, appearing steely and calm as they gave Goliath a black eye. Thanks to its dizzying output of Lego propaganda videos, Iran was able to connect with a 21st century global audience like never before. There’s little doubt who won the global propaganda war with this one. In the end, not even America’s closest allies would give their full-throated support for Trump’s war.

Finally, the world cannot and will not unsee the fact that Iran managed to threaten the entire global economy by closing the Strait of Hormuz. The fact that they could has revealed a fundamental weakness in the organization of the global American empire, something now laid out for all to see. The US has suffered big defeats–the Vietnam War, the more recent disastrous retreat from Afghanistan–but this feels like a more global loss. Besides, neither the Vietnamese nor the Taliban ever occupied quite the same obsessive function in the neoconservative American imagination as Iran; after all, they matter far less to Israel.

The Trump administration will try to bounce back from this by going after low hanging fruit, which probably means the government of Cuba. But it won’t be enough to restore the already flatlining global confidence in the US to pre-war levels, or to Make the American Empire Great Again. More disturbing, we can be assured that the full ramifications of what Trump’s done will only reveal themselves later, in the months and years to come. But the current round of the US-Israel war on Iran has undoubtedly created new fissures and cracks that will someday fully break.

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Most of you know me from the Balkans–from my writing about Serbian politics, from my time running the website Balkanist, from my many years living in Belgrade (with stints in Sarajevo and Zagreb). But few are aware that before all of that, I had a perfectly quiet and self-contained Scandinavian life with a Swedish-Danish husband whose father worked for Lars von Trier and summers spent drinking elderflower saft and swimming in the Baltic Sea. In recent years, I’ve found myself gravitating towards that part of Europe again, though it wasn’t initially deliberate. New Left Review’s Oliver Eagleton plucked me from Balkan obscurity in 2022 when he asked me to cover Sweden and Finland’s accession to NATO. I figured I could do it: I’d been married to a Swede, which meant I’d experienced all of their strange little national neuroses firsthand. I had taken classes at the Scandinavian department at Berkeley, so had a (very) basic grasp of the language, enough, at least, to understand what was being written about in the newspapers. Besides, it was striking that the rhetoric around joining NATO in the Nordic countries was so similar to what it had been in the Balkans a few years prior: some Swedish commentators, just like Montenegro’s then-President Milo Đukanović in 2015, were describing NATO accession as a Huntingtonesque “civilizational choice”–as “joining the West”.

As it would turn out, that piece changed my entire career. It was one of the most well-received articles I’ve ever written, and it freed me from the shackles and tedium of Balkan correspondence. These days, I get asked to write about everything from JD Vance to Silicon Valley to elections in Estonia: truly a dream career for a novelty seeker with crippling ADHD.

My personal history with Scandinavia is only part of why I was so thrilled to be contacted by the editors of the Norwegian daily newspaper Klassekampen earlier this year and asked if I would be open to writing a regular column. The paper puts out great writing and interviews and is beautifully designed. With my new rotating “Horisont” column, I’ll also be in excellent company: I’ll be alternating with Francesca Borri and William Shoki, among other greats. The focus of my column should mostly be trans-Atlantic affairs, though for my first, I wrote about the fissures opening up in MAGA since the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran–a contest we might describe crudely as unfolding between the “America First” and so-called “Israel First” factions. Scandinavian friends can read it now. Coincidentally, on the day that Klassekampen reached out to me about writing a column, I also got news that I’d been accepted for a writing residency in Finland for the month of August. I’m looking forward to once again spending summertime in the Nordic countries.

In other euro news, you can also read my “Requiem for the Populist Decade” in Spanish over on Spain’s El Salto. The paper is taking stock of ten years of Brexit and Trump, as I imagine many others will be doing this year.

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Dear readers, this is another free post for all, but I will likely need to start paywalling more of them. That said, I am grateful to all of my subscribers, both free and paid, and I appreciate each and every person who reads, likes, and shares my work. If you haven’t already, subscribe today and never miss a thing.

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Tomorrow, right-wing svengali Janez Janša will become prime minister of Slovenia for the fourth time. Janša has been a stubborn barnacle on Slovenian politics since 1989, and served as Minister of Defense during the brief war with Yugoslavia in 1991. His return to power, engineered in part by Israel, has sent a collective groan through certain swaths of the tiny Alpine country, whose post-independence politics have been dominated by the man. There is no one more furious about the entire state of affairs than members of the outgoing center-left coalition, who appear to be making good use of their final hours in power to convey some rather strong messages.

