Five civilians. Five aspiring cooperative managers. Five preventable deaths in a state-run training program that was never supposed to kill anyone.

Between 17 and 26 June 2026, Yonanda Muhammad Taufiq, Anisa Muyassaroh, Novia Rahmadhani Sihotang, Muhammad Rifki Renaldi Gunawan, and Nola Dya Sari—young Indonesians filled with dreams of serving their villages—collapsed and died while undergoing military basic training for a program designed to produce village cooperative managers. They were not soldiers. They were not combatants. They were civilian graduates who had dared to hope for stable employment in a brutally competitive economy.

The causes of death read like a medical indictment of systemic failure: cardiac arrest during an environmental orientation march; heat stroke after complaints of breathlessness and nausea were dismissed; active pulmonary tuberculosis that somehow escaped detection; pneumonia complicated by pre-existing hypertension and obesity; and finally, respiratory distress followed by cardiac arrest in a West Kalimantan hospital. Five bodies. Five distinct pathologies. One common denominator: an institution that valued schedule compliance over human survival.

The Ministry of Defence insists the drills were “basic”—just marching drills and military salutes. Yet basic drills killed five people in ten days. The Ministry offers fifty million rupiah in condolence money per family—roughly two years of a junior civil servant’s salary. It announces “white ribbons” for medically vulnerable participants. It signs a memorandum with the Health Ministry. It promises evaluation.

But evaluation of what? The program itself is the problem. Indonesia’s Red and White Village Cooperatives (Kopdes Merah Putih) are President Prabowo Subianto’s signature rural development initiative—a program intended to uplift village economies, not break civilian bodies. Yet the government chose to train cooperative managers through the Indonesian military, subjecting civilian accountants and community organisers to the physical rigours of recruit training.

“There is no relationship between professionalism in managing cooperatives and military training,” a coalition of Indonesian civil society organisations—including Imparsial, KontraS, Amnesty International Indonesia, and the Indonesian Legal Aid Foundation—declared in a joint statement. “Cooperative management competence is built through mastery of organisational governance, participatory leadership, accountability, financial literacy, and community empowerment—not through military training.”

The coalition is unequivocal: this is a “serious consequence of a policy that was wrong from the start because it forces a military approach into civilian space without basis, without relevance, and without justifiable accountability.”

Amnesty International Indonesia’s executive director, Usman Hamid, put it more bluntly: “This must be stopped. What is needed is training in business management skills and dialogic communication—not military training based on physical strength and monologic communication.”

The SPPI—Latsarmil tragedy did not emerge from a vacuum. It is the product of a slow, quiet remilitarisation of Indonesian civilian life that has accelerated alarmingly since the revision of the Indonesian National Armed Forces (TNI) Law.

The 2025 amendment to the TNI Law now permits active military personnel to occupy civilian positions in at least fourteen—and potentially nineteen—state institutions without resigning their commissions. As analysts have noted, this “erodes the principle of civilian supremacy” and “formally authorises the TNI to participate in civilian governance.” The boundary between military and civilian spheres—painfully carved out during the Reformasi era—is being systematically dissolved.

Military reform in Indonesia has always been inconsistent, “shaped by the ebb and flow of the country’s democratic consolidation.” But the SPPI case represents something more insidious: not merely the military’s influence over civilian affairs, but the military’s active remaking of civilians in its own image. Civilian cooperative managers are not being trained; they are being militarised. And when civilian bodies fail to withstand military rigour, the system shrugs and reaches for the condolence fund.

Structural violence is violence built into the architecture of society—unequal power producing unequal life chances. The SPPI program is structural violence in its purest form.

Indonesia’s youth unemployment rate remains stubbornly high. Secure, stable employment is scarce. When the state offers a pathway to a guaranteed career—even a pathway that includes thirty days of military-style hazing—young people have no real choice but to accept. The alternative is the slow, grinding violence of precarity, unemployment, and social exclusion.

“There are many irregularities,” Usman Hamid observed. “The families of the victims and the public have the right to know the cause of death and to thoroughly investigate who is responsible.” The victims had all passed medical screenings that declared them fit for training. They had all been deemed healthy enough to endure. They were not.

The state, by designing this program as a mandatory gatekeeping ritual that includes physical drills irrelevant to the job, exploits this desperation. It does not need to point a gun; the economy does that for it. Consent, in this context, is a fiction. The choice is between the violence of unemployment and the violence of a potentially lethal training program. That is not a choice. That is coercion.

Perhaps the most chilling aspect of this tragedy is the institutional response: not accountability, but deflection; not justice, but compensation.

Indonesia’s military justice system “lacks transparency, independence, and impartiality, and has failed to properly investigate and prosecute alleged serious human rights abuses by military personnel.” As rights group Imparsial has documented, “impunity for TNI personnel persists due to the lack of impartiality in the military justice mechanism.” UN experts have warned that processing cases through the military justice system “risks perpetuating longstanding patterns of impunity and fragmented accountability in Indonesia’s dual justice system.”

No high-level official has been named as a suspect. No commander has been charged with negligence. No one has resigned. The Ministry of Defence continues to defend the program while promising to “evaluate” it. The five dead become a line item in a budget, a statistic in a press release, a tragedy absorbed by grieving families while the institution absorbs nothing.

This is not governance. This is impunity institutionalised.

For global strategists and policymakers, the SPPI—Latsarmil tragedy should sound an alarm. Indonesia is Southeast Asia’s largest economy, a G20 member, and a democracy of 280 million people. It has a seat on the UN Human Rights Council. It projects itself as a model of democratic transition in a region marked by authoritarian backsliding.

Yet here, in plain sight, is a state that treats its own citizens as expendable inputs for bureaucratic goals. Here is a democracy where institutional prestige matters more than human life. Here is a system that weaponises poverty, militarises civilians, and shields itself with opacity and impunity.

This is not a “technical” problem solvable by white ribbons and health ministry memoranda. This is a constitutional crisis. This is a human rights crisis. This is a crisis of democratic legitimacy.

The Indonesian state has a choice. It can continue to sacrifice its young people on the altar of an obsolete ideology of toughness, or it can recognise that the purpose of public institutions is to protect life, not gamble with it. It can decouple civilian roles from military hazing. It can pursue criminal accountability for negligence. It can restore human dignity as the foundation of all state programs.

Or it can add more names to the list.

How many more lives must be lost before the state remembers that its citizens are not expendable?

June, end of the school year. In Rome, Italian educational institutions are inviting families to attend the end-of-the-year play, a ritual that forecasts the beginning of summer. I attended one of my son’s, who is enrolled in a libertarian outdoor education programme. They promote alternative learning methods immersed daily in a suggestive natural setting. There, they also perform the play: it is about gender roles.

“You are a woman; why do you play with cars?” one young actor says. “I am a woman and can do whatever I want!” another replied. Hearing this, warm applause broke out from the audience, composed of families and friends. It hit me: I did not enrol my son in a libertarian environment, inspired by critics of contemporary society such as Illich and Godwin and Postman. I pushed him to the epicentre of the modern liberal doctrine, which took its own idea of feminism as a global concept, adorned it with an ethical and undebatable notion of rights, and transmitted it to children as young as nursery age.

Are they right? Are women equal to men? And is this really a feminist point of view?

A liberal would answer positively to all the questions above. A radical, not. Biological differences, the latter would argue, referring to sexual dimorphism and reproduction, still matter. Somehow, however, modern liberal feminism intercepted any divergent or contestatory thoughts regarding the emancipation of women, silencing Western intellectual feminists such as the likes of Germaine Greer while working against religious women both in the Middle East and the West, advocating in favour of the secular autocracy against political Islam.

Their perception of women, which belongs to the new gender ideology, put its foundation in what Negri and Hardt defined as the modern Empire. The current world order, de-centred and global, presents itself as the only permanent and necessary form of civilisation. Similarly, this branch of feminism presents itself as the only legitimate tool against violence and discrimination, despite Kathleen Stock defining it as “individualistic as it gets,” as it considers “not only a social norm, but also your body [as] an obstacle to freedom.”

Italy, for instance, is a country that remains institutionally and profoundly chauvinist. Simultaneously, though, mainstream media continuously normalises the sexualisation of women at any age and their social role while conterminously promoting female prostitution and cosmetic surgery as self-determination rather than a form of commodification. Media messaging around women and girls within Italian media is incoherent at best: while regressive and harmful representations of “gender” are promoted even when entirely exploitative, the narratives around gender as “identity” are virtually untouchable.

Emblematic of this double bind, is the recent judicial case about the family in the woods, where Catherine Birmingham, an Australian mother living with her partner, Nathan Trevallion, and children in the forest of Italy’s Abruzzo region, had her children removed by the Juvenile Court for living off-grid. For weeks Birmingham was demonised on afternoon television programmes with commentary emanating from dressed-up, heavily made-up, quite plastic female opiners who questioned the mental health of the mother while accusing her of being rigid and possessive toward her kids. Meanwhile, it would seem that the policing of this family is what is “rigid” as Birmingham told RAI, “The children are happy, healthy. We haven’t done anything wrong if we want to return to nature.”

Indeed, liberal feminism belongs to the particular and individualistic kind of society in which we are living nowadays, the sort of vision pushed in the mid-twentieth century by the likes of Ayn Rand, who considered being selfish and self-reliant a rock that cannot be broken, all couched within a philosophical system of rational self-interest which she called Objectivism. Rand’s theories were themselves a product of the US post-Second World War economic boom. Documentary filmmaker Yasha Levine of the Nefarious Russians describes this ethos as a psyop fostered by Americans through films, books, and art. Consequentially, Rand’s notions of rational self-interest had a boom in the Reagan and Thatcher years and have expanded across American culture to include its “colonies” of which Italy is just one of many.

The myth of emancipation is tightly connected to the promotion of modernity as a sign of progress, enhanced by the “American saviours” who rescued Italy from fascism, drawing an end to World War II in Italy. However, many Italians know the reality of this American presence in our territory—mainly a tale of misery, prostitution, and the power of the conqueror. This saviour narrative, accompanied by economic aid such as the Marshall Plan, invariably pushed Italy into the era of industrialisation.

In 1957, the first supermarket opened in Milan, introducing concepts such as self-service and the possibility to buy an enormous amount of different kinds of products in one place. Household machinery and cleaning products, as well as items for improving personal hygiene, began to appear in Italian homes. Italy was changing, and women were instrumentalised in leading change.

Media propaganda rejected full-time motherhood just as it labelled breastfeeding as a sign of backwardness and pushed women to work. Consumerism of any kind has become the symbol of breaking from a past of poverty and advancing towards a modern future of ostensible liberation. The idea of humans as individuals, not communities, began to surface, along with the idea of self-realisation and the right to pursue personal freedom ahead of anything else. It is there that liberal feminism rose, becoming mainstream amid America’s suburban culture and ultimately reaching Italy shortly there after.

Rather than a struggle against the oppression of patriarchy, feminism focused on the isolation of the modern nuclear family, which American feminist Betty Friedan famously defined as a “comfortable concentration camp” that oppressed women. Coincidentally, such feminist musings emanated mainly from the new bourgeoisie. What was unbearable, then, was not the overwhelming amount of housework and childcare; instead, it was the boredom and loneliness that occurred in women’s spare time, which they learnt to cure with alcohol, sexual adventures, or an obsessive interest in their children.

From this milieu comes the idea that women’s empowerment means entering the business world exactly like men. These feminists believed that entering the masculine world of competitive achievement would cure the “problem that has no name,” intercepting the struggle of working-class women together with those who come from a different cultural environment or those who struggle with racial violence. While Western feminists argue about the right to be or not to be a mother, the global women’s health movement emerging in Latin America, Africa and Asia, has pointed out that due to centuries of slavery and colonialism, for non-white women, reproductive injustice has also involved the forced denial of motherhood. Under slavery, black women were forced to nurse the children of white mothers instead of their own for instance.

Liberal feminism has been critiqued for straying not only from diverse feminist voices but also from the foundational ideas of Friedan herself. In her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, Friedan encouraged women to look beyond the home, but she did not advocate for embracing the competitive world of the workforce. In her book she talks about the need for a lifelong commitment and contribution to the wellbeing of a society, an idea shared by many other twentieth-century individualist anarchists like Leda Rafanelli, who, despite rejecting cultural conservationism and state frameworks, similarly championed motherhood as a meaningful, continuous contribution to human progress.

