I headed off for my appointment with Nathan Holmes, a Reform town councilor. We met at 10am at the Kings, across from Furness House — recognizable by its smashed windows and long-closed post office — and a statue of Sir Henry Schneider, one of the original town fathers. Inside the pub elderly punters nursed their second or third pint of the morning (the Kings keeps miraculous hours) and a lad of 15 waved at me from a window table. We introduced ourselves and Nathan explained he was in fact 29 and a famous drinker. I mentioned that some years ago, a friend of mine had been in the habit of scoring drugs in Barrow, finishing his evenings in a nightclub known as HMS Chlamydia. “It was a barge,” Nathan explained with all the authority of a seventh-generation Barrovian, “whose owner was banned from opening premises on dry land.”

Heady with the well-being that is the special gift of an Admiral Old J Pineapple with Coke and ice, Nathan and I stepped out of the Kings and into sheeting rain. As we walked, he pointed out charity shops; a pawn shop; a vaping emporium; an arts venue whose air conditioning caused an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease in 2012, wafting the fatal bacteria over passersby and killing seven, and which is now closed permanently because of an asbestos leak; a market hall which the council shuttered on February 17 for the same reason; and a former working men’s club that was consumed by fire in 2017 but whose charred facade still stands, its garden full of refuse and its surfaces covered in graffiti (“Council stole my fukin car park”). At the “Gaza Strip”, a line of boarded up pubs, clubs and other defunct palaces of pleasure, it was time to part. Nathan extended a hand. “Welcome to Barradise.”

Barrow-in-Furness is the quintessentially left-behind former boomtown. It lies at the end of the Furness Peninsula — “Britain’s longest cul-de-sac” — at the entrance to Morecambe Bay. The town council of which Nathan Holmes is a member has few powers; important decisions are taken 34 miles and several light years away in the Lake District town of Kendal, seat of the unitary authority of Westmorland and Furness into which Barrow was unwillingly shoehorned in 2023. In fact, many Barrovians argue the town’s decline started in 1974, when it was hived off from Lancashire and incorporated into the administrative county of Cumbria (itself abolished in 2023).

Many and varied, in the declinist telling, are those responsible for the town’s current woes: successive political authorities, both Labour and Conservative, for starting development schemes that ran out of money and left unfilled holes in the town’s fabric; property speculators for buying up hundreds of houses and dividing them into bedsits, in the process preventing young Barrovians from getting onto the housing ladder; a gang of feral youths for terrorizing pensioners (when did you last see a McDonalds with a bouncer?).

It wasn’t always like this. In 1859, Henry Schneider turned Barrow into “the Chicago of the North” when he set up the world’s biggest steelworks, fed by his own iron. 12 years later, his associate James Ramsden founded the shipyard. Throw in an influx of Irish and Scottish labor and acres of brick terracing and you get the picture. Boys from the yard wed girls from the jute works and every street had a pub and a place of worship, mostly Catholic or nonconformist. “Barrow was a hive of theaters, music halls, and later, cinemas,” writes Jill Jepson in her account of the town; well into the Sixties, gates of 15,000 were not uncommon at lowly Barrow AFC. Barrovians gained a reputation for liking home so much that their idea of escape was a static caravan on the nearby dunes.

The yard specialized in warships, earning it a battering from the Luftwaffe in 1941. Postwar deindustrialization did for the steelworks while the end of the Cold War meant no more aircraft carriers to build. In the Nineties, 10,000 shipbuilding jobs were axed, with a deadly ripple effect on ancillary industries and services. The interdependence of town and yard that had sustained Barrow for most of its history was wrecked; as Derek Brook, a veteran Labour Westmorland and Furness councilor, told me, “all my friends with trades left and never came back.” The yard only escaped closure only because it had a monopoly on making nuclear submarines for the Royal Navy. Its current owner-operator is BAE Systems.

In 2014, Barrow was designated the unhappiest place in the UK. Its Covid mortality rate was among the highest nationally, and, in 2024, it came fourth in the league table of deaths from suicide, drink and drugs — the so-called “deaths of despair”. That same year, just 34% of Barrovians sitting English and Math GCSE gained a five or above, 12% below the national average. Last autumn, I visited a school in the center of town, where child poverty runs at 36%; behind each pebbledash facade might live five kids with different dads. “We don’t even think about teaching on a Monday,” the head told me. “We sit them down, give them something to eat, and look them over to see who had a difficult weekend.”

Little wonder that in the three decades to 2022, Barrow’s population fell steadily, if slowly, and now sits at 56,000. Meanwhile, BAE employees working on subs drive into town on a Monday morning, spend four nights in serviced apartments, before clogging the single-lane escape route at the end of a truncated week. Locals refer to them in a curt catch-all: “the contractors”.

In December I was among a crowd of just 2,106 that booed Barrow off the pitch following a three-nil defeat at the hands of Tranmere Rovers. That the Bluebirds are flirting with relegation from League Two may have something to do with the fact that the first team trains two hours away in Manchester, where many of the players live.

There are some new arrivals: but not to everyone’s liking. From July, the adjacent town of Dalton will host a new Muslim prayer hall. Among the allegations aired by opponents of this “mega-mosque in the Lake District” — in reality an innocuous, low-slung building well outside the national park — is that it will offer snipers an excellent vantage from which to shoot children at the neighboring primary school. Driving around Barrow with Sam Plum, the outgoing chief executive of Westmorland and Furness Council, I asked why the Union flags flying from the lamp posts were at half-mast. “They’re not,” she replied. “They’re the height of a man standing on a Transit van.”

On we drove, past the ruins of Furness Abbey, fully the equal in grandeur and romantic isolation of the more celebrated Fountains Abbey across the Pennines, and down Abbey Road, with its salubrious middle class side-streets and better-performing schools. Then we reached the waterfront, a mash-up of reclamation and demolition, sky, sea and Little Tony’s Tires, of slag piers and a notorious Glasgow-style tenement, Egerton Court, where you can pick up a rodent-infested flat at auction for £6,000. The tour ended on Walney Island, 11 miles long and nowhere more than a mile wide, a sleeping policeman of sand and marram grass guarding Barrow and its shipbuilders from the Irish Sea.

Wherever you stand in the central wards, as Jean McSorley, a historian of Barrow, told me, you can’t avoid the Shed, the headquarters of Britain’s submarine industry. The color of weathered silage and as brooding, hulk-like and tyrannical as the Ziggurat of Ur, it blocks every vista and is over the crest of every hill. In it and the surrounding assembly halls, nuclear physicists, engineers, electricians, metallurgists, coders and other specialists are engaged in an endeavor so complex that, to quote one senior naval officer, “there are stages when it’s like blacksmithing and there are stages when it’s like brain surgery.”

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Britain can’t tell its national story

By Christopher de Bellaigue

And this is what makes Barrow so interesting. For unlike almost every other British town with an industrial past, it also has an industrial future. A big chunk of the increased military spending that Sir Keir Starmer unveiled last year will be spent in Barrow, bolstering Britain’s fading pretensions to global significance. BAE is building four Dreadnought class nuclear-powered submarines to replace the Vanguards that entered service in the Nineties. Last September, the King was in town to welcome the newly completed HMS Agamemnon, the Navy’s seventh Astute class sub, also conferring royal status on the Port of Barrow. Yet another class of sub is being developed with the US and Australian navies.

Its order-book full to bursting, BAE has already added more jobs than it axed in the Nineties, and the workforce is expected to grow by a further 20%, or 2,500 people, over the coming decade. This number will include many Barrovian apprentices, a sign that ties between town and yard are being renewed. As Sam Plum told Patrick Cockburn of the Independent, “If you were born in Barrow today, you would know that you will be able to get a job in 18 years’ time.”

All the same, it will be harder to overcome the socio-economic chasm between the town’s two selves. That the Barrow of the Shed — that of ambition, ingenuity and a belly for the fight — breathes the same air as the villainous Egerton Court is a besetting shame. Each evening the yard releases thousands of well-paid professionals into a town center they roundly shun because the houses are rank and there is nothing to spend their money on. It’s the hairline fracture in every Dreadnought off the stocks, and the Government knows it.

In 2024, Starmer pledged £220 million over a decade to revive Barrow town center, stimulate the construction of thousands of houses, and improve people’s health and educational attainments. The goal is for BAE employees to settle in Barrow with their families, hymn the beauty of its tidal sands (a twitcher’s paradise) and contribute to the town’s rebranding as a somewhat edgy gateway to the Lake District.

Last February, Starmer appointed Simon Case, Boris Johnson’s former cabinet secretary, to be chair of Team Barrow, a public-private partnership charged with birthing the new Barradise. A year on, despite local grumbles that non-Barrovian civil servants are being paid a fortune to take forever achieving nothing, progress has been made.

“Unlike almost every other British town with an industrial past, it also has an industrial future.”

In September, the University of Cumbria opened a Barrow campus offering courses in mechanical engineering and nursing, the idea being that graduates will end up in jobs in the yard or Furness General Hospital, which suffers — surprise, surprise — from acute staff shortages. (That Dalton prayer hall will serve Muslim consultants at the hospital wasn’t something young Nathan Holmes wanted to talk about). Then, in January, after a long wait, Westmorland and Furness Council announced that it had found a lead developer to build 1,350 new homes in the Barrow docklands.

Planning for the campus and the Marina Village, as the docklands scheme has been insipidly named — as if the Chicago of the North were Jersey! — predate the Starmer government. But the combined resolve of BAE and the Prime Minister, who visited Barrow last year, increased the viability of both schemes. Extra cash has also been secured for health and roads, while on the private side of the partnership emboldened construction companies have been applying for planning permits in growing numbers.

The 100-strong initial student intake at the new campus is composed mostly of locals, BAE told me. Some, in fact, are on BAE bursaries; a “significant increase in applications” bodes well for next year. Other initiatives, such as placements for pupils studying at a local technical college, a new training hub intended to increase footfall in the town center, and support for early-age book-readers in Barrow, cost the world’s sixth largest arms manufacturer little — while demonstrating that it no longer regards its social and pastoral role as stopping at the yard gates.

Peter Anstiss, the former BAE business development director and Team Barrow’s CEO, acknowledged the public’s impatience with the pace of change, telling me that an initial phase of “process” and “deep dives” will give way to one of “delivery” by “experienced individuals” enjoying enhanced freedom of maneuver. His basic point was clear: Britain doesn’t lack for innovative governance structures designed to overcome planning bottlenecks and the corseting effect of regulation. Do not be surprised if Team Barrow soon adopts one such model in the hope of moving everything along faster.

Whether that will reassure those Barrovians who are increasingly drawn to the politics of protest is unclear. Last summer’s by-elections to fill three seats on the town council resulted in all being won by Reform candidates, Nathan Holmes among them. Come May 2027, when Barrovians — in yet another political reorganization — send representatives to a new enlarged authority, and elect a mayor enjoying devolved powers from London, there is every reason, I was repeatedly told, to expect a further rebuff for the traditional parties.

People react oddly to windfalls, and in the case of Barrow suspicions that outsiders are pulling a fast one have been sharpened by avoidable disasters like the recent closure of the market hall, which left some 70 stallholders adrift. After we met, Nathan sent me two images. The first was a “what we were promised” graphic of people going about their business in an attractively landscaped part of central Barrow. The second was  a “what we receive” photograph, showing the same area as it stands, desolate, unimproved and under inches of rain. The latter, in the end, may speak more persuasively than the technocratic reasonableness of Peter Anstiss. In truth, however, Barrow is already showing signs of the long-awaited revival; it must now accelerate.

Ali Larijani, whom the Israelis assassinated on Tuesday, was a ruthless propagandist who broadcast the “confessions” of dissidents broken by torture, and an apparatchik whose National Security Council oversaw the slaughter of thousands of unarmed protesters in January. Yet his long membership of Iran’s ruling clique at least gave him insight into the country’s external enemies. At a pro-regime rally shortly before his death, he observed that “Trump’s problem is that he doesn’t understand that… the more pressure he applies, the stronger the [Iranian] people become.”

For nations driven by patriotism, religion or both — Iran, the Palestinians, Ukraine, Russia, Israel — capitulation becomes more unthinkable the longer the casualty list. In this, the Iranian regime has form. Drawing on its experience of fighting Iraq in the Eighties, when the Islamic Republic was a production line of commanders going fearlessly to their deaths — recall one-armed Hossein Kharrazi, who was killed while diverting a subordinate away from enemy fire, and is remembered by his men for his valor and self-sacrifice — the state replaces fallen generals and politicians quickly and without fuss.

So far, at least 1,500 Iranians have been killed, including hundreds of civilians; much infrastructure has been destroyed. Now Trump is openly contemplating an invasion of the island of Kharg, off Iran’s southern coast, from where the country’s oil is dispatched to China and other more clandestine markets, while the CIA has been encouraging a rebellion among the Kurds in the country’s western provinces.

All the while, Mojtaba Khamenei, the country’s new supreme leader, who lost his wife, son and perhaps a leg in the attack that also killed his father and predecessor, Ali, promises a life without security for the regime’s enemies, both “domestic and foreign.” His Islamic Republic, a pariah state, tells the world’s most powerful military: bring it on.

That Iran derives strength from adversity and prefers heroic defeat to ungentlemanly victory derives in part from the foundation epic of Shia Islam. In 680, the Imam Hussein, the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, along with a tiny band of followers, was put to the sword by the powerful caliph, Yazid of Damascus, in what is now southern Iraq. Iran’s sectarian identity works in tandem with cultural exceptionalism. The Persian language emerged from the Arab invasions of the 630s energized and expanded, becoming a tool fit for the works of beauty that Persian poets went on to compose.

Similarly, Islamic beliefs and Persian forms merged to create a new aesthetic, visible in cities like Isfahan and Tabriz, and which spread as far as Central Asia and India. No one, then, has ever accused Iran of suffering from an inferiority complex. Or, for that matter, of excessive deference towards the parvenu Arabs of the Persian Gulf, the Arabs, in the words of an old bit of doggerel, grubbing around for lizards while the Persians sip chilled water.

Since the war began, Iran’s drones and missiles have exacted a death toll of fewer than 50 on the far side of the Gulf, but put the regimes in question, to say nothing of world oil markets, into a tailspin all the same. As for the people of Beirut, bombarded by Israel while calmly receiving hundreds of thousands of refugees from Benjamin Netanyahu’s furious assault on south Lebanon (itself prompted by Hezbollah’s feeble strikes on Israel following the elder Khamenei’s assassination), they poke fun at their neighbors in the Gulf for gathering up their dishdashas and running for the basement at the first sound of tinkling glass.

Many ordinary Muslims thrill to the spectacle of plucky Iran refusing to bow to the oppressors of the Palestinians. Pro-Iran demonstrations were held in Iraq and Pakistan following Khamenei’s assassination, the latter costing at least 22 lives, while, on 11 March, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, a majority-Sunni country, pledged solidarity with Shia Iran. “We have but one religion,” he declared in parliament, “and that is Islam.”

