So much attention paid in the UK to Danish Social Democrats struggling to hold on to 22% on polls and almost none to Swedish Social Democrats dominating at 34%
Lecturer for German and European Studies at King's College London. Opinions my own. RT not always endorsement. Also to be found at @APHClarkson@mastodon.social as well as @APHClarkson https://www.ullstein.de/werke/die-macht-der-diaspora/hardcover/978354910
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So much attention paid in the UK to Danish Social Democrats struggling to hold on to 22% on polls and almost none to Swedish Social Democrats dominating at 34%
Churchill delivered victory in the Second World War only to lose the 1945 election. Clement Attlee delivered the National Health Service only to lose the 1950 election.
I used a 5-min segment on CBC News Network to push back directly against 3 separate myths we often hear. I emphasized that: 1) BRICS is nothing more than optics; it's members are not actual allies; 2) Ru maintains its maximalist demands; no progress was made in Alaska; 3) Ru isn't winning the war.
A large swathe of US defence infrastructure in Texas, California, Arizona and New Mexico hasn't recently had its defences upgraded and would got hammered in a drone strike campaign
A large swathe of US defence infrastructure in Texas, California, Arizone and New Mexico hasn't recently had its defences upgraded and would got hammered in a drone strike campaign
Armed insurgencies often morph into criminal/drug-trafficking organizations, as in Colombia and Peru. Arms-trafficking insurgencies also often branch out into contraband/people smuggling, as in the Sahel. Mexican cartels already do the latter. We may soon see them reverse the former trajectory.
Merz: "I could call Putin at any time if I wanted to. In fact, I would do so if I thought it could shift the situation in the right direction. But today, every diplomatic effort we have made has only provoked even greater attacks on civilians. So we speak less." www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/202...
senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, former chief economist to Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) & director of budget and spending policy for Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign👇🏽
It's a remarkable example of the power od cognitive dissonance to see those who backed Brexit and Boris, both of which succumbed to the weaknesses their detractors pointed out from the start, not go "Hang on, maybe I'm bad at picking things".
The historical track record of global and regional powers willing to recognise the advantages of cooperation over competition when they feel threatened and have clashing strategic interests is not great
That's more thought given than a lot of colleagues shaped in particular, often US-coded, sub-disciplines
India's current geopolitical free agent status also foreshadows where the EU is heading if/when Russian ceases to be such an acute threat and if/when the US continues down a path of isolationist populism or even internal armed conflict set by Donald Trump
That's the crux of my point in terms of how the last 80 years of US dominance shaped not just intellectual outlook of scholars but how entire academic disciplines from IR to economics to Global History are structurally coded. Hegemony is assumed to be a default state in ways I think are flat wrong
...but my view is that global chaos is the default state and the last 80 or so years of a global system (more or less) was the exception not the rule. If you think surviving global disorder is the challenge, that then requires different preparation than what you'd do to handle a future hegemon
But the crux of my view is that the EU Commission as well as Member State governments have too many people that both fear the emergence of a new hegemon aka China and in the process assume that this next hegemon will emerge by default once the US collapses as a geopolitical actor. But..
Lol, that's so retro
tbh, it's a take that needs 4000 words rather than a social media thread.
So to arc back to what the sentiment in the EU about "rising China" stuff, I think in worrying about China as the next hegemon it risks becoming a distraction from an IMV more likely outcome where neither China, India or the EU, or anyone else has the capacity to create global order.
...but I view that tendency to assume that hegemony is the default state of the global political economy or military environment to reflect a fundamental failure of strategic imagination in a lot of econ and IR coded analysis in academic traditions shaped by a century of US dominance
Even in the EU. What I find so telling about the "OMG China" stuff is that while it reflects deep fears, it also operates on the assumption that if the US impales itself on its own internal contradictions there will inevitably see some other actor (AKA China) that will step in to create order..but..
mal andersherum.. indien wirft sich von heute auf morgen china vor die füße und das nennen die leute eine ernste analyse? teump hag wesentliche türen offengelassen. zB für smartphones aus indien. was modi gerade macht, ist nach innen senden und versuchen spielraum zu demonstrieren. man sieht an
IMV it's worse than that. It's a huge distraction in generating hopes for some new hegemon that shows up to make it all better rather than facing the more likely reality that the EU needs to prepare for a long era of geopolitical chaos.
legrandcontinent.eu/fr/2025/04/2...