Italy, instead, embraced this wave of transformation with blind eyes, as if it were the only direction for progress and emancipation. At the time, there were only a few critical voices, such as that of Pier Paolo Pasolini who warned that the quest for emancipation is leading Italians from a nuclear family to a family of consumers. From the moment women rightfully progress toward emancipation, the whole society regresses because it is consumeristic society that takes up her educational role. Pasolini, like Rafanelli, addresses the bourgeoisie as the class that shapes modern society. As holders of power, the elite class has no interest in educating a child; instead, their aim has only been to educate the children in societal adaptions where children are future labourers and consumers. In this way, liberation and emancipation are concepts that depend entirely upon the transformation of the individual to consumer, with the imperative that the individual must maintain and reinforce the status quo.

Emancipation nowadays continues to be perceived only as business-orientated, with the values of women measured by her remuneration or her ability to commodify herself in a fully liberal economic fashion. In his essay “The Sexual Division of Labor, the Decline of Civic Culture, and the Rise of the Suburbs,” Christopher Lasch, in examining postwar decline of women’s civic/communal involvement, addresses the importance and social value of these uncompensated activities. He suggests that women were behind the scenes, albeit without monetary reward, making, for instance, modern cities liveable and laying down the great age of American urbanism, which built public facilities such as libraries and playgrounds, preventing public spaces from being co-opted by business alone.

Today, all this is gone, and social productivity is valued only if there is compensation behind it. Meanwhile, global institutions and corporate brands have embraced the so-called language of inclusivity, non-discrimination, and anti-harassment policies, all in the name of emancipation. This, over the past two decades, has reduced the contemporary debate around feminism and women’s role in society to a dichotomy between those who embrace gender ideology which works to nullify any difference among gender roles and those who deny women’s oppression in any form. Where gender ideology pretends that sex is a choice to which any man can subscribe “as a woman” due to his fancy for floral prints or his penchant for effeminate mannerisms, where the subject can flee the body, this self-professed “progressive” ideology is anything but as it dangerously advocates that gender can be “corrected” through medical intervention, all in order to match gender stereotypes. Gender ideology is its own self-fulfilling prophecy.

Recently, the Italian government introduced parental consent for affectivity and sex education in schools, causing outrage among the liberal left, who accuse it of tacitly enabling sexual violence, as a lack of early age education on this topic could lead to sexism and drive men’s violence against women.

Italian NGOs that work with minors and marginalised communities such as the Roma and migrants, impose their language and projects of gender neutrality, claiming it is a policy to prevent gender discrimination and violence. In my experience, however, it is quite the opposite: by talking and lecturing people about rigid attitudes to gender, they enforce stereotypes that don’t belong to reality.

In Afghanistan, a traditional country where I lived and worked for 5 years, toddlers play indiscriminately with all sorts of toys. I myself witnessed a little boy playing with my make-up in front of the total nonchalance of his mother. However, in the media representation, it remains a country obsessed with gender rigidity, toxic masculinity and women’s oppression. Now and then we read news about an Afghan father who walks his daughter to school; these representations portray this act as if being a caring, male figure is an exception in countries that don’t embrace gender policy and language inclusivity courses.

Italians often cite the memorable 1979 interview of Oriana Fallaci with the leader of the Islamic Revolution, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, wherein she took off her chador in front of him, calling it “a stupid, mediaeval rag,” a gesture considered audacious and bold, a symbol of female freedom. Rarely is it mentioned that Fallaci typically used her interviews to turn herself into the ultimate protagonist. One critic, Cristina de Stefano, once stated that Fallaci was often the “only hero of her own story.” Similarly, Christopher Hitchens vituperated Fallaci’s journalistic style noting that she relied heavily on “hyperventilating scorn” and a self-aggrandising tone.

In short, she was known for being “a writer” rather than a journalist, as she often shaped her interviews without remaining faithful to her subject’s words, and she frequently employed tactics and gestures that would invariably cause a reaction, which she would later use as a title or angle for articles.

It is certain that Fallaci’s removal of her chador before the Ayatollah was planned beforehand, and that it was designed to stoke the flames of hatred within the easily triggered Western-centric point of view filled with misconceptions and prejudice towards Islamic culture. As Frantz Fanon eloquently wrote about the banning of niqab for Algerian women by France: “A woman who sees without being seen frustrates the colonisers.”

These strategic, marketable provocations, however, become the dominant methods to describe and analyse a fragment of society by those who today own the mainstream narrative. After the Taliban took Kabul in 2021 and the international media circus descended on the city, a video of Lucia Goracci, a leading Italian journalist for Rai (the national public service broadcasting company of Italy), went viral. She said to a Taliban soldier during an interview: “Why don’t you look at me in the eyes?” not mentioning, probably intentionally, that in Afghan culture men avoid eye contact with women as a sign of respect and a declaration of pure intention during a social interaction. Her reportage, as well as that of her other colleagues from those days, is filled with such rhetorical provocation and mystification playing on the already diffused racist stereotypes about Afghan culture.

If it is certainly true that gender roles are socially constructed, it is also true that social construction should not be presented as a homogeneous feature that only serves to diminish, obstruct, and oppress. The alleged neutrality of Liberal Feminism is nothing but a lie, as it ignores this reality, only to shape a new world where corporations can maximise the consumers of their product: one good for all.

“The overwhelming scale and rate of children killed and injured in Gaza have been unparalleled across modern conflicts globally,” a new report by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory reaffirmed this week. Building upon earlier evidence and new testimonies, the report backs warnings from Palestinians and international activists that Israeli forces deliberately target Palestinian children as part of a strategy to “destroy the future of the Palestinians in Gaza.”

“That’s a very serious conclusion to come to,” said Australian legal expert Chris Sidoti, one of the commission’s members, during a press conference on 26 June. Yet the widespread use of torture and other degrading treatment, attacks on schools and orphanages, and strikes on key infrastructure needed for children to lead dignified lives—such as hospitals—during the Gaza genocide left little room for doubt.

The report details various ways Israeli occupation forces have harmed children in the Strip since 7 October 2023. These include killing and injuring children through mass bombardment and indiscriminate attacks, as well as direct targeting via sniper fire and quadcopter shootings. These attacks have not ceased since the so-called ceasefire took effect in October last year, with over 100 children killed in Gaza since then. Combined with obstruction of aid deliveries and reconstruction, these actions continue to create a harrowing environment for all residents, particularly children.

“It’s all as it was in October 2025,” Sidoti added. “The [Gaza Peace] Plan should be declared a failure.”

The commission cited dozens of examples of children’s suffering. The list includes six-year-old Hind Rajab, who was killed in an Israeli attack on her family’s car and the ambulance responding to help them. It also describes how small children witnessed their families being shot or kidnapped. In December 2023, the report notes, Israeli soldiers threw four hand grenades into a house in Gaza City hosting 30 people. During the attack, a five-year-old suffered severe injuries, including abdominal evisceration. He was forced to evacuate without medical care. “He lost consciousness at the school while he was treated by a doctor who reinserted his exposed intestines by using nappies and taped his stomach.”

No “normal-sized” babies in Gaza

Interviews with international health workers volunteering in Gaza’s hospitals also revealed the extent of injuries suffered by children. From head and chest wounds to damage to eyes and hearing, the report warned that “at least 21,000 children were made newly disabled in Gaza and approximately 40,500 children suffered ‘war-related’ injuries.”

This means tens of thousands of children require long-term, often lifelong, rehabilitation but are unlikely to receive it due to the systematic destruction of healthcare infrastructure by Israeli forces. The impacts are equally felt by children with pre-existing chronic conditions, newborns, and pregnant women. “By October 2024, women in Gaza were reported to be three times more likely to die in childbirth and three times more likely to miscarry than before October 7, 2023,” the report notes.

By June 2025, a third of births in Gaza were premature, underweight, or required intensive care, including babies born at 32 weeks weighing only 0.9 kilograms. “Doctors have reported no longer seeing ‘normal-sized’ babies in Gaza.”

“There is a direct targeting by Israel to affect the long-term health outcomes of babies,” a paediatric nurse told the commission. “There is no reason why we cannot bring medications into Gaza to help pregnant women and babies, so it makes no sense except to think that this particular group is being targeted due to which there is a higher mortality among newborns.”

Compounding factors for children’s health include extreme temperatures and malnutrition, worsened by conditions created by Israel on the ground: destroyed housing, sanitation infrastructure, and aid obstructions. Speaking at the same conference as Sidoti, emergency physician Dr Mahmooda Syed referred to infectious diseases contracted by children with compromised immune systems due to hunger as “manufactured conditions.”

She emphasised that everything from basic hygiene to administering insulin is impossible in the current situation. A similar point was raised by Al Mezan Center for Human Rights on 25 June, highlighting the spread of insects and rodents resulting from Israel’s actions. The centre warned that “diseases and serious public health hazards have proliferated throughout displacement camps and residential areas amid the absence of clean water, sanitation supplies, and essential services.”

The report highlights cases of skin and hair conditions and faltering oral health. Such “manufactured conditions” often become deadly for children with compromised immunity. One case involved a 12-year-old girl with coeliac disease who suffered severe malnutrition after Israel’s 2025 blockade restricted access to gluten-free foods. The report notes that she lost “one-third of her body weight over six months, resulting in frail limbs, diarrhoea, fatigue, and a weakened immune system.” The child died “due to septic shock from a simple infection.”

“I was not able to finish any operation because every time child patients were taken back to the operating room, their injuries would be covered in maggots and sepsis under the dressings,” another health worker was quoted saying. “These child patients had no immune system due to malnutrition. Children just did not recover.”

Beyond Gaza, the report also sounds the alarm against a sharp increase in violence against Palestinian children in the West Bank, perpetrated particularly by Israeli settlers. The commission documented dozens of settler and Israeli forces attacks, which include killings, maiming, and sexual violence—and expose children to constant fear and trauma.

“By targeting children, Israel is eroding the foundational structure of Palestinian society, weakening the demographic vitality, and overall capacity of the Palestinian people to sustain and exercise its right to determine its future as a people,” the commission concluded. It recommended that governments take urgent and specific action, including a full arms trade ban on Israel, severing financial flows to illegal settlements, and investigating individuals known to have participated in attacks on Gaza—starting with their own citizens.

Yesterday’s US strikes on Iran, following the attack on the Ever Lovely cargo ship, are less a breakdown of the ceasefire than its logical conclusion—the farce was always going to enter this phase. Was the truce (Memorandum of Understanding, how ironic) ever a peace agreement? No, it was a mechanism; a way to manage the optics while the physical reality continues to deteriorate.

The Damage Is Already Done

Forget the tit-for-tat strikes. The real story is that the global supply chains that keep the world fed and fuelled are already broken. And the closure of the Strait of Hormuz was the convenient justification for a structural crack that was always opening under our feet. The West’s economic model—based on abundant credit and the assumption of perpetual financial growth—is in terminal decline, and missile strikes are supposed to throw smoke into the world’s eyes over this elementary truth. The war, then, is not the cause; it is controlled demolition, always flirting with getting out of control. While on the one hand it provides immediate profit gratification through market manipulation, on the other it tells us that the system is running out of road and accelerating down its destructive path.

The Fed’s Pivot Is Inevitable

So, what’s next? The Fed’s chest-puffing about rate hikes and the hawkish rhetoric won’t survive long, because a recession is already locked in. Broken supply chains + higher energy and food cost (US inflation at 4.2%, i.e. declining US dollar purchasing power) + cratering manufacturing jobs and consumer confidence = severe economic contraction. And contraction requires one thing from the central banks: cheap dollars. The Fed will pivot because a short-sighted mole has no choice but to keep digging. The only question is how fast.

When it does, we will see the same pattern we have seen for decades: lower rates, quantitative easing, more financialisation and securitisation, and higher inflationary spikes requiring to be “managed.” The architects of this system know only one response to crisis: more of the poison that caused it.

The Gold and Metals Selloff: A Sign of Desperation

This is where the picture becomes even clearer. Gold and silver have been selling off sharply. On the surface, this looks like a paradox: geopolitical chaos and inflation should send precious metals higher. But rather than a rejection of their safe-haven status, the selloff is a desperate cover against margin calls.

When leveraged positions start to unravel—whether in equities, derivatives, or commodities—institutions and hedge funds need cash fast. And the most liquid assets they hold are gold, silver, and other highly traded metals. This is therefore the signature of a system under extreme stress: fire sales of the most liquid assets to cover margin calls elsewhere. All this while the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) expanded its official gold reserves by 9.95 tonnes in May, marking its nineteenth consecutive month of accumulation. While Western institutions are selling gold to survive, the East is buying it to prepare.