Between US and Israeli attacks on military installations, gas fields, and the odd school, Iranian life goes on. Notwithstanding the danger and inconvenience, families convened yesterday to celebrate the Persian New Year, pride of place in homes being given to seven auspicious items (garlic; apple; a brown pudding with a base of wheat sprouts; sumac; the powdery fruit of the jujube-tree; vinegar; and coins), even if the traditional feast of herb rice and Caspian carp (beware: the tiny bones have a habit of lodging in the windpipe) has long been abandoned in favor of more affordable fare.

Yesterday I got through to Ali Dehbashi. An editor and literary doyen living in Tehran, I’d called to wish him Happy New Year. Dehbashi told me that his son Shahab had had a narrow escape that morning, when a house three doors down was obliterated in an Israeli airstrike. The target was Ali Muhammad Naini, the Revolutionary Guards spokesman: not that Shahab had any idea they were neighbors. His father is a pigeon fancier, but when I asked after the birds, Dehbashi told me that two pigeons and a canary had dropped dead from shock at the racket produced by Israel’s war machine. Having the misfortune to live on Palestine Square — which boasts a clock counting down the days to Israel’s longed-for destruction — he went on with typical understatement, “I suppose one is in the firing line.”

At the outset of the fighting, Trump urged Iranians to “take over your government” as soon as the dust had settled, for “the hour of your freedom is at hand.” Since then, in one of those cognitive exercises he lets us observe, like a child showing off his ability to join one bit of playdough to another, he has changed his mind. The President now deems a popular uprising unlikely because the security forces “have people in the streets… machine-gunning people down if they want to protest.” A few inquiries beforehand would have saved him from any misapprehension on this score and the world a lot of pain.

The irony of Trump and Netanyahu’s war of liberation is that it has silenced those opponents of the Islamic Republic who continued to agitate for freedom even after January’s massacre. Many had urged Trump to bomb the country to oblivion, placing their hopes in a restoration of the monarchy under Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the last Shah. Now, three weeks into this conflict of unexpected intensity, the true sentiments of the majority are hidden behind an intermittent internet blackout. Treat with caution the prognostications of Iran specialists in the US who haven’t seen the country in decades.

That said, the longer the pounding goes on, the more schools are hit and the more damage is done to buildings of national importance — it’s the meticulously cut mirror pieces adhering to the muqarnas, or stalactite squinch, that fall like dandruff when a bomb slams into the barracks a block away — the greater the likelihood that feelings towards the aggressors will cool.

The authorities are taking no chances. The national police chief, Ahmad-Reza Radan, has warned that should “scum, spies and hirelings”, his catch-all for pro-democracy protesters, return to the streets on the advice of Trump, Netanyahu or Pahlavi, they “will be treated as the enemy… our boys have their fingers on the trigger, defending their revolution, protecting their people and their country.” On Wednesday, three young men were executed for killing policemen in the January unrest.

For all his disagreeable qualities, Larijani’s removal has robbed Iran of an experienced negotiator who might have helped bring the war to an end before the country turns entirely to ashes — one of the reasons, it has been suggested, why Netanyahu targeted him. At present, peace suits neither the Israeli Prime Minister, who on Thursday said that the war would continue “as long as is necessary”, nor those Revolutionary Guardsmen for whom the current hostilities are an opportunity to militarize the Islamic Republic.

In all this, the hardliners may have an ally in Mojtaba Khamenei. His meager credentials as a Shia theologian are far from commensurate with the almost pontifical office, the guardianship of the jurist, which he lately inherited. The new supreme leader owes his elevation to the Guard. Assuming he stays alive — the attack that killed the father is thought to have left the son with life-threatening injuries — the clerical character of the Islamic Republic will fade and it will more closely resemble a uniformed dictatorship with a nationalist character.

Not a day passes without an official warning of threats to the country’s territorial integrity: code for foreign-funded agitations among the country’s Kurdish, Baluch and Arab minorities. But Iran isn’t in danger of falling apart. It isn’t Afghanistan or Iraq, modern confections of mutually antagonistic groups. Rather, it has a natural coherence based on the supremacy of the Persian language; its geographically logical homeland on the Persian plateau, ringed by seas and mountains; and the Shia Islam to which most Iranians adhere.

For centuries, indeed, these strengths have enabled Iran to survive invasions, violent changes of dynasty, famines, tribal uprisings, regicides and years of meddling by imperial Britain and Russia — not to mention the 1979 revolution itself. They will offset the centrifugal forces that Trump seems intent on stimulating. For the true danger to Iran is not disintegration, but implosion.

When Trump and Netanyahu decide that they have had enough, Khamenei and his friends in the Guard will have to deal with the same rotten institutions and ruined economy, the same seething anger and desire for change, that brought the people onto the streets in January — with the difference now that any chance of a diplomatic solution to Iran’s isolation has been foreclosed while Israel will continue to bomb the country and sabotage its institutions on a rolling basis. In the meantime, the “scum, spies and hirelings” haven’t gone away, and they have even less to lose. The police chief shouldn’t book any holidays.

Iran is experiencing the most evil days in its modern history. To mark an earlier catastrophe, the Anglo-American coup d’etat that ejected the country’s legitimate prime minister, Muhammad Mossadegh, in 1953, ushering in a quarter of a century of monarchical despotism, the poet Mehdi Akhavan-Sales composed the following lines which an Iranian friend of mine recently found himself reaching for.

“My house has caught fire, a soul-burning fire,
This fire burns in all directions,
Burning the curtains, the rugs, warp with weft,
I run aimlessly, crying, in the flames of the smoke-laden fire,
And amid my bitter laughter,
And the lamentation of my mirthless tears,
From a burning core,
I scream…”

It is unlikely, however, that Iran will accept Israel’s demands that it relinquish uranium-enrichment, dismantle its ballistic missile program and desist from reconstituting its network of regional proxies: effectively, the unconditional surrender that the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has consistently refused to entertain. His inflexibility has come at the price of an unremitting Western hostility that has, along with endemic corruption and mismanagement, crashed the economy and provoked the huge protests, revolutionary in character, which erupted across the country last month. The most plausible explanation for Khamenei’s preparedness to talk, then, is that he is playing for time and hoping that, if the worst comes to the worst, he will be saved by Trump’s aversion to wars which last more than a few hours.

On 1 February, the Supreme Leader warned that American aggression would precipitate a “regional” war, by which he meant Iranian attacks on tankers in the Persian Gulf and civilians in Israel. A few days earlier, Admiral Ali Shamkhani, an adviser of the Supreme Leader — who had a narrow escape when his apartment was targeted by an Israeli airstrike last summer — promised an “immediate, comprehensive, and unprecedented” response, “directed at the aggressor, at the heart of Tel Aviv, and at all who support the aggressor”. But Iran, we now know, is a spent military force and cannot carry out such threats.

Some 1,200 Iranians were killed in the 12-day war, compared with 28 Israelis and not a single American, while enemy aircraft bossed Iranian airspace. Around 90% of the missiles that Iran fired in response towards Israel were intercepted; a mere handful of its 500 or so drones made it into Israeli territory, the rest meeting a similar fate to that of the Iranian drone that flew close to the US aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln on Tuesday, and was shot down by one of the carrier’s jets. For all Iran’s bluster, the imbalance between a belt-and-braces autarky and the world’s most advanced militaries is as stark as that between the Mahdist army and the British at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, when thousands of Sudanese tribesmen were mowed down by Maxim guns to the loss of 47 British lives; or between the Mamluks and Napoleon’s Armée d’Orient a century earlier, when a medieval cavalry was put to flight by modern infantry squares spitting grapeshot.

No, it isn’t chaos in the Gulf nor brimstone over Tel Aviv that need concern us should the negotiations fail. It is the possibility of mass slaughter of unarmed civilians in the Islamic Republic itself.

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The Ayatollah will fight to the death

By Christopher de Bellaigue

For an ominous pattern of botched outside intervention and the implacable exercise of monopolized force, look no further than last month’s unrest and its suppression. Having begun as street protests by an “army of the hungry”, in the words of Hatam Ghaderi, perhaps Iran’s most perceptive political analyst, the movement took on a radical character after Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the last Shah, asked ordinary Iranians to go out and topple the regime on 9 January. The millions heeding his call were further galvanized by Trump’s promise, made a few days earlier, that if Iran “violently kills peaceful protesters… the United States of America will come to their rescue”.

In the event, thousands were mown down, Omdurman-style, on the streets of Tehran and dozens of other cities by Revolutionary Guardsmen firing Dushkas and AK-47s. We don’t yet know exactly how many people died, though the death toll certainly exceeds by thousands the nugatory figure of 2,985 conceded by the government — dwarfing also the 3,164 people killed by the Shah’s forces over the 16 years of sporadic revolutionary activity culminating in the monarch’s flight in 1979. As for the help promised by Trump, it never came.

The bloodiest episode of civil strife that Iran has seen for at least two centuries could have been avoided had the 86-year-old Khamenei bowed to longstanding demands and stepped aside. This would have paved the way for elections to an assembly to draw up a new constitution — a relatively bloodless transition, involving members of the current regime untainted by the worst excesses of corruption and cruelty, might have been possible. By refusing such a transition and turning his stormtroopers on mostly unarmed crowds — amid reports of the Revolutionary Guards’ snipers shooting bystanders in the head and of knife thrusts aimed deliberately at the genitals — Khamenei has cleared the field of potential unifiers, in the process condemning the Islamic Republic and its internal opponents to a fight to the finish.

A former British official with close connections to Western policy-makers told me this week that the thinking among Western countries, including Britain, is that the regime is out of puff and that a collapse as rapid and as straightforward as that of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad is likely. But in 30 years of reporting on the Middle East, I have learned never to be surprised by the ignorance and complacency of our policymakers. Iran resists such a reassuring prognosis; a messier denouement awaits.

Do not be fooled by the worldliness of Iran’s artistic and literary culture or the prosperity and accomplishments of its diaspora. For much of its post-Islamic history, Iran has contained a minority of fanatics; the difference is that today’s fanatics have guns in their hands and their backs to the wall. This is what Hatam Ghaderi refers to as the revolutionary “hard core” which has gathered around Khamenei, and is composed of Revolutionary Guardsmen, hardline clerics and members of the Basij militia.

They learned their trade fighting small, dirty wars in Iraq, Syria and Yemen; their worldview formed in prayer halls and barracks where a hatred of the godless West is propagated alongside a deep yearning for the return of the 12th Shia imam, who disappeared from view 10 centuries ago and will emerge to inaugurate an epoch of justice and peace. Religious meetings are conducted by men who sing of martyrdom and purity; they regard the killing of godless “rioters” acting at the behest of Israel as a virtuous act. With blood already on their hands, they have no way back into general acceptability, and nowhere to go but further and further into their own fantasies of martyrdom, all the while nurturing fond expectations of divine intervention. There is no reason to exclude Ali Khamenei from their number.

Whatever happens in Istanbul on Friday, and during the weeks to come, the Islamic Republic is unlikely to survive. Its people hate it too much. But its fall will not be the simple event that is seemingly contemplated in Washington and Jerusalem. The correct analogy is not with the kleptocracy that melted away with the fall of Assad but with those members of the Waffen-SS who carried on fighting even after Hitler’s death in 1945, exhibiting the same unappeasable contempt for death and hatred of their enemies that they did when he was alive.

When Reza Pahlavi was asked whether he took responsibility for the slaughter on the streets of his homeland, he replied coldly, “this is a war, and war has casualties”. That words have consequences means something tangible in a world of bullets and flesh and the destiny of a people. Many Iranians have entered a war with their regime that must end with the elimination of one or the other. Trump should think hard before he next promises Iranians his help, and mean it if he does, or he too will have blood on his hands.

Such assumptions have seen Khamenei and his acolytes in the Revolutionary Guard, the clerical establishment and the Basij militia ride out crisis after crisis, starting with the Green Movement led by Mousavi in 2009, extending through the Woman, Life, Freedom movement of 2022-3 and climaxing in the battering that the country received last summer at the hands of Israeli and US aircraft. Then, calls by Benjamin Netanyahu and Pahlavi himself for ordinary citizens to take advantage of the regime’s military disarray, by going out and toppling it, went conspicuously unanswered.

Now all has changed. Initially sparked by economic collapse, two weeks of protests have coalesced into a national movement, one whose aim is nothing less than the destruction of the Islamic Republic. Along the way, the regime’s tenaciously-held assumptions have become obsolete. The authorities have been caught unawares, and seem unable or unwilling to change course. On the contrary, the Islamic Republic remains fatally wedded to the old assumptions while the country enters an unpredictable and explosive new phase.

The scene was set by a summer of chronic water shortages and electricity outages. In December, the riyal collapsed and inflation touched 50%, the consequence of mismanagement, corruption and sanctions that the revolutionary oligarchy has knowingly courted and in some cases profited from. Tellingly, the initial protests, on 28 December, were staged not by the hijab-discarding young women, the sort who spearheaded the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. Rather, the discontent was sparked by the revolution’s traditional supporters: grizzled, pious traders in the bazaar. They were soon joined by youthful members of the country’s dispossessed middle class: nouveaux pauvres with a Jacobin rage in their hearts and supportive compatriots by their side.

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Iran’s fate is in Trump’s hands

By David Patrikarakos

The solidarity that is currently being shown between Iranians of different ages, classes and ethnicities is a far cry from the scenes I observed during the 2009 agitation, when bystanders watched with studied neutrality as protesters were dragged away to police torture chambers. Gone, too, is the inviolability of public property. These days, bystanders wade in with fists and kicks to save protesters from the security forces, while police stations and police cars are torched and — according to the semi-official Tasnim news agency — officers are killed. From the province of Kurdistan in the west to Baluchistan in the east and as far south as the refinery town of Abadan, no part of Iran is untouched. At least one small town, in the western province of Kermanshah, has been seized by rebels.

The regime has responded by killing dozens of protesters before cutting the internet on Thursday night. Behind the blackout, as is clear from video and audio files that continue to trickle out, more protesters are dying, more public buildings are being attacked and more hospitals are becoming war zones as parents smash down mortuary doors and remove the bodies of their dead children before the authorities can surreptitiously bury them. Such confrontations are a throwback to the 1979 revolution, which advanced to the rhythm of Shia mourning ceremonies, each funeral being a magnet for more protests and more deaths.

Only a few government services — notably regime propaganda conducted through social media — have been exempted from the blackout. Card transactions, on which the economy depends, have not. With shops shuttered, the protests seem to be growing. In one video clip of a huge nocturnal gathering, a voice is heard: “They say they are going to come and kill us. Let them try to kill this crowd!”

