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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.

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I have a new piece out in The Baffler today, “Yugoslavia Calling”. A few month ago, editor Matthew Shen Goodman contacted me and asked if I would be interested in writing something on the theme of mercenaries, foreign fighters and freelancers. The piece began to take shape in my mind almost immediately. The war drew so many losers, outcasts, ideologues, fanatics, sadists, and entrepreneurs looking for a buck (I guess every war becomes a magnet for such types), that there were already stories I knew I wanted to tell. There are many more that didn’t make it into the final piece.

I began researching the piece with a true distaste for the violent men who felt called to the region to fight in a foreign war, for a cause that was ostensibly not their own. I judged them as losers or sadists, people who couldn’t succeed as civilians. But then, at some point during my research, I think I started to acquire a little bit of empathy for them. Were their motivations always all that different from the human rights activists and politicians demanding humanitarian intervention? There were differences, sure, but there was also overlap. Exploring this tension, between the international community’s cosmopolitan concern, and the motivations of the foreign fighters, became a major theme of the piece.

I hope you enjoy the piece, and as ever, I welcome your feedback.

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I have a new piece about Turkey’s position in the US and Israeli war on Iran in the spring edition of the New Statesman. The cover is illustrated with an image of Trump eating a chocolate Easter egg wrapped in a foil globe: Trump devouring the world. My editors were interested in hearing my thoughts on how Turkey is navigating this war, as well as a general sketch of Turkey-in-NATO ahead of the alliance’s summit in Ankara this summer.

I went to a different summit in Istanbul this week called the Stratcom Summit, something put on by the government’s Directorate of Communications. It would have been useful for my piece in the Statesman. This year’s event was on the theme of “Disruption in the International System: Crises, Narratives, and the Search for Order”; unsurprisingly, much of the focus was on the war on Iran. There were familiar names and faces from diplomacy and regional governments (including a few from the Balkans) but the two most important speeches were from Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan and Director of the National Intelligence Agency (MIT) Ibrahim Kalin. I wanted to write up some thoughts from those speeches, though I will give more attention to Fidan’s since it was more topical.

First off, I hadn’t expected Fidan’s speech to be delivered in English, as most other officials gave theirs in Turkish. This meant that his words were definitely intended for a wide international audience. It was also a much more confident delivery than I’d seen from him before, and, I think, did what it had to do, which was project an image of an assertive Turkey amid regional war and crisis. The speech also had a bit of an “I-told-you-so” tone. Fidan repeatedly emphasized that the world–or perhaps just the West–is only just now catching up with what Turkey has been saying for years:

The present state of global governance is dysfunctional, paralyzed and unsustainable.

And this systemic disruption did not occur overnight.

It is the result of structural decay that Türkiye has systematically exposed for years.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s call for global justice and for the reform of international institutions was not a political slogan, it was a diagnosis.

A diagnosis many ignored until the crisis arrived at their own doorstep.

From the rostrum of the United Nations to countless multilateral platforms, we consistently sounded the alarm.

At the time, many preferred the illusion of their geopolitical comfort zones.

For years, as long as the cost of dysfunctional order was paid elsewhere, many were content with maintaining a self-serving status quo.

But today, that illusion has shattered.

Those who comfortably benefited from the unjust system are facing a reality as the crises finally touch their own shores.

I interpreted this mostly as a message for the West, and perhaps even a response to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at Davos in January about the imperiled liberal order. At the time, many criticized Carney for the fact that he had only felt inspired to describe the deficiencies of that order when Western countries were finally the ones being threatened; you’ll recall that at this year’s Davos, the big fear was that the United States was about to annex Greenland. Critics pointed out that people like Carney hadn’t been too troubled about the hypocrisies of the liberal order when it was only non-Western countries that were subjected to violations of their sovereignty and occupation or annexation of their territory.

Something else I found noteworthy about Fidan’s speech was the conspicuous lack of criticism of the United States. In Fidan’s view, Israel is the aggressor, and Israel is responsible for the region’s malaise. From Turkey’s perspective, this careful sidestepping makes sense: US-Turkey relations have generally improved during Trump’s second term, and they probably don’t want to mess that up. The Trump administration has done several things that the Turkish government has wanted it to do: it lifted sanctions on Syria, pushed for the full integration of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) into the Syrian army, and reached a tentative deal to drop criminal charges against Turkey’s Halkbank over its business with Iranian entities.