It is the same dynamic we saw in March 2020, when gold sold off even as the world was collapsing. It was not a sign that gold had lost its value but that the financialised system was cannibalising its own safe havens to survive the next hour. Investors and leveraged funds liquidated highly liquid assets like gold, which dropped 10% to 15%, to raise cash, cover heavy losses in other asset classes, and meet the dreaded margin calls.

So let’s keep this firmly in mind when we watch the news. What we are witnessing is a civilisational event, not a cyclical downturn.

· Oil—the lifeblood of the modern economy—is in structural shortage.

· Fertilisers—the basis of global food production—are being choked off.

· Debt—the foundation of “Western prosperity”—is at levels that can never be repaid without inflation or default.

· Liquidity is drying out (excess liquidity now turning negative for the first time since 2021).

· Trust—the invisible glue of the financial system—is evaporating.

War as Financial Imperative

But there is another layer to this—one that ties the battlefield directly to the balance sheet. The conflict in Ukraine and now the tensions in the Strait of Hormuz have revealed something that the financial world has been salivating over for a while: drones are the new El Dorado. As reported by Zero Hedge, analyst Clarke Jeffries at Piper Sandler (one of the world’s leading investment banks), noted that the 2020s will be defined by how cheap drone technology has transformed warfare—and set the stage for a fundamental rethink of $3 trillion in annual global military spending. The first wave will focus on cheap UAS production and domestic supply chains. The second wave will be driven by autonomy, swarms, and AI-powered command-and-control platforms like Palantir’s Maven Smart System.

And here is the kicker: every drone launched represents an economic net advantage for the belligerent that employs it. Why? Because a $2 million missile intercepting a $1,000 drone is a losing trade. Militarily, economically, politically unacceptable. The “democratisation of asymmetric warfare” has rewritten the rules of engagement, and the Pentagon is racing to catch up. Enter Dzyne Technologies, a California-based company building disposable attack drones using the same foam-moulding process used for beer coolers. No exotic supply chains or aerospace technicians billing at aerospace rates. The CEO Matt McCue puts it simply: “If your airframe costs almost nothing and pours out of a mold by the thousands, you’ve solved the problem Ukraine has been screaming about for three years.”

That problem is mass. Affordable, sacrificial, replaceable drone mass. And mass requires financing, which means debt; which means issuing more bonds; which means more quantitative easing; which ultimately means the Fed’s pivot is necessary to fuel the next wave of military-industrial expansion.

Obviously, war is an immense human and economic cost (for ordinary folks like us) but it is a massively lucrative investment for the aberrant elites and anyone compromised with the debt-soaked financial system. But like all investments in such a system, it needs cheap money to sustain. This is the “irrational logic” we continue to face: the war cannot end because the war is a business model that requires perpetual expansion into new technologies, new theatres, new forms of debt.

The new strikes on Iran are not a departure from the script—they are the script. They represent a crisis that cannot be resolved because any potential resolution would first require facing the truth: the Western economic model is finished. In the meantime, the only direction the capitalist system can take is down, which means recession, then stimulus, then more debt, then more collapse and destruction—until the entire edifice finally gives way. Let’s stay aware.

When something is not working, abandon it. The policy maker and politician, the latter often inclined to populist temptation and the endless tapping for votes, will decide to make a state of wrongheadedness even worse. The evidence is starting to grow that Australia’s daft delving into the world of regulating a child’s access to social media (the arbitrary limit when social media virginity is shed is 16 years) is falling flat. Here, we have the continued, easy target that keeps nourishing the blundering, self-pleasuring prefects in Canberra: irresponsible companies with their social media platforms luring children into a cyberworld of harmful content and damaging consequence. We also have the object of holy salvation: children untouched by the world. Punish the social media platform (though in small spanks rather than vigorous lashings) or at the very least convince them to place age-set limits to accounts; spare the unfortunate, ignorant child supposedly incapable of navigating technology they can master in a fraction of the time their parents can.

The process leading to the passing of the legislation was, it should be remembered, also suspect. With parental certitude and forced caring, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese spoke of saving childhood before the ravaging predations of Silicon Valley. Miraculously, children would cease being screen gorgers and become fit-as-fiddle athletes, climb trees or play the tuba. The underlying, somewhat sinister message, was that of a moral panic taking hold. And where such panic exercises itself, the urges to control, monitor and police tend to follow with molesting predictability. The children become a pretext and, if anything, ought to be ignored. Hence the conspicuous absence of extensive consultation with youth, or their involvement prior to the drafting process.

The resulting Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024 (Cth) is not sailing well. It was the subject of a recent analysis in the medical journal BMJ by researchers from the University of Newcastle. The observational study of 408 children between the ages of 12 and 17 found that over 85% of the participants “reported using social media platforms subject to the Act at follow-up.” Between 54-68% reported the use of their own accounts; 66% “reported exposure to platform age verification, most commonly self-declared age (24-39%) or uploading a picture (“selfie”) (13-27%).” Instances of circumvention or the use of social media via a private browser (6-11%) were also noted.

While it is easy to loose oneself in the blissful undergrowth of statistical data, the conclusion of the study is telling and, for the righteous in policy, damning: “Despite the intent of the Social Media Minimum Age Act 2024 to delay access to social media platforms and reduce the potential for online harms, little evidence was found of immediate substantive reductions in reported social media use by adolescent under 16 years.”

The academic study adds some dour bulk to the commentary showing the ban to be fatuous and embarrassingly ineffective. Data provided by the parental monitoring company Qustodio to Crikey in March would not have made pleasant reading to the prohibitionists. “While TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat all saw a decrease in use by Australians aged 10-15, the majority of teens who had been using social media platforms pre-ban remained on the services afterwards.”

That same month, the tireless Mike Masnick of Techdirt, never missing the chance to excoriate Australia’s buffoonish legislation, suggested that the ban had resulted in something far worse than simple failure. Fine if it was simply a case of having to do something for the children and failing for want of perfection. “But that’s not what happened. The ban didn’t leave things where they were. It made things actively worse through a mechanism that was entirely predictable.” The ban entailed “a test of technical sophistication, rather than a test of vulnerability. The kids who can’t figure out how to get around it—or who don’t have friends or older siblings to help them—are the kids who are already isolated or lack the technical skills to bypass a block.” The thick and lonely always get it in the neck.

Add to this the utter absence of punitive grit in the enforcement mechanism—so far no fines have been imposed (they can be as high as AU$49.5 million) for a failure of the platforms to comply—and one wonders where the utility of this feat of ineffectualness lies.

What, then, does the government do? Not abandon a silly policy to please parents who should know better, or voters unaware about the behaviour of children or, for that matter, social media platforms. Instead, Albanese tells his fellow parliamentarians on 25 June that there is “more to do” regarding a ban that is “complex.” His less than able gauleiter, eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant, far from admitting failure, simply claims a lack of sufficient teeth in enforcing the ban. “I don’t have potent powers,” she lamented to the Sydney Morning Herald earlier this month.

Worried about remarks made by the surly commissioner, Albanese has returned to the theme of control. “We can’t allow the power that these companies, which are unaccountable, which get massive amounts of … profit and have extraordinary power. We need to make sure that Australians are in charge of this.” His proposal: to increase the threshold of financial penalties to AU$99 million. For the PM, it was abundantly “clear big tech are not doing enough to comply with the law—there are still too many children on social media.” The eSafety commissioner would also be vested with greater powers to compel social media companies to furnish evidence of what had been done to prevent those under 16 years from opening or using an account, including from third parties.

Globally, the desire to hold back youth from perceived corruption, ennui and neuroses at the hands of nasty tech titans is underway. The Australian PM is pleased, for instance, that 16 countries have also decided to replicate the failing ban, because nothing sells in politics like a moralistic prohibition that doesn’t work. This has little to do with matronly urges to protect so much as the opportunist’s desire to exploit a situation. Children are not inherently innocent, charmingly ignorant, and hopelessly impotent as their false defenders assume. They are more than capable of making decisions and attaining an understanding of sophistication and worth regarding the use of technology. In time, as is often the case, they will end up teaching that very generation wishing to close doors how to not only open them but understand what’s behind the barrier, however ghastly it might be.

That Friday in the southwestern Algerian Sahara was scorching hot, with temperatures soaring well above 40°C. The horizon vibrated under the weight of the sun. It wasn’t only hot—it was suffocating, the air pressing down like something solid. Walking felt like walking into a blowtorch held at arm’s length, the heat arriving on your skin before you’d even taken the next step. My eyes stung. Every breath took a little more effort than the last, as if the air itself had thickened.

I had friends with me that day, and I’d brought them out into that heat on purpose. I grew up in this ksar—I know what’s waiting a few hundred meters ahead, even if they don’t.

Before reaching the narrow alleys of the ksar, we passed through a gate, then a porch, into the open square where the village assembly—the djemaa—has always gathered to deliberate. Several alleys begin from that square, branching off in different directions.

The world changed. Long before stepping inside a house, we were greeted by a gentle, refreshing coolness. It was not the harsh, artificial chill of an air conditioner, but a soft, living freshness that seemed to embrace us naturally and effortlessly. One of my friends actually said something—I don’t remember the words, just the tone, somewhere between confusion and relief. I’ve seen that reaction before, and it still doesn’t get old.

This was no accident. It was the result of centuries of accumulated wisdom—a remarkable mastery of architecture, urban planning, and climate adaptation developed by the inhabitants of the Sahara. In places like Taghit, every street, wall, courtyard, and opening was designed with a deep, intuitive understanding of sun, wind, shade, and water.

The question we must ask ourselves today is simple yet devastating: How did modern civilization, with all its technological supremacy, lose the ability to achieve what traditional builders did with earth and wind alone?

The Genius of Intelligent Design vs. The Brutality of Machinery

The Saharan ksour achieved thermal comfort without consuming a single watt of electricity. They relied entirely on intelligent design and a profound respect for the local environment. The inhabitants did not fight the climate; they danced with it.

• The Geometry of Shade: The narrow, winding alleys were intentionally built to minimize direct exposure to the fierce desert sun, ensuring that walls shaded one another throughout the day.

• Thermal Inertia: Thick earthen (adobe) walls absorbed the brutal heat during the day and released it slowly at night when the desert temperatures dropped, regulating the indoor climate naturally.

• Microclimatic Alliances: Buildings were arranged to channel cooling air currents through the settlement, while nearby palm groves further moderated temperatures, creating a beneficial microclimate that extended from the oasis directly into the heart of the ksar.

But the ksar on its own only tells half the story. You cannot really understand it without standing it next to the palm grove, because they were never two separate things—they are one system wearing two different shapes. The ksar is dense, vertical, closed: built to keep heat out. The palmeraie is open, layered, breathing: a place that pulls water up out of the ground and releases it back into the air, palm by palm, hour by hour. The ksar shelters the body. The palmeraie feeds the air the ksar depends on. Neither one explains the coolness alone. I grew up walking between the two without ever thinking of them as separate—the ksar was where we lived, the palmeraie was where the water was, and the air moved between them like it belonged to both.

A History That Still Surprises Me

There is a part of this story that has nothing to do with the ksar itself, and yet I think about it often.

When the French colonial administration arrived in this region, they saw what the builders of Taghit, Béchar, and Kenadsa had achieved—and for a while, they actually tried to imitate it. Walk through the older administrative quarters of Béchar or Kenadsa today and you will find colonial-era government buildings built in adobe, the same earth brick, the same material. But they could not leave it alone. They finished it with a straightedge and a square, gave it a European symmetry, an imported austerity—a building that borrowed the material and missed the spirit. It copied the brick and ignored the wisdom that shaped it, and the result still sits oddly today against the ksar’s own sobriety. I remember being struck, the first time I really looked at these buildings, that the colonial administration had recognized something true about adobe—and still gotten it wrong.

I want to be careful here, because I have no interest in any apology for colonialism, and I won’t have this read as one. But the fact remains, and it is worth saying plainly: in terms of actually adapting to this desert’s climate, the generations of architects and urban planners who came after that period got it wrong, for decades, and at some level, they know it. Somewhere along the way, the idea took hold that a beautiful façade has to be glass and aluminum panel, even if what sits behind it is an oven by two in the afternoon. Add to that the very mundane interests of the concrete lobby—an entire industry with no reason to celebrate a technique that requires no cement, no steel, nothing imported—and it becomes easier to understand why earth construction was pushed aside. Not because it stopped working. Because nobody profited from it working.

