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For Berlin, loosening its energy dependence on Russia is not simply about hitting Moscow’s main revenue stream. It’s a threat to roll back “Ostpolitik,” a totemic post-World War II policy of rapprochement with the Soviet Union, and by extension later Russia, that involved economic and political engagement, notably through oil and gas links.

Yet as customers desert Russia, its partnership with the oil titans of the Middle East, with which it jointly leads the OPEC+ coalition, has so far stayed intact. Russia and Saudi Arabia are the world’s top oil exporters, accounting for 29% of the global total. 

“The U.S. can try to make Saudi Arabia increase production, but why would they accept a break in the alliance, which is key for them?”

Riyadh’s OPEC+ partnership with Moscow calmed years of distrust between the two oil rivals, and saved the kingdom from relying exclusively on Washington.

“Saudi Arabia doesn’t want to switch horses mid-race when they do not know if the other horse is actually going to show up,”

Gulf Arab nations accused the U.S. of a lack of support in the face of repeated attacks by Iranian-backed militia on Saudi oil facilities and Gulf tanker traffic, and on Abu Dhabi this year. In a measure of the discord, the United Arab Emirates abstained in a U.S.-led United Nations Security Council vote to condemn Russia’s invasion.

Another source of friction lies in U.S. efforts to reinstate the nuclear agreement with Iran, Saudi Arabia’s regional rival.

“Now that we are in a crisis moment, we’re reaping the effect of that lack of trust that’s been building over the years,” said Karen Young, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington. 

Demonstrating just how exceptional the times are, a U.S. delegation traveled to Russian ally Venezuela last weekend in an overture to a country that holds the largest known crude reserves in the world.

Venezuela has been subject to international sanctions since the Trump era that have crippled its ability to sell oil. While there is not yet talk of allowing exports to resume, President Nicolas Maduro responded by offering to turn on the taps anyway, saying that state oil company PDVSA is prepared to raise output to as many three million barrels a day “for the world.”

the U.S. visit was “unexpected, surprising, a complete change in policy orientation,” with energy as the strategic catalyst.

“But I think there is a more important geopolitical move that is redefining the West,” he added. The U.S. is looking to confine the spheres of influence enjoyed by Russia and especially China, and for Venezuela that means a gradual process “to reincorporate with the West, through energy.” 

China will continue to carry on “normal trade cooperation” with Russia, including in oil and gas, said Zhao Lijian, a foreign ministry spokesperson. China is considering buying or increasing stakes in Russian companies such as Gazprom PJSC,

Even assuming a discount on the price per barrel, state-owned importers would weigh very carefully the impact on their global business of large purchases from a country that’s subject to so many sanctions, according to Qin Yan, an analyst with research house Refinitiv.

Neither would buying energy from Moscow be an easy solution, even if it meant less pollution, said Li Shuo, a climate analyst at Greenpeace East Asia. “To change China’s current energy structure, to replace a lot of coal it uses now with Russia’s oil and gas, would be a huge project for China, and it would take time,”

In Europe, the EU is refusing to budge on its climate commitments as it seeks to slash imports from its biggest supplier this year and replace flows from Russia completely by 2027. Those efforts were given a jolt by a suggestion that Moscow might shut off gas supplies through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline to Europe.

“We simply cannot rely on a supplier who explicitly threatens us,” EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said as she unveiled the bloc’s plans this week. 

as Scholz told the Bundestag, Russia’s attack on Ukraine means “we are in a new era.” The world today “is no longer the same world that it was before.”

the lack of public commemoration may also have something to do with the fear of relativizing the Holocaust and even giving succor to antisemitism. It’s a reasonable concern

according to the most recent census, in 2021, nearly a third of German residents were first- or second-generation migrants, compared with about a fifth in 2011

As a more diverse generation enters Parliament and takes on positions in regional and national government, so do new perspectives.

In December 2022, Germany returned some of the Benin Bronzes, 20 pieces of artwork stolen from what is today Nigeria by British soldiers and sold to Germany.

This process of education is an utter necessity, not just for the chancellor. Germany’s history is unique and uniquely atrocious. But other countries have histories worth knowing, too

We are at a continual deficit of either unity or cohesion. And in the wake of each new cataclysm, we’ve found ourselves further apart.

“It seemed as if these people did not count themselves as part of the community. That they came from another America.” They could heckle a praying singer. They could watch “The Lawrence Welk Show” but ignore a political assassination. The same economic system that put these specific Americans in the position to take this vacation — the white-collar stability, the inequality sustaining it — was what allowed them, now, to turn their backs. They didn’t really care about any of it; the broader narrative of patriotism and pride was just an excuse for doing what they wanted — for their self-interest — a narrative they could apply and discard from one situation to the next as they saw fit.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” she wrote — and, later in the essay, “I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it,” recounting “a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling.”

“The White Album” clarifies something essential to our current experience: what it’s like to navigate our fractured cultural landscape when it can feel so difficult to talk to each other, because we lack the sense of a shared reality on which such a conversation depends

That sense of “the final unraveling,” as Mr. Dunne described it, often feels like it’s currently underway.

For Ms. Didion, there was no overarching narrative we could rely on either to magically put things back together or to predict how it all might finally fall apart. “Writing has not yet helped me to see what it means,” she wrote in the essay’s final line.

This isn’t an American crisis alone. All around the world, developed nations have locked themselves into unsustainable, energy-intensive lifestyles.

Among those with the largest footprints are wealthy oil-producing microstates with small populations, like Qatar or Trinidad and Tobago, where the per-capita footprint pushes 60 tons

In the next tier, with the United States, are other sprawling, continent-size countries that use a lot of heating or cooling and where people tend to drive long distances, such as Canada and Australia (around 20 tons)

By dint of their density and reliance on mass transit, nations in Western Europe (as well as Japan and South Korea) make up most of the next tier, which cleaves roughly into two groups: places like Germany, Norway and the Netherlands that rely more on fossil fuels (around 15 tons),

places like the United Kingdom, Denmark and France that use a higher percentage of nuclear and renewable power. Though it’s half the size of an American’s, the footprint of someone in the typical French household still remains unsustainably high: around nine tons.

This is the paradox at the heart of climate change: We’ve burned far too many fossil fuels to go on living as we have, but we’ve also never learned to live well without them

the problem of the future is how to create a 19th-century carbon footprint without backsliding into a 19th-century standard of living. N

The greatest crisis in human history may require imagining ways of living — not just of energy production but of daily habit — that we have never seen before. How do we begin to imagine such a household?

With a carbon footprint hovering around the global median of 4.5 tons per capita, it falls within a narrow tier of nearly developed countries within sight of two tons per capita — the estimated amount needed to limit the world to 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming.

There are countries more prosperous, and countries with a smaller carbon footprint, but perhaps in none do the overlapping possibilities of living well and living without ruin show as much promise as in Uruguay.

Mujica harbored another deeper belief too. For years, he had been arguing that the “blind obsession to achieve growth with consumption” was the real cause of the linked energy and ecological crises.

In speeches, he pushed his people to reject materialism and embrace Uruguay’s traditions of simplicity and humility. “The culture of the West is a lie,” he told me. “The engine is accumulation. But we can’t pretend that the whole world can embrace it. We would need two or three more planets.”

He shared his own experience in solitary confinement, and how years without books or conversation drew him closer to the fundamentals of being: nature, love, family. “I learned to give value to little things in life. I kept some frogs as pets in prison and bathed them with my drinking water,”

“The true revolution is a different culture: learning to live with less waste and more time to enjoy freedom.”

By 2016, an array of biomass, solar and some 50 wind parks had replaced the grid’s use of oil, helping slash more than half a billion dollars from the country’s annual budget. Today, Uruguay boasts one of the world’s greenest grids, powered by 98 percent renewable energy.

prevailing economic conditions and something in Uruguay’s character had afforded the transition more receptivity than anyone predicted. This was one way in which a career in theoretical physics prepared Méndez for the world of policymaking, he said: “You have to be open to the solutions being very narrow and technical, or very wide and human.”

as the energy sector shifted, the mind-set in the country began to shift with it, Méndez said, sometimes in surprising ways. Some bought air-conditioning units, but many kept to their formerly low-consumption habits, continuing to hang their laundry and take the bus, dozens of which in Montevideo were now electric. Others bought plug-in timers to automate their laundries to run at night or installed solar water heaters on their roof

for Méndez, the biggest shift was among leaders. In cabinet and business meetings the problems of the future — like how to eliminate industrial waste and phase out gas entirely — began to feel like just that, he said: problems, not crises.

there appeared to be fundamental tension in how to bring Uruguayans along in the energy transition. On the one hand, the infrastructure shift needed to happen in the background, so the public never lost confidence in the grid — that part had been surprisingly smooth. But on the other hand, it was important to keep people engaged so they would support the necessary changes to come

Emaldi and her colleagues focused their efforts on electrifying transportation and growing the green-energy sector. The government eliminated duties and taxes on electric cars and rebranded a tax on gas as a CO2 tax, with a portion funding green initiatives.