The most apparently dramatic signal today was directed at Israel. Readers who’ve been following my coverage of the “Slovenia affair” either here or in Le Monde diplomatique will be aware that Israeli intelligence officers have meddled extensively in the internal affairs of the country in recent months, particularly in the March parliamentary elections. Earlier today, the government decided to prevent a plane flown by the Israeli charter company Israir from landing at the airport in Ljubljana. The aircraft was instead forced to divert to Croatia. Predictably, the move drew immediate condemnation from Israir CEO Uri Sirkis, who described the decision as “political” and rooted in the Slovenian government’s “clear opposition to the policies and direction pursued by Israel.” The Slovenian government maintains that the plane did not have clearance to land. Last-chance show of defiance or mere coincidence, the decision and the irate response it provoked in Tel Aviv were yet another expression of the outsized role Israel now plays in Slovenia’s affairs.

But there were also messages about Israeli interference in Slovenia that were conveyed by individual factions within the outgoing coalition. Readers will be aware that the focus of much of my reporting on Israeli meddling in Slovenia has concerned the government’s surprising decision not to join South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The announcement that Slovenia had reversed course and would not join the case as expected was made just days before the election. Much of my own research involved trying to understand how this decision had been reached, what kinds of pressure Israel had exerted, and which Slovenian ministers had ultimately caved in and decided against joining. However, much critical information remained out of view of the public at the time of my investigation: the vote on whether to join the ICJ genocide case was made in a closed government session on March 12th, meaning no one, including very well-placed journalists and relative insiders in Slovenia, had access to concrete knowledge about how individual ministers voted. The information was classified as “secret” and its disclosure labelled a threat to state interests.

Today, that all changed. In a decision reportedly taken by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, information detailing which ministers voted to join the lawsuit has been made public for the first time. There are political reasons for this: the outgoing MFA is Tanja Fajon, who has been especially vocal in her support of Palestine, as has her party, the Social Democrats. And as the newly released document detailing the vote makes clear, it was Svoboda (“Freedom”), the liberal party of outgoing Prime Minister Robert Golob, that was ultimately against joining the ICJ genocide case. Indeed, only one Svoboda minister voted in favor of doing so. Meanwhile, Fajon’s Social Democrats all voted “yes” to Slovenia joining the ICJ genocide case. Perhaps most disappointing of all were the two ministers from Levica (“the Left”) out of three who were absent for the vote. Levica is the Slovenian party that purports to be the furthest left and also fashions itself the most pro-Palestine. According to Levica supporters, one of the party’s ministers who was supposed to vote was on a trip during the session, while the other was present but stepped outside into the hall to talk on the phone and ended up missing the vote entirely. You could hardly write a more comically damning account of leftist negligence.

And just like that, the center-left government of Slovenia exits stage left. Janša is back, Israel is happy, and Slovenia can go back to being a pretty postcard country where nothing ever happens.

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Last weekend, there was a brief, imperfect symmetry between events in Serbia and Turkey. Since I’ve been offline for weeks, I only learned about it when I got a message from a friend in Belgrade asking me what was happening in Istanbul. The city’s privately-owned Bilgi University, known for its liberal-leaning politics, had been shuttered by presidential decree. (President Erdoğan then abruptly reversed this decision on Monday morning without apparent explanation). That news came just one day after an Ankara court’s provisional decision to remove Özgür Özel as the head of the center-left Republican People’s Party (CHP), the main opposition outfit here. The directive clears the way for the return of former CHP chair Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, now widely derided as Erdoğan’s “controlled opposition”. Police forcibly entered CHP headquarters in Ankara last Sunday, firing off teargas and rubber bullets.

Then, on Sunday night, a journalist friend in Turkey sent me a message asking about what was happening in Serbia. Some 1,400 km away, tens of thousands of people had been on the streets of Belgrade demanding early elections and protesting against the government of Aleksandar Vučić. The Serbian police responded with stun grenades and tear gas.

It was, as one commentator here put it, “a bad weekend for democracy”. All week, I felt like I should comment on the imperfect symmetry that a few people had pointed out, but every time I tried, I failed. I could not force myself to use the rote language, which read like bullet points on a grim NED report. Indeed, I couldn’t put the words together without experiencing profound distress. I should have lamented the erosion of “democratic norms”, and the parallel process of “democratic backsliding”. I should have invoked the “rule of law”, the decline in media freedoms, and appealed to the US or EU to “do something”. But I find this language strangely lacking, so much so that it actually makes me feel ashamed to use it. To be clear, I am not disparaging anyone who does; in the past, I have used this language myself. It’s possible that this is the only conceptual framework currently available to us. But that doesn’t change the fact that something is off about it, that something is wrong. And I want to try to understand why.