Earth never betrayed anyone. It is the oldest building material humans have ever had, and it has sheltered us since the beginning without asking anything in return. Hassan Fathy understood this with painful clarity in the middle of the last century, when he tried to bring mud-brick construction back to Egyptian villages and ran into a wall of contempt—from officials, from contractors, from people who had been taught that progress meant glass and concrete and anything that glittered. He spent a career proving that earth could be dignified, and watched the establishment refuse to believe him anyway.

I think about that contempt for earth sometimes, and it strikes me as a strange thing for any of us to carry, given where this all ends regardless. We spend our lives building further and further away from the ground—glass towers, steel frames, anything that announces we have left the dirt behind. And then it is the dirt that takes us back, in the end, along with the worms.

The Vicious Cycle of Modern “Cooling”

Today, despite our advanced technologies, many modern architects and urban planners struggle to reproduce such an achievement. We build cities that are increasingly dependent on mechanical air conditioning, yet we utterly fail to create comfortable outdoor spaces.

The paradox is striking: modern cooling systems may make buildings habitable, but they do so by transferring heat from the interior to the exterior. Every air conditioner cools a room by expelling even more heat into the surrounding environment. In many hot cities, thousands of air-conditioning units operate simultaneously, warming streets and public spaces and contributing to the catastrophic urban heat island effect.

We consume vast amounts of energy to correct problems that traditional builders solved through design alone.

The contrast is a critique of our modern lifestyle. The ksour created cool public spaces before one even entered a building, fostering community and outdoor life. Modern cities, by comparison, offer air-conditioned interiors surrounded by overheated, hostile streets and plazas. The result is a vicious cycle: hotter outdoor environments increase the demand for mechanical cooling, which in turn releases more heat outdoors.

A Blueprint for the Future, Not Nostalgia

The ksour of southern Algeria are therefore much more than historical monuments or tourist attractions. They are living lessons in bioclimatic architecture and sustainable urbanism. They remind us that our ancestors possessed a sophisticated, scientific understanding of environmental design—one that modern society has too often neglected, marginalized, or forgotten under the guise of “progress.”

Standing in the shaded alleys of Taghit on a day when the desert temperature exceeds 40°C, one cannot help but wonder: how did we abandon such knowledge? How did we trade self-sufficient harmony for energetic dependency?

And perhaps more importantly, how can we recover and adapt this wisdom to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century?

The answer to climate change and rising energy costs may lie not in ever more powerful air conditioners, but in rediscovering the principles that made the ksour of Taghit so comfortable, resilient, and harmonious with their environment in the first place. These ancient settlements offer something far more valuable than nostalgia: they offer a blueprint for a livable future.

When a nation of 280 million people rewrites its financial rulebook to grant permanent legal immunity to a select class of investors, it does not merely tweak policy. It performs a constitutional act. Indonesia has done precisely that. Buried within a 207-page financial-sector law passed on 4 June is a provision that shields purchases of bonds issued by the sovereign wealth fund Danantara from criminal, civil and tax investigations.

Bond records cannot be used for tax assessments or as evidence in court proceedings. There is no sunset clause. This is not a temporary amnesty. It is a permanent legal sanctuary, encoded in statute, for money that cannot survive the light of day.

Let this sink in: the government of Southeast Asia’s largest economy has created a legally protected channel through which capital can enter without scrutiny, without accountability, without consequence. This is not financial innovation. It is the institutionalisation of impunity.

The law explicitly treats investors in Danantara’s “Patriot Bonds” and “Merah Putih Bonds” as participants in Indonesia’s tax amnesty programmes, granting them additional fiscal benefits. Yet this goes far beyond previous amnesties. Those schemes, however problematic, at least had clear timelines and rules about penalties for unpaid taxes. The Danantara immunity has no such constraints. As Achmad Sukarsono of Control Risks observed, the government “seems eager to make the product irresistible. That’s precisely the problem. It may raise funds now, but it also means that when the state needs it, legal compliance can be bent.”

The Jakarta-based Centre for Economic and Law Studies (CELIOS) condemned the provision as one that “highly accommodates the interests of political elites and financial criminals.” Nailul Huda, a CELIOS director, warned that “perpetrators of corruption and transnational money laundering who commit financial crimes could use these instruments to launder their illicit proceeds.” Indonesia’s top anti-money laundering scholar, Yenti, cautioned that the door is now open for funds from cryptocurrency, capital market crimes and tax evasion to flow into the state treasury with minimal scrutiny—a development that could “destroy Indonesia’s hard-won reputation in combating illicit funds.”

The government’s defences ring hollow. Finance Minister Purbaya Yudhi Sadewa insists that the protections apply only to funds invested in the instruments themselves, not to investors' broader business activities. “Rather than keeping money abroad, we want it to enter the domestic financial system, even if there is a slight cost,” he said.

When asked whether the law could facilitate money laundering, his response was chilling, it’s better than letting funds flow abroad. Even if there is a slight loss, we should bring funds into Indonesia’s financial system for development. If you have large amounts of money, please invest immediately.

This is not fiscal policy. This is a state extending a formal, standing invitation to capital that must never be questioned—and justifying it with the logic of desperate expediency.

Danantara is no ordinary sovereign wealth fund. It manages over US$900 billion in state assets. It operates as a super-holding company overseeing seven parent state-owned enterprises with 844 subsidiaries. It has injected US$1.4 billion into debt-laden Garuda Indonesia, provided US$295 million in loans to Krakatau Steel, invested US$7 billion in downstream projects and earmarked billions more for everything from poultry to waste-to-energy. It raised US$1.5 billion in its debut global bond issuance this month, attracting about US$4.6 billion in orders from institutional investors across the United States, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

Yet the fund’s rapid expansion has triggered profound unease. “Danantara has strayed into areas most SWFs do not venture, and governance is still not well established,” warned Deni Friawan, a researcher at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). He added that “if it goes under, the cost to the state would be enormous. It’s simply too big to fail.”

The structural vulnerabilities are alarming. Public policy researcher Edi Sewandono has noted that Danantara operates “as an institution without fundamental corporate governance structures.” It lacks a board of directors, a board of commissioners, or audit and risk committees. There is no clearly defined decision-making hierarchy for investment committee responsibility, risk oversight or strategic direction. This governance vacuum creates “new vulnerabilities that could turn into serious problems.”

The power inversion within Danantara—where shareholders have override authority with presidential approval to appoint directors—“fundamentally compromises professional investment management independence.” This is not a fund. This is a parallel state in the making.

President Prabowo Subianto is leaning heavily on Danantara to finance infrastructure, strategic investments, military modernisation and flagship welfare programmes—all without breaching Indonesia’s legal 3 per cent budget-deficit ceiling. The fund has become an off-budget financing vehicle, a centralised export gatekeeper for strategic commodities including palm oil, coal and ferroalloys, and a holder of legal privileges that the Ministry of Finance itself cannot claim.

This fits a wider pattern. The government is centralising export oversight, tightening controls on export earnings and expanding military involvement in administrative affairs. As the Asia Times has noted, the administration is “building an entirely new layer of state control over trade” rather than strengthening existing institutions like the tax office, customs authority and anti-corruption bodies. The official justification—combating under-invoicing and transfer pricing—masks a deeper reality: fiscal pressure and the imperative to capture liquidity and assert control over strategic commodities at a moment of economic anxiety.

The parallels to the Suharto era are uncomfortable. During that period, the state-backed Clove Support and Trading Board—controlled by Suharto’s son Tommy—was ostensibly created to stabilise prices and protect farmers. The result was cronyism, distorted markets and widespread suffering among small producers. Today’s Indonesia has stronger institutions, but “the political temptation remains the same: When states control trade flows, access to power becomes economically priceless.”

Ratings agencies are watching. Moody’s has assigned Danantara Investment Management a Baa2 rating with a negative outlook, explicitly following Indonesia’s sovereign outlook. Fitch has given a BBB rating with a stable outlook, but the agency has already cut Indonesia’s outlook to negative due to “weaker policy credibility and transparency issues.” S&P Global has assigned a “BBB” long-term issuer rating. These ratings, however, rest on an assumption of government support.

If Danantara becomes associated with undeclared wealth, politically protected capital and opaque flows, that support—and Indonesia’s entire sovereign risk profile—becomes contaminated.

The mechanism is insidious. Every basis-point increase in Indonesia’s sovereign yield curve translates into higher interest payments on government debt, reduced fiscal space for healthcare and education, and higher capital costs for Indonesian corporations. The burden of Danantara’s impunity is thus socialised across 280 million citizens, while the benefits accrue to a narrow circle of politically connected bond buyers and the executive branch that accesses off-budget funds. This is a regressive fiscal transfer of immense proportions, executed not through a line-item in the budget but through the subtle, punishing arithmetic of global bond markets.

What remains of democratic fiscal consent when the most consequential financial decisions migrate to a legally insulated shadow budget? The answer is: very little. Parliament debates and approves a formal budget that no longer represents the totality of state financial commitments. The most consequential decisions—which strategic investments to pursue, which military systems to modernise, which welfare programmes to expand—are effectively made within the executive, financed through Danantara’s shadow budget and shielded from legislative scrutiny by the very immunities that make the bonds attractive.

This is a soft constitutional coup against the legislature, executed through financial engineering rather than tanks. The parallel treasury exists precisely because the executive seeks to escape the transactional costs of democratic consent: the need to negotiate, compromise and publicly justify trade-offs. By relocating fiscal action to a legally insulated entity, the government can pursue its agenda with the speed and decisiveness of an authoritarian regime while maintaining the procedural facade of democratic budgeting.

The Danantara bond immunity law is a bet—a bet that the short-term benefits of mobilising hidden capital outweigh the long-term costs of governance erosion, reputational damage and democratic decay. It is a bet that global investors will continue to look past the institutionalisation of impunity. It is a bet that the Financial Action Task Force will not place Indonesia on its grey list.

These are dangerous bets. As Rahma Gafmi, an economics professor from Airlangga University, warned, detailed implementing regulations are needed to “serve as a legal brake to ensure this extreme incentive does not go out of control and become the mass facilitation of illegal money laundering.”

But the problem runs deeper than regulation. When a sovereign wealth fund becomes a parallel state—when it operates outside the budget, beyond parliamentary control and above the law—the line between statecraft and state capture collapses. The republic begins to resemble a system where legality is optional, transparency is performative, and sovereignty itself is mortgaged to hidden capital.

Indonesia has not created a financial innovation. It has built a sanctuary for money that cannot survive daylight. And in doing so, it has placed its democratic institutions, its creditworthiness and its international reputation on a path toward slow, corrosive decline. The world is watching. The markets are watching. And the cost of this experiment will be borne not by the politically connected few who purchase these bonds, but by the 280 million citizens whose future is being mortgaged to opacity.

Taking an invention and claiming it as yours is called intellectual property, based on practices followed by US and European businesses. But what happens when your neighbour argues that inventions can’t be owned and that intellectual property is no longer applicable based on the rules and regulations you have established?

In March 2026, Russian officials announced plans to develop a state-managed system for the “temporary administration” of the intellectual property of foreign companies from “unfriendly countries” that left Russia after the 2022 Ukraine invasion. The move drew immediate concerns in policy and legal circles and is one of Moscow’s latest challenges to the Western-led system of patents, copyrights, and trademarks that has developed over centuries.

What Factors Contributed to the Development of Intellectual Property?

Before the modern IP system, creators could be protected through reputation, guild membership, secrecy, patronage, or state-granted monopolies. Early precursors to today’s framework took place in Venice, including printing monopolies in 1469, and reflected efforts to control the value of reproduced knowledge. Another milestone was the Venetian Patent Statute of 1474, which granted inventors time-limited exclusive rights over new creations. The European Enlightenment later helped spread the notion across the region that inventions and ideas could be legally ownable property, laying the foundations for modern IP law to develop in different states.

While powerful Western firms and states have the greatest stake in maintaining the existing system, given the advantages it ensures for key industries, that wasn’t always the case. From the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century, the US often relied on weak foreign IP enforcement, copying European industrial and scientific innovations, which “propelled the United States forward and quickly transformed it into one of the world’s leading industrial powers,” according to author Christopher Klein. British writer and journalist Charles Dickens, among others, meanwhile, complained about the widespread reprinting of books without royalties.