On Friday, the Revolutionary Guard’s intelligence wing warned against “any refusal to act” on the part of other organs of the state, a rare public admission of concern on the subject of regime cohesion. The following day the regular army, which usually takes no role in maintaining law and order, announced that it would safeguard strategic infrastructure and public property, also urging Iranians to thwart “enemy plots”.

But such warnings, and Khamenei’s own denunciation of the protesters as “rioters” whose motivation is to curry favor with Donald Trump, derive from the old reasoning that equates any call by Iranians for foreign intervention with unpatriotic betrayal. The country has a long history of such interventions, not least the 1953 coup in which MI6 and the CIA overthrew Mohammad Mosaddegh, Iran’s legitimate prime minister. Yet judging by the protesters’ cheerful calls for further attacks by the US and Israel, it is clear that they have rejected their parents’ squeamishness. According to the logic on the streets, another Western aerial campaign would be welcome if it advances the goal of toppling the Islamic Republic.

The main political beneficiary of the growing appetite for outside action is Pahlavi, who on Friday exhorted Trump to “be prepared to intervene to help the people of Iran”. And, for the first time, the self-styled crown prince is regarded as a serious contender for leadership of a new regime whose main attribute would be its good relations with Tel Aviv and Washington.

It is a remarkable transformation for the diffident 65-year-old who left Iran for Lubbock, Texas as an air force cadet in 1978, and was for years dismissed by liberal and Leftist opponents of the regime as an embarrassing reminder of his father’s corrupt and authoritarian rule. Pahlavi’s support for the joint Israeli-US attack on Iran this summer, furthermore, in which more than 1,000 Iranians were killed, appeared to put him at odds with his compatriots. No longer. On the burning streets of Tehran calls of “Long live the Shah!” ring insistently while Pahlavi’s former Leftist critics, in the words of one veteran Iranian analyst, “have started treating him with respect”.

Pahlavi rises, Khamenei falls. As recently as three years ago, the Supreme Leader’s will was unchallenged and his authority total; since then, the so-called “Axis of Resistance” he had built up across the Middle East has been obliterated by Israel, with his own intelligence services clearly compromised. Most significant, the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities last summer removed any possibility of an Iranian bomb, in the short term at least.

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“Rat Ali”, as Khamenei has been known since his scurrying departure for an underground bunker during the war last summer, looks every day of his 86 years. His death, preferably violent and painful, is being loudly petitioned. No one knows what conversations are going on between the Supreme Leader and his inner circle, which includes his son Mojtaba, for some time seen as a possible successor. But it is utterly implausible that Khamenei would, as The Times recently claimed, “flee to Moscow” if the regime looks close to falling.

Khamenei lost the use of an arm when he was blown up early in the revolution. He is not a quitter but a quietly stolid fanatic who will leave the Islamic Republic horizontally or not at all. And he has yet to turn the full force of his killing machine on the protesters. Observing all this, and fanning his tail feathers after his exfiltration of Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, is the US president — who, by immediately reimposing his policy of “maximum pressure” on the Islamic Republic following his election last year, has, it is now clear, helped bring the Islamic Republic to its knees. “If they start killing people like they have in the past,” Trump declared on Saturday, “we’ll be hitting them very hard where it hurts.” By that time, of course, the slaughter of protesters was well underway.

Trump has so far avoided meeting Pahlavi, perhaps judging that the regime remains a long way from collapse, or because, if the time comes, he favors a Venezuela-style decapitation and Khamenei’s replacement from within the current set-up. Hassan Rouhani, a former president known both for his moderation and his toughness, might be a candidate.

As if by providential design, the ousting of Maduro lends an aura of inevitability to the demise of the Islamic Republic. And yet regimes are not toppled by auras. They are not toppled because Dara Khosrowshahi, the CEO of Uber, who was born into a good family in Iran in 1969, says that he is looking forward to “investing aggressively” in his homeland in the “first 100 days” after liberation. They are toppled because the men with guns are killed or lose their stomach for the fight. And of that, so far as we know, there is no sign.

A lot has happened since the summer. Iranians have got over their horror of foreign interventions and have adopted the closest figurehead to hand. A people out of time, they are fighting for a liberal democracy, or — quainter still — a constitutional monarchy, just as the brand seems defunct. Behind the penumbra of the communications blackout, a country of 90 million, an ancient culture dishonored by its leaders, goes to work on itself.

The head of the self-help group, a quietly authoritative woman called Manasa, explained that the village gives out interest-free loans with the aim of breaking the stranglehold of the money-lenders. One woman had borrowed 15,000 rupees — around £130 — to open a canteen that caters to pilgrims visiting the local temple; all that circumambulation is hungry work. I asked the woman with the headscarf how many Muslims live in the village. “Eighteen,” she replied, before assuring me that the Shia mourning month of Muharram is observed here with the same punctiliousness as the Hindu festivals of Diwali and Dussehra.

When I asked the women to rate the local government, all eyes turned to the sarpanch, or council president, a handsome, well-groomed man. It turned out that the panchayat scored well for improving the water supply — a rare feat in this increasingly arid part of the country — and for the village primary school, which offers a good education in Telugu and English. But the roads! “There aren’t any,” sighed one woman, by which she meant that the narrow tracks which wind between the houses get washed away by the monsoon. With a flourish, the sarpanch announced that the village would have a new road “within three months”. On this happy note, the meeting broke up and we adjourned for selfies.

As a student of Hindi in the Nineties and then as a reporter at India Today, the country’s biggest news magazine, I was in awe of India’s federal constitution and its ability to keep the country whole despite the proliferation of ethnic groups, religions and languages. The states were organized along linguistic lines; over the course of the second half of the 20th century, through the addition of new states, autonomous councils in tribal areas, and the panchayats themselves, democracy set down roots so strong that no Hindu-Muslim riot or separatist movement seemed capable of tearing them up. For all the prevalence of poverty and injustice, the crust of corruption and nepotism that grew around the “natural” party of government, the Congress, and a tradition of political assassinations that took the lives of the country’s founding father, Mahatma Gandhi, and two Congress prime ministers, Indira Gandhi (no relation) and her son Rajiv, surely Bill Clinton was justified in 1994 in describing India as “one of the world’s greatest experiments in multi-cultural democracy”.

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The face of this democracy belonged to T.N. Seshan. A gloomy south Indian with a taste for Hindu philosophy, Seshan was appointed chief election commissioner in 1990, a time of spiraling “booth-capturing” — the practice by armed groups of seizing polling booths in order to stuff ballot boxes — and intimidation of lower castes to stop them exercising their franchise. On Seshan’s watch, booth-capturing plummeted, while in the run-up to the 1996 general election, he had some 300,000 known villains preventively detained. Seshan’s probity made him as famous as the national cricket captain, Mohammad Azharuddin, and the Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan, both Muslims, of course — along with the chief justice, Aziz Mushabber Ahmadi, and the future president, Abdul Kalam. Here, it was argued, was the advantage that secular India enjoyed over its estranged sibling, sectarian Pakistan, where elections, as Seshan liked to say, lacked integrity.

And yet, even in its golden age, as Prem Shankar Jha, a former prime ministerial adviser, reminded me when I visited him recently in Delhi, democracy was failing to give its citizens “economic security, the rule of law, and speedy, affordable justice”. These failings prompted the emergence of “an alternative model of nationhood that despised… religious pluralism”, advocating instead “a hard Hindu nation-state”.

Advance warning came on 6 December 1992, when a mob of Hindu zealots tore down a mosque that had been built on the site — according to Hindu tradition — of the birthplace of the god Ram in the city of Ayodhya. As the lodger of a Brahmin numismatist and her daughter 140 miles away in Varanasi, I was kept indoors by my nervous hosts who taught me how to make chappatis while gangs roamed the city looking for people to lynch. Further south, Bombay, India’s most diverse and cosmopolitan city, descended into religious bloodletting that claimed the lives of 1,200 people, most of them Muslim.

Ayodhya brought violent Hindu chauvinism into the mainstream. It gave an emerging nationalist politician called Narendra Modi, who in 2002 became chief minister of the western state of Gujarat, license to sit on his hands while more than 1,000 Gujaratis — two thirds of them Muslim — were killed in a communal firestorm in the same year.

In 2014, Modi became prime minister. Since then, he has striven to turn secular, multi-lingual India into a Hindu supremacist state whose lingua franca is no longer English, but Hindi — a north Indian tongue rejected by many in the south — and defined by its enmity for Pakistan, against which it fought a short, inconclusive war this spring. In 2019, Modi fulfilled a long-cherished nationalist dream by ending the autonomy that Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state, had enjoyed since independence. And last year, he inaugurated a huge temple complex on the site of the demolished mosque at Ayodhya before a crowd of billionaires, cricketers, politicians and actors. Shah Rukh Khan was nowhere to be seen.

My research in India this autumn took me to Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, Mumbai (as Bombay was renamed in 1995), Madhya Pradesh and the southern city of Chennai. During the Diwali holidays I was in Orchha, a once-sleepy town in Madhya Pradesh that has over the past decade or so become a popular destination for visitors to the town’s Ram temple; on the day I was there, the streets were full of double-decker buses debouching jovial pilgrims and stalls selling temple oil and marigold garlands. According to KPMG India, religious tourism accounts for more than 60% of travel in the country and by 2028 will be worth $59 billion. At Khajuraho, also in Madhya Pradesh, I visited 10th-century Hindu temples famed for their carved depictions of lovemaking inaccessible to the umbrella-legged. That India’s medieval Muslim invaders included spirited iconoclasts was evidenced by the fact that perhaps a fifth of the temples’ sandstone figures had been beheaded.

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All the while, as my Hindi came back, chatting to people in fields, markets, temples, trains and rickshaws, I was reminded insistently of two things. The first is that the failure of the old India to provide “economic security, the rule of law and speedy, affordable justice” is being perpetuated by the new India under Modi. The second is that, while their efforts may have yet to bear fruit in the panchayats of Andhra Pradesh, Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are diligently undermining democracy while turning the country’s 200 million Muslims from partners in a collective endeavor to a polluting enemy within.

For all Modi’s claims to be moving swiftly towards a “Developed India”, and the high-profile investments that have been made by tech firms such as Foxconn, the world’s biggest iPhone producer, the average growth rate in recent years of less than 6% is far short of the 10% that China achieved when its economy took flight between 1980 and 2015. So precarious is life for urban laborers, and so filthy the air they breathe — eight of the world’s 10 most polluted cities are in India — that many of the farm workers I met in Madhya Pradesh had returned to their villages after abortive moves to the city. Rather than take the government’s claims to have all but eradicated poverty at face value, Subhash Chandra Garg, the former top official at the finance ministry, presented me with a comparison of average per capita incomes. “In 2024, it was $13,660 in China and $83,660 in the US. In India it was $2,650.” He winced. “We’re 140th in the world.”

In the old days of socialist central planning, government statistics could be trusted. No longer. According to Reuters, 37 out of 50 independent economists disbelieve the official unemployment rate of 5.6%; alternative estimates range as high as 35%. More than half the population — which currently stands at 1.47 billion and is expected to peak at 1.7 billion in the early 2060s — is under 25, and each year between seven and eight million people enter a jobs market that cannot accommodate them. Stagnant wages and private sector lay-offs only heighten the allure of a job for life in public service — no matter how lowly the role. In 2024, 46,000 graduates and postgraduates applied for jobs as road sweepers and rubbish collectors in the state of Haryana. In the same year, Indian Railways received 19 million applications for 64,000 vacancies. As Palanivel Thiaga Rajan, the IT minister of the southern state of Tamil Nadu, told me, “the demographic situation is beginning to swamp us”.

Economic worries need a scapegoat. Addressing a large rally before this month’s assembly elections in the poor, populous state of Bihar, Modi inveighed against Muslim “infiltrators” from Bangladesh. The previous month, Medha Kulkarni, a senior BJP politician in the state of Maharashtra, led a delegation to sprinkle cow urine on a patch of ground where Muslim women had been spotted praying, thereby purifying it. Also in October, Pragya Thakur, a former BJP member of parliament, who was once arrested on suspicion of involvement in a wave of bombings against Muslims — she was freed for lack of evidence — proffered stern advice to any Hindu whose daughter has the temerity to fall in love with a Muslim. “If our daughter does not obey us,” she said, “if she goes to the house of a non-believer, spare no effort in breaking her legs.”

Long gone is the ecumenical India of the late president Abdul Kalam, whose father made a living by ferrying Hindu pilgrims to a popular shrine on his boat. As is the Bombay of the late musician Zakir Hussain, whose morning routine as a child in that once-tolerant city consisted of Muslim ghazals at home followed by ragas at a Hindu temple and mass at his Catholic school. It is hard to imagine another Muslim president, chief justice or national cricket captain in the world’s third-biggest Muslim country. When India’s Muslims are not being abominated, hectored or lynched, it is as if they do not exist at all: not in the speeches of Modi and his ministers, nor in the 12,000 schools catering to 32 million children that are administered by the BJP’s militant feeder organization, the RSS, nor in the numerous Hindu holidays whose observance, once a matter of personal preference, have been inked into the fabric of the state.

Most ominous of all, the Election Commission, citadel of T.N. Seshan, may have been captured by the government. In August Rahul Gandhi, the Congress’s most prominent leader, gave a detailed press conference in which he substantiated longstanding suspicions that the BJP’s narrow victory in the 2024 general election was achieved fraudulently and in collusion with the commission. In the southern electoral ward of Mahadevapura, he said, some 40 party workers had spent six months sorting through mountains of voting records and turned up more than 100,000 “fake” votes that were cast by means of invalid addresses, invalid photos, bulk voters at one location, voters who had cast ballots at several different booths, and “first-time” voters in their sixties and seventies. “This is happening across the country,” Gandhi said. “There is a huge criminal fraud being perpetrated.”

On 5 November, the day before the Bihar polls opened, he presented evidence for an even bigger “vote theft” in state elections held in Haryana last year, claiming that no fewer than 2.5 million votes — one in eight — were cast there illegally. Gandhi showed a photo of a hairdresser from Brazil that had been downloaded from the internet and appeared 22 times on the Haryana electoral rolls.

The Election Commission rejects Gandhi’s allegations, and has refused to hand over the electronic voting records that would enable the Congress — or anyone else — to conduct a nationwide audit of past elections. The Supreme Court has rejected petitions that it launch an investigation of its own. And in Bihar, the decisive defeat in November’s state assembly elections that Congress and its allies suffered at the hands of the ruling coalition, of which the BJP is a part, suggested that for voters the issue of vote theft isn’t as important as the state government’s promise to create 10 million jobs.

This is how democracies die. And while Modi’s contribution has of course been outstanding, Gandhi’s must also be acknowledged. The leader of the opposition is the son of Rajiv Gandhi, grandson of Indira Gandhi, great-grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, and the great-great grandson of Motilal Nehru, a Congress president before independence. Far from nobly shouldering an inherited responsibility to save Indian democracy, the princeling is part of the problem. And yet neither he nor other members of the Gandhi clan will step away from the family firm, while no other party exists that can challenge the BJP nationally.