Most commentators on foreign affairs acknowledge that the liberal order is in trouble, dying, or perhaps even already dead. There was a time when this would have been treated as some kind of fringe Duginist conceit; now it’s approaching mainstream consensus. Funeral orations and laments for the liberal order have been delivered everywhere from the Financial Times to the Atlantic Council to podcast interviews with Yuval Noah Harari in Davos. Sometimes people call the liberal order by other names: the rules-based order, the US-led order, the Western-led order, Western hegemony. But a rose by any other name would be the same rotting organic matter: the precise name we use for it isn’t important; what is important is what we mean when we talk about it and the fact that we’re calling it dead. When we invoke this dying liberal order, what we mean, at least in part, is the project of globalized liberal democracy, and the underlying assumption that the rest of the world would eventually adopt our system. After the events of 1989, we were told, Western liberal democracy was triumphant and history was over. But we all laugh at this “end of history” idea now. How foolish Fukuyama was; how naive. We know better.

But we’re not just calling time on the liberal order. The fundamental assumptions of that order are now being questioned in unprecedented places. Once again, there was a time when such talk was confined to anti-imperialist reading groups and associated more with the rantings of seemingly unhinged taxi drivers in places like Serbia or Uganda. But lately, many mainstream commentators, scholars and even liberal political leaders like Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney (of all people!) have been wrestling publicly with the reality of what the US-led order was and what it meant. They are acknowledging that it was, at a minimum, highly flawed, hypocritical, and unequal. Some go much further in their criticisms, as I do. But whatever your personal evaluation of the liberal order, you probably agree that it has become acceptable to dissent from it in polite company and in respectable newspapers.

How does this relate to Vučić and Erdoğan? The problem is that when we criticize leaders like them, we immediately default to the rhetoric of liberal democracy–the legitimation ideology of the supposedly defunct liberal order. And this, for me, creates a terrible discordance. When those of us who prognosticate about the demise of Western liberal hegemony abruptly start sounding like Vaclav Havel in 1989, we are attempting to have it both ways. So which one is it? If the liberal order is dying and was always horribly unequal (or worse) anyway, then why are we judging leaders according to its criteria? Can we declare the Church an archaic institution riven with superstition and reaction and then continue chastising any misbehavior as “sin” and demand perfect obedience to God?

I don’t think there’s any better evidence that we’re in a transition than this. There is an emergent, acknowledged crisis of faith among the liberal democratic brethren, and yet, we still lack an alternative system of belief or normative framework for navigating the world. When we encounter leaders whose behavior we dislike, we still describe it in terms of deviance–from a model we no longer fully believe in ourselves.

I’m guessing that some will try to counter this argument by saying that the reason the liberal order is in trouble is because of external attacks from its opponents–men like Erdoğan and Vučić. But I don’t think that’s true. I think they are very much a product of that order, and, in a way, represent a kind of crude culmination of it. After 1989, the Western liberal democrats who came to observe elections and otherwise administer democracy in states “transitioning” from communism prescribed plural elections as the apex of political progress. All that mattered were market economies and plural elections; everything else, it would turn out, was negotiable.

There was also another chink in the liberal democrats’ armor. While they claimed to venerate the sanctity of the “free and fair” election, they never really believed in absolute openness. Their “get out the vote” campaigns were always intended to bolster a specific candidate or party, and they took great care to engineer the desired electoral result. They provided extensive training and PR for their chosen candidates, and funded the “free and independent media” that boosted them and excoriated their opponents. In short, the liberal democrats believed that elections should be “free and fair”, but never so free and fair that a real left-wing or anti-systemic challenger could win. In this way, “electoral authoritarianism”–plural elections without a level playing field, the kind of system that Vučić and Erdoğan have cultivated–constitutes a mutated, degraded form of US-led liberal democracy rather than a radical break with it.

I have no new verbiage to dispense nor any particular prescription for what to do here. Like everyone else, I will have to continue employing solemn NED democracy report jargon, but I will not be surprised when such outmoded, uninspired language continues to yield uninspired results. Meanwhile, I think it’s important to remember: liberal dissonances are always heard and exploited, even when they are not acknowledged or even considered in the West.

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Trying to piece together the story of Israel’s shocking interference in Slovenia’s domestic politics felt a bit like the plot of a mystery novel in which a weary detective arrives in a little seaside town to investigate a murder: at first, it looked like everyone had something to hide. Several weeks ago, I was contacted by Le Monde diplomatique and asked to write a piece about the recent “Slovenia affair” involving Israel’s “private Mossad” spy firm Black Cube. The editors had read my post about the event here on Substack (don’t ever let anyone tell you this place is useless) and asked me if I would write something about it for a French audience. Initially, I thought I would mostly just reconstruct what I wrote here on Substack, albeit with more background and polish. But then I decided the story demanded a different approach. Slovenia’s rhetorical support for Palestine–among the most outspoken in alternately mealymouthed and collaborationist Europe–had clearly come at a high cost, and it was imperative that I at least try to find out what happened. The piece is now out in French.