Jane K. and Peder Sather Professor of History at UC Berkeley, Carla A. Hesse, noted in an essay that US attitudes toward IP shifted from an “objectivist-utilitarian” emphasis on shared knowledge to a “universalist-natural-rights” view that prioritized exclusive rights over the country’s growing number of inventions. This was also seen in Germany, where firms became known for reverse-engineering machine tools and improving foreign chemical products. The country later became a strong advocate of patent protection.

When these economies caught up technologically, incentives converged to help drive the creation of international IP rules. The 1883 Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property and the 1886 Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works were milestones in establishing the modern global IP system.

The Russian challenge to the notion of IP goes back more than a century, with the Russian Empire only partially engaging with emerging global IP regimes before its 1917 Revolution. While adopting patent and trademark laws on paper, it applied them unevenly and with minimal enforcement, while focusing on state control over strategic industries and foreign technology transfers. Later, the Soviet Union joined some international agreements, including the Universal Copyright Convention (1952) and Patent Cooperation Treaty (1970), while avoiding others such as the Berne Convention.

Hesse and economist Ha-Joon Chang have noted that since the 1970s, the US and Western Europe have increasingly used trade sanctions and agreements to pressure developing nations to adopt their preferred IP standards. Institutions like the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) have helped export Western-style IP rules, transforming intellectual property into a tool of economic governance that helped leverage technological progress.

Following the Soviet collapse, Russia moved its IP regime closer to Western standards in the 2000s and early 2010s, driven by WTO accession requirements and pressure and incentives from Western governments and corporations. Access to investment, markets, technology, and the global economy convinced Moscow that cooperation would be more constructive for national development.

China, of course, has been a principal target of claims about IP violations for Western companies. Beijing eased some tensions during the 2010s by improving its enforcement regime on intellectual property and, increasingly over recent decades, has focused on protecting the country’s expanding IP portfolio.

Ukraine

Hopes for further entanglement and collaboration with the Western IP regime were dashed after Ukraine entered the regional discussion. In the face of sanctions, Moscow increasingly explored legal avenues to limit the reach of foreign IP rights, citing national security concerns. It continued expanding its legal options over the coming years, including amending legislation in 2021 to allow the government certain use of patented inventions, utility models, and industrial designs without the rights holder’s consent.

The most significant changes followed Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Wartime measures introduced by Moscow against countries that had imposed additional sanctions on Russia allowed the use of patents and industrial designs from the sanctioning country without compensation, expanded parallel imports without the patentee’s consent, restricted royalty payments, and widened the state’s ability to authorise the use of protected technologies.

Russia’s decision to alter global IP rules caused shockwaves across the West, with The Conversation stating, “The suspension of intellectual property rights as an economic weapon in the context of a conflict is unprecedented, at least in recent decades.” But in their book Against Intellectual Monopoly, Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine argue that instead of a competitive market for innovations, patents have become a trading tool for powerful firms and countries in an oligopolistic patent market. From this perspective, challenging patent monopolies is essential to reducing dependence on foreign technology and increasing domestic innovative capabilities.

Russian courts have been more open to considering challenges to follow-on patents, saying that these secondary patents shouldn’t keep generic products from competing once the main inventions are available to the public. Russian officials and legal scholars attending the 2026 St Petersburg International Economic Forum, meanwhile, reinforced previous arguments that intellectual property rights are not absolute protections but economic privileges, subject to national development and competition objectives.

For many Russian firms, the risks of violating Western IP rights have also changed. Sanctions, market exits, and technology transfer restrictions have already cut many off from Western suppliers, reducing disincentives to continue using foreign technologies without authorisation, particularly when supported by state policy.

While the 2026 state-managed system shows efforts to formalise the reassignment of IP, Moscow has stopped short of abandoning IP law altogether. Instead, it has sought to selectively weaken protections while preserving access to international trade and technology and continues to use IP law to protect Russian inventions and companies abroad.

Post-Sanctions Developments

Some of the earliest signs of Russia’s new approach to IP drew attention for its impact on a variety of products and industries. Western brands such as Peppa Pig ended up in courtroom disputes over trademark control. The company that owns the rights to the popular children’s series had taken a Russian entrepreneur to court for drawing his own versions of Peppa Pig. Meanwhile, former McDonald’s franchises were taken over and rebranded by a local licensee, and there were media reports about microchips being stripped from imported home appliances to repair military equipment.

More consequential changes emerged at the industrial level. Parallel imports through third countries to bypass Western restrictions are being facilitated through close integration with China and its Eurasian Economic Union partners. Defence and dual-use technologies previously supplied by Western suppliers have been maintained, substituted, or replicated domestically. Western military equipment captured in Ukraine has been reverse-engineered, alongside civilian aerospace systems.

Foreign-owned automobile factories were meanwhile sold, frozen, or transferred to Russian operators before restarting under domestic branding. Russia’s car production fell from about 1.5 million vehicles in 2021 to roughly 600,000 before making a partial recovery in 2024, with sales of 756,000 vehicles, according to The Moscow Times. Several major facilities were later restarted under simplified production chains with increased reliance on imported components and Chinese supply chains, alongside output rebranding at former foreign-owned plants, such as Toyota.

Russia invited Chinese brands to fill the production gap, with their contribution rising from under 10 per cent of automobile sales in Russia before the Ukraine war to more than 50 per cent by 2023—2024. A large share of industrial capacity and investment has been redirected toward defence production and import substitution, making it difficult to determine the effects of Russia’s industrial and IP policies on the automobile sector.

The withdrawal of Western companies also exposed the dependency of modern economies on software and digital service networks. Reduced access to system updates, predictive maintenance, cloud services, and technical support created disruptions across the Russian industry and infrastructure.

Siemens, for example, suspended support for rail and industrial systems, while General Electric scaled back remote service and monitoring for gas and thermal turbines. SAP halted software used in factories, logistics, and energy, while Microsoft, Adobe, and other firms restricted services to software and cloud services for both businesses and consumers alike.

These measures have forced Russia to adapt to keep critical industrial systems operational. To support parts of its machine-tool sector previously dependent on Western hardware, Russian operators have relied on spare parts stockpiles, grey-market imports, and partial domestic substitution. For software, some equipment has operated offline using legacy software and local maintenance capabilities to replace vendor-linked support and update services.

At the consumer level, Russian authorities also signalled greater tolerance for software and media piracy, with Russian media emphasising that domestic consumers had been exploited for profit by Western brands. Underlying this was the belief that dependence on foreign IP sends licensing revenues abroad and slows the development of domestic technological capabilities, as well as cultural sovereignty.

Impact on the Pharmaceutical Industry

Some of Russia’s most significant developments have occurred in the pharmaceutical sector, where tensions over IP predated the war. Seeking greater pharmaceutical security, Russia used state procurement programmes and localisation requirements to favour domestic producers, with courts increasingly willing to limit foreign patent protections. In 2017, Russian courts approved the production of certain patented medicines, including for HIV treatments, to the consternation of Western drug companies, who don’t conform to the idea of free medicine.

Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite, in Information Feudalism, show how Brazil previously resisted pressure from the US government and pharmaceutical companies by threatening compulsory licensing for HIV/AIDS drugs in the 1990s and early 2000s, helping make treatment and prevention far more affordable. This approach was widely supported by medical scientists, AIDS activists, and international health organisations, according to the National Library of Medicine. In contrast, Russia lacked a comparable network. Western health organisations were viewed with greater suspicion in Moscow, limiting international support for efforts to expand access to affordable medicines. Russian health networks also faced greater isolation following the 2022 invasion, as Western sanctions and supply chains contributed to a more fragmented environment for international health cooperation.

As these pressures strained access to dozens of essential medicines, Russian authorities increasingly treated pharmaceutical patents as flexible when weighed against public health and public policy goals. Domestic firms expanded efforts to develop copies of complex medicines that would have faced major legal obstacles in other jurisdictions.

This has resulted in numerous high-profile disputes. In 2025, Russian biotech company BIOCAD received approval for its own version of Darzalex, the $10 billion-a-year cancer drug developed by Johnson & Johnson subsidiary Janssen. Boston-based Vertex has also accused the Russians of infringing patents linked to its cystic fibrosis treatment, Alyftrek. Danish drugmaker Novo Nordisk has challenged Russian patents relating to semaglutide products, while Britain’s AstraZeneca also has multiple disputes with Russian manufacturers over the manufacture of cancer and diabetes medicines.

Russian courts continue to be a major battleground for IP disputes. According to The Pharma Letter, both foreign drugmakers and Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) have lost a series of cases involving generic products launched before the expiry of patents on the original drugs. Meanwhile, pharmaceutical trade tensions between Washington and the EU have weakened collective Western efforts to defend pharmaceutical IP abroad.

Between Fragmentation and Reform

Russia’s challenge to IP protections was extensive even before the war, with Russia’s Intellectual Property Rights Court accused of using unlicensed software by a former judge in 2018.

Moscow’s IP strategy is not yet systematically applied to the state. While Russia’s executive and legislative branches have steadily expanded mechanisms to weaken foreign IP protections, parts of the judiciary have been more cautious. Hostile states, including Russia, still seek foreign investment, technology transfer, and access to global markets, and even while challenging Western IP rights, Moscow continues to rely on similar protections for its own inventions and companies abroad.

Western companies have also avoided treating the rupture as permanent. Although many suspended or exited Russian operations, most maintained trademark and other IP registrations in anticipation of a possible return. Allowing these rights to lapse would risk losing control in one of Eurasia’s largest markets and potentially set precedents elsewhere, particularly in China. As a result, many firms continue to do business in Russia, driven not only by financial considerations but also to ensure IP protection.

Russia is not alone in challenging aspects of the current IP system. India and South Africa spearheaded an international effort during the COVID-19 pandemic seeking temporary waivers on IP protections to ensure greater access to vaccines, sparking wider discussions on greater flexibility under current rules during emergencies.

A related issue is the patenting of pre-existing traditional knowledge. In 1995, researchers at the University of Mississippi’s Medical Center received a US patent for turmeric’s wound-healing properties until India challenged it by providing evidence that the practice had long been part of traditional medicine. The patent was revoked in 1997 but showed how long-established, socially beneficial knowledge can be appropriated through patent systems.

Russia’s efforts to challenge the Western-dominated IP model have seen mixed results, with some success in sectors such as pharmaceuticals but limited progress in advanced semiconductors and high-end industrial technologies. At the same time, Moscow’s continued reliance on IP mechanisms to protect its own assets highlights their central role in global innovation, technology transfer, and international trade.

As history shows, the appropriation and adaptation of foreign technologies and knowledge have often contributed to rapid industrial catch-up and advancement, including in many countries that are now among the strongest defenders of IP protection.

Former US national security advisor John Bolton and the President Donald J. Trump share traits neither probably knew they had. The latter, for one, is far more war mongering than he let on to American voters, evidenced by his recently failed, disastrous foray into attacking Iran. Bolton, on the other hand, has been a consistent war addict, the neocon’s preferred position in projecting US power through what the British used to call might. Earlier in June, Trump had the fantastic gall to say this about the man who had a brief stint as his own moustachioed national security advisor from 2018 to 2019: “I never thought [Bolton] was a smart person, that he was a radical right in terms of war, not in terms of other things. He was. He wanted to go to war with anybody that opened their mouth, anybody that talked, and I used him for a purpose, you know.” Yet another one of the president’s mirror portraits.

Trump went on to note Bolton’s involvement with the administration of President George W. Bush where “he created a lot of problems, but he always wanted to kill people in war, and that was okay for me, as long as I didn’t listen to him, which I never did.” Listening to Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu must have been quite something else.

That other commonly shared trait between the two is a rather sketchy approach to handling classified documents. In October 2025, a grand jury indicted Bolton for the discovery of private journal entries, private notes and assortment of classified material from his time as national security advisor. Many of the “diary” entries about his daily activities contained, among other things, military plans for adversarial foreign governments, covert US activities in various theatres, and intelligence on adversarial heads of state. This might have stayed buried but for the hacking activities of, as the Department of Justice put it, “a cyber actor believed to be associated with the Islamic Republic of Iran.” (The hack of Bolton’s personal email account was reported after he left office in September 2019 with one glaring omission: he did not tell the FBI or anyone else in government that the account contained national defence information.) How fitting in its symmetry that both Bolton and Trump have found themselves bedevilled by the same country of their ire.

The documents in question were sent to two of Bolton’s family members who were not authorised to access, receive or possess the classified material in question. These were conveyed via non-governmental email accounts and a non-governmental messaging platform yet to be approved for processing classified information. Copies of the said documents were also kept, without permission, at his Bethesda home.