“What comes in the near future will change more lives,” Minister Paganini told me. “You have to get into sectors or areas that are much more difficult than just changing the generation of electricity.” You need to change human behavior.

fossil fuels gave humanity the ability to choose our food, to transform a rainforest or windblown desert into something fertile and constant, a biotic vending machine from which eaters can select whatever they want whenever they want it. This choice now drives about a third of all global emissions. Most of them stem from the growing process itself — clearing land, fertilizing crops — with the bulk of the rest coming indirectly from the vast web of manufacturing and delivery systems that bring it to us: packaging crackers, refrigerating drumsticks, airlifting avocados.

One reason the global cattle industry had become so damaging, Baethgen said, was that too many grasslands had been razed or degraded. In the short term, feedlots produced more food, often with lower emissions, since cows got fatter faster and burped less frequently, but over the long term, without the grasslands to recycle carbon, net emissions built up. From Baethgen’s perspective, every damaged field thus represented a huge opportunity: By restoring grasslands, he could not only pull more greenhouse gases into the ground, but also grow more beef. And since the 1990s, Uruguay has managed a remarkable feat: increasing its annual production of beef without any increase in greenhouse gases — and doing all of this on natural pasturelands.

He believed too much climate science relied on big-picture modeling to drive engagement. “Those science-fiction scenarios were great to increase awareness,” he said. “But if you give a minister of agriculture information for the year 2080, that doesn’t do anything.” He waved a hand over the landscape. “You’re providing information, far in the future, with no resolution and no certainty. That’s the best combination to ensure paralysis. Nobody does anything.”

In his 2016 book, “The Great Derangement,” the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh says it’s unwise to reduce climate denial to “only a function of money and manipulation.” The sheer level of paralysis, he writes, “suggests that the climate crisis threatens to unravel something deeper, without which large numbers of the people would be at a loss to find meaning.” Ghosh wonders if the modern consumer mind-set can ever change, collectively or otherwise: “In a world where the rewards of a carbon-intensive economy are regarded as wealth, this must be reckoned as a very significant material sacrifice.”

Esponda described his family as middle to upper middle class. Both he and Laroca were economists for the city and together made about $30,000 a year. “Everybody in Uruguay is middle class,” he said. I thought I knew what he meant. Unlike in the United States, I found it difficult in Uruguay to discern class differences. Conspicuous displays of wealth seemed rare, as were the tiers of consumer goods that otherwise revealed someone’s spending. “There’s not the American consumerist mentality of ‘We need to get the next new thing,’”

On trips to New Orleans and Chicago, he had been transfixed by the selection of junk food in convenience stores, the undamaged furniture left on the street. “You guys throw away your whole home,” he told me. “Here, most of this stuff wouldn’t be trash.”

Esponda pointed to his couch, a sagging green camelback. It was given to them by his parents, he said, and barely fit his growing family anymore. But he couldn’t find a reason to replace it, even with a dual income that allowed them to save each month. “Why would I?” he said. It was a mentality apparent throughout the couple’s apartment. In stark contrast to most American homes with two kids, their apartment wasn’t overflowing with toys. Two bikes leaned against the wall by a plastic slide. “Our choices don’t really have anything to do with the environment,” he said. “It’s about saving money, yes, but also being careful with what we buy.”

Several people described frugality to me as a core tenet of the Uruguayan political project, though globalization had played a role, too.

something a man in the asentamientos said to me: “Nobody has confronted the real problem: How will the country grow?”

I thought of a single dad I met in Montevideo who said I shouldn’t think of his country as a model or example. It was too small, its progress too troubled. It was more like a laboratory for the rest of the world, he said.

We often picture the future as a kind of growth, a set of possibilities to expand and realize, but maybe it could also be the opposite, a present to reconcile and safeguard.

Part of the reason America has become so paralyzed by climate change is precisely that we’ve failed to acknowledge the limits it imposes — on where we can live, the things we can have, the household we can envision. This is a particularly difficult idea to sell to a country perched atop decades of accrued wealth, which was itself amassed by generations imagining further comfort and choice.

In the coming months, gas prices spiked, inflation climbed and the price of energy began to strangle Europe. No future seemed as certain as a less abundant one.

A former bank analyst at Bear Stearns, Estrada had decided to take a 75 percent pay cut to return home and eventually took a job with a local energy firm. “I read studies about how there’s a diminishing return on happiness above a certain income, and I experienced that,” he told me of living in New York. “I had more money than I had things I wanted to buy.” He said that contracting his life had allowed him to be more mindful of its details. It reminded him of the household his parents ran in the 1980s, when things were so precarious. No one left lights on or wasted water. They were mindful of the things they bought.

“We learn to live with less here,” he said. “And it’s made my life better.”

Mr. Musk favors intense, one-on-one conversations — one person described a party conversation with him for 90 unbroken minutes about astrophysics.

Mr. Musk once acknowledged in an interview with Axel Springer’s chief executive, Mathias Döpfner, that he gets lonely; in a 2017 interview with Rolling Stone, he said that as a child he vowed to never be alone.

One obvious way that he staves off loneliness is using Twitter. Mr. Musk, who frequently responds to the many Regular Joe accounts that tweet at him, uses the service almost every day, in a way that suggests the website is an outlet not just for his ideas but for his emotions.

“I spent almost every day with Elon for five years — apart from family time, he spends nearly every waking hour working,” Mr. Teller said. “If your idea of fun is a long weekend of rocket engineering in a humid, sparsely populated corner of South Texas, then you should be jealous of Elon’s social life.”

Many of his closest friends are longtime investors in his companies and share his technical worldview and his geeky preoccupations. Mostly in their 40s and 50s, these friends often see Mr. Musk at quiet dinners in the private back rooms of restaurants — low-key affairs in which the conversation turns to subjects like science fiction or World War II fighter planes.

ebecca Eisenberg, a lawyer in Palo Alto, Calif., who was senior counsel at PayPal from 2001 to 2007, was catching up with Mr. Thiel, she said, when Mr. Musk broke into the conversation. According to Ms. Eisenberg, Mr. Musk expressed his opinion that China was likely to invade Taiwan and that the American workers at a new Taiwan-owned chip factory in Arizona would never be as skillful as their Taiwan counterparts. Mr. Thiel, meanwhile, was largely quiet.

“I have two teenagers and four pets,” Ms. Eisenberg said. “It seemed like Peter was the dominant dog, and Elon was trying to impress him.”

economist J. Bradford DeLong ’82, Ph.D. ’87, looking back on the twentieth century two decades after its end, comes to a similar conclusion but on different grounds.

DeLong, professor of economics at Berkeley, looks to matters of “contingency” and “choice”: at key junctures the economy suffered “bad luck,” and the actions taken by the responsible policymakers were “incompetent.”

these were “the most consequential years of all humanity’s centuries.” The changes they saw, while in the first instance economic, also “shaped and transformed nearly everything sociological, political, and cultural.”

DeLong’s look back over the twentieth century energetically encompasses political and social trends as well; nor is his scope limited to the United States. The result is a work of strikingly expansive breadth and scope

labeling the book an economic history fails to convey its sweeping frame.

The century that is DeLong’s focus is what he calls the “long twentieth century,” running from just after the Civil War to the end of the 2000s when a series of events, including the biggest financial crisis since the 1930s followed by likewise the most severe business downturn, finally rendered the advanced Western economies “unable to resume economic growth at anything near the average pace that had been the rule since 1870.

d behind those missteps in policy stood not just failures of economic thinking but a voting public that reacted perversely, even if understandably, to the frustrations poor economic outcomes had brought them.

Within this 140-year span, DeLong identifies two eras of “El Dorado” economic growth, each facilitated by expanding globalization, and each driven by rapid advances in technology and changes in business organization for applying technology to economic ends

from 1870 to World War I, and again from World War II to 197

fellow economist Robert J. Gordon ’62, who in his monumental treatise on The Rise and Fall of American Economic Growth (reviewed in “How America Grew,” May-June 2016, page 68) hailed 1870-1970 as a “special century” in this regard (interrupted midway by the disaster of the 1930s).

