Iran

The second lesson is that we are in an age when those “hard industries” matter. Yes, Big Tech stocks have soared in recent years amid excitement about AI. But the Iran war shows that countries are very vulnerable if they lack industrial processes, however old-fashioned. “The old economy begins to take its revenge,” Jeff Currie, analyst at the US private capital group Carlyle, recently noted. “You can’t print molecules,” even…

In a farcical re-enactment of the Iraq War script, we were told that the Islamic Republic would collapse like a house of cards. But unlike in 2003, there has been little attempt to persuade the wider world, or even the US Congress. The rhetorical labour that accompanied the invasion of Iraq, however flawed or dishonest, has largely been abandoned. Even senior US military officials have struggled to explain how the campaign’s…

I posted an observation on X yesterday that generated a lot of talk and hate. I wrote that I’d seen a lot of people complaining that there was no propaganda campaign in the lead-up to this war, no effort to convince the American public that we were at imminent risk. There was a rather haphazard, tacked-on attempt by Steve Witkoff to advance the idea that Iran was a “week away” from being able to build a nuclear bomb, but this…