Analysts, journalists and scholars have been so shaped by a late 20th century world under US hegemony that they assume a global system shaped shaped by a dominant power is the norm Yet for long stretches of history the world was defined by disorder and chaos with no hegemon
I've written about the post-American world. But this rising East stuff reflects desperate hankering after any stable order around a new hegemon when in reality neither China, India or the EU have the unique mid-20th century dynamics that empowered the US. Instead we face chaos
This sort of hysterical take based on optics never quite delves into how many states involved in these summits actually share a free trade zone, customs union, currency structure and unconditional defence pact
Or alternatively the EU/UK Europeans might need to prepare for a collapse od the current global order followed by chaos in which there are no enforceable rules at all
It's remarkable that rhetoric that with any other society would be perceved as language of civil war is now just treated as just one of those routine things in US politics
Pritzker: "No one in the administration -- the president or anybody under him -- has called anyone in my administration or me. It's clear that in secret they're are planning this invasion with US troops."
Sinwar will go down as one of history's most disastrously deluded leaders in unleashing a vicious Hamas assault that totally misread dynamics in Israel But we shouldn't let Sinwar's strategic nihilism or Netanyahu's cynical brutality nullify efforts to imagine a better future
These are crimes against humanity that must be stopped, but focus also needs to remain on the question of what comes next for Israelis and Palestinians if and when they are stopped.
It may be impossible to wipe out Hamas, but the IDF crushed it as an existential threat to Israel a year ago. The military campaign to achieve that goal systematised war crimes from the start under a political leadership that openly hoped for mass expulsion of all Palestinians.
Perhaps a one-state solution is the only realistic outcome after the systematic evisceration of Palestinian institutions. But then focus on apartheid comparisons needs to be blunt about why a two state solution is unviable and what a just path to a shared state could be
If criticism of structural discrimination and legitimisation of systemic war crimes through Israel's instititions becomes anchored on claims that it is an Apartheid regime, then the precedent that harks back to would indicate outcomes in which both peoples share the same state
20% of India's trade is with the US and its nominal GDP is now bigger than Britain's and by PPP exceeds Japan's. It is among the fastest growing world economies. If you can't figure out that universities should be teaching Hindi, Urdu and Sanskrit you deserve to decline into irrelevance
Once upon a time, it seemed open and free links to reliable legal information would undermine such flights of political-media fantasy, but no. The links are there, un-clicked. People don't care what the actual law is and what judges actually said. They want to believe.
Both the Lucy Connolly and the Epping hotel cases have now taken on a political-media existence of their own, unconnected with what actually happened in court. It doesn't matter there were published sentencing remarks in one and a judge-prepared summary in the other. People want stories instead.
And, though there are 10k troops at the border, no ports of entry open to anyone needing asylum, money for thousands more BP agents and gear appropriated thru 2029, every Democratic immigration plan BEGINS with the need for more money and personnel to enforce the border. It will never be enough.
The Danish approach is, fundamentally, a “left bloc maximisation strategy” - the passion for it reminds me of in 2018, when I got any number of free trips to European capitals where they got very excited about the Corbyn surge, and faces would fall as they would realise it couldn’t work under PR.
The European Right-wing anti-migrant politicians and influencers who enthusiastically support Netanyahu are backing an Israeli government whose actions will end up pushing 100s of 000s of forcibly displaced Gaza refugees into the EU
So they decided to throw themselves a year long $21 billion military parade on the sea while the pension system is collapsing
Prime Minister of Poland Donald Tusk: As Madam Chairwoman and I were heading to this location, we received information and recommendations from security to cancel the conference or move it somewhere else, because Belarusian soldiers with long guns had appeared there.
Every authoritarian regime that embraced this aesthetic inflicted violence and chaos on its society
The dream: AI boosts productivity so much we all get 4-day workweeks. The reality: AI productivity gains are an excuse for companies to cut staff or ask why you need a hire at all. No one’s handing out Fridays off because your job got easier, just more pressure to justify your existence
Many also need to disconnect specific potential for global financial crisis around the overvaluation of the current tech sector from long term trajectory of specific technologies. Railroad speculation led to huge financial crashes in 1850s and 1873 but railways still transformed the world by 1900
Meloni’s government ratcheting up the rhetoric against the judiciary with one of her Ministers descrbing judges as "killers".