Gordon highlighted the role of a cluster of once-for-all-time technological advances—the steam engine, railroads, electrification, the internal combustion engine, radio and television, powered flight

Pessimistic that future technological advances (most obviously, the computer and electronics revolutions) will generate productivity gains to match those of the special century, Gordon therefore saw little prospect of a return to the rapid growth of those halcyon days.

DeLong instead points to a series of noneconomic (and non-technological) events that slowed growth, followed by a perverse turn in economic policy triggered in part by public frustration: In 1973 the OPEC cartel tripled the price of oil, and then quadrupled it yet again six years later.

For all too many Americans (and citizens of other countries too), the combination of high inflation and sluggish growth meant that “social democracy was no longer delivering the rapid progress toward utopia that it had delivered in the first post-World War II generation.”

Frustration over these and other ills in turn spawned what DeLong calls the “neoliberal turn” in public attitudes and economic policy. The new economic policies introduced under this rubric “did not end the slowdown in productivity growth but reinforced it.

the tax and regulatory changes enacted in this new climate channeled most of what economic gains there were to people already at the top of the income scale

Meanwhile, progressive “inclusion” of women and African Americans in the economy (and in American society more broadly) meant that middle- and lower-income white men saw even smaller gains—and, perversely, reacted by providing still greater support for policies like tax cuts for those with far higher incomes than their own.

Daniel Bell’s argument in his 1976 classic The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Bell famously suggested that the very success of a capitalist economy would eventually undermine a society’s commitment to the values and institutions that made capitalism possible in the first plac

In DeLong’s view, the “greatest cause” of the neoliberal turn was “the extraordinary pace of rising prosperity during the Thirty Glorious Years, which raised the bar that a political-economic order had to surpass in order to generate broad acceptance.” At the same time, “the fading memory of the Great Depression led to the fading of the belief, or rather recognition, by the middle class that they, as well as the working class, needed social insurance.”

what the economy delivered to “hard-working white men” no longer matched what they saw as their just deserts: in their eyes, “the rich got richer, the unworthy and minority poor got handouts.”

As Bell would have put it, the politics of entitlement, bred by years of economic success that so many people had come to take for granted, squeezed out the politics of opportunity and ambition, giving rise to the politics of resentment.

The new era therefore became “a time to question the bourgeois virtues of hard, regular work and thrift in pursuit of material abundance.”

DeLong’s unspoken agenda would surely include rolling back many of the changes made in the U.S. tax code over the past half-century, as well as reinvigorating antitrust policy to blunt the dominance, and therefore outsize profits, of the mega-firms that now tower over key sectors of the economy

He would also surely reverse the recent trend moving away from free trade. Central bankers should certainly behave like Paul Volcker (appointed by President Carter), whose decisive action finally broke the 1970s inflation even at considerable economic cost

Not only Galbraith’s main themes but many of his more specific observations as well seem as pertinent, and important, today as they did then.

What will future readers of Slouching Towards Utopia conclude?

If anything, DeLong’s narratives will become more valuable as those events fade into the past. Alas, his description of fascism as having at its center “a contempt for limits, especially those implied by reason-based arguments; a belief that reality could be altered by the will; and an exaltation of the violent assertion of that will as the ultimate argument” will likely strike a nerve with many Americans not just today but in years to come.

what about DeLong’s core explanation of what went wrong in the latter third of his, and our, “long century”? I predict that it too will still look right, and important.

these catastrophising billionaires are the presumptive winners of the digital economy – the supposed champions of the survival-of-the-fittest business landscape that’s fuelling most of this speculation to begin with.

What I came to realise was that these men are actually the losers. The billionaires who called me out to the desert to evaluate their bunker strategies are not the victors of the economic game so much as the victims of its perversely limited rules. More than anything, they have succumbed to a mindset where “winning” means earning enough money to insulate themselves from the damage they are creating by earning money in that way.

Never before have our society’s most powerful players assumed that the primary impact of their own conquests would be to render the world itself unliveable for everyone else

Nor have they ever before had the technologies through which to programme their sensibilities into the very fabric of our society. The landscape is alive with algorithms and intelligences actively encouraging these selfish and isolationist outlooks. Those sociopathic enough to embrace them are rewarded with cash and control over the rest of us. It’s a self-reinforcing feedback loop. This is new.

C is no hippy environmentalist but his business model is based in the same communitarian spirit I tried to convey to the billionaires: the way to keep the hungry hordes from storming the gates is by getting them food security now. So for $3m, investors not only get a maximum security compound in which to ride out the coming plague, solar storm, or electric grid collapse. They also get a stake in a potentially profitable network of local farm franchises that could reduce the probability of a catastrophic event in the first place. His business would do its best to ensure there are as few hungry children at the gate as possible when the time comes to lock down.

So far, JC Cole has been unable to convince anyone to invest in American Heritage Farms. That doesn’t mean no one is investing in such schemes. It’s just that the ones that attract more attention and cash don’t generally have these cooperative components. They’re more for people who want to go it alone

Most billionaire preppers don’t want to have to learn to get along with a community of farmers or, worse, spend their winnings funding a national food resilience programme. The mindset that requires safe havens is less concerned with preventing moral dilemmas than simply keeping them out of sight.

Rising S Company in Texas builds and installs bunkers and tornado shelters for as little as $40,000 for an 8ft by 12ft emergency hideout all the way up to the $8.3m luxury series “Aristocrat”, complete with pool and bowling lane. The enterprise originally catered to families seeking temporary storm shelters, before it went into the long-term apocalypse business. The company logo, complete with three crucifixes, suggests their services are geared more toward Christian evangelist preppers in red-state America than billionaire tech bros playing out sci-fi scenarios.

Ultra-elite shelters such as the Oppidum in the Czech Republic claim to cater to the billionaire class, and pay more attention to the long-term psychological health of residents. They provide imitation of natural light, such as a pool with a simulated sunlit garden area, a wine vault, and other amenities to make the wealthy feel at home.

On closer analysis, however, the probability of a fortified bunker actually protecting its occupants from the reality of, well, reality, is very slim. For one, the closed ecosystems of underground facilities are preposterously brittle. For example, an indoor, sealed hydroponic garden is vulnerable to contamination. Vertical farms with moisture sensors and computer-controlled irrigation systems look great in business plans and on the rooftops of Bay Area startups; when a palette of topsoil or a row of crops goes wrong, it can simply be pulled and replaced. The hermetically sealed apocalypse “grow room” doesn’t allow for such do-overs.

while a private island may be a good place to wait out a temporary plague, turning it into a self-sufficient, defensible ocean fortress is harder than it sounds. Small islands are utterly dependent on air and sea deliveries for basic staples. Solar panels and water filtration equipment need to be replaced and serviced at regular intervals. The billionaires who reside in such locales are more, not less, dependent on complex supply chains than those of us embedded in industrial civilisation.

If they wanted to test their bunker plans, they’d have hired a security expert from Blackwater or the Pentagon. They seemed to want something more. Their language went far beyond questions of disaster preparedness and verged on politics and philosophy: words such as individuality, sovereignty, governance and autonomy.

it wasn’t their actual bunker strategies I had been brought out to evaluate so much as the philosophy and mathematics they were using to justify their commitment to escape. They were working out what I’ve come to call the insulation equation: could they earn enough money to insulate themselves from the reality they were creating by earning money in this way? Was there any valid justification for striving to be so successful that they could simply leave the rest of us behind –apocalypse or not?

Let’s start with the obvious: Israel has a right to defend itself, rescue the hostages, arrest and prosecute Hamas and engage in lawful armed combat with its enemy.

People claiming the Hamas attack is the ‘violence of the oppressed’ are deluded. Hamas rules Gaza like a mafia state: its operatives walk around neighbourhoods in twos, dressed in dark suits, prying into people’s business. They run the place on a mixture of terror, public service provision and the kudos of their fighters.

They are feared but there is widespread disrespect for them, especially among secular and nationalist sections of the population.

Paradoxically, the western ‘anti-imperialists’ trying to apologise for the terror attack, and the Israeli right calling for retribution against civilians, both need to identify Hamas with the Palestinian population of Gaza in order to justify violence. But there is no basis for doing so.

The fact that a violent action takes place in the context of a wider oppression does not make it either (a) just (b) lawful under international law or c) effective in pursuit of social justice.

In this case, Hamas’s act of terror looks set to achieve the opposite.

What does Hamas want?

Hamas has offered a truce and asked for negotiations, stating that it has ‘achieved its objective’. If so, it’s logical to conclude that the immediate objective was to demonstrate proof-of-concept of an unstoppable pogromist terror. Do as we ask or we do this again, might be a fair summary.

