Today’s headlines suggest that neither Wotton’s irony nor Callières’ restraint has survived the new diplomacy. Washington says talks with Tehran are “going very well” even as military preparations continue. Iran denounces the terms as one-sided while keeping the diplomatic door ajar; European ministers warn that the conflict cannot be separated from wider confrontations with Russia. In an era of “policy by tweet”, then, what presents itself as realism looks, on closer inspection, like something older and less stable: a return to personalized statecraft, part feudal pageant, part mafia-style armed bargaining.

Donald Trump stands at the center of this shift. His postponement of threatened attacks, while marshaling troops and marines for a possible ground invasion, reflects a businessman’s transactional approach to international affairs — one that has had some purchase in the Western Hemisphere. But Iran is not Venezuela. Here, the same method risks producing not leverage but escalation, hardening positions into what increasingly resembles the religiously charged confrontation encouraging the same ideas of martyrdom and sacrifice that allowed Iran to weather the Iraqi onslaught of the Eighties.

Suggested Reading

America is losing Cold War II

By Michael Lind

What we are witnessing, in short, is not merely a crisis over Iran but a transformation in the culture of international policymaking. Late-night tweets by an aging leader now reverberate globally in real time. This marks a departure from the centuries during which international affairs, however imperfectly, were conducted through institutional channels that imposed a degree of predictability. In the digital era, diplomacy appears to be reverting to something closer to a pre-Westphalian condition: less governed by procedure, more by impulse; less mediated by institutions, more by personalities. Between Wotton’s irony and Callières’ restraint lies the enduring tension at the heart of diplomacy: the management of truth, trust and interest within a shared framework of rules. That framework — laboriously constructed over centuries — now looks shaky indeed.

Diplomacy, as it originally evolved, was designed precisely to restrain the arbitrary exercise of power. It became what the writer and diplomat Sir Harold Nicolson called a “skilled and difficult art”, embedding political action within recognized procedures governing the transition between war and peace. Its central premise was simple: states, not individuals, are the primary actors in international affairs. The contrast with today is striking. Decisions once filtered through diplomatic channels are now compressed into social media declarations, often addressed as much to domestic audiences as to foreign governments.

Marshall McLuhan’s famous aphorism that “the medium is the message” captures the significance of this change. A tweet is not merely a message conveyed through a different medium; it alters the nature of the act itself. It is immediate, public, performative. It collapses the distance between deliberation and declaration, bypassing the slow accretion of consensus on which diplomacy depends. In such a space, ambiguity — once a resource of diplomacy — becomes a liability, even as clarity can easily slide into provocation.

This transformation is reinforced by the erosion of formal diplomatic channels. In the Iran crisis, after all, negotiations have involved not only established officials but also informal envoys operating through fluid and sometimes opaque lines of communication. Steve Witkoff’s globetrotting is a case in point. All the while, European diplomats view such arrangements with skepticism, questioning both their coherence and their credibility. The result is a curious inversion: the most powerful state in the international system seems to be undermining the very structures that make diplomacy intelligible. To see how much of a departure this represents, it is worth recalling how those structures first emerged.

In the ancient world, envoys traveled between courts bearing messages that could avert — or precipitate — conflict. The Greeks developed rules governing treaties and war; the Romans treated agreements as legal instruments while manipulating them to advantage; Byzantium professionalized negotiation through trained envoys. Yet these practices remained personal. Rulers negotiated with rulers; alliances were sealed by marriages; agreements depended on honor as much as law.

It was only from the later Middle Ages that diplomacy acquired more robust institutional form. Wotton’s dig aside, the Venetian Republic provides a striking example here. Its diplomatic archive contains documents covering a formidable nine centuries, from 883 to its eventual destruction by Napoleon in 1797. This can be read as a vast parchment intelligence network, mixing gossip with sharp observations from the courts of Europe and beyond. The famous “relazioni” analyze neighboring states in forensic detail — measuring rulers, armies and economies with cool detachment.