The list of counts in the indictment proved menacing: eight for transmission and 10 for retaining classified defence information. On 26 June, Bolton entered a guilty plea to one count of retaining national defence information in a federal court in Maryland, thereby resolving all 18 counts. He faces a maximum prison term of 60 months and has agreed to pay a fine of US$2.25 million. The plea agreement also notes that neither he nor his survivors will be able to collect any annuity or federal retirement pay.

The officials at hand to make the announcement uttered the expected platitudes. Kelly O. Hayes, US Attorney for the District of Maryland, was in good form in talking about the priority of the attorney’s office as keeping Americans safe and ensuring that “anyone who endangers our national security will be brought to justice.” Hayden O’Byrne, Acting Deputy Assistant Attorney General, spoke of how the case “ought to send a message to other public officials whom the public has entrusted with classified, national defense information. If you wilfully mishandle these state secrets, the Department of Justice, led by the National Security Division, will investigate and prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law.”

Where to start with such remarks, other than to note the misdeeds of that most highly ranked of officials entrusted with the most sensitive of state secrets, one Donald Trump? The president’s appallingly lax approach to classified documents has teetered on the criminal. Such conduct, however, has never been punished. Following his first presidency, Trump faced a grand jury indictment bristling with 40 felony counts regarding the mishandling of classified documents arising from that term. The 8 June 2023 indictment against Trump and his alleged co-conspirator Waltine Nauta, who had been stationed as a valet in the White House during the presidency, noted his retention of “hundreds of classified documents” including information on defence and weapons capabilities of the US and foreign countries, US nuclear programs, potential vulnerabilities of the US and its allies to military attack and plans for possible retaliation given that eventuality. These had been secreted among newspapers, press clippings, letters, notes, cards, photographs and other miscellaneous material in “scores of boxes” which were duly transported to his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida.

In July 2024, and just days after an attempt was made on his life, Judge Aileen Cannon granted Trump’s motion to dismiss the case. He had successfully argued before his own appointee, that most satisfying state of affairs for an accused, that the DOJ’s appointment of special prosecutor Jack Smith violated the Appointments Clause of the US Constitution. Smith’s prosecution did not accord with “the role of Congress in the appointment of constitutional officers, and the role of Congress in authorizing expenditures by law.” That role could not “be usurped by the Executive Branch or diffused elsewhere.”

Smith, an appointee of former Attorney General Merrick Garland, initially appealed the decision. He was subsequently requested to dismiss the case with Trump’s return to the White House, as the DOJ is barred from prosecuting sitting presidents. In February this year, the same judge granted the president’s request to permanently prevent the release of Smith’s report on Trump’s handling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence. The report, comprising two volumes, had been submitted to Garland on 7 January 2025. In words that said much about the foundering Republic, Judge Cannon thought releasing the second volume of the report regarding the handling of the classified documents would cause “irreparable damage” to the president and “contravene basic notions of fairness and justice.” It would certainly reveal the sheer slovenliness of the leader of the free world when dealing with matters classified.

As that old idiom goes, the fish rots from the head down, and the second administration has not disappointed with its singular treatment of sensitive security information. Dare one forget that caricature of carelessness called Signalgate, when then national security advisor Michael Waltz added Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic to a Signal chat chain containing details on forthcoming military strikes on Yemen. These included sequencing details of the attacks, information about the targets and weapons that would be used. No counts levelled there, except perhaps that of risible stupidity. For that mighty achievement, Waltz was made ambassador to the United Nations.

Trump, currently reigning in a kingdom beyond prosecution, has been splenetic in his attitude to Bolton, whom he accused, most richly, of using classified information in his unflattering account of the Trump administration in The Room Where It Happened. For Trump, power is an exercise of personal grievance and petty remonstrance. No slight is undeserving enough of punishment. Bolton tattled about the room where things happened; he just did not read it very well. Not so smart after all.

Israeli authorities hosted several politicians from European countries this week, signalling continued ties despite threats to sever communications with high-ranking EU officials over alleged comparisons of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to apartheid South Africa.

On 22 June, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar met with Dubravka Šuica, the EU Commissioner for the Mediterranean, as well as Željka Cvijanović, the Serb member of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s presidency. During her visit, Šuica also met Israeli President Isaac Herzog, while Cvijanović attended a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Both guests reaffirmed their support for Israel’s so-called security.

The EU maintains support for Israel’s “right to security.”

“I am pleased to be in Israel, one of our key partners,” Šuica wrote on social media, still ignoring calls from over a million EU citizens to end the EU-Israel Association Agreement. “We discussed ongoing challenges and how we can address them together. I underlined that the EU fully supports Israel’s right to security.”

“With Isaac Herzog, we discussed EU-Israel relations, including open challenges and potential new opportunities to strengthen our cooperation on areas of shared interest,” the EU Commissioner added. “Israel is a key partner. We share deep ties and a common interest in a stable and secure Middle East.”

Šuica also met Palestinian Authority representatives. However, critics argue the bloc’s primary intention remains preserving relations with the occupation, despite a slightly stricter narrative on settler violence emerging in official EU stances. Progressive politicians and activists also criticised Šuica’s participation in Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace” meetings, warning it legitimises a colonialist approach to Palestine.

Additionally, the EU Commissioner’s visit drew criticism from well-known figures inside the EU. Former High Representative for Foreign Affairs Josep Borrell—the man who once compared Europe to a garden to be protected from the jungle represented by the rest of the world—highlighted the hypocrisy of Šuica sitting with Sa’ar days after he threatened to cut ties with current High Representative Kaja Kallas. Reports suggest Kallas had compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to apartheid-era South Africa during a private meeting with Mexican officials. Kallas has avoided confirming these statements publicly, appealing for “respectful and constructive” exchanges following Sa’ar’s announcement.

Shared Islamophobic tropes from Israel to the Western Balkans

Željka Cvijanović expressed more explicit support for Israeli authorities than Šuica. Current representative of the Republika Srpska entity in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s presidency, Cvijanović hails from the same party as Milorad Dodik, who is known for denying war crimes, amplifying separatist narratives, and forging ties with authoritarian political groups.

In this context, Israel has long maintained strong relations with the Republika Srpska. Cvijanović met with Netanyahu in a diplomatic setting without Bosnian flags, prompting the Bosnian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to issue a formal note of protest. The visit sparked outrage in Bosnia and Herzegovina, with critics warning that Cvijanović was aligning with an entity accused of war crimes and promoting Islamophobic narratives.

This concern was linked to Sa’ar’s remarks about the “need to safeguard Christian minorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina” as well as Cvijanović's speech at the JNS Summit. There, she praised Israel for building “democracy” in the region and called for intelligence sharing and “strengthening security partnerships.”

“This is a struggle between civilisation and extremism, between free societies and violent ideologies,” Cvijanović said, equating Israel with “free societies.” “It is about choosing now between those who want coexistence and those who want domination, between those who defend life and those who glorify death,” she stated, propagating a distorted image of West Asia.

Iran is demanding that all members of the NATO alliance who participated in the US-Israeli war against the country earlier this year be held accountable for war crimes and other violations of international law.

The demand followed the recent admission by NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte about the role of European countries during the US-Israeli war in Iran, which began on 28 February and ended with a ceasefire on 8 April.

Speaking to Fox News on Wednesday, Rutte admitted that thousands of aircraft took off from US bases in various European countries during the US-Israeli aggression in Iran.

“Country after country, ally after ally have made their bases available.” Rutte described “between 4,000 to 5,000 planes taking off from European bases to support Epic Fury.” He was responding to complaints about the underwhelming support of NATO members during the US war efforts in Iran.

Rutte repeated those comments during his meeting with US President Donald Trump later in the day.

However, Trump still looked unimpressed with Rutte’s claims. He expressed his displeasure at the European role and publicly questioned NATO’s contributions to his war efforts, claiming that he was disappointed with most of them.

Italy refutes Rutte’s claims.

Rutte specifically named Italy and Romania, citing them as examples of European support for the US war in Iran officially termed Operation Epic Fury.

“If you look at Italy, 500 planes took off from US bases in Italy to support Epic Fury,” Rutte claimed, putting Italy’s right-wing government in an awkward position given its public stance of opposition to the war.

Italy is home to over a hundred US military installations, including a large naval base in Sicily and an air base in the northern region.

However, the right-wing government under Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni had officially distanced itself from the US war efforts, largely due to the strong popular sentiment against the war in the country.

Italy has witnessed large public protests and strikes carried out mostly by workers against any involvement in Israeli wars in Palestine, Lebanon, or US-Israeli attacks in Iran in the last few months.

Rutte’s claims about Italy have now created a massive backlash in the country, with the opposition seeking fresh explanations from the government.

On Wednesday, the Meloni government refuted Rutte’s claims, calling them “misleading.”

“As already clarified in the parliament, the government authorised exclusively technical and logistical, non-kinetic activities,” Italy’s defence minister Guido Crosetto was reported saying.

Crosetto also claimed that Rutte was confusing “authorised support flights with combat-related operations,” claiming their involvement was purely limited to “technical and logistical support.”

Crosetto claimed that Italy’s actions did not violate any international laws and its acts were as per the arrangements made under its constitution and agreements with its allies, Reuters reported.

Damning admission of NATO’s complicity

Esmail Baghaei, official spokesperson of the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, raised the issue of accountability in a social media post on Thursday, 25 June.

Baghaei called Rutte’s comments a “clear and damning admission of NATO’s active complicity in an unlawful war of aggression against a sovereign UN member state—a flagrant violation of international law and the core principles of the UN Charter.”

Along with Italy and Romania, which were named by Rutte, “every other European country that has assisted the US-Israeli aggression against Iran must explain to their own people and to the world why they chose to collude in this blatant act of aggression and in the commission of mass atrocities against Iranian people,” Baghaei insisted.

More than 3,300 Iranians, including hundreds of children and its top political and military leadership, among others, were killed in the US-Israeli strikes, which went on for nearly 40 days.

The indiscriminate bombings carried out by the US and Israel destroyed hundreds of schools, university campuses, science laboratories, sports complexes, and other civilian infrastructure as well as medical facilities in the country, apart from crippling the global economy after Iran imposed restrictions on trade through the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation.

One such US strike on an elementary school in Minab killed over 160 school girls during the first hours of the war, creating global outrage and allegations of war crimes.

“The organisation [NATO] and its individual member states that participated in such decision-making must be held accountable for all the consequences,” Baghaei said.

Chanting, “We are not partners, we are workers,” hundreds of workers across Mexico who provide rides and deliveries through apps held a two-hour work stoppage on 15 May demanding fair rates, an end to unjustified deactivations, and ultimately, a collective labor agreement with app giants like Uber, Didi, and Rappi (two Uber-Eats style delivery platforms).

The National App Workers Union (la Union Nacional de Trabajadores por Aplicación, UNTA) said the work stoppage included workers in five states and Mexico City. They were joined by app workers in at least 15 countries who held similar stoppages during peak hours.

President Claudia Sheinbaum advanced a landmark federal labor law reform in 2024 recognizing Mexico’s 1.2 million app-based workers as employees—granting them access to social security, profit-sharing, and federal housing credits. But the bar to access these benefits remains too high, workers say: only 10 percent of app workers earn enough to be eligible.

Luis Fernando Mora Reyes, an app worker for seven years and the union’s Secretary of Training and Culture, said he took inspiration from the Flint Sit-Down Strike at General Motors in 1936-7, a landmark in the organizing of auto workers in the U.S.

“Getting off your motorcycle or [out of your] car, and sitting on the sidewalk with a group of workers while you’re discussing, talking, exchanging ideas about the union,” he said, “it reminded me a lot about these images of strikers within the plants at Flint.”

Mora Reyes shuttles pizzas, groceries, and meal orders on his trusty bike. In an average week, he bikes between 15 and 40 miles: “It depends on my knees,” he said. Even then, Mora Reyes said, he’s one of the lucky ones who can do this work part time as his second source of income. He thinks of his older colleagues who work full time, “who can’t afford a motorcycle, let alone a car, and I see how they suffer.”

Impossible Bar

In order to qualify for benefits under the new labor law, workers who make deliveries using a car must make about 19,000 pesos per month (approximately $1,105 USD), which is double Mexico’s minimum wage. What’s more, not all of their earnings are counted towards this salary floor: 48 percent are excluded to account for costs like gasoline and maintenance.