The wider aim, according to numerous experts, is to force Hamas and Iran back into the power-broking process in the Middle East region, paralysing Saudi-Israeli rapprochement.

The firm view of the Islamic Republic is that the governments that are gambling on normalizing relations with the Zionist regime will suffer losses. Defeat awaits them…Today, the situation of the Zionist regime is not a situation that encourages closeness to it. They [other governments] should not make this mistake. The usurper [Zionist] regime is coming to an end.

Hamas could only achieve the aim of ending Saudi-Israeli rapprochement with an attack designed to trigger massive retribution, risking a regional all-out war.

there’s a line in Khamenei’s 3 October speech that, in retrospect looks explanatory: Thus, [the Zionists] are filled with grudge. They are filled with anger! Of course, the Quran exclaims: “Say, “die of your rage!” (3:119). That’s right. Be angry, and die of your rage. And this will happen. They are dying. With God’s help, this matter of ‘die of your rage’ is happening now as regards the Zionist regime.

‘Die of your rage’ might actually be a good summary of what Hamas intends Israel to now do.

Enraged by the barbarity of the attacks, Israel unleashes unprecedented collective punishment against Gaza, triggering both Hezbollah and West Bank militants to join in the fight; this in turn prompts a wave of anti-Semitic demonstrations in western cities, and draws the USA into a regional quagmire, testing the limits of American support for Israel

Meanwhile combat losses, and retribution over the complete failure of Netanyahu’s strategy of ‘managing’ the conflict, raise political divisions in Israeli society to the point where its democracy fails.

In a context where both Russia and China have complex hybrid destabilisation operations going on in western democracies, and where the Brics+ project is pursuing the active decomposition of the rules-based order, this objective does not look as mad as at first sight.

the ‘multipolar world’ turns out not to be one of peaceful coexistence, but characterised by extreme conflicts and genocide.

In pursuit of systemic competition Beijing and Moscow are scraping at every open wound in the body geopolitic

it’s what you get when you purposefully dismantle an international order based on treaties and explicit rules. And where elites in Russia, the USA, Brasil and parts of Europe are openly experimenting with ethno-nationalist politics.

Chaos, then, is a feature of multipolarity, not a bug.

Israel has signalled its military objective is to destroy Hamas. From my experience in Gaza I would say: that is possible.

But be in no doubt. It will need a sustained urban combat operation, a long-term military occupation, massive loss of civilian life, an existential refugee crisis in Sinai, and the diversion of US-supplied ammunition and resources from Ukraine.

Attempting it with a largely conscript/reservist army, full of recently mobilised and enraged soldiers? Again it’s worth remembering Khamenei’s exhortation to Israelis to ‘die of your rage’.

The very impossibility of all these outcomes shows why we need an internationally mediated peace, alongside a functional two-state solution, which allows the people of Gaza to live in peace, exercise democracy and travel across borders.

not only will liberal sympathy for Israel evaporate, but the Muslim minorities in some Western countries will be radicalised.

Typically, from my experience, combat in Gaza takes the following form. There is a street with children playing at one end; in the middle it is eerily deserted; at the other end is the IDF and above is an IDF drone. But there is no front line. The mujahedeen are in tunnels, popping up to take sniper shots or lay IEDs at night, and only committing ATGMs once a vehicle comes into view. The only front line is, for most of the time, between the IDF and Palestinian civilians.

Both sides risk miscalculating. Hamas does not care what happens to Palestinian civilians in Gaza, many of whom hate Hamas.

But there is a danger of miscalculation for Israel too. Netanyahu’s far-right government completely missed the threat, actively stoked tensions in the West Bank and Al Aqsa, and could easily now double down on a self-destructive course.

Ultimately, you cannot hold two million people in an open air prison without a gaoler to keep order. If Hamas can’t do it, the IDF will have to be a permanent occupation force, or it will have to install the PA, or the UN will have to send a stabilisation force.

Danger of miscalculation

The Brics+ ideology

The Gaza crisis is the latest example of how the Russian/Chinese ‘multipolar world’ project works in practice. It doesn’t matter whether there is a chain of command that goes Moscow→Tehran→Hamas. There is a chain of understanding – seize every opportunity to militarise all conflict; exploit every unexpected breakthrough; make all violence symbolic; weaponise the information space and push conflict into the heartlands of ‘imperialism’.

the Brics+ ideology. Its central tenets are that a multipolar world is better than the charter system; that universalism and international law are over; that the West no longer has the right to use the structures of international governance to normalise concepts like democracy or human rights; and that everything that disorganises the rules-based order is progressive, even when carried out by reactionary political forces.

Arab nationalism no longer looks like the dominant ideology on the demonstrations we’ve seen in Sydney, London and NYC. Alongside it there’s a mixture of Islamism plus the ‘decolonisation’ agenda of postmodernist academia.

For the past two years, during the Ukraine war, this incipient red-brown ideology has been mostly contained:

with this conflict there is now a danger that the masses turn up, and are corralled into this emergent fusion of far-left/far-right politics.

I’ve spent the period post-2016 trying to equip the democratic left to defeat this ideology. It’s not about being ‘anti-woke’, or apologising for colonialism: it means teaching people that a cocktail of anti-humanism, anti-universalism and anti-rationality is a route to excusing the totalitarian states in Russia and China, and – now – the genocidal actions of their proxies.

A case study of this is the statement issued by 31 Harvard student groups saying they ‘hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all the unfolding violence’ – just hours after the Hamas attack began.

the global left is rapidly splitting into irreconcilable camps – as Edward Thompson recognised it would, under the influence of post-structuralism in the 1970s.

The logical implication is that Palestinians have no agency whatsoever. That Hamas murders civilians because Israel has ‘structured’ Palestinian reality to make that inevitable. For people presumably wedded to ‘decolonising’ the curriculum, it is a shockingly colonialist premise.

The logic is that Israel is responsible for everything Hamas does because its violence has ‘structured every aspect of Palestinian existence’ since the Nakba.

There are many civilisations, and none is superior or inferior to another. They are equal since each civilisation represents a unique expression of its own culture, traditions, and the aspirations of its people.

In a way, what Putin preaches is an ‘intersectionality of the peoples’: identity politics raised from the level of the individual to the level of the ethnic group.

And it turns out anti-Enlightenment leftism makes it pretty easy to converge with that view. The common assumptions are disdain for universalism, scorn for international law and human rights, repudiation of the Enlightenment (and thus liberalism, social democracy, humanistic Marxism and anarchism) and worship of any totalitarian government that delivers economic development.

This is the modern incarnation of Stalinism, and – to the surprise of nobody who has studied actual Stalinism – it has no problem seeing fascists like Hamas as the ‘agent of progress’.

we need to understand how closely this hyper-deterministic and anti-universal world view maps onto the ideology presented, for example, by Putin at Valdai last week. For Putin there is no single human civilisation, only civilisations, which must be rooted in ethnicity establish their co-existence through the survival of the fittest:

One camp, he said, is a theology. The other a tradition of active reason. The first repudiates liberalism and universalism. The second recognises its debt to liberalism and wants to make universalism consistent

The first claims international law is a sham; the second knows that, though the institutions of the rules-based order are flawed, they are better than chaos.

that you can stand with the Israeli people under attack while simultaneously standing up for the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination.

Those flaunting their joy at the murder of Israeli civilians need to understand the licence this creates in the minds of rightwing ethno-nationalists in our own society. What Hamas did to the kids of Kfar Azar, the far right wants to do to you.

Peter Thiel has lost interest in democracy.

Thiel has cultivated an image as a man of ideas, an intellectual who studied philosophy with René Girard and owns first editions of Leo Strauss in English and German. Trump quite obviously did not share these interests, or Thiel’s libertarian principles.

For years, Thiel had been saying that he generally favored the more pessimistic candidate in any presidential race because “if you’re too optimistic, it just shows you’re out of touch.” He scorned the rote optimism of politicians who, echoing Ronald Reagan, portrayed America as a shining city on a hill. Trump’s America, by contrast, was a broken landscape, under siege.

Thiel is not against government in principle, his friend Auren Hoffman (who is no relation to Reid) says. “The ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s—which had massive, crazy amounts of power—he admires because it was effective. We built the Hoover Dam. We did the Manhattan Project,” Hoffman told me. “We started the space program.”

Their failure to make the world conform to his vision has soured him on the entire enterprise—to the point where he no longer thinks it matters very much who wins the next election.

His libertarian critique of American government has curdled into an almost nihilistic impulse to demolish it.

“Voting for Trump was like a not very articulate scream for help,” Thiel told me. He fantasized that Trump’s election would somehow force a national reckoning. He believed somebody needed to tear things down—slash regulations, crush the administrative state—before the country could rebuild.