But I also found it interesting because it somewhat mirrors a position increasingly held by many “restrainer” conservatives, realists, as well as some leftists in the United States. It’s a position that’s emerged from discussions about Israel and the United States that have only intensified since the start of the war on Iran. The debate centers around which country–Israel or the United States–is leading or instigating policy. Is Israel merely an “aircraft carrier” of the United States–a local, militarized outpost of the American empire that takes its orders directly from Washington? Or has the United States government been heavily influenced (and perhaps even captured) by Israeli interests and the powerful Israel lobby, who have exploited Trump’s vanity to achieve ends mostly beneficial to Israel but potentially detrimental to the United States? In other words, Fidan’s decision to sidestep criticism of Trump while criticizing Israel actually aligns with a growing tendency within American conservative thought.

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Pretty little Slovenia. The Alpine state of just over two million people is roughly the size of New Jersey, but it punches far above its weight in international intrigue. First, there is the country’s native daughter and American first lady, Melanija Knavs, who was plucked from relative obscurity and brought to the United States to model by an Epstein associate who would later introduce her to Donald Trump. Then there was the Russian sleeper cell: In late 2022, a “normal-looking” Ljubljana couple with two children were arrested by police in one of the most secretive operations in the country’s history. It turns out the pair were “illegals”–Russian agents under deep cover, living with false identities. Not even their children knew who their parents really were, or that they were Russian.

The latest scandal is perhaps the most consequential, as it involves foreign intelligence agents engaged in campaign manipulation–and the tactics of the mafia–at the highest levels of power. On Sunday, Slovenia held its parliamentary elections, in an atmosphere charged with acrimony. The incumbent left-liberal coalition led by the Svoboda (“freedom”) Movement looks to have eked out the slenderest of victories, which would dash the hopes of the right-wing Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS) of former Prime Minister Janez Janša. However, as of this morning, there was a less than 7,800-vote difference between Svoboda and SDS, meaning once mail-in ballots are counted, the official result, which will be announced on April 7, could look slightly different. But what currently looks like a very modest win for Svoboda came with a steep cost.

A few weeks ago, Slovenia’s indispensable Mladina (“youth”) published an investigative piece by Borut Mekina about Israeli meddling in the campaign. According to their investigation, SDS officials, including Janša, worked with the private Israeli spy firm Black Cube on an elaborate operation to manipulate public perceptions ahead of the vote. Black Cube engaged in “covert surveillance and wiretapping” of officials from the governing coalition. Posing as potential investors, Black Cube employees wined and dined government officials while recording them in secret. Then, a few weeks ahead of the vote, an anonymous website appeared online in English: anti-corruption2026.com. The site linked to clandestinely recorded videos of officials from Svoboda discussing their political relationships; in many cases, the content of these conversations is more embarrassing than criminal. But Janša and SDS maintain that the videos reveal evidence of corruption in the government of Prime Minister Robert Golob. Among the most contentious issues involved was the purchase of a partially derelict building in Ljubljana for several times what it cost just a few years earlier. Meanwhile, Janša has admitted to meeting with a Black Cube associate, but denies hiring the firm to work for SDS directly. Slovenia’s Intelligence and Security Agency (SOVA) has confirmed that Black Cube indeed interfered in the campaign.

But there is more going on here than meets the eye. While Black Cube is officially private, it has extensive ties to the Israeli government: the firm was founded by former Mossad agents, and one of the Israelis that Janša met with last year was Black Cube advisor Giora Eiland, who used to serve as head of Israel’s National Security Council. This matters because of the position Slovenia has taken on Israel in recent years. Last year, Slovenia became the first country in Europe to impose an arms embargo on Israel. It also banned Israeli cabinet members Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich from entering the country. In December, the public broadcaster pulled out of Eurovision in protest of Israel’s participation. But it was reports that Slovenia would join South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that drew the greatest ire in Tel Aviv.