For the Venetians, and soon for other Europeans too, policy became cumulative, grounded in institutional memory and precedent more than personality alone. These developments culminated in the Peace of Westphalia. Concluded at the end of the Thirty Years’ War, and involving some 190 delegations, it established the principle that states — territorial units governed by sovereign authorities — were the primary actors in international affairs. The system that followed was refined in later settlements, notably the Congress of Vienna, which codified rules of diplomatic precedence and representation.

That legacy is now under strain — not just from social media, but also the provenance of the new diplomacy’s leading actors. To understand Middle Eastern politics, particularly its manifestations in the Gulf, it is well worth starting with the Muqadimma, by the renowned North African scholar Ibn Khaldun. Born in Tunis in 1332, he is often seen as a precursor of Western political and social theorists from Machiavelli to Marx. Leadership, according to Ibn Khaldun, exists through superiority, and superiority through a concept he calls asabiyya. An Arabic word, it is usually translated as “group-feeling” or “clannism”.

More to the point, drawing on asabiyya allows us to more clearly understand this shift in practice. In Khaldunian terms, power rests not on abstract institutions but on the cohesion of ruling groups, often organized around family or clan, and buttressed by endogamous practices such as marriage between first or second cousins. The force of asabiyya resists impersonal structures and tends to revert, under pressure, to personalized forms of rule. Across the Arab Gulf , petrodollar wealth has reinforced these patterns. In these tribal monarchies, political authority remains tied to ruling families whose internal cohesion — not public legitimacy — underpins the state.

Iran, for all its authoritarianism, presents a more complex model, combining clerical power with electoral mechanisms and a layered constitutional structure. Seen in this light, the drift towards personalized diplomacy reflects a convergence: the erosion of the public domain in the West meets the persistence of kin-based systems elsewhere. The comparison with the medieval world becomes instructive. Before the modern state system, political authority was personal. Kings operated within networks of kinship and rivalry; agreements were contingent; reputation was central. Conflict could be ritualized. Jousting offers a suggestive parallel: a controlled encounter governed by rules, yet driven by personal honor. Victory conferred prestige; defeat entailed humiliation. The contest was as much about display as outcome.

There is, however, a crucial asymmetry. Israeli and US reliance on targeted assassination reflects the logic of personalized power. Yet applied to Iran, it risks confusing visibility with vulnerability. Unlike many Arab regimes, Iran possesses a dense institutional structure in which authority is distributed across clerical bodies, elected institutions, and the security services. Power resides not in individuals alone but in an interlocking system capable of absorbing losses and regenerating leadership. The paradox is clear: strategies based on personalized power can fail against systems whose resilience lies in institutional depth.

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Has MBS made a fatal error?

By Malise Ruthven

No less important, the feudal approach to foreign policy is also bewildering for everyone else. European leaders, already divided over Iran, respond not to coherent strategies but to shifting signs from Washington. The lack of consultation undermines trust; volatility undermines credibility. Nor are regional actors themselves exempt from these challenges. Personalized diplomacy may allow for rapid engagement, but it also undermines predictability. Relationships become central — but also fragile. For the Gulf states, particularly the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, the implications are vast.

If, after all, American policy appears contingent on personal relationships rather than institutional commitments, the incentive to hedge increases. This may take the form of diversified alliances or, more ominously, the pursuit of independent deterrence. Reports that Saudi Arabia is gathering uranium, together with its longstanding links with Pakistan, raise the question of whether Israel’s regional nuclear monopoly will remain uncontested. Such calculations belong not to a stable order but to a system in which trust is eroding and guarantees are no longer taken at face value.

Of course, none of this implies a simple return to the medieval past. States remain powerful, and institutions persist. But the balance between institutional constraint and personal agency is shifting. And unlike the jousts of old, the consequences will not be contained to sport.

The unilateral sanctions[1. In any case, the remaining five signatories to the JCPOA may have a say in this; they could thwart the sanctions by employing workarounds which would mean using the Euro or Yuan to trade oil, or by imposing their own blocking legislation] are designed to collapse the Iranian economy, escalate popular protests, and topple the clerical regime – all without a war that would send oil prices through the $100 per barrel ceiling of a few years ago.