He admits now that it was a bad bet.

“There are a lot of things I got wrong,” he said. “It was crazier than I thought. It was more dangerous than I thought. They couldn’t get the most basic pieces of the government to work. So that was—I think that part was maybe worse than even my low expectations.”

eid Hoffman, who has known Thiel since college, long ago noticed a pattern in his old friend’s way of thinking. Time after time, Thiel would espouse grandiose, utopian hopes that failed to materialize, leaving him “kind of furious or angry” about the world’s unwillingness to bend to whatever vision was possessing him at the moment

Thiel. He is worth between $4 billion and $9 billion. He lives with his husband and two children in a glass palace in Bel Air that has nine bedrooms and a 90-foot infinity pool. He is a titan of Silicon Valley and a conservative kingmaker.

“Peter tends to be not ‘glass is half empty’ but ‘glass is fully empty,’” Hoffman told me.

he tells the story of his life as a series of disheartening setbacks.

He met Mark Zuckerberg, liked what he heard, and became Facebook’s first outside investor. Half a million dollars bought him 10 percent of the company, most of which he cashed out for about $1 billion in 2012.

Thiel made some poor investments, losing enormous sums by going long on the stock market in 2008, when it nose-dived, and then shorting the market in 2009, when it rallied

on the whole, he has done exceptionally well. Alex Karp, his Palantir co-founder, who agrees with Thiel on very little other than business, calls him “the world’s best venture investor.”

Thiel told me this is indeed his ambition, and he hinted that he may have achieved it.

He longs for radical new technologies and scientific advances on a scale most of us can hardly imagine

He longs for a world in which great men are free to work their will on society, unconstrained by government or regulation or “redistributionist economics” that would impinge on their wealth and power—or any obligation, really, to the rest of humanity

Did his dream of eternal life trace to The Lord of the Rings?

He takes for granted that this kind of progress will redound to the benefit of society at large.

More than anything, he longs to live forever.

Calling death a law of nature is, in his view, just an excuse for giving up. “It’s something we are told that demotivates us from trying harder,”

Thiel grew up reading a great deal of science fiction and fantasy—Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke. But especially Tolkien; he has said that he read the Lord of the Rings trilogy at least 10 times. Tolkien’s influence on his worldview is obvious: Middle-earth is an arena of struggle for ultimate power, largely without government, where extraordinary individuals rise to fulfill their destinies. Also, there are immortal elves who live apart from men in a magical sheltered valley.

But his dreams have always been much, much bigger than that.

Yes, Thiel said, perking up. “There are all these ways where trying to live unnaturally long goes haywire” in Tolkien’s works. But you also have the elves.

How are the elves different from the humans in Tolkien? And they’re basically—I think the main difference is just, they’re humans that don’t die.”

During college, he co-founded The Stanford Review, gleefully throwing bombs at identity politics and the university’s diversity-minded reform of the curriculum. He co-wrote The Diversity Myth in 1995, a treatise against what he recently called the “craziness and silliness and stupidity and wickedness” of the left.

Thiel laid out a plan, for himself and others, “to find an escape from politics in all its forms.” He wanted to create new spaces for personal freedom that governments could not reach

But something changed for Thiel in 2009

he people, he concluded, could not be trusted with important decisions. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wrote.

ven more notable one followed: “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

By 2015, six years after declaring his intent to change the world from the private sector, Thiel began having second thoughts. He cut off funding for the Seasteading Institute—years of talk had yielded no practical progress–and turned to other forms of escape

The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom,” he wrote. His manifesto has since become legendary in Silicon Valley, where his worldview is shared by other powerful men (and men hoping to be Peter Thiel).

Thiel’s investment in cryptocurrencies, like his founding vision at PayPal, aimed to foster a new kind of money “free from all government control and dilution

His decision to rescue Elon Musk’s struggling SpaceX in 2008—with a $20 million infusion that kept the company alive after three botched rocket launches—came with aspirations to promote space as an open frontier with “limitless possibility for escape from world politics

It was seasteading that became Thiel’s great philanthropic cause in the late aughts and early 2010s. The idea was to create autonomous microstates on platforms in international waters.

“There’s zero chance Peter Thiel would live on Sealand,” he said, noting that Thiel likes his comforts too much. (Thiel has mansions around the world and a private jet. Seal performed at his 2017 wedding, at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna.)

As he built his companies and grew rich, he began pouring money into political causes and candidates—libertarian groups such as the Endorse Liberty super PAC, in addition to a wide range of conservative Republicans, including Senators Orrin Hatch and Ted Cruz

Sam Altman, the former venture capitalist and now CEO of OpenAI, revealed in 2016 that in the event of global catastrophe, he and Thiel planned to wait it out in Thiel’s New Zealand hideaway.

When I asked Thiel about that scenario, he seemed embarrassed and deflected the question. He did not remember the arrangement as Altman did, he said. “Even framing it that way, though, makes it sound so ridiculous,” he told me. “If there is a real end of the world, there is no place to go.”

You’d have eco farming. You’d turn the deserts into arable land. There were sort of all these incredible things that people thought would happen in the ’50s and ’60s and they would sort of transform the world.”

None of that came to pass. Even science fiction turned hopeless—nowadays, you get nothing but dystopias

He hungered for advances in the world of atoms, not the world of bits.

Founders Fund, the venture-capital firm he established in 200

The fund, therefore, would invest in smart people solving hard problems “that really have the potential to change the world.”

This was not what Thiel wanted to be doing with his time. Bodegas and dog food were making him money, apparently, but he had set out to invest in transformational technology that would advance the state of human civilization.

He told me that he no longer dwells on democracy’s flaws, because he believes we Americans don’t have one. “We are not a democracy; we’re a republic,” he said. “We’re not even a republic; we’re a constitutional republic.”

“It was harder than it looked,” Thiel said. “I’m not actually involved in enough companies that are growing a lot, that are taking our civilization to the next level.”

Founders Fund has holdings in artificial intelligence, biotech, space exploration, and other cutting-edge fields. What bothers Thiel is that his companies are not taking enough big swings at big problems, or that they are striking out.

In at least 20 hours of logged face-to-face meetings with Buma, Thiel reported on what he believed to be a Chinese effort to take over a large venture-capital firm, discussed Russian involvement in Silicon Valley, and suggested that Jeffrey Epstein—a man he had met several times—was an Israeli intelligence operative. (Thiel told me he thinks Epstein “was probably entangled with Israeli military intelligence” but was more involved with “the U.S. deep state.”)

Buma, according to a source who has seen his reports, once asked Thiel why some of the extremely rich seemed so open to contacts with foreign governments. “And he said that they’re bored,” this source said. “‘They’re bored.’ And I actually believe it. I think it’s that simple. I think they’re just bored billionaires.”

he has a sculpture that resembles a three-dimensional game board. Ascent: Above the Nation State Board Game Display Prototype is the New Zealander artist Simon Denny’s attempt to map Thiel’s ideological universe. The board features a landscape in the aesthetic of Dungeons & Dragons, thick with monsters and knights and castles. The monsters include an ogre labeled “Monetary Policy.” Near the center is a hero figure, recognizable as Thiel. He tilts against a lion and a dragon, holding a shield and longbow. The lion is labeled “Fair Elections.” The dragon is labeled “Democracy.” The Thiel figure is trying to kill them.

When I asked Thiel to explain his views on democracy, he dodged the question. “I always wonder whether people like you … use the word democracy when you like the results people have and use the word populism when you don’t like the results,” he told me. “If I’m characterized as more pro-populist than the elitist Atlantic is, then, in that sense, I’m more pro-democratic.”

“I couldn’t find them,” he said. “I couldn’t get enough of them to work.

He said he has no wish to change the American form of government, and then amended himself: “Or, you know, I don’t think it’s realistic for it to be radically changed.” Which is not at all the same thing.

When I asked what he thinks of Yarvin’s autocratic agenda, Thiel offered objections that sounded not so much principled as practical.

“I don’t think it’s going to work. I think it will look like Xi in China or Putin in Russia,” Thiel said, meaning a malign dictatorship. “It ultimately I don’t think will even be accelerationist on the science and technology side, to say nothing of what it will do for individual rights, civil liberties, things of that sort.”

Still, Thiel considers Yarvin an “interesting and powerful” historian

he always talks about is the New Deal and FDR in the 1930s and 1940s,” Thiel said. “And the heterodox take is that it was sort of a light form of fascism in the United States.”

Yarvin, Thiel said, argues that “you should embrace this sort of light form of fascism, and we should have a president who’s like FDR again.”