On Friday, the Israeli MFA tweeted:

Indeed, on March 12, Slovenian Foreign Minister Tanja Fajon had announced that Slovenia was reversing its decision and would not join the ICJ genocide case. She said that national security experts had told officials that joining the lawsuit “would jeopardize Slovenia’s national security”, warning that “many of the country’s cyber defense systems are of Israeli origin.” When asked if the country had been subjected to external pressure, she answered in the affirmative. “It is clear that these pressures exist, we are all subjected to them by superpowers, and ultimately this must be taken into account when deciding,” she said. “But again, one thing is principled stances, another might be questions of national security.”

Given the timing of this announcement, some have speculated that Israel agreed to let up on some of the campaign interference in exchange for Slovenia’s agreement not to join South Africa’s genocide case at the ICJ. Either way, it’s clear that the Slovenian government was subjected to extensive external pressure.

In Alpine miniature, the Slovenian example thus reveals the way Israeli intelligence agents manipulate the internal affairs of foreign states. Using mafia-style tactics of questionable legality, and aligning with odious figures like Janša, they shape campaigns, how populations perceive their own leadership, and how and if sovereign countries engage with international humanitarian law.

The EU and NATO–usually rather vocal about the whole foreign interference thing–now have to decide if they will actually confront this or look the other way. Just a few years ago, a Romanian election was cancelled when the winner was thought to have secured his victory with pro-Russian propaganda on TikTok. Israel’s foreign interference in Slovenia has been far more egregious and aggressive. And if it’s not stopped now, it may be coming to an election near you.

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I am trying to keep most of my work un-paywalled, but I have decided to paywall this one. This is a reader-supported newsletter, which means I rely on paid subscribers to keep it going, so consider becoming a paid subscriber today if you can! I am grateful to each and one of my subscribers for their continued support and encouragement.

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Beginning at around 9:40 am local time yesterday, while most Americans were fast asleep, the US and Israel launched a new war on Iran. No clear objective has been provided to the American public. In a speech announcing the attack, President Trump offered a list of grievances as justification, many of them ancient history by American standards: the Iranian hostage crisis (1980), the Beirut barracks bombing (1983), and the Iraq War (2003). It reminded me a bit of Putin’s speech on February 21, 2022, in which he set forth his own list of grievances about Ukraine drawn from Russia’s much longer, deeper historical memory: territorial arrangements from the 16th century, the October Revolution of 1917, and Khrushchev’s 1954 transfer of Crimea to Ukraine, among other excuses proffered for the “Special Military Operation”.

The two speeches made me think about Joseph Brodsky’s essay, “Blood, Lies and the Trigger of History” published during the Bosnian War in 1993:

Evocations of history here are bare nonsense. Whenever one pulls the trigger in order to rectify history’s mistake, one lies. For history makes no mistakes, since it has no purpose. One always pulls the trigger out of self-interest and quotes history to avoid responsibility or pangs of conscience. No man possesses sufficient retrospective ability to justify his deeds -- murder especially -- in extemporaneous categories, least of all a head of state.

We have alternately heard that this war is about destroying whatever remains of Iran’s nuclear program (which we were already told was “obliterated” in the last US and Israeli attack on Iran in June), and that it is about regime change. Indeed, the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, was killed last night, but that does not mean that the government is about to fall. The usual justifications about human rights have been rolled out by some peripheral figures but have never sounded less convincing or more selective. Perhaps the clear lack of objective conceals a darker agenda: many experts believe that Israel would be satisfied with a ruined country fractured by civil war. A country mired in chaos and sectarian bloodshed would pose no threat to Israel. It is a tactic Israel has tried in Syria with some success, if you can call it that. What’s remarkable is that this war on Iran, which has already killed at least three Americans, has no discernible strategic benefit for the United States.