Allister Heath was born to a bourgeois family in Mulhouse in France and only moved to the UK as a student, so he has less in common with the English white working class than than immigrant communities that live and work alongside it in cities like Sheffield or Derby
Let’s see a class breakdown of the Telegraph’s recent journalistic hires.
⚡️ Russia's Rosneft net income plummets 68%, Reuters reports. Oil prices were dragged down by production hikes by Saudi Arabia and other OPEC countries.
So what precisely do the right want to do about the white working classes? Certainly not go to university, as they want numbers down. Nor to have a unionised manufacturing job, as they don't want unions. No, they just want pawns as part of their culture wars. They don't give a toss.
The fact so many national US and also some international media outlets refuse to acknowledge that is just fucking stupid. It's like the fact that a US admin is completely inept at doing anything properly outside of graft does not compute for them even though it's obviously true.
The media’s unwavering normalisation of this shambles of an administration is beyond the pale.
Kind of amazing how many analysts and scholars wasted 100 000s of wordcount worth of credibility in taking the incoherent flailing of an incompetent administration that is rapidly paralysing the US seriously
1/7 “Ukraine is just a small Soviet army fighting a bigger one.” That analogy is lazy—and wrong. Ukraine is not a mini-russia, militarily or otherwise. It’s something very different. Let’s break it down 👇
The hype around the Danish example is baffling, and now they're honing in on Sweden where..the centre-right/far right government looks like it will get kerbstomped by resurgent SocDems
Once again the evidence-free allure of the Danish model, where the social democrats are down and the radical right is just as popular as before
Pivot to the Caribbean
UK now largely uses MRNA vaccines in key areas
📌 City department of law are directed to pursue every legal mechanism, to resist unconstitutional efforts & hold them accountable 📌 Demands Trump stand down from deploying the military in Chicago 📌 Chicago PD not to wear masks or collaborate with ICE on patrols, arrests, or immigration enforcement
I stand with Chicago. I stand with Mayor Johnson. 🚨 NEW: Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson just signed an executive order to resist Trump’s federal invasion and occupation of the city. Details in 🧵
One possibility is Ru is starting to realize it won't be able to occupy Ukraine militarily so it is returning to its earlier strategy of trying to create enough chaos and destabilization as to cause state failure/collapse. Another possibility is pure revenge and hatred for Maidan's 2014 success.
Thank-you Ed Davey. Keep doing this. Relentlessly.
Lots on the substack this week... My post on "the financial crisis theory of everything" - why nearly all our other problems stemmed from the 2008 crash. samf.substack.com/p/the-financ...
Continuing anyway is probably the funniest possible way to admit this is not really sincere?
Andrij Parubij, ukrainischer Abgeordneter und ehemaliger Parlamentspräsident, wurde heute in Lwiw ermordet. Das bestätigte der ukrainische Präsident Selenskyj. Die Behörden fahnden nach dem mutmaßlichen Täter. Zu den Motiven ist derzeit nichts bekannt.
If Angela Rayner lived in a cardboard box, the Telegraph would claim she nicked it.
This is, I think, great news, in that it will hopefully unblock some of the magical thinking in and around Downing Street:
Trump is going to end up carried around in an inert vegetable condition like Bouteflika as rival courtier factions around him interpret vague coughs and gurgles as confirmation that the MAGA god emperor backs their latest brutally delusional scheme
Accept? No. But other countries need to get on with their own agendas instead of waiting for american leadership that currently does not exist.
More datapoints for how powerful regions will inevitably seize control of what were once federal powers as the centre descends into authoritarian chaos
I feel like everyone (including Canada) is just waiting for the US to time machine itself back to sanity instead of getting on with the reality of today and probably some time to come.
To be effective any European effort to correct weaknesses in the EU to ensure Europe's survival need to take the possibility into account that if Trump continues at his current trajectory the US may cease to be a functioning geopolitical actor
This is why recent rounds of European self-flagellation in response to the Trump-Putin Alaska summit were so baffling Of course the EU needs to do more to strengthen, but the heart of the global crisis is Trump's destabilisation of the US that makes America look confused and weak
It’s hardly the only factor, but losing anti-communism as a major purpose for human rights politics really weakened any sense of affinity for the center right in most of the West.
Excellent analysis of why housebuilding is grinding to a halt in London here. With an important challenge to those who want to focus only on social housing.