Did Thiel agree with Yarvin’s vision of fascism as a desirable governing model? Again, he dodged the question.

“That’s not a realistic political program,” he said, refusing to be drawn any further.

ooking back on Trump’s years in office, Thiel walked a careful line.

A number of things were said and done that Thiel did not approve of. Mistakes were made. But Thiel was not going to refashion himself a Never Trumper in retrospect.

“I have to somehow give the exact right answer, where it’s like, ‘Yeah, I’m somewhat disenchanted,’” he told me. “But throwing him totally under the bus? That’s like, you know—I’ll get yelled at by Mr. Trump. And if I don’t throw him under the bus, that’s—but—somehow, I have to get the tone exactly right.”

Thiel knew, because he had read some of my previous work, that I think Trump’s gravest offense against the republic was his attempt to overthrow the election. I asked how he thought about it.

“Look, I don’t think the election was stolen,” he said. But then he tried to turn the discussion to past elections that might have been wrongly decided. Bush-Gore in 2000, for instanc

He came back to Trump’s attempt to prevent the transfer of power. “I’ll agree with you that it was not helpful,” he said.

there is another piece of the story, which Thiel reluctantly agreed to discuss

Puck reported that Democratic operatives had been digging for dirt on Thiel since before the 2022 midterm elections, conducting opposition research into his personal life with the express purpose of driving him out of politic

Among other things, the operatives are said to have interviewed a young model named Jeff Thomas, who told them he was having an affair with Thiel, and encouraged Thomas to talk to Ryan Grim, a reporter for The Intercept. Grim did not publish a story during election season, as the opposition researchers hoped he would, but he wrote about Thiel’s affair in March, after Thomas died by suicide.

He deplored the dirt-digging operation, telling me in an email that “the nihilism afflicting American politics is even deeper than I knew.”

He also seemed bewildered by the passions he arouses on the left. “I don’t think they should hate me this much,”

he spoke at the closed-press event with a lot less nuance than he had in our interviews. His after-dinner remarks were full of easy applause lines and in-jokes mocking the left. Universities had become intellectual wastelands, obsessed with a meaningless quest for diversity, he told the crowd. The humanities writ large are “transparently ridiculous,” said the onetime philosophy major, and “there’s no real science going on” in the sciences, which have devolved into “the enforcement of very curious dogmas.”

“Diversity—it’s not enough to just hire the extras from the space-cantina scene in Star Wars,” he said, prompting laughter.

Nor did Thiel say what genuine diversity would mean. The quest for it, he said, is “very evil and it’s very silly.”

“the silliness is distracting us from very important things,” such as the threat to U.S. interests posed by the Chinese Communist Party.

“Whenever someone says ‘DEI,’” he exhorted the crowd, “just think ‘CCP.’”

Somebody asked, in the Q&A portion of the evening, whether Thiel thought the woke left was deliberately advancing Chinese Communist interests

“It’s always the difference between an agent and asset,” he said. “And an agent is someone who is working for the enemy in full mens rea. An asset is a useful idiot. So even if you ask the question ‘Is Bill Gates China’s top agent, or top asset, in the U.S.?’”—here the crowd started roaring—“does it really make a difference?”

About 10 years ago, Thiel told me, a fellow venture capitalist called to broach the question. Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, had made the Giving Pledge a couple of years before. Would Thiel be willing to talk with Gates about doing the same?

Thiel feels that giving his billions away would be too much like admitting he had done something wrong to acquire them

He also lacked sympathy for the impulse to spread resources from the privileged to those in need. When I mentioned the terrible poverty and inequality around the world, he said, “I think there are enough people working on that.”

besides, a different cause moves him far more.

Should Thiel happen to die one day, best efforts notwithstanding, his arrangements with Alcor provide that a cryonics team will be standing by.

Then his body will be cooled to –196 degrees Celsius, the temperature of liquid nitrogen. After slipping into a double-walled, vacuum-insulated metal coffin, alongside (so far) 222 other corpsicles, “the patient is now protected from deterioration for theoretically thousands of years,” Alcor literature explains.

All that will be left for Thiel to do, entombed in this vault, is await the emergence of some future society that has the wherewithal and inclination to revive him. And then make his way in a world in which his skills and education and fabulous wealth may be worth nothing at all.

I wondered how much Thiel had thought through the implications for society of extreme longevity. The population would grow exponentially. Resources would not. Where would everyone live? What would they do for work? What would they eat and drink? Or—let’s face it—would a thousand-year life span be limited to men and women of extreme wealth?

“Well, I maybe self-serve,” he said, perhaps understating the point, “but I worry more about stagnation than about inequality.”

Thiel is not alone among his Silicon Valley peers in his obsession with immortality. Oracle’s Larry Ellison has described mortality as “incomprehensible.” Google’s Sergey Brin aspires to “cure death.” Dmitry Itskov, a leading tech entrepreneur in Russia, has said he hopes to live to 10,000.

. “I should be investing way more money into this stuff,” he told me. “I should be spending way more time on this.”

You haven’t told your husband? Wouldn’t you want him to sign up alongside you?“I mean, I will think about that,” he said, sounding rattled. “I will think—I have not thought about that.”

No matter how fervent his desire, Thiel’s extraordinary resources still can’t buy him the kind of “super-duper medical treatments” that would let him slip the grasp of death. It is, perhaps, his ultimate disappointment.

There are all these things I can’t do with my money,” Thiel said.

I had gone to graduate school in Lebanon, then moved back there in an attempt to better understand how Hezbollah had evolved into Israel’s most capable foe. My research revealed as much about Israeli missteps and weaknesses as it did about Hezbollah’s strengths.

If Israel is going to have any strategic success against Hamas, it needs to do three things differently from conflicts past.

Hezbollah took everything Israel could throw at it for a month and was still standing.

As noted earlier, Israel has an unfortunate tendency to lay out maximalist goals—very often for domestic consumption—that it then fails to meet

In 2006, for example, Israel’s then–prime minister, Ehud Olmert, told the country he was going to destroy Hezbollah, return the bodies of two Israeli prisoners, and end the rocket attacks on Israel.

Israel did none of the three. And although Lebanon was devastated, and Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, publicly apologized for the raid that started the conflict, most observers had little doubt about who had won the conflict.

Strategic Humility

As Eliot Cohen has pointed out, the other side also has maximalist goals. Hamas and Hezbollah want nothing less than the destruction of Israel. But they are in no rush.

Nasrallah addressed the Arabic-speaking world for the first time since the start of this conflict on Friday. Significantly, he declared that although fighting still rages, Hamas became the conflict’s winner as soon as Israel claimed that it would destroy the militant group, which he confidently predicted it would not.

Hezbollah clearly does not want to enter this conflict in any meaningful way. It knows that the pressure will grow to do so if Israel has any real success in Gaza, but for the moment, it doubts that Israel will accomplish any such thing.

that Israel will destroy Hamas. That just isn’t going to happen, especially because no one has any idea who, or what, should replace Hamas in Gaza. So tell the world what will happen—and how it will make Israel and the region safer.

Communications Discipline

One of the things that struck me was the almost profane way in which Israeli military spokespeople would often speak, to international audiences no less, about non-Israeli civilians

“Now we are at the stage in which we are firing into the villages in order to cause damage to property … The aim is to create a situation in which the residents will leave the villages and go north.”

The callousness with which Israeli spokespeople too often describe the human suffering on the other side of the conflict, the blunt way in which they described what many Americans would consider war crimes, never fails to offend international audiences not predisposed to have sympathy with Israeli war aims.

much like right-wing American politicians, who sometimes use inflammatory rhetoric about real or perceived U.S. enemies, Israeli officials often resort to language about adversaries and military operations that can be exceptionally difficult for their allies to defend on the international stage:

One minister casually muses about using nuclear weapons on Gaza; another claims that the Palestinians are a fictional people. One can safely assume that people will continue accusing the Israeli government of including genocidal maniacs when they can point to officials in that government talking like, well, genocidal maniacs.

Israel needs to develop a clear communications plan for its conflicts and to sharply police the kind of language that doesn’t go over as well in Johannesburg or Jordan as it does in Jerusalem.

Focus on Iran

Few people have any interest in a regional war. The economic consequences alone would be dire. But had I been in Israel’s position on October 8, I might have been sorely tempted to largely ignore Gaza—where even the best-trained military would struggle to dislodge Hamas without killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians—and focus my efforts much farther east

Israel nevertheless needs to find a way to change Iran’s strategic calculus. Otherwise, Hamas and Hezbollah will only grow stronger.

“Do you think we can sit and negotiate with them after this?” he asked. “They need to stop shelling us, destroying infrastructure, launching airstrikes, killing animals and burning forests.”