I posted an observation on X yesterday that generated a lot of talk and hate. I wrote that I’d seen a lot of people complaining that there was no propaganda campaign in the lead-up to this war, no effort to convince the American public that we were at imminent risk. There was a rather haphazard, tacked-on attempt by Steve Witkoff to advance the idea that Iran was a “week away” from being able to build a nuclear bomb, but this messaging came late and contradicted the administration’s prior reports about an obliterated nuclear program. Indeed, the Trump administration’s foreign policy is warned over boomer neoconservativism, but unlike the neocons before him, he hadn’t tried to give the war on Iran a clearly defined objective or coherent propaganda narrative. On X, I suggested that this was because he no longer has to: there have been no mass anti-war protests like the kind that accompanied the runup to the invasion of Iraq. Several people objected to this, claiming that protests in 2003 only started after the war began, but this, as anyone who participated in those protests remembers, is false: there were massive protests against the war before even a single missile was launched. I suggested that the reason the government can count on our relative inaction is that the American people are largely pacified by technology, utterly stupefied and numb from online shopping and personalized algorithms mainlining a steady stream of mind-melting short-form video content to each individual. Of course, there are still pockets of virulent opposition on college campuses and in the streets which I don’t wish to diminish, but in wars past, protest was truly a mass phenomenon. And I do think that we are more atomized and more pacified today. Back in 2003, we hadn’t yet completely retreated into our screens.

However, I don’t think that’s entirely right. Or rather, I think it’s part of the story, but not the whole thing. There is a parallel process at play, which has something to do with autocratization (yes, I said it), a trend observable in liberal democracies as well as authoritarian regimes. For years, theorists of “authoritarian neoliberalism” have written that after the 2008 financial crisis, leaders in capitalist countries shifted “towards more undemocratic and coercive forms of neoliberalism”. As political economist Ian Bruff has written, authoritarian neoliberalism can involve direct repression, surveillance, and coercion against dissent, but it means more than “the exercise of brute coercive force”; in fact, it also manifests in attempts to “insulate certain policies and institutional practices from social and political dissent”. Indeed, the planned invasion of Iraq was preceded by months of political discussion, hearings and congressional resolutions, as well as the aforementioned anti-war demonstrations. The point isn’t that any of that was effective at stopping the war; the point is that it was still considered necessary. Now, the government doesn’t even feel like it needs to come up with an elaborate pretext, phony intelligence, or the theatre of congressional hearings that would lend the war a faint veneer of quasi-democratic legitimacy. Trump just does things. Indeed, his acts of aggressive unilateralism are often marked by surprise, which requires keeping the public in the dark. This means there is no pantomime of democratic buy-in, no fake “procedure”, and no sustained, coherent propaganda campaign.

Of course, Trump is the most extreme, “mask-off” version of this tendency, but I do feel that much of the West is developing in this same general direction: democracies are getting less democratic, as politicians feel less and less that they need to seek the consent of the governed–or even just the appearance of consent–before undertaking wildly unpopular action. We are in an era of governance by “you can just do things”, wherein the messiness of liberal democracy looks more and more like an obstacle to keeping up with our rivals.

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The current US military build-up in the Middle East is the largest in more than two decades–not since the 2003 Invasion of Iraq has Washington deployed so many military assets to the region. Armchair analysts, Polymarket gamblers, and regional experts have been predicting a US attack on Iran since last month, but there is still ample confusion about whether one will be forthcoming, and if so, why: the objective of such an attack is still unclear. To help clarify the stakes, explore various scenarios, and understand the positions of governments in the region, I turned to Giorgio Cafiero, the CEO of Gulf State Analytics and an adjunct assistant professor at Georgetown University. (Follow Giorgio on X)

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Last week, I published an article about Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik’s many lobbyists and the triumphant photo-ops with MAGA personalities that they arranged for him on a recent trip to Washington. For those just tuning in, Dodik resigned as president of Republika Srpska (Bosnia’s sub-state Serb-majority entity) last year as part of an opaque deal with Washington to have US sanctions on himself and his associates lifted, but remains leader of the ruling Alliance of Independent Social Democrats (SNSD). This means that despite his official departure, he still retains major sway over politics in Republika Srpska.

Republika Srpska in the News

In addition to the meetings in Washington, Dodik’s lobbyists also appear to have secured him a bit of exposure in downmarket American media. On February 9th, two op-eds about Bosnia ran in the Washington Times, a newspaper with a rather eccentric origin story: The paper was founded in 1982 by the Unification Church, more often known as the “Moonies”, a Christian cult established by a self-proclaimed messiah from South Korea. Accused of brainwashing its members, the Moonies are perhaps most famous for their mass weddings held in football stadiums, in which thousands of couples marry at the same time.