India’s last big spasm of communal violence came in the winter of 2019-2020 when Muslims in Delhi who were protesting against a discriminatory asylum law and measures to weed out “infiltrators” were attacked by Hindu zealots abetted by the police, leaving at least 54 dead. India has known periods of bigotry before, as the decapitated carvings at Khajuraho demonstrate, and recovered. For the moment, however, for India’s Muslims, it’s a question of keeping one’s head down and one’s sangfroid intact. Lunching at Bagdadi, a legendary Muslim-owned canteen in Mumbai, my eye was caught by the item “Beef Fry” on the antique menu board. When I remarked to the owner that eating beef is enough to get you killed in today’s India, he replied with a smile, “we keep the original menu board because our customers like it. But we haven’t served beef in years. It’s buffalo meat and we have the laboratory analysis to prove it.”

While Trump’s eventual return to the White House saved him from prosecution for trying to overturn the US government, Bolsonaro enjoys no such immunity. He is being tried for masterminding a failed coup d’etat by Alexandre de Moraes, a shaven-headed bruiser on the country’s supreme court, and will probably be sent to jail for a long time. And as if that were not destabilizing enough for Latin America’s biggest and most complicated country, Trump is now waging diplomatic and economic war against the government of President Lula.

The crisis started on 9 July, when Trump sent Lula an open letter announcing 50% tariffs on Brazilian products, among the highest he has applied. For all Trump’s talk of a level playing field, this has less to do with trade — the US runs a surplus with Brazil — than with taking down a titan of the global Left and aiding a fellow Right-winger in difficulty. Trump called Brazil’s treatment of Bolsonaro a “witch hunt”. That’s the very term he used to describe his own legal travails.

But if Trump expected Lula to scurry to Washington D.C. for a dressing down, he misread this grizzled opponent of the country’s former military dictatorship, who has himself seen the inside of a jail cell after being engulfed in a corruption scandal. Not for Lula the toadying of a Keir Starmer or an Ursula von der Leyen; in a televised address to the nation on 18 July, he denounced Trump’s “unacceptable blackmail” and “attack on national sovereignty”, adding in an interview with CNN, “if Trump was Brazilian… he too would be on trial”.

For his part, de Moraes, the kind of man who arranges the office furniture so as not to be surprised by a possible assailant, ordered Bolsonaro to wear an ankle tag to stop him absconding — as he did, to Florida, during the debacle of January 2023.

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From his position on one of the most powerful courts in the world, “Big Alex”, as he is known, has punished US tech companies and Bolsonaro supporters, who had fired off scurrilous posts from America, with fines and other restrictions. Last year, meanwhile, he blocked access to X in Brazil until the platform complied with his order that it ban accounts spreading the fallacy that the 2022 presidential election was rigged. From exile in Washington D.C., where even de Moraes cannot reach him, Eduardo Bolsonaro, the ex-president’s son and a deputy in the Brasília parliament, calls the judge a “psychopath out of control”.

It was lobbying by Eduardo that persuaded the US government, on 30 July, to impose sanctions on Big Alex — who promptly placed the elder Bolsonaro under house arrest and seized his mobile phone. On 6 August, Trump’s tariffs came into effect, albeit with exceptions that include Embraer aircraft, orange juice, iron ore, wood pulp and petroleum. Brazilian coffee producers have started panic selling while, as Elizabeth Johnson of TS Lombard, a veteran Brazil analyst, told me, “the mango farmers of northeastern Brazil will have no alternative but to bury their rotting fruit in the ground”.

Wary of fueling inflation — already running at 5.4% — by imposing reciprocal sanctions, and with his fellow Bric leaders absorbed in tariff negotiations of their own, Lula’s ability to retaliate either unilaterally or in concert is limited. According to the Sao Paulo newspaper Estadao, the government is steeling itself for additional tariffs later this year, when Bolsonaro’s trial may conclude in a judgment that is politically fatal to him and objectionable to Trump.

All this said, the size of Brazil’s internal market makes it reasonably well placed to weather external shocks. Last year, after all, exports accounted for less than a fifth of GDP, of which just 12% went to the US, compared to 28% to China. Furthermore, as Diego Sartorato, a former staffer in Lula’s office, told me, while agribusiness — Bolsonaro’s natural constituency — will suffer as a result of the new tariffs, “the effect on inflation has already been positive”. As Sartorato points out, the price of a 500g pack of coffee has fallen from over $9 to around $7 — “and Brazilians love their coffee”.

If this, then, is what a breakdown in relations between the two largest economies in the Americas looks like, it also shows how events might help a physically frail, 79-year-old, third-term president win back lost support in time for his re-election bid in 2026. “Trump is making Lula great again,” Johnson went on, alluding to a recent opinion poll showing Lula’s approval rating above 50% for the first time this year. “What could be better for an embattled politician than to have an external enemy and for his main rival to be the cause?”

It is certainly getting harder for Bolsonaro to square his slogan, “Brazil above everything!” with his embarrassing devotion to a foreign leader intent on crippling the Brazilian economy. And yet, at an estimated 37,000, the crowd of Bolsonaro supporters that converged on central Sao Paulo on 3 August to protest against their hero’s house arrest was three times the size of a similar gathering — this one with Bolsonaro himself in attendance — at the same location in June. In Rio, a demonstrating Bolsonarista told France 24 that she agreed “100%” with the US sanctions on de Moraes, adding that “since no solution was found here, it had to come from elsewhere”.

For all the dedication of Bolsonaro’s core supporters, however, the Lula government is riding a wave of patriotism, one lent additional power by a US investigation into a wildly popular Brazilian payment system on the grounds that it may discriminate against US alternatives.

As for Lula himself, his TV address last month showed him punchy and alert — useful for preempting comparisons with “sleepy” Joe Biden, his old friend from the gerontocracy of the Left. Meanwhile the political tyro Bia Lula — the President’s 30-year-old granddaughter — has been having fun at Bolsonaro’s expense. “He’s constantly putting his feet where his hands should be,” she chuckled in a recent video, “and now he’s at home with his ankle tag and without a phone… congratulations, champ!” Then, turning her attention to Eduardo: “you spent two billion reals [$363 million] on lobbying in the United States. And the result? Father arrested and assets blocked. Total success!”

Amid the knockabout, Bolsonaro’s trial grinds on, and the charges could hardly be graver. The former president is accused of trying to destroy Brazil’s democracy. He is also accused of plotting to assassinate Lula and de Moraes. On 28 July, one of his co-defendants accepted the authenticity of a “coup plan” envisaging the imprisonment of several supreme court judges. Bolsonaro himself has acknowledged that he took part in meetings to discuss “alternative ways” of staying in power, the options including the deployment of military forces and suspension of civil liberties — but stopping short of an actual coup. “A coup is something abominable,” he told de Moraes from the stand, “and such a hypothesis was never even considered.”

That Big Alex is presiding over the trial of a man accused of plotting to kill him is not the only peculiarity of a case whose proceedings are broadcast live, with much incriminating evidence deriving from plea bargains, and whose final judgement is the subject of opinion polls. The most recent, conducted in late July, found that 48% of Brazilians want Bolsonaro to be sentenced to prison for his role in the alleged coup; 46% do not. That such polls are even conducted illustrates how public opinion is both grit and lubricant in the machinery of Brazilian law.

His conviction and imprisonment seemingly preordained, and his social media accounts silenced by Big Alex, Bolsonaro is running out of road. And yet, whether he is succeeded as figurehead of the far-Right by Eduardo or another of his sons of varying flamboyance and dissipation; the more straightforwardly conservative governor of the state of Sao Paulo, Tarcisio de Freitas; or someone we haven’t heard of yet, the answer is probably no: Bolsonarismo isn’t going away. Through his rhetoric, his undermining of environmental regulations and his support for the mining, farming and gun lobbies, he has vitalized a body of opinion, anti-woke, pro-wealth and fervently evangelical, that will retain its potency for years to come.

And what of the man himself, with his infantile smile and fragile amour propre, his alliances with agribusiness and evangelists who hold their noses at his incoherent speeches stippled with obscenities intended to curry favor with the plebs, a favorite being porra, meaning “semen”; the man of the immortal line, uttered to a female political opponent, that she was too ugly to consider raping? While he was never — even as president — in charge of the movement that takes his name, the former paratrooper did more than most to bring into existence the Brazil of deforestation, expulsion of indigenous people and farms the size of Luxembourg, the Brazil of soaring gun ownership where 600,000 people were murdered over the course of a decade, and where, in the year ending July 2024, 83,988 cases of rape were reported.

Opposite the presumed felon stands the dinosaur Lula, who for all his ancientness and his tolerance of corruption represents the Brazil of affability, multilateralism and care for the poor — and now of wounded pride. And, everywhere, the mutual animosity of the bald judge and the foreign president, spreading like an oil slick over the waters of the western hemisphere.

That said, recognition by Britain and France, which last week announced a similar if unconditional plan, means more than recognition by Brazil or even China. Come September’s UN General Assembly, and assuming that Benjamin Netanyahu doesn’t execute an implausible U-turn and embrace the two-state solution that he has rejected for years, two G7 members, among them the US’s closest ally, will have shoved Israel further towards pariah status. America is the only outside party able to influence Israeli policy in any meaningful way, and of US pressure there is little sign.

If Britain’s faltering journey towards recognition seems unlikely to alleviate the agony of Gaza’s civilians, Starmer’s announcement at least acknowledges the deeper, broader forces that have been unleashed by Israel’s actions since the October 7 attacks. Indeed, the agony of Gaza today may one day seem trivial compared to the slower but incomparably more destructive disorder that threatens the Middle East in years to come.

Few scholars have greater awareness of these forces than Fawaz Gerges, a professor at the LSE and a renowned expert on the Middle East. The Lebanese-American is usually a jovial, ebullient person but when we met shortly before the British announcement his smile was full of pain.

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“I can see no obvious way out of the disaster that is heading for the Middle East,” he told me. “Egypt is waiting to implode and Jordan faces severe challenges.” The reason is the wave of popular hatred that has built up against Israel and threatens to overwhelm Arab regimes that are linked to the Jewish state through peace treaties or, in the case of Jordan, because they harbor millions of displaced Palestinians. “Of course, the ultimate casualty will be Israel itself,” Gerges concluded. “Living by the sword, Israel has turned itself into a fortress and history tells us that fortresses fall.”

Gerges isn’t alone. I also spoke to a senior Saudi official and confidant of Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince and effective ruler. Before October 7, Saudi Arabia had been expected to join the Abraham Accords, under which the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco normalized relations with Israel in 2020. The prospect of Saudi adherence is distant now.

“Middle Eastern stability depends on the Gulf economies,” the official told me, “and we cannot prosper without peace. Sure, we can cope with a war in Yemen and a not-so-stable Iraq, but if Jordan and Egypt explode, the danger for us will be acute. Different groups will vie for control of our holy places, Mecca and Medina. And it won’t be like the Mamluk Empire in medieval times, with a single regime exercising hegemony over the whole region, but chaos and a free-for-all.”

A doomsday scenario may be sketched out as follows: recognition of a Palestinian state being dead on arrival, the Palestinians continue to be persecuted not only in Gaza but also the West Bank and Israel proper, while Israel engorges itself on militarism and nationalism that drive out the last vestiges of compassion and good sense. The Arab states, for their part, captured by groups that apply themselves to Israel’s destruction, in cahoots with a rejuvenated Islamic Republic of Iran and cheered on by antisemites in the West, are unable to provide basic services to their people. More and more brown people come out of the region and into the lands of white people who don’t want them. Pretty, isn’t it?

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Nor does any part of this scenario require the various parties to do anything but continue down the path they are already on. Earlier this year, for instance, Donald Trump floated a plan to “clean out” Gaza and “resettle” its population of some two million people in neighboring Arab countries. According to a recent poll commissioned by Pennsylvania State University, 82% of Israelis support the expulsion of Gaza’s residents, while 56% favor expelling Palestinian citizens of Israel. (Back in 2003 the figures were 45% and 31% respectively.) On Tuesday, Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, referred to Gaza as “an inseparable part of the Land of Israel”, also predicting that the West Bank, currently partly governed by the Palestinian Authority, would come under Israeli sovereignty.

The problem for Israeli supremacists is that the Palestinians won’t disappear. They are too numerous to exterminate, and their Arab neighbors have said they won’t take them in, ostensibly for reasons of solidarity but in reality for fear of destabilizing their own fragile societies. The last thing Egypt’s current strongman, Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, wants is an influx of Gazans clamoring for jobs, houses and a political voice — Jordan, whose indigenous population complains of being swamped by their Palestinian guests, being the example to avoid. Finally, the Palestinians possess a keen appreciation of the deadly intentions of their adversary and something approaching a relish for the fight to thwart them.

This is crucial; as a historian I have come across numerous communities that have lacked such attributes and disappeared as a result. The Jews of Lisbon, for instance, having converted to Catholicism, in most cases expediently, suffered a hideous massacre in 1506 before being driven into exile by the Inquisition. Or take the Armenians of what is now eastern Turkey, denigrated as fifth columnists by the Ottoman government during the First World War. In their villages of mud and straw in the valleys of the Anatolian plateau, they waited docilely to be sent on death marches that killed over a million. And, of course, there is the Holocaust itself, that supreme example of a nation unprepared for the fate in store for it — and for which unpreparedness Israel is the living, breathing refutation.

To cite a contemporary case, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which took up arms against the mighty Turkish state in 1984, avoided extirpation for all of 41 years in part by refusing to lay them down again. The PKK’s recent pledge to disarm, in return for integration into Turkish political life, would put the destiny of the Kurds in the hands of the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He is one of the world’s least trustworthy politicians and the PKK’s decision may prove unwise.

A movement of national liberation, rather than the bunch of jihadis Netanyahu depicts it as, Hamas has said that it will disarm once Israel retreats to its pre-1967 borders — which, given the political impossibility of that happening, means never. Besides, why would Hamas give up the main weapon it has against a much more powerful enemy: the ability to strike asymmetrically, causing maximum horror and distress?

Hamas has lost support among ordinary Gazans: not because of popular revulsion at the October 7 attacks, widely regarded as nothing less than the Zionists deserved, but because of its callousness towards its own people’s suffering and its intransigence in negotiations with Israel. Yet, Hamas is wildly popular in the West Bank, and indeed elsewhere in the Arab world. Israel itself believes that terrorist networks are replacing dead Hamas fighters at a rate of five to one. “60% of Hamas fighters are the sons of martyrs,” I was told by Avi Shlaim, an emeritus professor at Oxford and a prominent Israeli critic of his homeland. “The easiest thing for Hamas is to recruit more fighters to replace the ones it has lost.”