This carveout “is a mutilation of our rights,” said Shaira Garduño Tovar, Secretary of Gender Equity for the union. Motorcycle drivers like her need to make approximately 14,000 pesos per month to qualify; currently, she makes between 7,000 and 8,000 per month. “I’d need to work from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Imagine spending 12 hours [straight] on a motorcycle—the strain on the body that that entails.”

The app giants and pro-employer groups lobbied for the carveout to minimize the contributions they would be required to make into the Mexican Social Security Institute system, said Sergio Guerrero, General Secretary of the UNTA, in 2025. “We at UNTA have always opposed these percentages. The position of these companies was the one that was taken into account.”

Water, Tacos, and Oil

Since the union’s founding in November 2020, UNTA members have worked to build relationships with other app drivers across the country.

Their efforts are complicated by the extensive reach of company unions. An estimated 90 percent of collective bargaining agreements in the nation are pro-employer “protection” contracts that lock in low wages and stave off actual union representation.

Building relationships with these workers—and making the case for a very different sort of unionism—can’t be rushed. At the heart of it is “letting them see that we’re not sent by the government, we’re not delinquents, just everyday workers,” said Mora Reyes. “They see we’re not offering money, but instead promising our loyalty, our work, and our commitment. Those who stay, stay for the right reasons.”

One approach that has helped: the union puts on “solidarity stands” in areas where app workers tend to congregate: “We offer them a bit of water; if possible, a bit of food, maybe a taco or a slice of pizza,” said Pedro Guerra, who has worked on the apps for eight years. “Where we can afford it, we’ve been able to give them oil for their motorcycles, perform minor maintenance like lubricating their chains, things we know represent an extra cost out of drivers' pockets.”

Orange Zones

The union has also established a handful of “orange zones” where drivers can go if they’re experiencing a safety issue, or just need a place to use the restroom. The zones have no formal government backing or financial support; UNTA simply works to get local business on board. “It’s a web of solidarity that we’re building,” said Mora Reyes.

There are also group chats where drivers can check in if they feel unsafe, said Luis Fernando Higuera Rivera, head of the union’s organizing committee in Mexicali. “If a client [is harassing] a driver, she can place an alert in our group.” Any drivers who are in the area then approach to de-escalate the situation if needed.

But despite every effort to mitigate the risks, the work remains grueling. “Day after day, we face accidents,” said Garduño Tovar. “We face the risk of being assaulted.” That fear is especially present for workers who deliver on a bike or motorcycle: “If you have an accident, your car covers you. But for us on the bikes, the first thing that goes flying is our bodies.”

Weather conditions raise the stakes. “Even when the roads are dry it’s risky, because any tiny thing on the pavement, a bit of oil or sand can cause you to skid when you brake,” she said. “Just imagine when it’s raining.”

Many workers, particularly those on bikes and motorcycles, try to avoid driving in the rain, despite the financial hit: “It’s not worth risking my life for 30 pesos,” Guerra said.

“I Have Three Bosses”

The apps offer the promise of being your own boss. But for Mora Reyes, that couldn’t be further from the truth. “I have three bosses,” he said. “The government, the app, and the client. I’m accountable to all three. If I do something the app doesn’t like, they deactivate me. If I do something the customer doesn’t like, they deactivate me. If I do something the government [doesn’t like], I’m detained. We’re everything but our own bosses.”

While app workers may not be their own bosses, they can still run their own unions. One tactic to foster member leadership: UNTA’s digital courses on organizing tactics, economics, and writing skills. The classes are open not just to UNTA members, Guerra said, but to any app worker who’s interested, and to members of other unions: “We’ve had electricians and people from the water department attend too.”

Guerra has led the writing courses himself. The first two sessions focus on writing fundamentals like sentence structure and tenses. The last two address logical fallacies and how to structure arguments. He gives students assignments to make sure the material is landing, he said, “but the real impact is felt in the daily life of the organization. One of the aims is to decentralize skills, in order to decentralize power. The more skills our members have, the more prepared they are when they hold union office.”

The app giants won’t stand by idly as Mexican workers enforce their labor rights. But there is plenty of fertile ground for organizing. “I was always sure there would be a reform. I never doubted it,” said Garduño Tovar. “The platforms arrived in Mexico nearly 13 years ago. It took nearly 10 years to win that reform. Maybe it will take us another 10 years, but we’re going to eliminate that [carveout]. We can win this.”

Originally produced for Labor Notes

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has every right to condition European relations with any other country or bloc on respect for human rights. That, of course, would hold true if she genuinely cared about such values herself.

In response to the 19 June signing of the memorandum of understanding between the United States and Iran—intended to bring an end to a destructive war—von der Leyen declared that the European Union does not intend to lift its sanctions on Tehran.

Speaking on 15 June, ahead of the G7 summit, she firmly conditioned any diplomatic thawing on domestic changes within the Islamic Republic.

“The principle of sanctions is that we need real change on the ground before we can think about lifting them,” she stated, adding: “As long as there is no behavioral change, you cannot lift the sanctions because of human rights violations.”

Viewed in isolation, the European position might appear principled, even commendable. In its broader geopolitical context, however, it exposes a staggering level of hypocrisy.

On that very same day, the European Union’s duplicity was laid bare. During a Foreign Affairs Council meeting in Luxembourg, Europe effectively refused to take a unified stand on imposing trade sanctions on Israel, despite its ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip and unchecked colonial violence and expansionist policies in the occupied West Bank.

The discussion itself would not have taken place had it not been for the persistent efforts of Spain and Ireland, which have repeatedly urged the bloc to suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement over Israel’s flagrant violations of international law. The initiative failed because the EU remains deeply divided, constrained by the requirement of unanimity on foreign policy and repeatedly blocked by pro-Israel governments.

While Europe continues to engage Israel—providing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist coalition with desperately needed political and economic lifelines—the European public has increasingly moved in the opposite direction.

Recent polling across numerous countries has revealed growing opposition to Israel’s war and genocide in Gaza and increasing support for Palestinian rights. Across Europe, mass demonstrations, consumer boycotts, campus mobilizations, and divestment campaigns have reflected a widening gap between public opinion and official policy.

This reality appears entirely irrelevant to von der Leyen, who remains preoccupied with the human rights records of states viewed as Western adversaries. Such concern is not motivated by solidarity with victims, but by the desire to maintain political leverage that can be invoked when convenient and ignored when necessary.

Lest we forget, von der Leyen was among the first Western leaders to visit Israel following the events of 7 October, arriving in Tel Aviv on 13 October 2023. Standing alongside Israeli leaders, she offered unconditional backing, declaring that “Europe stands with Israel.” She did so as Palestinians in Gaza were already being subjected to a devastating military assault that would soon claim tens of thousands of lives.

Although her rhetoric became somewhat more cautious as international legal institutions began investigating Israel for genocide and pursuing war crimes cases against its leaders, her fundamental political alignment never truly changed.

For anyone to believe that von der Leyen has suddenly discovered that human rights should occupy center stage in any responsible foreign policy is simply delusional. This is especially true given how restrained she remained, both in language and action, as the US-Israeli war on Iran expanded into a regional catastrophe that should never have been allowed to unfold.

None of that matters to von der Leyen, of course, since such immense human suffering does not neatly fit within her geopolitical priorities.

It is tempting to conclude that, for von der Leyen and many Western leaders, some human rights matter more than others. Yet even that assessment grants too much credibility to their position, because it assumes that human rights are the actual basis of policy. More often than not, they are merely invoked when politically convenient.

Even the Catholic Church appears to be moving away from this selective moral framework. Since his election in May 2025, Pope Leo XIV has repeatedly emphasized a vision of “just peace” over the traditional doctrine of “just war,” warning against the use of moral and religious language to legitimize military aggression. During his Palm Sunday homily earlier this 2026, he stressed that “God rejects the prayers of those who wage war,” a direct challenge to the normalization of violence by political leaders.

But von der Leyen cannot help herself. The instrumentalization of human rights has long been a staple of Western foreign policy, despite mounting evidence that such commitments are rarely applied consistently. In that sense, Europe appears increasingly bankrupt—not only morally, but politically as well.

The war involving Iran, the subsequent US-Iran agreement, and the major geopolitical shifts surrounding both unfolded largely without meaningful European involvement. Reduced to the role of spectator—or occasional cheerleader—the EU exerted little influence over events, underscoring its diminishing relevance in Middle Eastern and global affairs.

This helps explain why von der Leyen resorted to familiar rhetoric about human rights in Iran while remaining largely silent on Israel’s devastating actions in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and elsewhere in the region. With Europe’s influence steadily shrinking, moral posturing has become a substitute for meaningful diplomacy.

Will the EU continue along this path of growing irrelevance, or will it finally heed the views of its own citizens, challenge Israel’s impunity, and pursue a foreign policy genuinely independent of Washington? The answer may determine whether Europe can reclaim political relevance—or continue its slide into long-term decline.

Britain could have a new prime minister as early as mid-July after Keir Starmer announced his resignation on Monday, 22 June. The announcement came amid widespread discontent with Starmer’s policies and mounting calls for him to step down. Newly elected parliamentarian Andy Burnham, former mayor of Greater Manchester, is widely expected to replace Starmer as both prime minister and Labour Party leader.

Left-wing and progressive critics have denounced the Starmer administration for failing to address working-class concerns and endorsing Europe’s regional military build-up. Beyond economic policy, they have also emphasised Starmer’s support for Israel throughout the Gaza genocide—including his government’s refusal to implement an arms embargo on Israel and their crackdown on the Palestine solidarity movement and civil rights in general.

“Keir Starmer could have ended child poverty, homelessness and the grotesque levels of inequality in this country,” Your Party’s Jeremy Corbyn—whom Starmer helped oust from the Labour Party—wrote in reaction. “Instead, he abandoned those in need, destroyed our civil liberties and facilitated genocide in Gaza. That is how this prime minister will be remembered—and that is the legacy of moral and political bankruptcy he leaves behind.”

Corbyn’s party colleague Zarah Sultana highlighted Starmer’s involvement in several high-level scandals that have shaken the Labour Party recently, including the appointment of Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the United States despite his close association with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. “A man who gave the top diplomatic job to the ‘best pal’ of a convicted paedophile, said Israel has the right to cut off water and electricity to Gaza, rolled out the red carpet for Israeli war criminals, and kept the weapons flowing to the Israeli military as it committed genocide,” Sultana wrote of Starmer.

“Ultimately, Starmer will go down as one of the most unpopular prime ministers in British history,” the Peace & Justice Project echoed. “In less than two years, he has gone from a historic landslide to a Labour government on the brink of political extinction.”

Over the past two years, Starmer’s cabinet has also walked back many pledges from the 2024 campaign, cutting welfare, continuing the privatisation of health services, and failing to take decisive action on the cost-of-living crisis. When progress was made—such as scrapping the two-child benefit cap—it only happened under intense pressure from both Labour members and the public.

In the context of economic policy, left-wing analysts point to Starmer’s continuation of austerity-driven policies previously advanced by Conservative governments. “Starmer and his chancellor are playing the same tired austerity game while enabling and empowering the finance curse perpetuated by the City of London, throwing in for good measure cuts in international aid to fund a military spending trickle under the guise of a ‘Strategic Defence Review’,” wrote former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis. “It is the same old doctrine: austerity for the masses, socialism for the financiers and the arms dealers.”

As a result, trade unions that have backed Labour for decades have recently expressed extreme discontent, signalling they might cut ties with the party and consider backing others as a more progressive alternative to the far-right Reform and other right-wing options.

Looking ahead, several trade union leaders emphasised that the new Prime Minister must honour promises to bring services like transport and water into public hands and oppose anti-migrant and racist rhetoric.

“The next Prime Minister has an opportunity to break with tinkering around the edges and deliver a complete transformation of this country, permanently shifting wealth and power to working-class people,” stated Andrea Egan, head of the public services union UNISON. “Schools, hospitals, councils and transport—and the public service heroes working in them, keeping our country running—must be the fiscal priority, not the military and foreign wars.”

“Whoever replaces Keir Starmer needs to be clear that the status quo has to change,” said Fire Brigades Union leader Steve Wright. “The reason we find ourselves with yet another PM standing down is that, like May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak before him, Starmer failed to break with the perceived wisdom of attacking public services, failing to tackle wealth inequality, whilst letting privatised public utilities rip off the people of this country. A new Labour leader needs to learn that lesson and learn it fast.”