The first Washington Times piece about Bosnia is titled “Republika Srpska deserves independence”, an op-ed written by Deputy Commentary Editor Anath Hartmann. A quick perusal of Hartmann’s other work reveals an arch-neocon perspective (e.g. staunch defenses of the IDF bombing hospitals), and the introduction to his article about Republika Srpska is perfectly tailored to a neoconservative audience in Washington:

Prominently displayed on the outer wall of the Iranian Embassy in Sarajevo is a sign that reads, “In memory of Iranian men who sacrificed their lives for peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina.”

These words might surprise Americans, many of whom likely don’t know about the long history of the Islamist world’s inroads in the Balkans.

It’s clear where this is going. The message here is “support Republika Srpska’s independence from Bosnia because the rest of the country is run by Hezbollah/Hamas/ISIS”. It’s absurd, of course, but once again we see the now familiar propaganda tactic: Your enemies are our enemies. We are on the same side.

But I couldn’t help but marvel at this framing for a different reason. While it is certainly true that Iran smuggled military aid to Bosnia in contravention of the arms embargo during the war in the 1990s, in more recent times, it is Serbia that has cultivated close ties with Iran. These days, direct flights operate between Belgrade and Tehran, Iranian drones are showcased at defense exhibitions in Serbia, and Iran still refuses to recognize Kosovo’s independence. If you’re still not convinced, here’s President Vučić on last month’s protests in Iran:

I ask people to read the books Operation Ajax and All the Shah’s Men. This was the 1953 operation, when (the last Shah of Iran, Mohammad) Pahlavi came to power…Look today at how Mossad and the CIA are carrying out operations using the same formula after 73 years. And here, some were dreaming, 25 years later, that they could repeat what happened on October 5, 2000, the overthrow of former President Slobodan Milošević.

Vučić sees the recent protests in Iran as a Western-backed regime change effort. In contrast to Serbia’s wary posture towards the West, the Bosnian government in Sarajevo has made explicit its desire to join NATO. This has meant that Sarajevo’s relations with Iran have actually been somewhat strained in recent years, while Iran’s relations with Serbia have grown stronger.

Of course, Dodik and Vučić are different men; there are some minor differences in the foreign policy orientation of Belgrade and Banja Luka. But given their efforts to display unity (at least publicly), the idea that the Iran of today is a close ally of Bosniaks and an enemy of the Serbs is absurd. (For what it’s worth, I am not disparaging Serbia for its relations with Iran, and think efforts to strengthen relations with non-Western countries are a good thing).

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The rest of the op-ed is an attempt to inspire fear about the alleged Islamist threat simmering in placid Sarajevo. Near the op-ed’s conclusion, Dodik is quoted (emphasis mine):

Nothing good lies ahead for Western values under the current setup.... Young people are leaving. The birth rate is in decline. Under Presidents Obama and Biden, Srpska lost many of the rights granted to it under the Dayton Accords, Mr. Dodik said.

It is strange to see Dodik lament that Bosnia is not fertile ground for “Western values” in this way. Most observers of Serbian politics will know that Dodik regularly rails against the West; indeed, the only way I can imagine him invoking “Western values” is to mock them. For example, here’s a line from a letter sent from the National Assembly of Republika Srpska to US Senator Jeanne Shaheen in 2023 (emphasis mine):

The utter disregard for international law, the rule of law, the Constitutions of BiH and the Republic of Srpska, as well as the hubris expressed through the use of sanctions and threats against the elected officials and institutions of the Republic of Srpska reflect the hollowness of “Western values” and represent an existential threat to the Republic of Srpska.

There’s something unexpectedly interesting here, which is a certain elasticity around Serbian identity in the age of Trump. At the recent Munich Security Conference, it became clear that there are two competing visions of what “the West” means in elite Western circles: one is a liberal vision upheld by the Democratic Party and predicated on NATO and shared liberal values; the other is a conservative vision, espoused in a speech by Secretary of State Marco Rubio at Munich, which is instead rooted in shared religion, civilization, race, and culture. As Nathalie Tocci, director of Istituto Affari Internazionali, put it:

The current political dominance of the conservative interpretation has made it possible for Dodik to invoke “Western values” in a non-derogatory way: in short, when the Democrats are in office, Serbs are emphatically not Western, perhaps even enemies of the West. However, when right-wing conservatives are in power, it’s possible for Serbs to move closer to the West or even become part of it, at least provisionally. But once again, Dodik is also playing to Western sensibilities here. For many outside the West, the notion that there is a civilizational West and a liberal Atlanticist West constitutes a “distinction without a difference”. As I wrote in my piece “Joining the West” in 2022, Balkan leaders have described NATO accession itself as a “civilizational” choice.