Since admitting to the American public that you want a war with Iran is politically insensitive, the administration is pushing the idea that it can bring down the dangerous Iranian theocracy in the same way Reagan pressured the former Soviet Union, with economics.[2. It is, though, an absurd comparison, since the Soviets were nuclear-armed peer competitors of the US, with client Communist parties in almost every country in the world. There is also no one in Iran comparable to Mikhail Gorbachev from whose hands the reins slipped. Iran, in comparison, is at most a regional power which has never succeeded in exporting its unique governance model – with the exception of Hizbollah in Lebanon, where it is part of the ruling coalition and an ally of Maronite Christians. Even in majority Shia Iraq, the recent general election was largely fought over curbing Iran’s political influence.]

Such is the American concern about the mid-level Middle-East power, in an effort to deepen instability, certain American factions are abetting anti-regime sentiment.

For sure, ordinary Iranians have grievances. But episodic protests since December about the hardships of university graduates (42% of whom are unemployed) and truckers facing high fuel or insurance costs, or the mismanagement of water resources in Arab Khouzestan, a region prone to drought, have been contained with a minimum of state violence.

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Why there are still deals to be done in Iran

By Liam Halligan

They harbour, too, a welter of resentment towards the lifestyles of the jeunesse dorée, or ‘aghazadehs’ in Farsi. The children of the elites are all over social media; the son of one reformist politician recently explained his prosperity in terms of ‘good genes’. The lavish wedding of a model and the son of another diplomat – all posted on Instagram – occasioned much furious comment from the 12 million young Iranians too poor to marry.

Another grievance is the vast sum being expended on external adventurism by the IRGC, particularly in Syria, where maybe 2,000 Iranian personnel have perished, including IRGC generals who lead from the front.

But, with the exception of a three day protest in Tehran’s central Bazaar over the plunging rial, these protests have not generally included middle-class Iranians in the big cities. Furthermore, the regime knows how to calm any political dissent with talk of restoring Iran’s Senate (abolished in favour of the Guardian Council in 1979) or releasing from house arrest the three men who led the 2009 Green Movement after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad rigged his re-election as president.

In the eyes of US hawks, it probably seems pretty simple to turn these protests into an existential crisis for the regime. But most Iranians have keen memories of US (and British) interference in their country – on a vacation there, my friend Jack Straw was recently handed a parchment list of such malign interference extending back to the 1840s – and they are well-informed about botched western interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, not least since they still host two million Afghan refugees.

Moreover, were the mullahs to fall, the two alternatives are unappealing to most Iranians. The most likely would be a military or revolutionary guard strongman, a role for which IRGC Quds force commander Major General Qassem Soleimani is ideally suited. He would have none of the clerics’theological inhibitions about nuclear weapons. People know that this would mean war.

The second alternative would be the Islamo-Marxist terroristic cult, Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), an unpopular faction which key members of the Trump team have assiduously cultivated.

Further reading

The Iranian regime is secure for now but will economic integration with the West help or hinder? Its leaders cannot decide.

By Michael Burleigh

The MEK was among the plethora of groups which toppled the Shah in 1979. It was the only grouplet to actually kill six Americans, in line with its song “Leave American, your blood is already spilling on the ground”. After innumerable assassinations of Iranian regime personnel, the group was expelled in 1981. Then, after being evicted from France for plotting terrorist activities, welcomed five years later by Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Based at Camp Ashraf north of Baghdad, they fought for Saddam and raided Iran, as well as helping Saddam crush uprisings by the Kurds and Shia in 1991.

Although the MEK was the first entity to be listed on the United States Foreign Terrorist Organization roster in 1997, Camp Ashraf was never disbanded by the US military after the 2003 occupation. Instead, it mutated into a hermetically sealed ‘Jamestown’style headquarters for the cult, which is based on worship of its leader Maryam Rajavi. Her husband Massoud disappeared in 2003, and is still wanted for crimes against humanity by the Iraqi government. MEK is like the Iranian equivalent of the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers. They have about as much credibility in the eyes of Iranians as a British SS formation would have had for us in the 1940s.