Fun to see Truss once again presenting herself as a austere spending cutter who was foiled by her party who wouldn't countenance doing tough things. In reality, the author of a universal energy bailout bigger, blunter, longer and more generous than anyone thought sensible.
What will bring down the BBC will not be pressure from its traditional enemies on the Far Right but rather it will be a loss of willingness to fight for it among its traditional allies among the Centre-Right, Liberals and Left
Polling from @Moreincommon_ on Lucy Connolly More than half think her sentence was too lenient or about right. Only a third that it was too harsh. Only 18% think politicians should associate themselves her, while 51% think they should actively distance themselves from her.
That assumes discourses are always fixed. At the moment the over the top wallowing in fatalism among the UK and US liberal/left worries me as much as a lot of what the Right produces.
At the moment the over the top fatalism among the UK and US liberal/left worries me as much as a lot of what the Right produces
we're dealing with everyday life market processes that hit voters from different milieus directly. To default to "muh all voters stupid" tropes you can see spreading among the UK and US liberal/left is to fatalistically embrace defeat before a fight is even started
Some will, but that doesn't help much if the gilts market collapses or tech firms go bust and voters start also blaming political and business leaders. Remember Fred the Shred?
Even with the Peston mess at the time, I suspect that the BBC in particular has a leadership that will be far less able to handle the coverage and fallout of a financial crisis professionally than in 2008
It will be interesting to see how the BBC and Sky News begin to realise that the growing signs of distress in the global economy might turn out to be of more personal significance to their viewers than small boats crossing the Channel
So acc to a very agitated Malcolm Rifkind on Today we are in a national crisis re Immigration and the only solution is to leave the EHCR. - This won’t solve anything. It’s just Brexit 2.0. The absolute hysteria that has engulfed some politicians and the U.K. media is astonishing. To put it mildly.
Right now across the West we are seeing the center right radicalize against human rights as an illegitimate tool of majorities against the majority, while at the same time the far right is increasingly adopting the language of rights to promote ethno-nationalist majoritarianism.
I’ve seen a lot of explanations for this but I think the stupidest, pettiest one is correct - college kids being rude really has been the most pressing problem facing the opinion column set turning “someone protested me” into a national crisis because it’s the only time they experience negativity
The Showa comparisons are honestly applicable given that "the Army has fallen from the favor of the emperor, it is now the Navy's time in the limelight" is a headline
Buying anything from overseas is about to get more expensive, more logistically complicated, slower, and overall more annoying. Film photography community, retro games community, people into skincare already seeing chaos on eBay. eBay sellers locking US buyers out. www.404media.co/trump-tariff...
Norbert Elias's passages on the buildup to and aftermath of WW1 in Germany in his "The Germans" and Alfred Vagts's reflections on the same period in his "History of Militarism" should be required reading for Americans
This week in it's never McSweeney's fault: "Keir Starmer launches Downing Street shake-up" - on.ft.com/4mCchJ9 via @FT
Liew is still one of the better sports journos around though
There are once great clubs in the second and third tier leagues of every European country and Manchester United seems desperate to join that boulevard of broken dreams
If you honestly believe the Russians hit the EU delegation in Kyiv by accident, I don't think you should be allowed to operate heavy machinery and I frankly question if letting you dress and bathe yourself is a violation of our collective duty of care.
Ah what's wrong little buddy? Why the dirty delete? Big clever dark money think tank boy like you can almost certainly defend the position you came to based on ✨vibes✨ against a bunch of people who have actually read a book one time.
Competitive European football matches should not be played outside Europe, UEFA President Aleksander Čeferin said yesterday.
My trolls on our atrocities thru this war: 2022: It didn't happen. 2023: Missile fragments did it. 2024: Ukraine staged it. 2025: Ukraine deserves it.
We seem to have rather quickly transitioned from ‘don’t be silly it’s far too early to think about the result of the next election’ to ‘omg reform are gonna win’.
“Several leading executives who publicly supported Labour in the run-up to the July 4 poll said they were “horrified” by its record in office so far, criticising “poor political decisions” and a “lack of ability”.“ www.ft.com/content/b103...
Reform councillors in Nottinghamshire won't engage with local journalists because they can’t stand being held to account. This is what a Reform government would be like. They're a far-right, authoritarian party that seeks to undermine our democracy. www.nottinghampost.com/news/news-op...