As the saying goes, victory is survival for a guerrilla army. Anyone with a smartphone can watch films showing plucky Hamas warriors clambering onto Israeli armored vehicles and taking them out using explosive devices recycled from captured ordinance and finessed on the kitchen table, before, presumably, the inevitable retaliatory execution by an Israeli drone. You don’t need to kill many Israeli soldiers to show your staying power, or to convince Israeli reservists of the advisability of dodging the draft — not that Netanyahu’s government is releasing figures on those who fail to present themselves.

No wonder the other Arab nations are so jittery. In Jordan the Muslim Brotherhood, which spawned Hamas, trounced pro-government parties in elections last September. In Egypt, the authorities announced earlier this month that they had thwarted terrorist attacks targeting prominent figures, apparently planned by the armed wing of the Brotherhood. Recall, too, that it was a Brotherhood government that al-Sisi toppled to seize power in 2013, and whose former cadres smolder in the prison cells of Egypt’s police state. Not that the effects of Gaza will be confined to the Middle East or the Muslim world. According to a British security source, quoted by Reuters, the Gaza war is “likely to become the biggest recruiter for Islamist militants since [the Iraq invasion of] 2003”.

In the words of the Saudi official I spoke to, the Trump administration needs to take a long view that considers the law of cause and effect. Trump’s promise to settle the Gazans “in far safer and more beautiful communities, with new and modern homes, in the region” proclaims his ignorance of this law. The want of long-term, morally coherent thinking among the political class is marginally less glaring in Britain than it is in Israel and the US. And, if the belated and conditional recognition of Palestine remains strategically open to doubt, Starmer’s government has at least won Trump’s trust. It must now team up with the Arab nations and focus America’s attention on preventing today’s Gazan catastrophe from becoming something worse.

If you’re going to issue a cultural call to arms, it helps to have an idea what “our own culture” actually means. Reform and the Conservatives only know what they are rejecting: Islam and Europe. As for Labour, when Lisa Nandy became culture secretary a year ago, she pledged to transform Britain into a “self-confident” country, one where everyone can “see themselves in the stories we tell”. On the question of what that national story is, however, she was tellingly silent.

One answer was to be found earlier this week, at Lords Cricket Ground, where England and India contested one of the most exciting test matches in living memory. The game marked the triumphant return, after injury, of the English fast bowler Jofra Archer, born in Barbados. The winning wicket was taken by a Briton of Punjabi origin, Shoaib Bashir, who toiled heroically with a broken finger. As the Indians like to say, cricket is an Indian game that the English accidentally invented. All of this qualifies it for prominent inclusion in “the stories we tell” — including about empire.

And yet the Government seems unbothered by the fact that most children in this country are ignorant of the game. At Lords this week, of Lisa Nandy, whose Bengali father no doubt played as a pupil at St Xavier’s, Calcutta, there was no sign. No sign, either, of the “self-confident” country she predicted a year ago. Cultural highs like a memorable test match aside, the historically informed reference points that used to unite us are melting away. Our political parties unite on the need for a national revival: but when asked to define the nation they deliver platitudes about diversity or values. Nandy isn’t alone. Few people in public service today boast the imagination or institutional firepower to identify the events, heroes and artifacts that make up our national story — let alone harness them to a revival commanding broad enthusiasm.

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For cultural libertarians, of course, such a top-down approach chills the soul. They scoff at the German government for funding opera houses in every market town, and the French for asserting the superiority of their civilization in reports on the country’s drains. According to this argument, Britain’s small “c” version of culture is partly propelled by personal taste: take, for instance, the exquisite series of Chagall stained glass windows commissioned by the D’Avigdor-Goldsmid family in the Anglo-Saxon church at Tudeley in Kent. Profit, for example in the form of the rampantly successful King Penguin books of the Forties and Fifties on cultural subjects, also has a role, as does philanthropy. Liverpool’s splendid Walker Gallery, built by the eponymous brewer, shows the impact that philanthropists can have on the inner life of the nation.

Of cultural tsars, the theory goes, we have no need. And yet the cultural identity of Britons today has been partly shaped by fiat. In 1951, the Festival of Britain, centered on London’s South Bank with satellites around the country, brought contemporary style and primary colors to a nation that had been conditioned by war to truckle in gravy browns and khaki green. Two years later, the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II announced a “Second Elizabethan Age”, with a ceremony that combined youth, promise and rituals that had been cut and pasted from 1,000 years of monarchy.

In 1969, the country’s arbiters of taste, the BBC and Lord Clark, got together to make Civilisation, 650 minutes of television that showed that while the British hadn’t actually produced a lot of the world’s greatest art, they understood it better than anyone else. Civilisation attracted unprecedented viewing figures for a series on high culture. As the future deputy chairman of Christies was told by his daily help, “now I understand why you love art so much.”

Britain last told its story to the world at the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics. “Isles of Wonder”, Danny Boyle’s spectacle depicted a country that was both traditional and forward-looking, stable and dynamic. The Left was thrilled by the prominence given to the NHS, Windrush and the Suffragettes; the Right revelled in the Chelsea Pensioners, the Industrial Revolution and the Eton Boating Song. There was a comic turn by the Queen and James Bond, and 62,000 people came together to murder “Hey Jude”. In its end-of-year review, Q magazine called the ceremony “the most surprising, moving, spectacular cultural event this country had ever seen”.

Step away from Britain, meanwhile, and back to the 19th and early-20th centuries, and it becomes clear that the movements of mass awakening that generated that remarkably successful unit of social currency, the nation state, were the result of concerted efforts to devise national stories. Verdi’s Battaglia di Legnano, written after five days of street fighting that drove the occupying Austrians out of Milan in 1848, was an “opera with a purpose” in the words of the music historian Charles Osborne. Certainly, it gave Italy’s Risorgimento its hummable tunes, and it’s surely no accident that some nationalists used “VERDI” as an acronym for “Vittorio Emanuele, Re d’Italia” (“Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy”). It was a similar story elsewhere: in 1873, the Turkish playwright Namik Kemal’s Homeland or Silistria, a thunderous dramatisation of a successful rearguard against the Russians in the Crimean War, inspired a new understanding of the nation founded less on the authority of the Sultan than the valour of his subjects.

National cultures are often born or revitalised in wars and emergencies. Ireland’s identity was formed in the 1916 Easter Rising against the British, and the civil war that followed the establishment of the Irish Free State four years later. The slow death of the Ottoman Empire culminated in defeat at the hands of the Allies in the First World War. From the wreckage, a nationalist army officer called Mustafa Kemal established a republic, based on his interpretation of the Turks’ language, history and culture. His system has survived — albeit with modification — down to the present.

I spoke recently to Olesya Khromeychuk, director of the Ukrainian Institute in London and the author of a moving memoir about her brother, a soldier and casualty of Putin’s invasion. She told me that her compatriots’ culture has been strengthened by the current war, with bookshops proliferating, theatres rammed and world classics hitherto available only in Russian selling out in Ukrainian. Something similar is currently happening in the Islamic Republic of Iran, where, trapped between the mullahs and the regime’s foreign enemies, ordinary Iranians exhibit an ever-greater attachment to their own culture, from the epic Shahnameh to the revival of pre-Islamic traditions such as the winter solstice, celebrated with readings from the national poet, Hafez, alongside mountains of pomegranates.

“A culture is made up not simply of works of art, or of literary discourses,” Orlando Figes, the historian of Russia, has written, “but of unwritten codes, signs and symbols, rituals and gestures, and common attitudes that fix the public meaning of these words and organise the inner life of a society.” The irony is that the rapid erosion of such codes in this country — mention “Alfred and the Cakes” and many young people look at you as if you are mad — has coincided with strident calls for national revival and, in the case of Reform, salvation. Yet such calls are unrealistic if the cultural foundations on which such a revival might be built are undermined.

Our culture has been impoverished. There are many culprits here. Woke traduces hundreds of years of history as tainted with criminality, leading to swathes of our national story, in all its gore and glory, being lost to sight. When I attended a high-profile Shakespeare production recently, it was clear that one of the younger actors barely understood the words she was saying. The fault didn’t lie with the actor, I suspect, but with that patronising and self-fulfilling pose of egalitarianism, common in many schools, that considers Shakespeare too “inaccessible” to teach properly.

Such was the glee of the Thatcherite Right in dismantling the unions in the Eighties that it did not stop to think that the death of the collieries would also kill the brass bands, clubs and solemnities that gave substance and meaning to the country’s mining communities. The Right deplores the turning of churches into mosques while itself remaining vacuously irreligious. The Church of England is itself complicit, having long ago abandoned those adornments of our written culture, the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible. A far-Right participant in last summer’s riots was hard-pressed to explain what he was fighting for, other than the right to go to the pub.

When I asked a young Briton to summarise the dominant culture among his generation, he replied, “an international version of American culture that can be found anywhere.” The Right demands that immigrants “integrate” — and rightly so — but if we are not careful there will be nothing left to integrate into.

Whether or not we end up fighting Putin’s Russia, in which case young Muslims and white Britons will become brothers-in-arms in a war for national survival, the cultural emergency is real. 2012 is an age ago. The Queen is dead and Bond is on gardening leave. Society has been further weakened by rancorous lunges for power by aggrieved minorities, whether ethnic, sexual or religious, and the furious reaction of their opponents.

It’s time, then, to revive culture by fiat. Put the British Museum’s Nicholas Cullinan, the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Tristram Hunt and the Royal Ballet and Opera’s Alex Beard in a room together, and don’t let them out until they have written the story that Lisa Nandy airily suggested would write itself. Involve universities, public intellectuals and faith leaders; make the endeavor itself a cause for celebration. That Shakespeare will be the lynchpin is inevitable — his is the last word on so much of the human condition — with supporting roles for those cultures that have entered the bloodstream of Britain, overwhelmingly for the good.

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Britain’s relationship with Islam, for instance, is much older and more interesting than the culture warriors would have us believe, from the establishment of Oxford’s first chair in Arabic, in 1637, to the 62,000 Muslims who died fighting for the British Empire in the First World War, a sacrifice that the Right passes over in silence. That cricket, with all its potential as a unifier, should be included by many in the “inaccessible” category, is another short-sighted omission that has been facilitated by bien-pensant loathing for the empire. Tell the story of this country, warts and all. But tell it. Tell it and tell it again until we see ourselves in it.

Among the artifacts that must be honored in the national story is a building I visited last week. In November 1940, Coventry’s medieval cathedral was destroyed by German bombs. After the war, the Scottish architect Basil Spence rebuilt it. When the new building opened in 1962, traditionalists hated it for being too modern, while modernists hated it for following a Gothic plan. Yet in its blend of old and new, of the sombre and the hopeful, it has become one of this country’s greatest treasures.

The visitor comes in through a huge glass wall animated by engravings of saints and angels that fly between the window bars, creating a sense of lightness and liberation. Immediately the eye runs to the curved wall of color on the baptistery wall — designed by John Piper — its stained glass a mass of blues with splinters of red, green and yellow, redolent of a sunburst, eternity, or a shining power.

And so you advance, into the cavernous, darkening space, along stepped walls that angle away from you for the slow reveal of yet more stunning abstract stained glass. The effect is monumental but unpompous; each feature, from the altar of hammered concrete to the wooden choir stalls surmounted by a canopy that evokes the crown of thorns, is impeccably designed and finished. The final resting point of the traveling eye is the stupendous tapestry that hangs the full height of the cathedral — 23 meters — at the chancel end, designed by Graham Sutherland and depicting a loving Christ in an almond-shaped aura, his foreshortened knees forming a second, echoing aura, and the whole suspended in luminous greens and yellows. That Britain is no longer a country of observant Christians makes the enduring power of Spence’s masterpiece all the more remarkable.

The New Carolean Age has started limply. But King Charles III’s longstanding interest in culture, in the broadest sense of the word, and his much advertised respect for religious faith of all kinds, make him the natural figurehead for the quest for a national culture. Come Maundy Thursday next year, when the monarch hands out coins to the old folk, he should do so in Coventry Cathedral, in the heart of his realm, a fit setting for a culture that is not a game you either win or lose, but a “casket”, in Basil Spence’s words, full of “jewels”.

Khamenei was referring to the two noisy, emphatic words that Trump had posted the previous day: “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER.” The US President had already prompted an exodus from Tehran, by telling the city’s inhabitants to evacuate. Intimating that he knows where Khamenei is hiding, Trump called him an “easy target” even if he won’t kill him “for now”.

Holding up his good hand, which is to say his left, for emphasis (he lost use of his right hand in 1981 to a bomb hidden in a tape recorder by an opposition group called the People’s Mujahedin), the Supreme Leader continued, “if America enters the fray it will suffer irreparable harm.”

Six days into the war, Israeli planes, missiles, and drones continue to cause widespread damage to Iranian military, nuclear and civilian targets, while the odd missile from Iran’s much smaller arsenal gets through Israel’s defenses. On Monday, a US aircraft carrier began steaming from the South China Sea to the Middle East, while Trump toys with the option of “the big one”, as he calls it — bunker-busting bombs dropped by stealth bombers on Iran’s as yet impregnable uranium-enrichment site at Fordow, near the desert city of Qom.

The Supreme Leader’s warning of “irreparable harm” may be intended to suggest that, should the current, purely aerial conflict evolve into a ground operation — in other words, in the event that Fordow cannot be destroyed from the skies and troops are deployed — the result will be, to quote a prominent Tehran-based opposition figure, “Vietnam”.

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If it’s true that the Americans — or rather the Israelis, whose penetration of Iran’s intelligence has helped them achieve dominance in the war so far — have spared Khamenei the fate that they have visited on dozens of assassinated military leaders and nuclear scientists, this is presumably because they wish to preserve the only person with binding authority over the entire regime. But keeping Khamenei alive is also a risk, for this fearless warrior in his 87th year is the icon of the regime’s most fanatical foot soldiers. Not for Iran the scenario of Iraq after the 2003 invasion, when Saddam Hussein’s “elite” Republican Guard melted away; nor will Khamenei emulate Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian dictator who scuttled off to exile in Moscow when his regime was toppled last year. The Islamic Republic may have lost the love and respect of the majority of Iranians, but its core is intact.

To be sure, services are starting to falter. Banks that have been hacked have stopped disbursing savings; deposits in gold are also stuck. Some of the thousands of Tehranis who fled in response to Trump’s call have now returned, having found the hills outside the city no safer from Israeli attack than the apartments they left behind. Police stand at every corner, watching for sabotage.