It is, therefore, all the odder that a galaxy of US politicians and securocrats – including John Bolton, Rudy Giuliani, Andrew Card, Tom Ridge, Howard Dean, Wesley Clark, Jim Woolsey, Porter Goss, Anthony Zinni, and Michael Hayden – have accepted fees of between $25,000 and $50,000 to speak at rallies calling for the delisting of the MEK, and deployment of it as a ‘third force’ against the regime in Tehran.

The Americans have also been quietly cultivating Kurdish-Iranian militants, who regularly carry out assassinations inside Iran from a Kurdish Autonomous region which is also the lair of the Kurdish-Turkish PKK, another designated terror organisation.

Presumably the idea that ordinary Iranians are ever going to coalesce around these murderous sects appeals to hawkish thinktanks in Washington DC, but it is like a sick joke in Iran.

Which brings us to the final point, namely that it is Saudi Arabia rather than Iran which is destabilising the region with a hopelessly erratic foreign policy. It was not the Iranians who took Saad Hariri the prime minister of Lebanon hostage in order to forcibly alter the country’s internal political affairs.

Further reading

Is crony capitalism trumping US nuclear strategy?

By Michael Burleigh

Nor can the de facto collapse of the regional Gulf Cooperation Council, after Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman felt emboldened by Trump, be attributed to Tehran. The malicious economic isolation of Qatar has nothing to do with Iran, but everything to do with Saudi and Emirati hatred of Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani Emir, of al-Jazeera, and of Doha as a putative commercial rival to Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was forced from his job after he opposed a Saudi/UAE invasion, though not the insane scheme to excavate a canal cutting off Qatar, and gifting a new nuclear waste dump on its side.

The same diplomatic duo have been responsible for the disastrous military incursion into Yemen where they have triggered a massive humanitarian crisis in the Arab world’s poorest nation.

Worse, the Saudis and Emiratis have struck secret deals with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in south western Yemen, recruiting them as mercenaries to fight the Houthi, or paying them to vacate positions with their weapons intact. AQAP are regarded by informed observers as the most technologically-sophisticated bomb makers in the organization (devices in printer cartridge nearly downed a plane). This is why the US government has hit them with 140 drone and airstrikes since 2017.

But of course, unlike Iran, the Saudis and their Emirati and Bahraini sidekicks have deployed tens of millions of dollars and pounds sterling via PR firms and lobbyists to spin stories for the western media – not to mention the billions they expend on buying arms that keep people in work in Lancashire and the like. This may be why there has been remarkably little comment about Riyadh’s angry severing of relations with Canada, which bravely drew attention to the arrest of women who had led the protests against the driving ban, after this mutated into something like civil dissent. So much for the much-feted ‘MbS’ as the modernising reformer.

Incredibly, the US and UK seemed to regard Canada and Saudi Arabia as equal allies having a tiff, whereas in reality Canada has been a Nato stalwart for seven decades, while Saudi Arabia is at best an autocratic ‘frenemy’ with a lot of money. So instead, we buy their convenient fictions about Iran.

First, some history

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was based on a key pact between two men in the 18^th century, long before the state of Saudi Arabia existed from 1932 onwards.

One was Muhammad Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, a religious leader and theologian from the remote Nejd region of Arabia. He adopted the austere and intolerant creed of the medieval theologian Ibn Taymiyya, who was a controversially puritanical figure even in his own medieval lifetime – think Jan Hus on steroids.

Wahhab opposed Muslims paying their respects to the tombs of the Prophet and his companions (the original ‘salafi’) or hoping for saints to intercede on their behalf, which he condemned as polytheism. With views like these Wahhab needed political protection, much like Luther and Calvin had in early modern Europe.

In 1744, Wahhab took an oath of allegiance to the ruler Muhammad bin Saud. Saud, in Riyadh, would rule his modest tribal domain according to Wahhab’s interpretation of Islam. Wahhab, in turn, would preside over the Saudi clerical hierarchy or ulema, as they still do today.