Moving on, the second op-ed is titled “An Islamist State on NATO’s Border?”, and was written by Max Primorac, a research associate at the conservative Heritage Foundation. Primorac attempts to do the same thing Hartmann does: make Bosniaks look odiously Muslim and radical, and therefore somehow threatening to NATO (nevermind the fact that there are Muslim countries in NATO already). Primorac has other strong opinions about how to reshape Bosnia. At a panel discussion on the Dayton Accords in Zagreb in December, he said that the only solution for Croats in Bosnia was to form a “third entity”. In other words, that in addition to the Muslim-majority Federation of Bosnia and Serb-majority Republika Srpska, that another piece of Bosnia should be carved out for Bosnian Croats. Once again, he used a civilizational framework to advance his argument:

The situation for Croats is so difficult that the only way for them to survive is the formation of their own entity. They are the only truly pro-Western people in BiH and can be an important link between Serbs and Bosniaks.

An Epstein Associate and Modeling Agency Founder in Banja Luka

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AOC’s big foreign policy debut at the Munich Security Conference last week generated much chatter about a potential 2028 presidential run. It was not that her performance was exceptional exactly, but rather that everyone vaguely left-of-center is desperate for a sliver of optimism from their representative politicians, many of whom have been oddly passive in the face of Trump. To a parched man stumbling through the desert in the noon-day sun, AOC was a shimmering mirage: promising from a distance, but elusive up close.

The Munich Security Conference is attended by the world’s defense and security elite, making it a kind of Davos for decision-makers whose religion is Atlanticism. AOC’s message was perfectly tailored to them: she trotted out the Bidenite “autocracy vs democracy” framework which I spent an entire essay dismantling over at the Ideas Letter last month. By using this framework, AOC communicated to the elite that she belonged at Munich, that she essentially shared their liberal Atlanticist vision of the world, albeit with a few caveats. Among them was her “working class perspective” on US foreign policy. In AOC’s telling, income inequality causes authoritarianism. While I appreciated the novel injection of income inequality into a discussion of democracy and our foreign policy, the point that AOC tried to make was muddled and incoherent. On the one hand, yes, income inequality can lead to polarization, scapegoating, and the rise of right-wing populism. But “authoritarianism” doesn’t quite fit here: you could also argue that left-wing governments have eliminated inequality through authoritarian means. How do you think radical wealth redistribution happens? But I get that what we’re talking about here is an essentially liberal Atlanticist conception of authoritarianism, which means any government that is opposed to the United States and NATO. Still, even AOC appeared to understand that “right-wing populism” was a far better term. At a more confident appearance at TU Berlin later in the week, AOC used “right-wing populism” in the places where she’d used “authoritarian” at the security conference. Here, you could see two slightly different messages for two different audiences: for the security think tank set, who sought reassurance that she would assume the Democrats’ aggressive posture towards America’s enemies, she used “authoritarian”; for left-leaning academics, she used the more precise “right-wing populism”.

Further, AOC’s invocation of the autocracy vs. democracy framework implies that the United States needs to defend democracy abroad. This presumably means shoring up our commitments to NATO (AOC invoked the “trans-Atlantic partnership” more than once) and democracy promotion efforts that take money away from programs that could be used to benefit the American working class. Countries cannot have both a beefed up militarism and robust social welfare: just ask European leaders about the difficult choices they’re making now about their defense. AOC therefore still needs to explain how costly efforts to “uphold democracy” abroad constitute a “foreign policy for the working class”.