If morale among ordinary Iranians seems to be holding up, this is down to the spirit of resilience and good humor that Iranians often adopt in times of mortal peril. People hand out slices of watermelon or drinks of sherbet to motorists waiting for hours in queues for petrol. Shopkeepers in rural towns deliberately undercharge fleeing urbanites for provisions. Even the practice of buying bread has changed. The head of a large family who used to snap up sangak by the dozen now hands them out to poor people in his neighborhood. Meanwhile, gallows humor is an outlet for jangling nerves, as Iranians joke that the best way to avoid getting killed is to take sanctuary in the house of the country’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian: no one, not even Israel, would waste a bomb on him.

Yet discord is spreading too. The question of how people should react to Israeli aggression has divided opposition activists into two camps that fling accusations at each other with a violence and coarseness I have never before witnessed in Iranian public debate. One side accuses the other of treacherous collusion with Netanyahu’s war of aggression; the other levels charges of falling in meekly behind the domestic tyrant.

Social media is full of pictures of civilian casualties; so much for Netanyahu’s weasel words about standing four-square with “the noble Iranian people”. Of the more than 600 Iranians who are thought to have been killed since the war began, an estimated 263 are civilians. More than 1,300 people have been wounded.

Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the last shah of Iran, whose detractors refer to him as Quarter Pahlavi, in honor of a coin of intermediate value named after his father’s dynasty, has been calling without effect for a mass uprising against the regime. The self-proclaimed Crown Prince made a bad impression when he was interviewed by the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg last Sunday. “Anything that weakens the regime,” he said, “is something positive.” A visibly shocked Kuenssberg asked, “are you actually saying that Israel bombing your country, civilians in Iran being killed, is a positive thing?”

The irony is that, in the short term at least, the war has made Iranians less likely to overthrow their leaders, not more. Just a few weeks ago, the country seethed with political agitation, with truck drivers going on a nationwide strike and Iranians protesting government failures such as water shortages, pollution, and a dearth of the natural gas with which the country is so generously endowed. For two years now, the regime has been unable to force the millions of women who abandoned the hijab during the Woman, Life, Freedom protests of 2022-3 to put on their headscarves again. The devastating effects of sanctions on the economy and expectations of Khamenei’s imminent demise led many to believe that a change of regime would happen organically and without outside stimulus.

However much millions of Iranians detest the Islamic Republic, uprisings orchestrated by foreign invaders are tainted with dishonor and treachery. Over the past century or so, Iran has suffered repeated interventions by foreign powers, from regime change to aborted reform movements. No Iranian who has come to power on the coattails of foreigners has prospered.

To Senator Ted Cruz, one of America’s most prominent hawks, regime change is “not a complicated question”, requiring only a “popular uprising”. The people of Iraq and Afghanistan might have something to say about that. Furthermore, implicit in predictions of an imminent rebellion is an assumption that public opinion is static. In fact, it changes fast, particularly in a wartime crisis that forces people to examine their basic allegiances while also placing them, and their families, in acute danger. Many Iranians, if faced with the choice between Khamenei and Netanyahu, will — with the heaviest of hearts — choose the former.

In the United States, the war has exposed rifts in the MAGA movement. Thanks to Tucker Carlson, at least we know not to go to Senator Cruz for Iran expertise. Questioning the Republican senator on Wednesday about his support for regime change, the former Fox News host sprang him a trap, asking, “How many people live in Iran?” When Cruz admitted he didn’t know, Carlson went on with feigned incredulity and impressive comic timing, “you don’t know the population [slight pause] of the country [slight pause] you seek to topple?” Then Carlson asked him what percentage of the Iranian population is ethnically Persian, which of course Cruz was unable to answer, allowing Carlson to declare in triumph, “you’re a senator who is calling for the overthrow of the government and you don’t know anything about the country!”

What is lacking in this war of dubious legality and towering ignorance is a moral or humanitarian compass guiding policy. Regardless of the Islamic Republic’s callous and criminal maladministration, and Khamenei’s role in goading Israel and the United States into their current fury, the acts of war that we are witnessing are propelling Iran towards a fate little different from those of Iraq and Afghanistan following the invasions of the early 2000s. European and other states need to kickstart diplomacy without delay — starting with the meeting that has been scheduled between the foreign ministers of Britain, France, and Germany, on the one hand, and the foreign minister of Iran, on the other, in Geneva on Friday. This must go beyond a polite recapitulation of Trump’s demand of “unconditional surrender” and lay the groundwork for a revived diplomatic process aimed at allowing Iran strictly monitored uranium enrichment and sanctions relief. If this does not happen and Khamenei chooses to go down fighting, not only will the 92 million people of Iran suffer unjustifiably, but their country will radiate regional and global instability for years to come.

Netanyahu’s objective here isn’t simply to destroy Iran’s nuclear program and its ballistic missiles. It is to embarrass and demoralize the Islamic Republic by flaunting Israel’s mastery of sabotage and subterfuge as his pilots roam unimpeded above the Persian plateau. The scope of the Israeli attacks was big, from Tabriz in the far north to Dezful in the south; the intelligence and precision, as with the campaign that decapitated Hezbollah last year, were impressive. Images released by the Israeli military showed shadowy figures, purportedly Israeli commandos, setting devices around Iran’s air defenses that were detonated during the assault. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the head of the Revolutionary Guard’s Air Force, was killed along with other senior officers in an underground command center whose existence should have been a secret.

According to Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations the strikes killed 78 people and wounded 320. This is its biggest loss of senior military leaders since the darkest days of the Iran-Iraq War of the Eighties. A clutch of nuclear scientists were also assassinated. As Netanyahu promised in an unctuous address to “the proud people of Iran”, complete with a snatch of Persian delivered in his guttural Hebrew accent, “More is on the way.”

In return, on Friday, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, vowed to show “no mercy” to the “evil, despicable, terrorist, Zionist” enemy. But he no longer has the tool kit to execute such threats. Until last year he would have mobilized Iran’s proxies in its “axis of resistance”, but Hezbollah and Hamas have both been maimed by Israel’s furious response to the attacks of October 7, while his client Bashar al-Assad was last year ousted from power in Syria, the Islamic Republic’s former bridgehead to the eastern Mediterranean.

He cannot lightly target military installations belonging to the US, despite holding it responsible for Israel’s actions, for that would bring Trump down on his wraith-like, 86-year-old head. Only American planes can deliver the biggest “bunker-buster” bombs that are capable of penetrating the mountainside that protects the Iranians’ as-yet impregnable enrichment facility, at Fordow, near the holy city of Qom. It is best to avoid needless provocation.

Netanyahu has no such qualms, claiming to be clearing a path for the Iranian people to achieve “your objective, which is freedom”. In Tehran the roads are full of police guarding against the possibility of the popular insurrection that is the nightmare of dictators in war. Petrol sales have been capped at 20 liters per vehicle. A nation immiserated by sanctions, its once-thriving middle class pummeled back to the bread line, will suffer further. But the dignity of Iranians is resilient and there are few signs of panic among people that have lived with either the promise of war or its fully materialized reality ever since the revolution that swept away the Shah in 1979.

Many Tehranis left the capital when Saddam Hussein launched Scud missiles during the Iran-Iraq War, and, before then, when Britain and Russia invaded in World War II. But now the old people are staying, doggedly reluctant to up sticks, not, I think, from any particular animus towards Israel, whose precision and fastidious avoidance of mass civilian casualties has aroused their admiration, but a determination, now that the Islamic Republic may have begun its end game, to stay the course.

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On Friday, with the night sky was alive with whizzing ordnance, from the rooftops, scattered female voices came together: “Death to Khamenei! Death to Khamenei!” The regime is a joke. Its most cherished icon, the compulsory hijab, has been smashed and there is nothing the authorities can do to force the women who have thrown off their headscarves to put them on again. Droll social media posts keep up morale. One shows a hairy man in a cocktail dress standing on the balcony of his Tehran apartment toasting the incoming Israeli missiles with what appears to be shots of vodka. Someone has posted a photo of Hossein Salami, the unlamented commander of the Revolutionary Guard, who was killed on Friday, with his hands held far apart and the legend, “I’m telling you, a missile this thick, right up my arse…” In contrast, there is some sympathy for Muhammad Bagheri, the country’s chief of staff, and another victim of the Israeli cull; he was reputedly troubled by the supreme leader’s use of the armed forces as agents of domestic repression and recently, and in stark contrast to his more blood-thirsty colleagues, issued a call for peace.

For its part, America is struggling to hold a consistent line on the attacks. Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, called the Israeli strikes a “unilateral action”. But if Donald Trump didn’t approve the attacks, it would hardly strengthen his credibility as leader of the greatest and most powerful nation in the history of the world, would it? “I think it’s been excellent,” the President said of the very attacks he had tried strenuously to dissuade Netanyahu from launching. Offended by a journalist’s implication that he may not have been fully in the loop, he retorted, “Heads-up? It wasn’t a heads-up. It was…we know what’s going on.”

Trump and Netanyahu seem to have stumbled into a good cop-bad cop routine, with the US President urging the Iranians to come swiftly to terms “before there is nothing left”. Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, and Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy, had been due to meet in Muscat tomorrow for the sixth round of talks aimed at capping Iran’s uranium enrichment in return for a lifting of sanctions. But the President’s boasting that he was in on the Israeli attacks, the assassination of Shamkhani, who had been overseeing Iran’s negotiators, and Israel’s evident determination not to allow an Iranian enrichment capability of any kind have dampened Iranian enthusiasm. In the words of a foreign ministry spokesman, “You cannot claim to negotiate and at the same time…allow the Zionist regime to target Iran’s territory.”

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If Trump did approve the Israeli action, as opposed to simply knowing about it, it may be that he thinks Iran will be bounced into accepting a complete cessation of enrichment. In fact, events of recent days, clearly aimed at toppling the regime, are more likely to suggest to Khamenei that only by going for a bomb can the Islamic Republic survive.

Iran’s route to do so is to further enrich its stockpile to weapons grade. Given that Natanz seems to be out of action — according to Rafael Mariano Grossi, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who has visited the site often, it was “heavily damaged” in the Israeli attacks — the fuel needs to be moved to Fordow. Such a transfer, however, would make it a “sitting duck” for Israeli drones, according to a former US spy quoted in the New York Times, while Trump would presumably unleash his exceptionally heavy bunker busters if he learned that Khamenei had issued orders to go for a bomb. Not that Trump ever utters the name of his adversary, which tells us a lot.

Khamenei’s name is not dissimilar to the name of his predecessor, the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini. But distinguishing between the two is perfectly manageable if you put your mind to it. You would expect the Iranians to figure out the difference between, say, Thomson and Timpson, wouldn’t you? Furthermore, if you dignify your adversary with a name, a personality, psychological traits, weaknesses and strengths follow naturally; your adversary becomes legible. But the current American administration is not interested in reading its foes. “Khamenei” is too much of a mouthful for them, so they call him, with cartoonish emphasis, “the Ayatollah”.

And so, 46 years since he played a small role in the victory of the Islamic Revolution, this man without a name who is in fact one of the most significant politicians of our age is running out of road. The current crisis is unlikely to end without him conceding the right to enrich uranium, which, to his mind, amounts to surrendering to the enemy he has spent his entire life fighting, and which might not, in any case, save the Islamic Republic. Flight is not an option. Unlike Assad, he would not accept a dacha outside Moscow. He would prefer to die in Iran. The Ayatollah is very old and he is surrounded by men who keep getting killed. To go for a bomb would be the last throw of the dice, and probably suicidal, and we are not quite there yet.

The messaging is haywire. A recent newspaper headline announced with stentorian gravity the hottest May Day since records began; that same headline loomed over a photograph of swimmers frolicking in the surf. And my sheep-farmer neighbor in Cumbria — this year of all years, when the lambs were born onto bone-dry hillsides — leaned on the handlebars of his quad bike and said to me: “The thing is, Chris, when it comes to climate change, I don’t know what to believe.”

Well we do know that the world is getting hotter. Forget restricting the rise in temperature to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, as envisaged by the 2015 Paris Agreement; depending on the time period you base your monitoring on, we’ve either already breached that limit or are about to do so. In March, the French government announced measures to prepare the country for a rise of 4°C. Even 3°C would, in the words of Lord Stern, a respected British climate economist, be “way outside the experience of Homo sapiens” and “life-changingly, civilization-changingly, awful”.

Let nobody say we weren’t warned. In 2006, Stern wrote a report about the economics of climate change for Blair’s government that was widely read — and, as it turned out, widely disregarded — both in Britain and abroad. While Stern argued that “the benefits of strong and early action far outweigh the economic costs of not acting”, the most powerful government at the time, that of President George W Bush, believed more in regime change than climate change.

Extrapolating from Stern’s figures, the $4-6 trillion that Bush and his successors spent invading and immiserating Afghanistan and Iraq would have paid for 10 years of the relatively inexpensive transition to a low-carbon global economy that was then on offer. Now, after two more decades of intensive fossil fuel consumption, ever-higher concentrations of greenhouse gases, and many political false starts, this transition has become both more costly and less assured of success. In 2024, the Independent High-Level Expert Group on Climate Finance costed the necessary climate measures at around $6.5 trillion a year by 2030, rising to as much as $8 trillion by 2035.

On 29 April, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) published a paper entitled “The Climate Paradox: Why we need to reset action on Climate Change”. In the paper’s foreword, Blair wrote that voters are fed up with being asked to make “financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle” that have “minimal” effect on global emissions, and that the UN’s annual COP talking shops “will not deliver change at the speed required”.

Coming from a former prime minister who prided himself on his reading of public opinion and his prioritizing of “delivery” over dogma, these points were well made. Blair’s conclusion, however, was doctrinaire and unwise: “Any strategy based on either ‘phasing out’ fossil fuels in the short term or limiting consumption is a strategy doomed to fail.” Environmentalists erupted.

The paper itself was authored by Lindy Fursman, a former climate adviser to the New Zealand government. Besides advocating for more investment in adaptation and technological fixes such as carbon capture and removal — both eminently sensible, though regarded by hardline environmentalists as tantamount to “giving up” on efforts to cut emissions — Fursman divided humanity’s attitude to the crisis into three historical phases. First came an age of activism in the Nineties, which was followed by a decade or so of optimism; now, we’ve entered a far more ominous age of apathy.

The age of optimism peaked in Britain in June 2019, when the nation became the first G7 economy to commit to Net Zero by 2050. The amendment to the 2008 Climate Change Act was so uncontroversial that MPs waved it through without a vote. It was a rare moment of bipartisanship in the premiership of Theresa May. It was also a year of activism. Extinction Rebellion occupied public spaces, Greta Thunberg scolded the UK parliament, and in September, in cities around the world, at least four million youngsters, many of them truants grinning in their school uniforms, took to the streets to demand radical action. So rattled was the aviation industry by flight shame that a nervy KLM ad asked customers, “Could you take the train instead? Next time, think about flying responsibly.”

Then Covid arrived, followed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which laid bare, in Fursman’s words, “a fundamental reality: when faced with financial hardship, domestic economic stability and living costs take precedence over climate action”.