I will admit that I was also motivated by the stunning lack of European opprobrium at this blatant attempt to manipulate the internal politics of a sovereign EU member state; in addition to Black Cube’s mafia-style operation that involved clandestinely recording some of the most blackmail-worthy people in Slovenia’s government, it turned out Israel also had another form of leverage over the country, and that had received far less media scrutiny. Slovenia, like many other EU member states, the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK, and the US federal government, is heavily dependent on an Israeli cybersecurity software company called Check Point. The firm is run by elite intelligence veterans from the notorious Unit 8200, the IDF’s cyberwarfare and intelligence agency that helped orchestrate the pager attacks on Hezbollah. Check Point gives Unit 8200 alumni undue sway over foreign governments, undermining their sovereignty. At the height of the Black Cube scandal, just days before the election, the Slovenian government announced that it had decided to reverse its decision to join South Africa’s genocide case against Israel before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague. After some initial reticence, it turned out that a lot of people wanted to talk about the entire affair.

My apologies to my fellow non-Francophones that the piece is only available in French right now; I hope it will be translated into other languages soon.

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Few periods in NATO’s 77-year history have been more disorienting for the alliance than Trump’s second presidency. True to Trumpian form, the past 15 or so months have been whiplash-inducing and unpredictable. As Trump was sworn in for another term in January 2025, there was widespread panic among Atlanticists that Trump would quickly end the war in Ukraine on terms favorable to Russia. Trump and Zelenskyy’s televised spat in the Oval Office last February reinforced this fear.

But at some point over the six months that followed, something changed. Trump’s rhetoric on NATO was unusual and belligerent, but his actual policies turned out to be more conventional than many feared. Trump did not “end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours” (as he’d promised on the campaign trail.) Instead, he began expressing his “disappointment” with Putin and threatened to impose crippling tariffs on Russia. NATO members (with the exception of Spain) agreed to raise their defense spending to 5% of GDP, something Trump touted as a victory at last June’s NATO summit in The Hague. Indeed, Trump-NATO relations looked to be on more solid ground at the start of last summer. The longstanding liberal insistence that Trump was being puppeteered by Vladimir Putin started looking almost like it had been intentional misdirection: there was a foreign leader who held undue sway over US policy, but it was Benjamin Netanyahu.

Far more damaging to NATO cohesion than Ukraine were Trump’s repeated threats to annex Greenland. The idea that the most powerful NATO member state could seize territory belonging to one of its pretty little Scandinavian allies was truly shocking and unprecedented. A few months later, the US-Israeli war on Iran intensified the apparent deterioration of relations: Though NATO allies were not consulted ahead of the attack, they were harangued by Trump for refusing to comply with Washington’s dictates after the fact. Trump has repeatedly called NATO “a paper tiger” for declining to launch a military operation to open the Strait of Hormuz; he has also savaged the leaders of individual NATO member states (including erstwhile friends like Italy’s Giorgia Meloni) for failing to “help” the US fight its war.

That just about brings us up to present. On July 7-8, Turkey will host the annual NATO Summit in Ankara. Already, there is talk that Turkey plans to use the event as an opportunity to reinvigorate the alliance and strengthen fraying bilateral ties within it. Turkey feels well positioned to do so. While many NATO member states have seen their relations with Washington strained since Trump took office a second time, in Turkey, the opposite is true: Turkey-US relations have improved under Trump. This can be partly attributed to the personal rapport between Trump and Erdogan, but Assad’s fall in Syria in December 2024 also set the stage for a new convergence of interests. In startlingly short order, the Trump administration lifted sanctions on the new pro-Ankara government in Damascus and pushed for the integration of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) into the Syrian army–two of Turkey’s priorities in the new Syria. Now, Turkey is looking to build on this purported momentum by pushing for a new approach to NATO, one in which the US and Turkey will play leading roles as the alliance’s twin “engines of real hard power deterrence”.

At an event in Washington last week titled the “Turkish-American Alliance at the Heart of NATO’s New Geopolitics” put on by the pro-government Turkish policy think tank SETA, the idea was discussed in greater detail by current and former officials from the US and Turkey. Participants stressed that myriad global crises prove that Europe still cannot go it alone. The implication was that the continent still needs the US and Turkey, who possess the two largest militaries in the alliance.

From what I could gather, the new approach also involves a reframing of how trans-Atlantic security ought to be understood. While in previous years, the alliance has focused on Russia to the exclusion of almost everything else, the current war on Iran has made it clear that there are other mounting threats to European security that demand a concerted response: paralyzed trade, deeper energy (in)security, global economic crisis, and the renewed spectre of refugee flows, to name but a few.