Eventually a descendant of Saud called Ibn Saud wrested Saudi Arabia from the Ottomans, aided by a fanatic army which espoused Wahhab’s ideas. He slaughtered the army shortly after.[1.  Michael Crawford, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab. Makers of the Muslim World (Princeton 2014) for these details]

Black gold

Oil production took off in Saudi Arabia with the formation of the Arabian American Oil Company. Over several decades, the Saudis increased their revenue share of the company until 1988 when they finally secured 100% control and called it Saudi Aramco. One of the few parts of the Kingdom to run with clockwork efficiency is the huge Aramco compound at Dhahran, where 11,000 expats live.[2.  For the history of Aramco see Daniel Yergin, The Prize. The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power (New York 2012) pp. 392ff]

Not all Saudis have been content with these developments, or the hedonistic lifestyle that took hold. Wealth is very unevenly spread and the Kingdom is notoriously corrupt. A few years ago, for example, billions were spent on a sewer network in Jeddah. In reality, after the funding was embezzled, manhole covers were laid without adding pipework below ground, and the city was flooded in waste.[3.  See Lawrence Wright ‘The Kingdom of Silence’ The New Yorker 5 January 2004 on Jeddah’s sewerage crisis.]

In 1986 the Saud family opportunistically decided to change their royal title to ‘Custodian of the Two Holy Places’ and began to invest in propagating Wahhabism abroad. The main vehicle for this was, and is, the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, which also appoints murky clerical ‘diplomats’ within the Saudi diplomatic service.

Experts estimate that $6 billion has been spent building Wahhabist-influenced mosques and madrassa schools the world over, not to mention books from the world’s largest press. From Nigeria to Malaysia and via London and Birmingham, these inculcate Wahhabism through rote learning of the Koran. It’s telling that when ISIS needed school textbooks for schools in the erstwhile Caliphate, it used Saudi imports without altering a line.[5.  Michael Burleigh, The Best of Times, The Worst of Times. The History of Now (London 2017). On Wahhabism in Africa see Yaroslav Trofimov ‘Jihad Comes to Africa’ Wall Street Journal 5 February 2016]

With a sizeable constituency of religious zealots at home, Saudi policy has been to simply export them. The Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan after December 1979 was a good opportunity for this, especially with the West eager to arm these ‘mujahadeen’. Some of the mujahedeen evolved into Al Qaeda, under their Saudi warlord Osama bin Laden. It was inevitable that 15 of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi. [3.  From many, many accounts see Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower. Al Qaeda’s Road to 9/11 (London 2006) and Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens. The Story of A Family And Its Fortune (London 2008), both excellent on the Saudi background.]

Little or none of which has impacted on the West’s official view of the Saudis as swing oil producers and customers for enormous arms sales. And since western human rights NGOs keep harping on about the repressive aspects of Saudi Arabia (there is a Chop-Chop Square in Riyadh, not to mention floggings and stonings), the ruling dynasty periodically essays modernizing reforms. Most have been cosmetic.

Where we are now

MbS is a self-styled technocratic reformer, keen to diversify the Kingdom away from hydrocarbons, and towards what is outlined in a revamped McKinsey report called ‘Saudi Vision 2030.’ One chronic problem is a bloated public sector in which people are paid for doing nothing. MbS’s aim is to create private sector work for the many idle young Saudi hands, in finance, entertainment, tourism and so on, while reducing the 11 million strong army of expats and dependents.

Other issues are the absence of working women (they need male chaperones) and an acute lack of affordable housing, which since marriage depends on a home, means many frustrated young males without partners.[7.  See Laura El-Katiri ‘Saudi Arabia’s New Economic Reforms’ Harvard Business Review 17 May 2016 and Shmuel Even and Yoel Guzansky ‘Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030: Reducing Dependency on Oil’ INSS Insight nr 819, 6 May 2016]

At the same time, MbS wants to undermine the social power of the joyless Wahhabi clergy and the ubiquitous Muttaween religious police who serve the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Suppression of Vice.