In addition, AOC was emphatic that the US needed to “revisit its commitments to foreign aid”: yet another expensive item to add to our sprawling tab! At risk of sounding like a stuffy killjoy, where is the money going to come from to pay for it all? I can already hear the objections: “Lily, we’re going to tax the rich!” Suffice to say, I remain skeptical that this is really possible in the United States, which means that we’re probably just going to end up in the same trap that older, less telegenic Democratic Party leaders have set for us before: bankrolling war and propping up corrupt governments in foreign countries to the detriment of our own abandoned working class, who in turn will be vulnerable to the manipulations of any right-wing populist that comes along.

At another point in her performance at Munich, AOC spoke about American hypocrisy. She described hypocrisies as liabilities. What AOC therefore seemed to gesture at was a newer, better “rules-based order” whereby things are mostly the same as they were before, minus the hypocrisies. The divergent responses to Gaza and Ukraine loomed over this part of the discussion. However, the notion that we can defend democracy abroad without hypocrisy demonstrates a limited understanding of the history of our foreign policy. Indeed, the lions’ share of our hypocrisies have been rooted in our democracy promotion efforts, and have often been framed as a righteous “standing up to authoritarianism”. It has been this belief–that the United States, because it calls itself a democracy, has divine permission to ride roughshod over international law and the sovereignty of other states–that has made our foreign policy hypocritical. AOC’s embrace of Biden’s autocracy vs democracy frame is therefore at odds with her mission to get rid of American hypocrisy.

Many critics have fixated on AOC’s stumbling over a question about Taiwan. In summary, AOC was asked if the United States should defend Taiwan in the event that China were to invade. Of course, Washington’s policy on what to do in such a scenario has long been one of strategic ambiguity: the US will not commit publicly to any specific response to Chinese action on Taiwan. After an agonizing pause filled with lots of fits and starts, AOC eventually eked out a response that hinted at this policy of strategic ambiguity, but it came across as amateurish. Predictably, the response to pointing this out was ad hominem attacks mixed with delusional wishful thinking. “I bet you couldn’t answer that question!”, “Rubio and Vance could never come up with an answer that good!”, “what about Trump’s gaffes?” I fear that this represents a dangerous level of complacency. At this point, everyone should know that this is how the social media ecosystem operates and therefore be able to anticipate attacks rather than complain about how unfair they are after the fact. The best way to prepare is to work to patch up vulnerabilities, not attack anyone who points out self-evident weaknesses that any voter would pick up on. And yes, presentation matters. Voters want to feel reassured that their elected officials can take decisive action when necessary, and that they are confident and well-prepared. Trump’s deviation from the norm does not absolve Democrats of this.

But even a rotten-hearted cynic like me must concede that it wasn’t all bad. At a talk at TU Berlin later in the week, AOC appeared stronger and more self-assured. She cautioned against the temptation of political cynicism, sharing her own story of overcoming it. Here, her millennial relatibility was an asset rather than an embarrassment: she let her story speak for itself. She also warned about the dangers of atomization, of a world in which we call an Uber to take us to the airport rather than get a ride from friends, and where the bonds of community and family are dissolved to make way for the market. Here I could see flashes of AOC at her best: not as an extremist firebrand, as the right so often depicts her, but as a consensus-seeking bridge builder. It’s a perception that has made her the most popular candidate for 2028 among Democrats under 30 by far: 30% of Democrats between 18-22 and 35% of Democrats between 23-29 say they would vote for her if the presidential primary were held today. But despite this formidable position she’s earned in the party, her lackluster trip to Germany suggests that it’s not nearly enough.

I want to write about other places and things, but unfortunately, Aleksandar Vučić and Milorad Dodik keep providing us with new material. And when Serbian politics intersect with American corruption, I am congenitally incapable of holding my tongue. Between the Epstein files and Republika Srpksa’s filings in the FARA database, I have been spending an inordinate amount of time on the website of the US Department of Justice. The story emerging out of Republika Srpska looks like it was generated by putting a bunch of recent international headlines in a blender and reassembling them in new combinations. Trump, Epstein, Mossad, Iran, even ICE: it’s all there. This report, which barely scratches the surface, is so long that I had to divide it up into two separate posts.