The US-Israeli war on Iran has also reportedly prompted Turkish diplomats to push to invite four Gulf states to this year’s summit: Qatar, the UAE, Bahrain, and Kuwait. These states are members of something called the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative (ICI), a somewhat forgotten NATO partnership forum created at the Istanbul Summit in 2004, the last time Turkey hosted the annual NATO summit. The ICI was established to assist with counterterrorism efforts and countering WMD, among other Iraq War-era concerns.

In addition to the US-Israel War on Iran, Trump’s decision to withdraw roughly 5,000 US troops from Europe will also loom large over the summit. Last week, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth “abruptly” cancelled two US military deployments to Europe; they had been scheduled to rotate through Poland, the Baltic states and Romania. But for the Atlanticist faithful, all is not grim. They also see reason for hope. Some are opting to view Putin’s suggestion that former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder play a mediation role in peace talks as another sign that Russia is finished, and that a peace settlement favorable not to Russia but to Ukraine is coming soon.

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This little Substack–the very one you subscribe to–got a shout out in the Financial Times yesterday. Edward Luce, whose work I’ve always liked and read regularly–called me a “respected pundit” in his newsletter. It is always nice to see the word “respected” attached to one’s name, particularly in the most respected newspaper in the world! It’s especially nice to be described that way as a woman. We are used to being called insulting things like “hard working”. So thank you to Edward Luce for that. The word “pundit” naturally carries some negative connotations, but I will shoulder them with dignity.

All of that said, Luce mentioned me and linked to this Substack because he disagreed with my latest post here about the end of the right-wing populist decade. He believes that it’s premature to recite a funeral oration for right-wing populism now.

I think Luce makes some good points. For one, he writes that populism could have just as easily been declared dead in 2020, when Trump was defeated by Joe Biden and Covid was raging. He reminds his readers that some people asserted that Covid would spell the end of populism. Of course, that didn’t happen. Instead, the pandemic gave right-wing populism new life. Right-wing populists depicted vaccine mandates and lockdowns as the social engineering work of corrupt medical-pharma elites (or some such thing).

However, I do think there are some significant differences between the first and second Trump administrations that warrant examination. First, Trump’s polling numbers have never been as low as they are now. They are historically abysmal. This means that he’s being more thoroughly discredited in his second administration than he was just six years ago. Further, his supposedly “populist” policies now read as a litany of failures. The spectacle of cruelty and violence that was the first year of ICE raids has been dialed back following mass public backlash. Tariffs–the cornerstone of Trumpian economic populism–were determined to be largely illegal by the Supreme Court. (As the Guardian’s diplomatic correspondent Patrick Wintour wrote last year, “this is the time to declare economic populism, and not free trade, dead”).

The same goes for this administration’s conduct of foreign policy, which many opponents were far too quick to label “isolationist”. On Iran, that generational fixation of boomer neoconservatives, Trump has demonstrated a conventional hawkishness. “Operation Epic Fury” sent the swamp into fits of ecstasy. On Ukraine, he has also been far more conventional than his detractors feared, or as last year’s confrontation with Zelenskyy in the Oval Office appeared to portend. (Ross Douthat even described Trump’s Ukraine policy as a success in the New York Times last week). According to MAGA populists’ own criteria, then, Trump’s second administration has been a resounding failure. MAGA’s internal dynamics also track with this interpretation. Steve Bannon and others associated with the movement’s more traditionally populist wing have been sidelined, while those in the more neocon and Silicon Valley crowd have gotten much closer to the inner circle. Those in the neocon and Tech Right camps are closer to conventional conservatives or overt elitism than they are populist. (Have you heard all the Silicon Valley gloating about AI creating a “permanent underclass” lately?)

Luce also writes that Nigel Farage’s right-wing populist Reform has been leading the polls in the UK for the past year. While this is certainly true, there are also signs that the party’s momentum is already slowing down. First, one analysis from yesterday’s regional and municipal elections indicated that Reform’s vote share was 27%. While this was still enough to defeat Labor, the result also represents a drop of five percentage points from last year’s local elections, when Reform secured a full 32 percent of the vote.

Indeed, there is already fatigue about Farage on the far-right. If you follow discussions on the political fringe as I do, you’ll see that Farage is now viewed by many as an establishment stooge. Part of this is the toxicity of the Trump brand, surely–Farage is an ally of the US president. But some on the far-right now depict him as pro-immigration. The emergence of an even more far-right outfit, Restore, is symptomatic of this. You may be tempted to conclude that the founding of another far-right party indicates that right-wing populism is alive and well, but I actually think it could go either way. When Restore published its first big video a few months ago, the admiring response from supporters was how “un-MAGA” it was; rather than clownish, personality-driven populism of the Farage variety, its message was delivered with a grim seriousness. It did not feel the need to justify itself in terms of opposition to the libs or Brussels; its somber mood drew on the British virtue of the stiff upper lip, of a simple “doing what needs to be done” (in this case, the mass deportations of human beings). I was struck by the tonal shift, which is why I concluded my last post by saying that whatever right-wing politics come next could prove even worse: less buffoonish and more effective.