Although MbS has struck at a few freelance Islamist clerics with huge Twitter followings, he has not laid a glove on the Establishment whose stipends his regime pays, and nor has he curtailed the money spent globally propagating Wahhabism. Has he rescinded school textbooks which advocate killing apostates and ‘sorcerors’, or a jihad against all infidels? Has he told the clergy to desist from calling the oppressed Saudi Shia in the oil rich Eastern Province ‘heretical snakes’ and the like? Of course not. What his calls for a ‘moderate’ Islam mean are actually an apolitical version under a revamped authoritarian monarchy for MbS says nothing about representation and consent.[8.  James Dorsey ‘ Crown Prince Mohammed’s Vow to Moderate Saudi Islam: Easier Said Than Done’ Lobe Log  3 November 2017]

Instead, MbS’s latest (preposterous) gambit is to entice foreign investors to help him fund a $500 billion high tech city called NEOM on the Gulf of Aqaba, that sum being significantly more than the Kingdom’s annual budget or its foreign currency reserves. Since he does not like much of conservative small town Saudi Arabia, MbS’s aim seems to be to build himself another version more to his tastes, where young people can drink cocktails and wear bikinis while designing software. Half the ‘population’ will be robots. Western tourists will be able to visit pre-Islamic pagan sites. One wonders how the Wahhabis will regard that?[9.  Andrew Torchia ‘Saudi Arabia plans an investment zone to expand its economy beyond oil’ Reuters/Christian Science Monitor 24 October 2017.]

As MbS prepares to take over when his father Salman abdicates, he has one further trick up his sleeve, which we have witnessed in recent weeks. Though he does not shrink from the luxuries of life – in 2015 MbS paid £453 million to a Russian vodka oligarch for his super yacht Serene after spotting it in the Med – he has decided to copy Xi Jinping’s autocratic playbook with an anti-corruption campaign.[10.  Although the arrests of the likes of News Corp and Twitter shareholder Prince Alwaleed bin Talal generated many headlines, the judicial mechanics are opaque. See ‘New Saudi Committee to investigate public corruption opens ‘new era of transparency’ The National (UAE) 5^th November 2017. Some regard MbS as a puppet of his older mentor the UAE ruler ‘MbZ]

Conveniently this has struck down various potential rivals, who found their bank accounts blocked along with their private jets held at Jeddah and Riyadh airports. They are currently sleeping on mattresses locked in the ball-room of the Riyadh Ritz Carlton, where a couple of weeks ago thousands of investors were gathered to put money into NEOM. Another potential rival died in a helicopter crash near the Yemeni border.

Even the loftiest visions can hit obstacles, as indeed the Serene did when symbolically it ran aground on rocks in 2017 off Sharm al Sheikh after navigational errors.[11.  Felix Sowerbutts ‘134 m ‘Serene’ runs aground in Red Sea’ Superyachtnews 25 August 2017]

MbS had to dip heavily into royal coffers when public sector employees objected to downsizing this summer. The Saudi economy is flat-lining and bond auctions are filling gaps in public finances. MbS’s foolish war in Yemen is costing $58 million a week, with no signs of progress, and the Qataris are resisting Saudi attempts to isolate and depose their ruler for supporting Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. The Emir of Qatar is under Russian, as well as Iranian, Turkish and US protection. The Saudi proxy war against Assad in Syria has been a disaster too, and now the prime minister of Lebanon, a Saudi puppet, has joined the president of Yemen in exile in Riyadh, as the Kingdom intensifies hostilities on the Lebanese front of its struggle with Iran. Riyadh has also been meddling in Iraq and Kurdistan too.

By contrast, the more sophisticated Iranians are on the advance at all points of the compass, notwithstanding MbS’s ludicrous claims that all Islamist terrorism can be parked at Tehran’s door since 1979.

So far the self-styled ‘Prince of Youth’ relies on the fact that he is popular among younger Saudis who yearn for change. For sure they do, if you ask them about attending cinemas, football matches and rock concerts. But then ask them if they would be relaxed about a stranger dating their sister, and a certain froideur ensues.[12.  For such a survey see the Dorsey article above.]