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Blackouts are coming for Britain

By Wessie du Toit

In the furore that followed the TBI’s intervention, Stern described Fursman’s paper as “muddled and misleading”. “If the UK wobbles on its route to Net Zero,” he went on, “other countries may become less committed.” Yet regardless of whether the UK government “wobbles”, the future of the world will not be determined by climate action here.

Britain’s share of global emissions is 1% and falling. Its self-image as a decarbonization success story owes less to Net Zero policies than it does to the fact that Britain is a post-industrial economy offshoring emissions to Asian countries that make the processed food, clothes, and electronics we like to buy. By and large, we and much of the rest of Europe have done our emitting, while China surpassed America as the world’s biggest emitter more than 20 years ago.

Instead, it’s the increasingly populous emitters of the developing world — China, India, Southeast Asia, and Africa — that will decide what happens next. These markets should now be receiving an unprecedented inflow of affordable climate finance to enable them to feed, house and provide energy to their people without frying the world. And yet, for reasons of indebtedness, poor credit worthiness and superior returns on Wall Street, this isn’t happening except in the case of China. According to the International Energy Agency, 90% of new clean energy investment has gone to the rich world, plus China, since 2021. Just 2% has gone to Southeast Asia. And in 2024, investments in green energy in Africa, whose population is expected to double by 2070, totalled a nugatory $22 billion. This is the most significant factor in our current predicament. But it is not the only one, and, again, politics is to blame.

Far from being the subject of an international consensus, Net Zero has become as divisive a notion as Bush and Blair’s “war on terror” in the early 2000s, and without good reason, for while the war on terror was a mendacious enterprise dressed up as an elevating mission, Net Zero was once a more or less attainable goal undone by politics. As prime minister, Blair compared the fight against climate change to the battle against fascism in the Second World War, and it was his government that published the first draft of the climate change bill that went on to become law. But he also refused to end the tax-free status of aviation fuel because it would have imperilled the great British summer holiday.

Few politicians have the integrity and wherewithal to handle an issue that would test the capacities of the greatest visionary. Nor do we ask them to. But the proposition so cogently laid out by Stern in 2006 — essentially, pay not very much now in order to avoid a world of pain later on — was ignored by our leaders, and many electorates. Planning for the long term, it seems, is anathema to our instantaneous approach to capital allocation, communication and electoral success. Indeed, it may be that electoral democracy in its current state of degeneration is fundamentally unsuited to the kind of systemic change that the crisis demands. That China continues to bring coal-fired power stations online shouldn’t obscure the fact that the People’s Republic has developed by far the most plausible plan for the transition to renewable energy of any major economy.

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The true cost of Net Zero

By David Rose

Given that the Chinese model cannot easily be adapted in the West, and that meaningful change here will only come from popular pressure on political and economic elites, what is lacking most obviously from the current debate is the loud and ungovernable clamour of those who have the most to lose.

For while climate anxiety may course through our tracked and cosseted young people, there is no sign of further mass protests. Extinction Rebellion activists are referred to Prevent. Greta agitates for Gaza. Parents advise their offspring to concentrate on their exams. As I was told by a theology teacher at a large London secondary school, the exuberance shown by pupils during the protest of September 2019, and the school’s support for their cause, has given way to “hopelessness”.

An infantilized and emasculated youth is no driver of revolutionary change. And yet there are two reasons for young people to act. On the negative side, and to descend into the vernacular, while the planet is to some extent demonstrably and unavoidably shafted, if no action is taken it will become worse than shafted. It will become increasingly uninhabitable.

The second reason isn’t negative at all. It’s an inspiring message of emancipation that can be summed up in the words of Jeremy Oppenheim, whose company, Systemiq, funnels investment and expertise into climate measures around the world. “Sustainability,” he writes, “is a promise of freedom: freedom from polluted air, from unaffordable energy, from food systems that harm our health and ecosystems, and from plastics and chemicals that trash our environment… It’s not about restrictions or fear — it’s about the possibility of a better life.” This “better life” is one of abundance in which the weather is our friend, our food actually tastes of something, and we thrive in intelligent partnership with the forces of nature. What could be more thrilling than that?

It’s telling that the most significant intervention on the climate in recent times has come from a septuagenarian former prime minister with a trust problem. It’s time for young people to start owning this crisis; time for them to throw off the noise-canceling headphones and try for a better life.

Negotiations between Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, and Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, got going on 11 March in the pleasantly low-key setting of Oman. On the insistence of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, who draws the line at eyeballing the enemy, the meeting was “indirect”, with the teams in separate rooms and messages relayed through the Omanis. Araghchi and Witkoff did however “bump into one other” at the close of official business, in the Iranian’s account, and “exchanged amenities”, evidence for the “direct” talks that Trump regards as a superior sort of negotiation. Araghchi told Iranian TV that the Americans want to “reach a deal in the shortest possible time”, adding with the gentle smile of an older civilization, “of course, no easy task”.

Fresh from imposing more sanctions, threatening military action and moving stealth bombers and an aircraft carrier to within striking distance of Iran’s main nuclear sites, Trump now proclaims his desire that Iran become “a wonderful, great, happy country” — albeit one without nuclear weapons. The President’s belief that epochal change is in his gift remains unassailable, even after the debacles of Ukraine and tariffs. It is this belief, and his indifference to precedent and history, that so alarm Netanyahu and Pahlavi while giving his Iran diplomacy an outside chance of success.

The Iran-US feud started with the 1979 revolution that overthrew the crown prince’s father, Shah Mohammad Reza, America’s main client in the region, replacing him with an Islamic regime whose zealots occupied the US embassy in Tehran and held its staff hostage for well over a year. In the Eighties, the Reagan administration supported Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in its eight-year war against Iran, while the Iranians established Hezbollah in Lebanon to resist Israeli and American hegemony; a bomb attack on a US military compound in Beirut in 1983 killed 241 marines. With the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq of the early 2000s, hostilities reached the borders of the Islamic Republic; in Washington DC prominent neocons told me the mullahs would be next.

But the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan discredited the principle of regime change through occupation. And, for the past 20 years, Iran and the US have waged a squalid war that has featured bombings, cyber attacks, assassinations and proxy campaigns across Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen — not to mention the thousands of statutes, executive orders and designations that the US has issued against Iran, and which together constitute the most comprehensive sanctions regime in history.

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Is this the end of Erdoğan?

By Christopher de Bellaigue

Early in his first term, Donald Trump withdrew from a nuclear deal, known as the JCPOA, that had been negotiated by the Obama administration and European powers, under which Iran received sanctions relief in return for capping uranium enrichment and accepting stringent inspections. Trump’s subsequent policy of “maximum pressure” crippled Iran’s economy — according to the IMF, gross official reserves fell from $123 billion in 2018 to $4 billion two years later — but did not dissuade Khamenei from continuing to develop his nuclear capabilities: insurance, as he sees it, against regime change.

According to the UN’s nuclear watchdog, Iran has “dramatically” accelerated its uranium enrichment to up to 60% purity, easily within reach of the 90% purity necessary for a weapon. The country is now capable of producing enough fissile material for several bombs in a few weeks, though it could take months to perfect a weapon and its means of delivery.

Vali Nasr, an Iran expert at Johns Hopkins University, believes that the Iranians received an assurance in Oman that Trump will not insist that they dismantle their program: but instead agree that they may go back to enriching at lower levels, suitable for civilian use, while accepting tough inspections in return for sanctions relief. If this sounds like the JCPOA that Obama approved, and that Trump described as the “worst deal in the world”, that’s because it is. “Trump can claim that he got better terms,” Nasr said on 14 April, but “the best we can get is that Iran goes back to terms that look like the first nuclear deal”.

Nothing riles Trump like comparisons with his Democratic predecessors and, having hinted that the US would accept Iranian enrichment for civilian purposes, on Tuesday Witkoff insisted that “Iran must stop and eliminate its nuclear enrichment and weaponization program… a deal with Iran will only be completed if it is a Trump deal”. Whether Witkoff will insist on the new, tougher conditions, when the two sides meet again on Saturday, cannot be known; what is certain is that his words will please Netanyahu and hardliners in the US while confirming Khamenei in his belief that the US cannot be trusted.

In the 85-year-old ayatollah, Trump has a negotiating partner who will never pay him the compliment of a face-to-face meeting and whose hatred for the “Great Satan” does not distinguish between Democrats and Republicans. Khamenei’s personal animus for Trump goes back to a drone strike that the president ordered on Baghdad Airport in January 2020. The strike killed Qassem Soleimani, a military strategist and commander greatly beloved of the Supreme Leader, who had molded Iran’s regional proxies, its “Axis of Resistance”, into an outstandingly effective instrument of overseas power.

Soleimani’s indispensability was underscored after Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 threw the Axis of Resistance into a tailspin. If Soleimani had been around to influence events, it is unlikely that Hezbollah would have launched its subsequent rocket attacks on Israel, which served only to provoke Netanyahu into assassinating the group’s leaders and obliterating its networks. Nor would Iran have allowed the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, its main regional ally, to fall tamely last December. Israel had already launched its most damaging airstrikes on Iran to date, and flaunted its penetration of the country’s intelligence services by assassinating Hamas’s political chief while he was staying in a government guesthouse in Tehran.

Foreign humiliations have played out against a domestic backdrop of soaring inflation, a plunging currency and a population that uses every opportunity, from women leaving off the mandatory hijab to a rumble of protests on quotidian government failures, to register its revulsion with its leaders. To the question of why the very same Khamenei who last month rejected Trump’s demand for talks, calling his overture “a deception of public opinion”, went on to dispatch his foreign minister to confer with Steve Witkoff, the answer is surely that proffered by Reza Pahlavi: “the regime has never been as weak.”

In the distinction between a tightly monitored civilian program and outright dismantlement of the nuclear scheme may lie the difference between war and peace. Khamenei will not easily give up the deterrent value of nuclear ambiguity — and expose himself to the hostility of hardliners in the US, who will try to persuade Trump to go for regime change. He will brandish his drones and ballistic missiles, which last year reached Israel, albeit doing little damage, and hope that Trump’s aversion to costly foreign wars does the rest.

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On 8 April, Abbas Araghchi asked in the op-ed pages of the Washington Post whether Trump wants to “become another U.S. president mired in a catastrophic war in the Middle East — a conflict that would quickly extend across the region and cost exponentially more than the trillions of taxpayer dollars that his predecessors burned in Afghanistan and Iraq”. The foreign minister went on to evoke his country’s “unparalleled” scope for trade and investment. “It is the US administrations and congressional impediments, not Iran, that have kept American enterprises away from the trillion-dollar opportunity that access to our economy represents.” Back in 2016, when the JCPOA was in force, and it looked as though capitalism’s last big frontier, as Iran was billed, would be breached, I advised foreign investors on commercial opportunities in the country. In the event, most walked away because they doubted whether America was sincere about sanctions relief. For all the ostensible commitment of a Democratic administration to facilitating investment in Iran, its heart wasn’t in it.

Nixon in China is the analogy Trump’s people reach for whenever he canters into the diplomatic unknown. But the more salient comparison is with the leader he is not. Not for Trump the conviction Zionism and institutional loyalties of Joe Biden, who from his position on the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee felt keenly America’s agony during the hostage crisis of 1979-81, and for whom, in the words of an Iranian official quoted by Trita Parsi, a prominent Iranian-American who has long lobbied for detente, “offering us sanctions relief was as painful as peeling off his own skin”. Trump doesn’t do history. His institutional loyalty is in negative territory. What matters to him is face and business.

And here, in the words of Ali Vaez, another veteran observer of US-Iranian relations, is another reason to be very cautiously optimistic about the new diplomatic process. “What is different,” he told CNN on 12 April, “is that President Trump has the authority and the power to deliver on sanctions relief in ways that President Obama never could and President Biden never would.”

Since then İmamoğlu’s party, the Republican People’s Party, or CHP, has held huge protest rallies across the country and staged a primary in which more than 15 million people anointed him as their candidate for the presidency. The opposition has also led a boycott of industrial conglomerates, media companies, and retail groups associated with the government, which has been patchily observed. On 2 April, many shops in Istanbul and elsewhere were shuttered in support of some 3,000 detained protesters. Such measures are clearly intended to spook investors and prompt a currency crisis of the kind that the Central Bank has already spent $25 billion in reserves to prevent. The interior minister deplored the opposition’s “assassination attempt on our national economy”.

The small number of independent Turkish journalists still able to work inside the country concur that the CHP, a fissiparous outfit with a talent for walking into political traps, has handled the crisis surprisingly well. Noting that İmamoğlu’s detention even brought protesters into the streets of Erdoğan’s hometown of Rize, on the Black Sea, one such commentator, Murat Yetkin, declared, “the wind is changing”.

Since Erdoğan embraced authoritarianism in the early 2010s, he and his AK Party, or AKP, have captured the judges, cowed the universities, and lobotomized the mainstream media. Rather than report on the biggest of the recent protests, by hundreds of thousands of Istanbullus (2.2 million according to the CHP), on 29 March, Turkey’s main news channel debated filo pastry recipes for the forthcoming Bayram holiday.

Erdoğan has a habit of revealing the outcome of judicial investigations before they conclude. Referring to a probe into what he called the “bribery, corruption and terrorism” of CHP municipalities, he predicted that “as it advances and deepens [it] will reveal how far the arms of the criminal organization have embraced the municipalities like an octopus”. Depicting the protests as a Jacobin frenzy, and neglecting to mention the police’s use of tear gas, water cannons, and rubber bullets, he warned that such “street terror is nothing but an attempt to veil thefts” of which his opponents stand accused.

That the current agitation is both deep and wide testifies to Erdoğan’s declining credibility even among his constituency of Islamists, nationalists, and small businesses, which is corroborated by ever-slimmer electoral pickings. It also points to the emergence, finally, of a credible alternative to his suffocating misrule.

For years the CHP had struggled with the legacy of Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Republic, who conceived of the party as an engine of Turkish nationalism, economic dirigisme, and prescriptive secularism. Erdoğan’s recent CHP opponents were either too nationalist to attract the Kurds, who make up around 18% of the population, or — as in the case of Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, loser of the 2023 election — were disadvantaged by their membership of the Alevis, a big minority sect to which some Sunnis are axiomatically (and indefensibly) averse.

İmamoğlu, by contrast, is an observant Sunni with a background in the private sector — which Erdoğan supporters find reassuring. He possesses personal magnetism, a reputation for competence, and an instinct for the popular cause (milk for poor children; cleaning up the Golden Horn, for years a foul and dangerous suspension, now a place where dolphins cavort). To the Alevi and socially liberal base he inherited from Kılıçdaroğlu, he has added many Kurdish supporters. In a speech he delivered in the Kurdish region a few days before his incarceration (a 50-minute barnstormer with barely a glance at his notes), he referred to the Kurds as “the foundation stone, the central pillar of this country”. The emergence of the Kurds as a political force marks a big departure from the old nationalist insistence on a wholly Turkish nation. When I lived in Turkey as a journalist in the Nineties, CHP officials would deny the existence of the Kurds altogether, calling them “our brothers in the southeast” or, yet more egregiously, “mountain Turks”.