To be sure, the aforementioned video is not entirely devoid of populist features. In it, party leader Rupert Lowe speaks directly to the camera, promising that candidates for Restore would come “from outside the political establishment”. But then, he takes a decidedly un-Trumpian turn. The candidates, he says, “will be from science, from the military, from medicine, from business, from education.” This is not your crackpot MAGA uncle’s populism; this is something more sober, more formal, and, potentially at least, more lethal.

Luce also makes an important point about immigration. There is no question that immigration will continue to produce a backlash on both sides of the Atlantic, and particularly in Britain. As long as right-wing politicians continue to blame “liberal elites” or “globalists” for immigration policies, then that backlash will have a populist character and speak in a populist vernacular. But once again, I think there has been a subtle shift in the way Muslim immigration in particular has been talked about and even opposed since October 7th. Prior to October 2023, opponents of immigration invoked “globalist” elites (and the implication was often that they were Jewish, with George Soros as the ultimate villain). Now, right-wing commentators are just as likely to invoke a supposed crisis of anti-semitism as a reason to stop Muslim immigration. Many will claim there is no distinction here. They will say that all of it is anti-immigration, and for many commentators, that’s all that really matters. But I detect in these slight shifts a growing rhetorical foregrounding of elite foreign policy concerns over those of the “masses”–and a downgrading of “the people”.

Finally, Luce notes correctly that the conditions that proved fertile ground for the millennium’s first populist backlash, like the diminished middle class and new technologies that fueled polarization, are worse now than they were at the onset of the populist decade. AI, he writes, is poised to intensify the ongoing destruction of the public square. I think this is possibly true, but there are also some other terrifying trends that point in different directions. Earlier I mentioned the Silicon Valley elites who now boast of AI’s creation of a “permanent underclass”. Their project is one not of populism but unabashed elitism, and in some cases, even monarchism. There is no pretense to caring about “the people” or even the nation (as I have written before, the Silicon Valley tech right abhors the nation state). Rather, they envision a world that is rigidly hierarchical, authoritarian, stratified according to IQ, and sustained by permanent war, social atomization, internet pacification, and mass surveillance. Of course, this still sounds fanciful, but it is what the Silicon Valley right wants. And this means there are still new and nightmarish directions for right-wing politics to go. Declaring the populist decade dead may not be the optimistic prognosis some might think.

Finally, I think it’s important to recall that populism is cyclical. It comes and goes. It goes into hiding for years or even decades, and then reemerges at a moment of crisis. The right-wing populism of the last decade had a very particular set of features, affects, and aesthetics, and I do think that it has already reached its peak and is dying a slow but steady death–albeit on slightly different time tables in different countries. Whether right-wing populism mutates to survive in a new form–which it certainly could–or disappears altogether remains to be seen. But the 2016 MAGA-style right-wing populism of Trump and Brexit has never looked more geriatric and feeble.

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A few weeks ago, I wrote about Orbán’s loss in the April 12th Hungarian election. I posited that Orbán’s loss, coupled with Trump’s abysmal polling numbers, hinted at a possible growing fatigue with right-wing populism. A few people misinterpreted what I wrote–they thought I was talking about right-wing politics. Nothing could be further from the truth: I think right-wing politics are here to stay. But what I do think might be nearing the end of its life cycle is a certain brand of MAGA-style right-wing populism. (As I was finishing up this post, I got a notification that someone else had just published a similar thing minutes earlier–apparently others are coming to similar conclusions).

This year marks the 10-year anniversary of Trump’s electoral victory against Hillary Clinton and the Brexit referendum, twin shocks that announced the entrance of right-wing populism into the mainstream of global power politics. In the decade since, we’ve heard perhaps too much about right-wing populists, a veritable freak show that has spanned Bolsonaro in Brazil to Geert Wilders in the Netherlands. Even so, a brief refresher might be in order. There are political scientists who dedicate their lives to the study of populism, but I’m going to brutally oversimplify things by saying that populism is an approach to politics; some even describe it as a “tactic”. Either way, its essential feature is that it positions “the people” against “the elite”. Trump and the backers of Brexit harnessed the dissatisfaction of the “losers of globalization” and popular resentment for the 2007-2008 financial crisis and hitched them to a right-wing populist project. A decade ago, it was wildly successful.

Today, I’m not so sure it would be. Trump’s disapproval numbers appear bottomless–62% by the most recent poll–a record low. There is also ample buyer’s remorse for Brexit. According to a poll published earlier this year, 58% of British people think it was wrong to leave the European Union, and just 30% think it was right.