It is relatively easy to adopt the external trappings of western modernity, like the soulless architecture of Saudi cities, but far harder to adopt the West’s liberated spirit.

Having made many enemies in his precipitate rise to the top, MbS may find that a war with the descendants of Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab is a step too far, even for such a Promethean figure as him. Another kind of war, with Iran, would be a disaster for all of us.

Sometimes the gossip is about salacious matters, such as which Hollywood star has been accused of a knee-touch.  Sometimes it has the slightly more highfalutin air that the same discussion gains when it revolves around ministers of state.  But sexual misconduct is not the only subject of gossip in western democracies.  Often the subject is equally prurient, but devoid of sex.  In recent days the British public was able to enjoy the spectacle of the Conservative government’s minister for International Development being sacked (or persuaded to resign) in real time.  We got to watch and read a number of corrections of previous statements, apologies and warnings and then the great spectacle of Priti Patel being ordered back from Africa for what was expected to be, and indeed proved to be, her imminent departure from the British Cabinet.

It is worth pausing for a moment on occasions such as this.  Rolling news programmes ran progress reports on the flight back to the UK from Kenya, which Patel had been ordered to take.  According to one report, “Brits were glued to a map said to be tracking Priti Patel’s flight back to London.  At one point more than 22,000 people were following the Kenya Airlines plane on the Flightradar24 website, the live flight tracker said.”

What for?  What did anybody hope to gain from this?  To be slightly ahead of their friends in the news of the latest developments.  To enjoy the spectacle of a politician getting some type of comeuppance.  Schadenfreude for the bored, perhaps?

But to consider how strange this gossip-as-news is, consider how unlikely it is that Priti Patel would have hit the news had she not been about to be fired.  If she had arrived in Kenya and carried out her duties, would any of that have made the press?  Would any of it have been reported at all?  What would the coverage have been of UK aid policy in Africa?  What analysis of the figures, of the waste and/or benefits of such aid would have been attempted?  How many people would have tracked her plane’s return to the UK?

For anyone engaged in or concerned with the world this descent towards gossip – whether higher or lower – is a serious concern.  If the world were stable and the situation at home and abroad in a state of higher bliss, then the consummate interest in the sexual habits of celebrities and the career prospects of young cabinet ministers would be understandable.  But, given the challenges we face, these preoccupations look not just puerile but almost decadent.

In the Middle East alone, events have been unfolding the significance of which lies in exactly inverse proportion to the amount of attention they have received.  A week ago the Prime Minister of Lebanon, Saad Hariri, announced that he was stepping down as Prime Minister.  He made this announcement from Saudi Arabia, stating that his life was in danger in Lebanon.  In the days that have followed the government of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain have ordered their citizens to leave Lebanon immediately.

Meanwhile the Saudi ruling family has had the nearest thing that the Kingdom is likely to get to a coup.  This week the 32-year old son of King Salman, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, topped his recent spate of reforms by arranging to have the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh cordoned off and arranging for a range of people to be held there on corruption charges.  This included eleven senior princes, among them Prince al-Waleed bin Talal, whose personal empire stretches from the Savoy in London to a significant stake in Twitter.  Of course to arrest Saudi princes for corruption is like arresting accountants for accounting.  A photo of a grand room with the princes all arrayed on mattresses in their grand fortress was humiliatingly released.

But what is happening in Saudi is a huge range of games – all of which are of huge import but few of which get even an ounce of the weight of attention given to what is sadly simply easier news.  The first is a prince trying to reform in a hurry.  With a massive youth-bulge in the local population and an increasing number of Saudis studying abroad (200,000 this year) the Crown Prince is looking to address the social problems which will grow in his country.  Behind that there also lie the contours of a far bigger regional game.

For the recent years of Western disengagement from the region have left the region’s players needing to find their own alliances and stand on their own feet.  The two terms of Barack Obama’s Presidency were not simply years of withdrawal.  They were years of Iranian advance.  Indeed when the history of the post 2001 wars is written historians may well look in bafflement at why America and her allies cleared vast areas of land only for the hostile forces of Iran to then move in.  Why did the West become the bulldozer for Iran’s real estate ambitions?