Asked about the worst moment of the past year, he cited Bucha – the garden town just outside Kyiv where Russian soldiers last spring executed at least 700 civilians, dumping bodies in the streets in a grisly display. “It was horrible,” he said. “We have seen that the devil is not somewhere underground but among us.”

So far the US president’s administration has refused to provide long-range ATACMS artillery to the Ukrainians, apparently on the grounds that it could be used to hit targets inside Russia. Zelenskiy said it was needed to protect civilians from Russian predation, adding Ukraine would employ these systems solely to target enemy logistics centres in occupied areas.

The conversation was reminiscent of what happened with tanks, he said. European countries and the Biden administration initially ruled out sending them, only to later change their minds. They would similarly agree to supply F16 fighter jets, he predicted. Delay was terrible since it means “we lose more people”, he said.

Zelenskiy repeatedly emphasised the war was not a local dispute between unhappy neighbours. He said Ukrainians were fighting and dying for civilised European values and for freedom. Asked if Moscow would invade another state, if it won in Ukraine, he said: “Unfortunately, yes. Putin has failed on the battlefield. He needs to demonstrate success.”

For climate, we already are seeing a glimpse of what is to come: drought, floods and far more extreme storms than in the recent past. We saw some of the implications over the past year, with supply chains broken because rivers were too dry for shipping and hydroelectric and nuclear power impaired.

As with climate change, demographic shifts determine societal ones, like straining the social contract between the working and the aged.

We are reversing the globalization of the past 40 years, with the links in our geopolitical and economic network fraying. “Friendshoring,” or moving production to friendly countries, is a new term. The geopolitical forces behind deglobalization will amplify the stresses from climate change and demographics to lead to a frenzied competition for resources and consumers.

The problem here, and a problem broadly with complex and dynamic systems, is that the whole doesn’t look like the sum of the parts. If you have a lot of people running around, the overall picture can look different than what any one of those people is doing. Maybe in aggregate their actions jam the doorway; maybe in aggregate they create a stampede

if we can’t get a firm hold on pedestrian economic issues like inflation and recession — the prospects are not bright for getting our forecasts right for these existential forces.

The problem is that the models don’t work when our economy is weird. And that’s precisely when we most need them to work.

Economics failed with the 2008 crisis because economic theory has established that it cannot predict such crises.

A key reason these models fail in times of crisis is that they can’t deal with a world filled with complexity or with surprising twists and turns.

The fourth, artificial intelligence, is a wild card. But we already are seeing risks for work and privacy, and for frightening advances in warfare.

we are not a mechanical system. We are humans who innovate, change with our experiences, and at times game the system

Reflecting on the 1987 market crash, the brilliant physicist Richard Feynman remarked on the difficulty facing economists by noting that subatomic particles don’t act based on what they think other subatomic particles are planning — but people do that.

What if economists can’t turn things around? This is a possibility because we are walking into a world unlike any we have seen. We can’t anticipate all the ways climate change might affect us or where our creativity will take us with A.I. Which brings us to what is called radical uncertainty, where we simply have no clue — where we are caught unaware by things we haven’t even thought of.

This possibility is not much on the minds of economists

How do we deal with risks we cannot even define? A good start is to move away from the economist’s palette of efficiency and rationality and instead look at examples of survival in worlds of radical uncertainty.

In our time savannas are turning to deserts. The alternative to the economist’s model is to take a coarse approach, to be more adaptable — leave some short-term fine tuning and optimization by the wayside

Our long term might look brighter if we act like cockroaches. An insect fine tuned for a jungle may dominate the cockroach in that environment. But once the world changes and the jungle disappears, it will as well.

the major finding of the survey “is that democratic norm violations of the sort many Republicans ran on are an electoral loser.”

Republican candidates, Westwood added, “running on platforms that supported democratic norm violations were standing behind a policy that seems to only resonate with Trump and a small minority of Republican voters.

A publicly released post-election analysis by Neil Newhouse and Jim Hobart, partners at the Republican polling firm Public Opinion Strategies, found, for example, that a far higher percentage of Democrats, 81 percent, believe “Republicans represent a threat to democracy that, if not stopped, will destroy America as we know it,” than Republicans (69 percent) believe the same thing about Democrats

the election outcomes are consistent with the interpretation that the candidates most closely associated with Trump suffered a penalty. Voters rejected all the Trump-endorsed secretary of state nominees in important swing states. Republicans unexpectedly lost seats in districts where Republican incumbents who supported Trump’s impeachment had been denied renomination. Republicans closely linked to Trump lost elections in winnable swing states

Both Democrats and Republicans, Westwood said,overestimate the extent to which the other side supports democratic norm violations by up to five times. There is a real risk that damage to our country could occur not because of support for norm violations but as a pre-emptive strike based on the faulty assumption that the other side has abandoned democracy.

abortion, which worked to the advantage of Democrats, “was more of a factor than the pre-election polls indicated,” with almost as many voters, 31 percent, saying it was a high-priority issue as the 32 percent who identified rising prices and inflation, an issue that benefited Republicans

Almost identical percentages identified concern over democratic backsliding, at 25 percent, a pro-Democratic issue, as the 26 percent who identified jobs and the economy, a pro-Republican concern.

through 2020, a larger percentage of Republicans considered themselves “to be more a supporter of Donald Trump” than “a supporter of the Republican Party.” That came to an end in January 2021, and by this month, 67 percent said they were “more a supporter of the Republican Party,” more than double the 30 percent who said they were “more a supporter of Donald Trump.”

Crime, Greenberg wrote,was a top issue for many Democratic base voters. A quarter of Blacks and half of Hispanics and Asians voters trusted Republicans more than Democrats to address the issue. With Democrats trailing Republicans by 10 points on crime, Democrats have a lot of work to do.There is another word of caution for Democrats. The party’s single most important achievement in 2022 was to maintain control of the Senate, preventing Republicans from blocking Biden’s judicial and executive branch appointments.

n 2024, however, 23 seats in the Democratic caucus will be up for grabs — including two independent seats (Angus King in Maine and Bernie Sanders in Vermont) — making it that much harder for Democrats to keep their thin majority. Eight of these Democratic seats are in purple or red states (Montana and West Virginia, for example), offering multiple opportunities to the Republican Party

In contrast, all 10 of the Republican-held seats up for election in 2024 are in solidly red states.

a “builder class”—a brains trust of youngish idealists, which includes Patrick Collison, co-founder of Stripe, a payments firm valued at $74bn, and other (mostly white and male) techies, who are posing questions that go far beyond the usual interests of Silicon Valley’s titans. They include the future of man and machine, the constraints on economic growth, and the nature of government.

They share other similarities. Business provided them with their clout, but doesn’t seem to satisfy their ambition

The number of techno-billionaires in America (Mr Collison included) has more than doubled in a decade.

ome of them, like the Medicis in medieval Florence, are keen to use their money to bankroll the intellectual ferment

The other is Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, a startup accelerator, whose essays on everything from cities to politics are considered required reading on tech campuses.

Mr Altman puts it more optimistically: “The iPhone and cloud computing enabled a Cambrian explosion of new technology. Some things went right and some went wrong. But one thing that went weirdly right is a lot of people got rich and said ‘OK, now what?’”

A belief that with money and brains they can reboot social progress is the essence of this new mindset, making it resolutely upbeat

The question is: are the rest of them further evidence of the tech industry’s hubristic decadence? Or do they reflect the start of a welcome capacity for renewal?

Two well-known entrepreneurs from that era provided the intellectual seed capital for some of today’s techno nerds.

Mr Thiel, a would-be libertarian philosopher and investor

This cohort of eggheads starts from common ground: frustration with what they see as sluggish progress in the world around them.

Yet the impact could ultimately be positive. Frustrations with a sluggish society have encouraged them to put their money and brains to work on problems from science funding and the redistribution of wealth to entirely new universities. Their exaltation of science may encourage a greater focus on hard tech

the rationalist movement has hit the mainstream. The result is a fascination with big ideas that its advocates believe goes beyond simply rose-tinted tech utopianism

A burgeoning example of this is “progress studies”, a movement that Mr Collison and Tyler Cowen, an economist and seer of the tech set, advocated for in an article in the Atlantic in 2019

Progress, they think, is a combination of economic, technological and cultural advancement—and deserves its own field of study

There are other examples of this expansive worldview. In an essay in 2021 Mr Altman set out a vision that he called “Moore’s Law for Everything”, based on similar logic to the semiconductor revolution. In it, he predicted that smart machines, building ever smarter replacements, would in the coming decades outcompete humans for work. This would create phenomenal wealth for some, obliterate wages for others, and require a vast overhaul of taxation and redistribution

His two bets, on OpenAI and nuclear fusion, have become fashionable of late—the former’s chatbot, ChatGPT, is all the rage. He has invested $375m in Helion, a company that aims to build a fusion reactor.