The populist decade has died many small deaths, and there are several causes for its demise. First, it has died slowly through co-optation and neutralization. Right-wing populists running on an anti-establishment, even “anti-systemic” platform have tended to embrace establishment-friendly policies once in power. Trump has gone about systematically obliterating every “populist” campaign promise he ever made–none more than his “no new wars” pledge. But he’s not the only one. Populist right-wing parties across Europe have also become “domesticated” in office: welfare chauvinists have become “business-friendly” Thatcherite neoliberals (such as the Sweden Democrats) and Euroskeptics have become pro-EU Atlanticists (like Giorgia Meloni in Italy). Even old Nigel Farage is in the midst of a transformation. In 2017, he condemned Trump’s bombing of Syria. Nine years later, he is telling the New Statesman that Iran potentially poses “a greater danger to Britain than Russia” (or at least he was in the war’s first weeks). These leaders and parties may retain elements of a populist-right presentation, but their policies are often closer to the conventional center-right.

Another factor contributing to the demise of the populist decade: these parties, personalities, and policies have been in power long enough now that they have started to become the elite–or at least, an elite. Populism is an effective strategy for unseating entrenched power, but after it’s been in power a while itself, it tends to become everything it hates. It’s a similar problem that revolutionaries face after coming to power and attempting to sustain their rule: you can only maintain that insurgent energy for so long. Eventually you become just another sclerotic regime. Trump and his analogues on the other side of the Atlantic continue to invoke the “globalist elite” boogeyman, but are probably getting diminishing returns out of it. They may lament that the left has captured many elite institutions like culture, media and the academy, but they have also cultivated something of their own right-wing counter-elite through think tanks, publications, and powerful networks in Silicon Valley. Eventually, “the people” start noticing that the right-wing populists are sending their kids to fancy schools and driving nice cars too.

A third and final point I’ll make is about Zionism and the populist right post-October 7th. Before October 7th, right-wing populists might have still been able to claim that they aim to put “the people” above elite concerns. But with the full-scale mobilization of the security-military-intelligence-media-surveillance apparatus to insulate Israel and its supporters from reality, they can no longer pretend that they care for the masses–or even America–first. The privileging of Israel above all else has meant the populist right is now preoccupied with minoritarian concerns rather than the majority. Further, right-wing veneration of Israel is usually predicated on it being a country of “high IQ elites” that needs defending against “brown thirdworldist biomass”, to use the crude online vernacular. Support for Israel is also increasingly unpopular with “the people”, meaning it has become a top-down elite project. There is nothing “populist” about a policy that sends gas and food prices soaring so that Israel can achieve regional hegemony.

But as I hinted at earlier, populism isn’t the only vehicle for right-wing politics. I suspect that after years of Trump’s buffoonish incompetence, there might be an appetite for a serious, effective, technocratic governance. At the same time, I sense there is also a desire to ditch the proles and go full right-wing Silicon Valley elitism, which could turn out to be even worse than the clownish populists of the past decade.

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Last week, I went viral in Pakistan. Very viral. I went so viral in fact that my follow-up tweet about the experience, which I posted several days later, also went semi-viral. It was all so immense, and prompted so many interactions with so many people of different political affiliations and beliefs, both celebrity and civilian, that it has inspired a new curiosity about the country. Most remarkable were all the invitations I received to have meals in people’s homes, a kindness I won’t forget.

The occasion was peace talks between the United States and Iran in Islamabad, Pakistan’s unexpectedly lush capital. If you can recall all the way back to two weeks ago–practically the Pleistocene era in internet time–many people were worried that Trump was about to use a nuclear weapon on Iran. It started when the American president wrote that “a whole civilization will die tonight” on TruthSocial. JD Vance then hinted that the US “had tools” that it hadn’t used yet, but could. In a major story run that same day, a London-based Iranian diaspora journalist named Ghocheh Habibiazad quoted an “anonymous Iranian” in Iran who had allegedly expressed support for Trump’s use of a nuclear bomb on their own country. After questions arose about the authenticity of the quote, the BBC quietly removed it from the story without explanation. But the damage was already done. The BBC’s original inclusion of the idea suggested to some that consent was being manufactured for the utilization of a tactical nuclear bomb. Then, public figures like Tucker Carlson issued statements urging people within the US chain of command to disobey orders should they be instructed to prepare for the use of the bomb. Just as the week’s atomic anxieties and fears of uncontrolled escalation reached a fevered pitch, a two-week ceasefire was announced.

Pakistan, it would turn out, was the country that played the biggest role in brokering that ceasefire. Other countries played major supporting roles, particularly Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. Meanwhile, Europe was remarkable only for its complete absence in the mediation efforts.