So severe has the need for allies become that the much-vaunted cooperation between the State of Israel and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has even broken out in public.  It is no longer a secret that the Jewish State feels itself to be surrounded by Iran’s proxy forces.  Firstly, through the combination of developing missile technology and endlessly bloodthirsty rhetoric which the Iranian regime continues to engage in.  Secondly, through Iran’s move into Iraq and Syria.  And thirdly, through its ongoing effort to build up its proxy army of Hezbollah on the country’s southern border with Israel as well as across the nation as a whole.  No visit to any part of the region today can fail to be dominated by the vast looming conflict that all of this at some point suggests will occur.

Yet all this is just one week’s developments in one part of the Middle East, in a highly redacted form.  Across Africa huge stories are playing out all the time which have to fight to even achieve ‘News in Brief’ status in the Western press.

Are we aware that we are distracting ourselves?  Or is this a form of pre-emptive defeatism?  It appears to me to be a combination of these things.  Over recent years Britain and America, among other Western powers, have decided that the Middle East is too complicated for us.  We no longer seem to produce the energy or people required to have a serious stab again at involving ourselves more meaningfully – even diplomatically – in what is going on there.  And if that is the conclusion we have reached in the Middle East, how much more is it the case in Africa where even the largest news companies now only bother to populate an entire continent with correspondents at one end or the other.

Our gaze has retreated, along with our horizons and our ambitions.  Leaving us, perhaps inevitably, following a ministerial plane as it goes along its way and waiting for another sexual scandal to then distract us all for a moment longer.

Without saying a word, she demonstrated the normality of her driving a car to the leader of a country where women were banned from driving. She just got on and did it.

Vox described it as a ‘hazing’  and HuffPost called her a ‘badass’. We Brits don’t tend to think of the Queen in quite those terms, but we’re bursting with pride at her quiet demonstration of the contrast between the way we do things and the way that Saudi’s rulers do.

Saudi Arabia’s driving ban had been attributed to the teachings of the ultra-conservative Wahhabi form of Islam but a couple of weeks ago the ban was lifted.

Women are now allowed to drive, although they remain highly restricted, both in travel and other freedoms.

The jury’s out as to whether this change is more religious, political or cultural, and of course the three factors often affect each other. The Dalai Lama once told the New York Times: “I’ve gained an awareness of the sensitivity of women’s issues; even in the 1960s and 1970s, I didn’t have much knowledge of this problem.”  Religious leaders are products of their time.

It might all feel like tiny progress to those who would like to see much more parity of opportunity for women and men around the world – not least because Saudi women drivers will still be heavily restricted and require permission from a male guardian. But this step sends a signal: to Western audiences and also to Pakistan and other areas where Saudi-influenced Wahhabism has a presence. Communities in Pakistan, Indonesia and Bangladesh look to Saudi Arabia for their moral guidance as well as their funding, and this decision will be noted there.

Women and religion

Data often suggests that women are more religious than men and more likely to pray often, although the indicators used to identify religiosity necessarily vary between religions, based on their traditions. Christian women are more likely to attend church than men are, but Muslim women are more likely to pray at home than publicly because attendance at mosque is more usually required of men than women.

Feminism and religion

There’s far more to say on women’s opportunities, freedoms and religious roles than there is room for here, but Kristin Aune’s helpful summary of the relationship between secular feminism and religion notes a three-stage journey from feminism versus religion with adversarial debates about power structures and the role of the state, through feminists turn to spirituality where female-centred spiritualities gained support, to religious feminists and the increasing voice of gender debates in some formal religions. Linda Woodhead notes that the changing role of women in the workforce occurs simultaneously with female disaffiliation from some formal religions.

Further reading

Manual al-Sharif was arrested and jailed for driving in Saudi Arabia.

Karen Armstrong explores Wahhabism, fundamentalism and the terrorism of so-called IS.