Of all the qualities that İmamoğlu needs as he begins a confinement that will either destroy him or make him invincible, the most salient is that he, alone among Erdoğan’s adversaries of the past quarter of a century, is a proven winner. In 2019 İmamoğlu was elected mayor of Istanbul, which had been a fiefdom of the AKP and its predecessor party ever since Erdoğan himself became mayor in 1994. The Supreme Election Council promptly annulled İmamoğlu’s victory and ordered a re-run only for indignant Istanbullus to return him with a bigger majority. In last year’s mayoral elections, he trounced his AKP opponent. As the saying goes — and as Erdoğan can confirm, having himself made the leap from mayor of Turkey’s biggest city to prime minister — “whoever wins Istanbul wins Turkey”.

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Erdoğan's new world order

By Lily Lynch

When I interviewed a smiling Erdoğan in the spring of 1997 on the terrace of an Ottoman pleasure house, the then Istanbul mayor had a reputation for personal magnetism, competence, and an instinct for the popular cause (planting trees on Istanbul verges, piping water to the poor). In this sense, he and İmamoğlu have much in common — they even both hail from the Black Sea region. We were brought early strawberries which we ate while admiring the view over the Bosphorus. The word “democracy” came up often as we talked, even though the previous year Erdoğan had caused outrage by describing democracy as a tram: “it goes as far as we want it to go, and then we step off.”

Last month Turkish democracy ran out of track. Erdoğan’s decision to arrest his rival is a bet against his own experience. It was a jail sentence handed down by Turkey’s (then militantly secular) judiciary that propelled Erdoğan to national power in the first place. His crime in December 1997 was to recite a martial poem which the courts interpreted as an incitement to religious insurrection. The vindictiveness of the judgement turned him into a martyr while his mastery of the democratic discourse established him as a symbol of what Turkey’s Nato allies, searching frantically for unobjectionable Muslim regimes, referred to as “moderate” Islam. The US consul in Istanbul visited the mayoralty to commiserate; the case, she said, would “weaken confidence in Turkish democracy”. Erdoğan served four months in prison and in 2002 became prime minister, a post he subsequently abolished, creating the executive presidency he currently occupies.

The president does not intend to step down when his second term ends, in 2028, as the constitution decrees. Which brings us to another character integral to determining the outcome of the current crisis: Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which has waged an on-off war against the Turkish state since 1984. Erdoğan needs the help of Öcalan’s followers in parliament to enact constitutional changes that would allow him to run for a third term. The PKK is keen: its units have been hammered from the skies by Bayraktar drones manufactured by Erdoğan’s eponymous son-in-law, and its alliance with Syria’s Kurds has been imperilled by Turkey’s influence over the new government in Damascus, which it helped install. So it was a big moment when, on 27 February, after months of secret negotiations, Öcalan ordered the PKK to disarm and disband. Two days later the group’s commanders in northern Iraq announced a ceasefire.

A good deal for the Kurds would involve parole for Öcalan and a new Turkish constitution enshrining Kurdish cultural and political autonomy. But Amberin Zaman, perhaps the best-informed analyst of Kurdish affairs (and herself a courageous reporter who was driven out of Turkey by Erdoğan’s threats), believes that the president’s promises to Öcalan (made through intermediaries) amount to little more than an amelioration of his prison conditions and freedom for a prominent Kurdish politician. Nor have the Kurdish nationalists stayed silent during the current protests, with one of their parliamentary leaders denouncing İmamoğlu’s arrest as “a black stain” and “a blow against democracy and justice”.

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Further blows will be landed. It is possible that Erdoğan will appoint an apparatchik to assume the government of Istanbul as he has done for municipalities whose Kurdish nationalist mayors have been removed or jailed. The loyal media will release details of alleged misdemeanours by the CHP, whose leaders are warning that the authorities will fabricate evidence using AI.

In a reign lasting almost a quarter of a century, Erdoğan has many precedents to draw on as he assaults the CHP. Back in 2016, a coup attempt by parts of the armed forces that had been infiltrated by devotees of Fethullah Gülen, an exiled cleric, was met with a huge purge not only of the army but also the bureaucracy, the universities and the media. Hundreds of thousands of people — not all of them Gülenists, by any means — were jailed, sacked, or forced into exile. To go by the accusations that the government has been leveling against the CHP, the party would be wise to brace for a similar total war.

Forget moderate Islam. Forget Turkish democracy. Erdoğan long ago flattened the secular judges and generals in his path and what he represents now is transactional geopolitics and power in perpetuity. Like the Ottoman sultans he admires — a favorite is Sultan Selim I, who almost tripled the empire’s size and committed what would nowadays be called a genocide against the Alevis — his vision is panoptic. He keeps his army, Nato’s second largest, busy fighting Kurds on both sides of the Syrian border. He opens the sluices and migrants flow into the EU; when the EU pays him enough he shuts them again. He pipes Russian natural gas into Europe for Vladimir Putin, while to Volodymyr Zelensky he sells Bayraktar drones that are used to kill Putin’s soldiers. Donald Trump likes him so much he let Turkey off with a 10% tariff and congratulated Erdoğan on doing “what no one’s been able to do in 2,000 years; you’ve taken over Syria”. The Russians call him “the plug for every barrel”.

This time around, don’t expect the US consul to come to the mayoralty to deplore the spectacle of a Democrat behind bars. Don’t expect Sir Keir Starmer to leap to the defense of a fellow Leftist who on the eve of his arrest was stripped of his university degree, rendering him ineligible to become president. Instead, think of Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, who crowed, “There’s just a lot of good, positive news coming out of Turkey right now.” For this isn’t the late Nineties. In its cells, its streets, this pro-democracy movement stands alone.

Turkey won praise for quickly assembling container cities to accommodate the Syrian refugees who streamed across the border in the early years of the civil war. And you can be sure that Erdoğan, a near-absolute ruler even before the state of emergency he proclaimed on Tuesday, will exert himself to get the homeless housed as soon as possible. Politically, the hazards lie in the past. Every collapsed building is a reminder of the corruption associated with a construction industry whose leading players are known more for their government connections than their adherence to safety norms. Alluding to hypothecated taxes that the government introduced after earlier earthquakes, and which are designed, among other things, to make buildings earthquake-resistant, Kılıçdaroğlu asked: “So where is that money? Gone! They fed it to the gangs!”

The tragedy will cast a long and bitter shadow over the presidential election that is due on May 14. For the government, disaster management is an election campaign by another name. And Erdoğan loves elections. Since 2002, he and his Justice and Development Party, or AKP, have won six Turkish general elections, one presidential election and three referendums. That he doesn’t fight clean or fair can make one forget that he’s probably the world’s most successful electoral politician, and certainly among the most instinctive, a populist who’s rarely happier than when whipping up a crowd of flag-waving supporters, ridiculing his opponents or addressing in terms of proprietorial familiarity those pious Turkish nationalists who make up the biggest section of the country’s electorate.

Erdoğan’s worst shock at the polls came in 2019, when the AKP lost control of two key mayoralties: Istanbul, to a new star of the secular-leaning Republican People’s Party, Ekrem İmamoğlu, and Ankara. Erdoğan responded to defeat in Istanbul, which he considers his fief, by insisting on a rerun, which İmamoğlu won by a bigger margin. But last December a pliant judge sentenced the mayor to two and a half years in prison for calling election officials “idiots”, and banned him from politics — thus blocking his path to a run against Erdoğan in May.

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By David Patrikarakos

Opinion polls suggest that not only İmamoğlu, who remains in office pending appeal, but also other opposition politicians, could beat Erdoğan — which makes sense when you consider that inflation is at 64% and the economic miracle Turkey enjoyed until 2015 has given way to pain, much of it self-inflicted. (The reason why Turkish inflation is the second highest in the G20 is that Erdoğan has an ideological aversion to raising interest rates; his Central Bank — “his” being the operative word — has cut the benchmark rate by 10 percentage points since September 2021, just as other central banks raised theirs.) But when, shortly before the earthquake, I asked a politically astute Turkish friend — someone I have known since the late Nineties, when I was a resident reporter covering, among other things, the rise of a promising young Istanbul mayor called Recep Tayyip Erdoğan — whether the president really can be beaten, she replied with an unhesitating “no”.

After two decades in which he has survived coup attempts by secularists and rival Islamists and bombing campaigns by Islamic State and Kurdish militants, Erdoğan’s staying power can appear uncanny and preordained. Bekir Ağırdır, a columnist, wrote recently that news that the six opposition parties that have formed an alliance against the AKP are already “sharing out jobs and power” betrays a delusional complacency that only “strengthens the conviction that [the election] can’t be won”. Another commentator noted that the media in Russia, Turkey’s most important ally, is predicting a shoe-in for Putin’s chum across the water, “the indispensable Erdoğan”.

Since 2016, when Putin, in contrast with the West, backed Erdoğan unconditionally as he suppressed a coup attempt by rival Islamists, the Turkish president has met his Russian counterpart more than any other leader. Uneasy bedfellows the two countries may be, with interests that don’t always coincide in Syria, the Caucasus and, most recently, Ukraine, but the relationship isn’t really about Turkey and Russia; it’s about two strong men who share a desire to boss the neighbourhood but have sharper differences with the West than they do with each other.

One might marvel that even now, after Erdoğan has captured the judiciary, locked up tens of thousands of opponents, throttled the internet and herded the approved media into pens of abject obedience, all the while relieving his own party of anything resembling a mind of its own, Turkey has an opposition at all. But the country contains big minorities — Kurds, liberals and a heterodox sect called the Alevis — who hate his Sunni Turkish majoritarianism and that, in the Kurds’ case, have taken up arms against it. If these constituencies pull together, and there is sufficient attrition from the government side, an electoral shock may still be possible. In the three national elections and one referendum that have been staged in Turkey over the past six years, the number of votes received by the opposition has oscillated between 22.5 and 24 million, while Erdoğan and his allies have received between 24 and 27 million.

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By David Patrikarakos

The opposition is disunited. Kılıçdaroğlu of the Republican People’s Party is a dogged but uninspiring Alevi. Its other main component is a Right-leaning party containing Turkish nationalists. But the Turkish nationalists refuse to admit the country’s main Kurdish party, the Peoples’ Democratic Party, regarding Kurdish nationalist politicians as the polite face of armed separatism. And yet Kurdish votes will be crucial if power is to change hands on 14 May. Four months shy of the election — and with the Peoples’ Democratic Party facing a possible ban for its links to Kurdish militants — it isn’t clear which candidate or candidates from the opposition alliance will stand and who might be acceptable to the Kurds.

Erdoğan devoted his first 10 years in power to trying to improve human rights, liberalise the economy and make peace with the Kurds, all under the approving eye of the US and the EU, with which Turkey opened accession talks in 2005. He also expelled Turkey’s meddlesome generals from politics and embarked on a creeping Islamisation of the state. He presented a smiling alternative to the authoritarian secular state when I met him, in his capacity as mayor of Istanbul, in the spring of 1997, offering me delicious early strawberries on the terrace of an Ottoman folly he had restored and assuring me of the purity of his democratic convictions. Six years later, after a spell in jail for quoting from a controversial poem, he came to power nationally with the support not only of a large chunk of the electorate but also of the West, which regarded Erdoğan’s brand of pious but apparently pluralistic conservatism, and the spectacle of a Muslim Nato member knocking on the door of the EU, as the world’s best chance of avoiding a clash of civilisations.

Then came the 2010s — the decade of the Syrian civil war, the collapse of the Kurdish peace process and rising tensions with the EU, which, it was now clear, had no intention of letting Turkey in — and his programme degenerated into an unstable collage of transactions, vendettas and exhibitions of military potency. Democracy and human rights were discarded even if Erdoğan still needs the shot in the arm of periodic elections, contests which, short of stuffing ballot boxes, he has used every means available to win. There is no longer anything in the way of overarching design save a mission to keep his job and resist the circling enemies that are determined to drag Turkey down from her rightful position of global influence.

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By Thomas Fazi

Two decades of power does odd things. The same Erdoğan who once vowed to topple the “godless” Bashar al-Assad, and whose army occupies swathes of northern Syria, now wants normalisation with his southern neighbour. The philanthropist who let in 3.6 million Syrian refugees in the name of Islamic solidarity has done a volte face and vows to send them home. Erdoğan the doctrinaire Muslim welcomes millions of hard-drinking European tourists; the EU he takes such pleasure from deriding happens to be the country’s biggest trading partner and source of foreign investment. Putin’s pal also supplies drones to Zelensky. And every incoherence in policy is justified by invoking the goal of a strong, respected Turkey, capable of rebutting her many foes. You can be sure that, when the time comes to assess his government’s performance in dealing with the fall-out from the earthquake, Erdoğan won’t dwell on the Western countries that have rushed to Turkey’s aid.

Before the earthquake, in an address to the nation from his palace in Ankara, the President warned that the country’s enemies would never accept a Turkey “whose infrastructure is healthy, whose political will is its own, whose military and technological capabilities are rising”. Fortunately, he went on, “we have proved to the world in the struggle we have waged… that we can protect our independence and our future without regard to the impositions, desires and strictures of anyone else”. After a brisk overview of various recent ground-breakings, ribbon-cuttings and medal-pinnings he had attended, and not forgetting his latest chat with Mr Putin, he gave an enthusiastic account of the opening of a new high-speed metro line linking Istanbul and the airport, after which, pausing for effect, he said, “they don’t even have this in Paris”. This elicited dutiful titters among the cabinet ministers in the hall. Pressing home his advantage, the president concluded, “the Paris metro has a leaky roof”.

Having dealt with one European has-been, his tone hardened when he spoke of the public burning of a Quran by a well-known Islamophobe in Stockholm, on 21 January, as an “ugly act” which, since it took place outside the Turkish embassy and under the protection of the Swedish police, was “not only a religious issue, but also a national one”. Expanding his theme to include the current spat with Sweden and Finland over their accession to Nato, which he has promised to veto if they do not extradite scores of Kurdish “terrorists”, Erdoğan announced that “those who encourage or close their eyes” to the Quran’s desecration should “expect not the slightest indulgence from us on the subject of their application to join Nato… if you love the terrorists and Islamophobes so much (his voice rising to a familiar crescendo) why not entrust the security of your nation to them!” Calming down a bit, Erdogan went on to give details of his economic genius. The ministers crossed and uncrossed their legs. It wasn’t the performance of a man who expects to be moving out of his home, which cost $600 million, is four times the size of Buckingham Palace, and is alleged to have gold loo seats, later this summer.