Mr Lonsdale, who shares a libertarian streak with Mr Thiel, has focused attention on trying to fix the shortcomings of society and government. In an essay this year called “In Defence of Us”, he argues against “historical nihilism”, or an excessive focus on the failures of the West.

With a soft spot for Roman philosophy, he has created the Cicero Institute in Austin that aims to inject free-market principles such as competition and transparency into public policy.

He is also bringing the startup culture to academia, backing a new place of learning called the University of Austin, which emphasises free speech.

All three have business ties to their mentors. As a teen, Mr Altman was part of the first cohort of founders in Mr Graham’s Y Combinator, which went on to back successes such as Airbnb and Dropbox. In 2014 he replaced him as its president, and for a while counted Mr Thiel as a partner (Mr Altman keeps an original manuscript of Mr Thiel’s book “Zero to One” in his library). Mr Thiel was also an early backer of Stripe, founded by Mr Collison and his brother, John. Mr Graham saw promise in Patrick Collison while the latter was still at school. He was soon invited to join Y Combinator. Mr Graham remains a fan: “If you dropped Patrick on a desert island, he would figure out how to reproduce the Industrial Revolution,”

While at university, Mr Lonsdale edited the Stanford Review, a contrarian publication co-founded by Mr Thiel. He went on to work for his mentor and the two men eventually helped found Palantir. He still calls Mr Thiel “a genius”—though he claims these days to be less “cynical” than his guru.

“The tech industry has always told these grand stories about itself,” says Adrian Daub of Stanford University and author of the book, “What Tech Calls Thinking”. Mr Daub sees it as a way of convincing recruits and investors to bet on their risky projects. “It’s incredibly convenient for their business models.”

In the 2000s Mr Thiel supported the emergence of a small community of online bloggers, self-named the “rationalists”, who were focused on removing cognitive biases from thinking (Mr Thiel has since distanced himself). That intellectual heritage dates even further back, to “cypherpunks”, who noodled about cryptography, as well as “extropians”, who believed in improving the human condition through life extensions

Silicon Valley has shown an uncanny ability to reinvent itself in the past.

Karahan Tepe, and its penis chamber, and everything that inexplicably surrounds the chamber – shrines, cells, altars, megaliths, audience halls et al – is vastly older than anything comparable, and plumbs quite unimaginable depths of time, back before agriculture, probably back before normal pottery, right back to a time when we once thought human ‘civilisation’ was simply impossible.

After all, hunter gatherers – cavemen with flint arrowheads – without regular supplies of grain, without the regular meat and milk of domesticated animals, do not build temple-towns with water systems.

Taken together with its age, complexity, sophistication, and its deep, resonant mysteriousness, and its many sister sites now being unearthed across the Harran Plains – collectively known as the Tas Tepeler, or the ‘stone hills’ – these carved, ochre-red rocks, so silent, brooding, and watchful in the hard whirring breezes of the semi-desert, constitute what might just be the greatest archaeological revelation in the history of humankind.

The solitary Kurdish man, on that summer’s day in 1994, had made an irreversibly profound discovery – which would eventually lead to the penis pillars of Karahan Tepe, and an archaeological anomaly which challenges, time and again, everything we know of human prehistory.

in late 1994 the German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt came to the site of Gobekli Tepe to begin his slow, diligent excavations of its multiple, peculiar, enormous T-stones, which are generally arranged in circles – like the standing stones of Avebury or Stonehenge. Unlike European standing stones, however, the older Turkish megaliths are often intricately carved: with images of local fauna. Sometimes the stones depict cranes, boars, or wildfowl: creatures of the hunt. There are also plenty of leopards, foxes, and vultures. Occasionally these animals are depicted next to human heads.

The obsession with the penis is obvious – more so, now we have the benefit of hindsight provided by Karahan Tepe and the other sites. Very few representations of women have emerged from the Tas Tepeler so far; there is one obscene caricature of a woman perhaps giving birth. Whatever inspired these temple-towns it was a not a benign matriarchal culture. Quite the opposite, maybe.

Urfa man now has a silent hall of his own in one of Turkey’s greatest archaeological galleries. More importantly, we can now see that Urfa man has the same body stance of the T-shaped man-pillars at Gobekli (and in many of the Tas Tepeler): his arms are in front of him, protecting his penis

‘Gobekli Tepe upends our view of human history. We always thought that agriculture came first, then civilisation: farming, pottery, social hierarchies. But here it is reversed, it seems the ritual centre came first, then when enough hunter gathering people collected to worship – or so I believe – they realised they had to feed people. Which means farming.’ He waved at the surrounding hills, ‘It is no coincidence that in these same hills in the Fertile Crescent men and women first domesticated the local wild einkorn grass, becoming wheat, and they also first domesticated pigs, cows and sheep. This is the place where Homo sapiens went from plucking the fruit from the tree, to toiling and sowing the ground.’

People were already speculating that – if you see the Garden of Eden mythos as an allegory of the Neolithic Revolution: i.e. our fall from the relative ease of hunter-gathering to the relative hardships of farming (and life did get harder when we first started farming, as we worked longer hours, and caught diseases from domesticated animals), then Gobekli Tepe and its environs is probably the place where this happened

‘I believe Gobekli Tepe is a temple in Eden’. It’s a quote I reused, to some controversy, because people took Klaus literally. But he did not mean it literally. He meant it allegorically.

This number is so large it is hard to take in. For comparison the Great Pyramid at Giza is 4,500 years old. Stonehenge is 5,000 years old. The Cairn de Barnenez tomb-complex in Brittany, perhaps the oldest standing structure in Europe, could be up to 7,000 years old.

I do definitely know this: some time in 8000 BC the creators of Gobekli Tepe buried their great structures under tons of rubble. They entombed it. We can speculate why. Did they feel guilt? Did they need to propitiate an angry God? Or just want to hide it?’ Klaus was also fairly sure on one other thing. ‘Gobekli Tepe is unique.’

These days Gobekli Tepe is not just a famous archaeological site, it is a Unesco World-Heritage-listed tourist honeypot which can generate a million visitors a year. It is all enclosed by a futuristic hi-tech steel-and-plastic marquee (no casual wandering around taking photos of the stones and workers

Necmi shows me the gleaming museum built to house the greatest finds from the region: including a 11,000 year old statue, retrieved from beneath the centre of Sanliurfa itself, and perhaps the world’s oldest life size carved human figure

‘We have found no homes, no human remains. Where is everyone, did they gather for festivals, then disperse? As for their religion, I have no real idea, perhaps Gobekli Tepe was a place of excarnation, for exposing the bones of the dead to be consumed by vultures, so the bodies have all gone

Aslan tells me how archaeologists at Gobekli have also, more recently, found tantalising evidence of alcohol: huge troughs with the chemical residue of fermentation, indicating mighty ritual feasts, maybe.

he explains how scientists at Karahan Tepe, as well as Gobekli Tepe, have now found evidence of homes.

The builders lived here. They ate their roasted game here. They slept here. And they used, it seems, a primitive but poetic form of pottery, shaped from polished stone. They possibly did elaborate manhood rituals in the Karahan Tepe penis chambe

Yet still we have no sign at all of contemporary agriculture; they were, it still appears, hunter gatherers, but of unnerving sophistication.

Another unnerving oddity is the curious number of carvings which show people with six fingers. Is this symbolic, or an actual deformity? Perhaps the mark of a strange tribe?

Karahan Tepe is stupefyingly big. ‘So far,’ he says, ‘We have dug up maybe 1 per cent of the site’ – and it is already impressive. I ask him how many pillars – T stones – might be buried here. He casually points at a rectangular rock peering above the dry grass. ‘That’s probably another megalith right there, waiting to be excavated. I reckon there are probably thousands more of them, all around us. We are only at the beginning. And there could be dozens more Tas Tepeler we have not yet found, spread over hundreds of kilometres.’

Karahan too was definitely and purposely buried. That is the reason Necmi and his team were able to unearth the penis pillars so quickly, all they had to do was scoop away the backfill, exposing the phallic pillars, sculpted from living rock.

the most remarkable answer of all, and it is this: archaeologists in southeastern Turkey are, at this moment, digging up a wild, grand, artistically coherent, implausibly strange, hitherto-unknown-to-us religious civilisation, which has been buried in Mesopotamia for ten thousand years. And it was all buried deliberately.