Last week, you’ll recall I wrote about Dodik’s two big international trips: first to Israel, where he received an award in the Knesset, and then to the United States, where he attended Trump’s Prayer Breakfast and met with top administration officials, including Pete Hegseth and Karoline Leavitt. The trip to Washington was viewed as a major success by Dodik supporters, and for good reason: Just a few months ago, the former President of Republika Srpska was under crippling US sanctions imposed by the outgoing Obama administration in 2017. But last fall, Dodik managed to get the Trump administration to lift those sanctions. And last week, he attended an NBA game in Washington and successfully nabbed photo-ops with many political celebrities, an astonishing turnaround for a man who’d been blacklisted by the United States until only recently. Now we know how he managed to execute the mother of all comebacks: by spending millions of dollars on lobbying firms, including one run by a former Israeli arms dealer who also used to work for Mossad.

Dodik has a nasty lobbying habit (I’ve detailed some of those relationships before). He has spent unusually large sums of money purchasing American influence from Western lobbying firms while railing against Western influence in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Though he fashions himself a sovereigntist a la Orbán, Dodik seeks not to rid Bosnia of foreign influence but rather to swap one foreign patronage and influence network for another. In concrete terms, he wants to get rid of the liberal, “globalist cabal” that is more friendly to Bosniak interests and replace it with the right-wing MAGA conservative network that is more friendly to Serbian and Croatian (read: Christian) interests. This all sounds crude and unfortunately very civilizational, but it is how Dodik and many others in Bosnia view the stakes.

At a press conference on Tuesday, Bosnian Minister for Foreign Affairs, Elmedin Konaković, publicized the name of Dodik’s newest lobbying firm, the Israeli-Canadian company Dickens and Madson, though documents describing the relationship have already been on the FARA website for months. FARA, for those unaware, is an acronym for the US Foreign Agents’ Registrations Act, which mandates that “foreign agents”–usually lobbyists, lawyers, and consultants–working on behalf of foreign governments register their working relationship with the Department of Justice. In one FARA filing that Dickens and Madson has with Republika Srpska, the aim of the relationship is stated clearly: “The Republic of Srpska seeks to secure the support of the United States and obtain independence from Bosnia and Herzegovina.”

According to the same filing, Dodik paid a retainer of $2 million in early September, followed by two subsequent payments of $1 million each later that month, for a total of $4 million paid to Dickens and Madson in September alone. For that hefty price tag, Dickens and Madson agreed to “provide advice and counsel” to Repubika Srpska and “to advocate before the executive and/or legislative branches” of the US government to “secure political support to consolidate and strengthen the political position of the Republic of Srpska”.

Dickens and Madson also agreed “to arrange meetings with government officials and provide public relations services to further [Republika Srpska’s] goals and activities.” In other words, we now have a better idea about who arranged all those photo-ops with Trump officials.

Before we get into the eccentric Israeli personality who is Dodik’s Montreal-based lobbyist for Dickens and Madson, it’s important to stress that Republika Srpska is paying many other lobbying firms as well. The sub-state entity also employs former Illinois governor and ex-con Rod Blagojevich. His lobbying firm is called RRB Strategies, and according to FARA filings, it has already met one of its goals, which was having US sanctions on Dodik and his associates lifted. Other aims as yet unmet include working to eliminate Bosnia’s Office of the High Representative (OHR), a colonial-style position currently occupied by German diplomat Christian Schmidt; the OHR possesses sweeping powers over Bosnia’s internal affairs. Another of Blagojevic’s goals for Republika Srpska is to “encourage legal procedure” against Schmidt for “illegally occupying” the Office of High Representative.

Another American lobbying firm retained by Republika Srpska is Stokes Strategies, which arranges congressional visits and handles most of the for-profit business that Republika Srpska conducts. Yet another lobbying firm enlisted by Republika Srpska is MO Strategies, headed by veteran Republican advisor Martin Obst, who receives $10,000 per month for his services. Also retained is Zell and Associates, which has agreed to engage in “efforts intended to influence US government officials and segments of the US public”; Republika Srpska’s lobbyist at Zell and Associates is Israeli-American lawyer and chairman of Republicans Overseas Israel Marc Zell. Other registered agents working on behalf of the entity include GS2 Law, Schifanelli Law, the Texas-based law firm McGinnis Lochridge, and Becker and Poliakoff, which, among other things, will “promote the public re-examination of the Dayton Peace Accords within the United States”.

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