It wasn’t the first time this particular group of countries–Pakistan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt–had come together in recent weeks. Indeed, there was ample diplomatic “buzz” that the quartet could evolve into a more formal bloc of some kind. I was asked by my editors at UnHerd to evaluate the group and whether its emergence reflected broader trends. The piece ended up being a joy to report and to write. I got to speak with Chas Freeman, a former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia who also served as Nixon’s interpreter during his historic 1972 visit to China–coincidentally, the last time that Pakistan scored such an enormous diplomatic victory. Ahead of Nixon’s visit that year, it was Pakistan that facilitated communication between the United States and China.

Viktor Orbán is out in Hungary. Europe’s enfant terrible for the last 16 years, the former liberal-turned-obstinate-pillar of the “conservative internationale” conceded defeat last night. He was ousted by Peter Magyar, an erstwhile ally who split from the outgoing Fidesz a few years ago. Magyar’s new Tisza Party (“Respect and Freedom Party”) is a generic center-right, pro-EU outfit, but managed to win 138 out of 199 seats in parliament; this means it secured the two-thirds majority necessary to change the constitution. Not since 2010, when Fidesz won a two-thirds majority in a vote described as the “revolution in the polling booth”, has a political party scored such a crushing victory in a Hungarian election.

Orbán’s defeat has implications beyond little Hungary. Taken together with Trump’s abysmal approval ratings and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s failed referendum last month, it hints at a global fatigue with right-wing populism–and the growing toxicity of the Trump “brand”. At the same time, a possibly related phenomenon: the “post-liberalism” trend of recent years appears to be falling out of fashion in intellectual circles. In Budapest, Orbán sought to cultivate his own incubator of conservative thought. A new network of think tanks, publications, and fellowships was created with the aim of nurturing thinkers on the right. In a sea of “globalist liberalism”, Hungary would serve as a bastion of conservative freedom, unencumbered by the hysterical dictates of Woke. But what did it do, really, other than give a faint intellectual veneer to complaints about Drag Queen Story Hour? The problem with it is that it was all negation. It lacked a positive message of its own. In this way, it was not unlike Russian propaganda, with which there is much overlap: it’s not that there aren’t major problems with Western liberalism, but rather that Putin–and Orbán, too, it would turn out–does not have an appealing counter offer. For now, it looks like Trump’s disastrous presidency is poised to inspire a liberal renaissance, and send much of the world running into the arms of globalist elites, begging to be taken back.

But back to Hungary. The campaign leading up to yesterday’s vote was an especially acrimonious one. It was marked by allegations of foreign interference, purported sabotage of a gas pipeline in Serbia, and leaks of private phone calls. But the insurgent Tisza’s overriding theme was anti-corruption. Indeed, Magyar ran a pretty standard “anti-corruption” campaign–a well-worn but effective tactic for unseating long-running regimes. It is an especially familiar formula for those of us who are students of Central and Eastern Europe. But what’s effective at winning elections has not always translated into effective governance. In fact, anti-corruption campaigns have a habit of becoming vehicles for corruption once their party takes office. The fall of Orbán ally Nikola Gruevski in North Macedonia was one of the most glaring examples. Prime Minister Gruevski was brought down by the center-left SDSM led by Zoran Zaev, who promised an end to corruption. The country even opened a special office for prosecuting corruption cases in 2015, and its female prosecutors received glowing write ups in Western media that likened them to a crime-fighting “Charlie’s Angels”. Lo and behold, once in power, SDSM ended up being spectacularly corrupt themselves; even “Charlie’s Angels” were eventually implicated in graft. And who could forget Serbian leader Aleksandar Vučić’s widely heralded anti-corruption crusade, on which his party rode to power in 2012 and which defined his earliest years in office? To think that Vučić could ever present himself as an earnest voice against corruption is laughable today.

This is not to rain on anyone’s parade. I, too, feel a sense of relief that Orbán lost. But the implications are many, and I have not yet processed them all. I am acutely aware, for instance, that this is very bad news for Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik and President Vučić. Orbán was their champion, their bridge to Trump, their big Magyar brother across the border who could throw his weight around in the international arena more than they could. Who does Dodik have now? And what about Vučić? In Europe at least, they are alone. Of particular interest is the fate of the sale of NIS–the Petroleum Industry of Serbia, majority-owned by Gazprom–to the Hungarian multinational oil and gas company, MOL. The entire deal seemingly hinged on Orbán’s unique ability to act as a bridge between Washington, which has sanctioned NIS, and Russia, which is selling its majority share of it. With Orbán gone, the status of that deal is unclear.

But perhaps today is not the day to worry about all of that. Perhaps today is just a day for remembering that things can change.