On Saturday, 20 June, the UN Security Council raised concerns over “the imminent risk of mass atrocities” against the civilians in El Obeid, capital of war-torn Sudan’s North Kordofan state.​

The city has been encircled by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which has been at war with its former ruling partner, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), since April 2023.​

Amid an increasing build-up of RSF troops around the city, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk warned on 18 June of an “imminent offensive” with the risk of “serious international crimes.”

The UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, is also “alarmed” by the RSF’s “substantial military reinforcements around El Obeid,” said his spokesperson, Stéphane Dujarric, adding, “We must not allow the horrors of El Fasher to be repeated in El Obeid.”​

The city of El Fasher was the last major SAF holdout in the vast Darfur region in western Sudan. Laying siege for over 500 days to cut off the supplies of food, medicines, and other essentials, the RSF caused a famine and subjected the population weakened by hunger to repeated bombardment before finally overrunning their defences.

Killing civilians in what is estimated to be tens of thousands, the RSF depopulated the city with a campaign of atrocities which, according to a UN probe, bore the “defining characteristics of genocide.”

​After its takeover of El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state, the RSF consolidated control over the entire Darfur region, consisting of five states, with the exception of some towns on the border with Chad, across which the conflict has begun to spill over.

​Following this consolidation in the west, the RSF has been expanding eastward into the Kordofan region, which has now become a main frontline of the war between the SAF and the RSF.

​North Kordofan state’s capital, El Obeid, sits on the highway connecting El Fasher to the national capital, Khartoum, to which the SAF-led government had returned only in January 2026, over two and a half years after relocating to Port Sudan in the early days of the civil war.

​The RSF has held El Obeid in siege-like conditions for over 18 months and killed scores of civilians with drone strikes over the last 10 days. 500,000 civilians in the city are at risk of suffering mass atrocities if the RSF launches an attack, the UN Human Rights Council warned.​

“We cannot allow the repeat of the preventable atrocities we documented in El Fasher,” Türk said, adding, “Let this be a stark warning to the world about an impending human rights disaster and worsening humanitarian situation.”

The Iran-US Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) emerged not from reconciliation, but from exhaustion and strategic failure by the United States and its allies. It was the product of a war that had reached its political limits. Washington and Tel Aviv presented their illegal war of aggression as a necessary response to Iran’s nuclear energy program, missile capabilities, and regional alliances. Yet behind this language of security lay a broader objective: to weaken Iran decisively and restore a regional order centered on unquestioned US and Israeli dominance.

For more than two decades, successive US administrations had sought to contain Iran through sanctions, diplomatic isolation, covert operations, cyberwarfare, and targeted assassinations. The recent war represented the most intense expression of this strategy. The assumption in Washington and Tel Aviv was that overwhelming force would cripple Iran’s military infrastructure, fracture its state capacity, provoke internal instability, and perhaps open the way for political transformation.

That expectation was not fulfilled. Iran suffered extensive damage to military facilities, infrastructure, and economic assets. Civilian life was severely disrupted. But the Iranian state did not collapse. Its command structures continued to function, its armed forces retained retaliatory capacity, and its leadership preserved enough cohesion to withstand the assault. Despite the murder of several key leaders of the Islamic Republic, it remains in authority and its legitimacy has in fact been strengthened.

Equally important, Iran demonstrated that it could impose costs beyond its own borders. Missile and drone attacks reached Israeli territory and threatened strategic infrastructure across the Gulf Arab states. The conflict imposed by the US and Israel ended up with disrupted shipping routes, raised insurance costs, unsettled energy markets, and reminded governments across the world that instability in the Gulf cannot be contained within the region.

As the war continued, the gap between military power and political achievement became increasingly visible. The United States and Israel possessed overwhelming military superiority, but they could not convert battlefield pressure into decisive political outcomes. Iran remained intact; regime change did not occur. The Axis of Resistance—from Iran to the Mediterranean Sea—was weakened but not eliminated. Continued escalation promised greater destruction, but not strategic victory. Due to this fact, the MoU is not a final peace treaty. It is a provisional framework designed to halt direct hostilities, reopen channels of negotiation, and prevent the conflict from spreading further.

Its first and most immediate provision is a temporary cessation of direct military operations. The framework establishes a 60-day period during which the parties are expected to negotiate the terms of a more durable settlement. This pause does not resolve the underlying conflict, but it creates space to prevent accidental escalation and reduce the immediate risk of a wider regional war.

Second, the MoU centers on the Strait of Hormuz. This is the agreement’s most economically significant feature. Roughly one-fifth of globally traded petroleum passes through this narrow waterway. During the war, threats to shipping demonstrated both Iran’s geographic leverage and the vulnerability of the global economy to instability in the Gulf. The MoU treats maritime deconfliction not as a technical matter, but as a central pillar of regional and global economic stability.

Third, the agreement establishes a process for negotiations over Iran’s nuclear energy program. Crucially, it does not impose immediate dismantlement of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. Instead, it opens discussions on enrichment levels, inspection mechanisms, monitoring arrangements, and the possible return of international technical oversight. This marks a shift from coercion to bargaining: Iran is not being treated simply as a target, but as a state whose consent is required for any durable nuclear arrangement.

Fourth, the MoU includes discussions on sanctions relief, oil exports, and the possible release or mobilization of Iranian financial assets. The details remain contested. But the principle is clear: economic strangulation did not produce surrender. A sustainable settlement will require some degree of economic accommodation.

Fifth, the agreement reportedly includes regional deconfliction mechanisms, particularly around Lebanon. This reflects the fact that the conflict was never only bilateral. Iran’s regional alliances, Israel’s military operations, US security commitments, and the fragile balance in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and the Gulf are all connected. Any agreement that ignores this regional architecture will remain unstable.

The most revealing aspect of the MoU is what it omits. It does not demand regime change, it does not require Iran to abandon its missile program, and it does not force Tehran to withdraw entirely from regional political and security affairs. In short, the agreement recognizes Iran as a regional power whose interests must be negotiated, not simply bombed away.

The MoU exposes important differences between the strategic priorities of the United States and Israel. For Israel, the war was an opportunity to reshape the regional balance of power. Israeli policymakers have long regarded Iran as the principal obstacle to their strategic ambitions in West Asia. The weakening of Hezbollah, the fragmentation of resistance networks, and the isolation of Tehran were seen as necessary steps toward a regional order more favorable to Israel. The United States shared some of these objectives but operated under broader constraints. Washington had to consider not only military outcomes, but also oil markets, global trade, Gulf allies, domestic political pressures, and the risk of wider international involvement. As the costs mounted, US calculations increasingly diverged from Israeli maximalism.

The result is an agreement that many in Israel are likely to regard as insufficient. The war did not eliminate Iran as a strategic actor. It did not produce regime change. It did not destroy Iran’s capacity to influence events beyond its borders. Most importantly, it ended not with capitulation, but with negotiation. This outcome reveals a deeper problem for Israeli strategy. Military superiority can inflict enormous damage, but it cannot by itself produce political legitimacy or regional acceptance. Israel can strike targets across West Asia, but it cannot determine the political future of societies beyond its borders through force alone.

For the United States, the MoU represents the recognition of another reality: military dominance no longer guarantees political obedience. This lesson has been learned repeatedly in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and now once again in relation to Iran.

The Gulf Arab monarchies are among the most important observers of this agreement. Throughout the conflict, Gulf governments were caught between competing pressures. They remain dependent on US security guarantees and have expanded overt or covert relations with Israel. At the same time, they understand that any regional war with Iran places their own economic and social stability at risk. The disruption of shipping routes and threats to regional infrastructure made this vulnerability unmistakable. The Gulf states possess immense wealth, but their economies depend on secure maritime trade, stable energy exports, foreign investment, and the confidence of global markets. A prolonged war endangers all of these.

The likely conclusion for Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, and Oman is pragmatic rather than ideological. They will continue to work with Washington. Some will maintain or deepen relations with Israel. But they will also seek channels with Tehran and avoid becoming direct platforms for escalation. This trend was already visible before the war. The Saudi—Iranian rapprochement facilitated by China in 2023 reflected a growing recognition that regional stability cannot be achieved through permanent confrontation. The war has reinforced that conclusion. The Gulf monarchies have learned that neither Iran nor the United States is going away. Their future depends not on choosing one side permanently against the other, but on managing the contradictions between them while protecting their own interests.

Whether Iran has won depends on how victory is defined. If victory means avoiding destruction, Iran did not win. The country suffered severe economic losses, infrastructure damage, military degradation, and human costs. The burden of the war fell heavily on ordinary Iranians. But strategic outcomes are not measured only by damage suffered. They are also measured by political objectives achieved or prevented.

The central objective of the United States and Israel was not merely to damage Iran. It was to fundamentally weaken Iran as an independent regional actor. On that measure, the campaign fell short. Iran remains sovereign and the government of the Islamic Republic remains in power. Its military capabilities have been reduced but not eliminated. Its diplomatic relevance has been strengthened by the fact that negotiations now revolve around securing Iranian consent rather than imposing foreign dictates. In this sense, Iran achieved what many states facing overwhelming military pressure have sought throughout history: survival. Survival is not romantic. It is often costly, brutal, and incomplete. But in international politics, survival can be the most important measure of strategic success.

The larger significance of the war lies elsewhere. The conflict demonstrated once again that destruction is not the same as power. Military force can demolish infrastructure, kill combatants, and impose suffering. What it cannot always do is produce political transformation. The United States and Israel possessed vastly superior military capabilities, yet they could not secure the political outcome they desired. The Iran—US MoU is therefore not a story of decisive victory by either side. It is the story of a war that revealed the limits of coercion. Iran emerges battered but standing. The United States and Israel emerge powerful but unable to dictate terms. The Gulf states emerge more conscious of their vulnerability. The region enters a new phase in which negotiations, rather than battlefield victories, will determine the next chapter of West Asian politics. That is the deepest political meaning of the MoU: military power can destroy, but it cannot always rule.

There are people who live from their own work. There are people who live from the work of others. And then there are political agitators who survive almost entirely by manufacturing historical enemies. Milorad Dodik, the longtime leader of Republika Srpska—the Serb -majority entity within Bosnia and Herzegovina—has long since become a leading figure in that particular industry. In his political vocabulary, phrases such as “age-old enemies,” “true enemies,” and “our enemies” have become something between a verbal tic and a greeting.

“Good afternoon.”
“Good afternoon.”
“Who are the age-old enemies today?”

At a recent “highly important” public discussion in East Sarajevo, we were given a straightforward answer: Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks).

Thank you. Goodbye. See you again tomorrow.

Yet this kind of historical reductionism is hardly Dodik’s monopoly. For decades, it has also permeated a significant segment of the Bosniak nationalist media landscape, from Hayat TV and Stav magazine to Dnevni Avaz, one of the country’s largest newspapers. Within that narrative, much of premodern and modern Serbian history is frequently reduced to a single grand anti-Muslim conspiracy stretching across centuries—from Saint Sava, the founder of the Serbian Orthodox Church in the thirteenth century, right up to the present day. One might think that after eight hundred years such a conspiracy would eventually grow tired, but apparently not.

This simplification is sustained not only by political propaganda but also by the writings of figures such as Rasim Muminović, a philosopher and prominent intellectual associated with the Party of Democratic Action (SDA), the main Bosniak nationalist party founded by Alija Izetbegović. Muminović described Serbs as “the most bloodthirsty animals,” genetic “monsters that are neither human nor dog,” and “human gorillas,” effectively offering an entire nation a collective psychiatric diagnosis and a quasi-biological classification in place of historical analysis.

It is therefore hardly surprising that similar ideas later found an echo in the work of the late Abdulah Sidran, one of Bosnia’s most celebrated writers and public intellectuals, whose influence on Bosniak cultural and political discourse remains considerable even after his death. Sidran claimed that Serbs had spent the last two centuries working toward the disappearance of his people. Like Dodik’s rhetoric about “age-old enemies,” this is a thesis that could be dismantled by an average fourteen-year-old pupil in the final year of elementary school who has mastered the basic chronology of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Balkan history.

Between Sidran’s narrative and Dodik’s rhetoric of “centuries-old enemies,” the difference is largely one of flags and party symbols. The mechanism itself remains unchanged: complex historical processes are compressed into tribal morality tales, while entire communities are transformed into permanent villains whose guilt is presumed to transcend generations.

The problem is that the phrase “age-old enemy” is not the sort of expression one should casually toss around like a barroom remark or a party slogan. It is among the most serious historical labels imaginable. If a people truly has an age-old enemy, we are talking about a sustained, continuous, and fundamental antagonism spanning entire historical epochs. We are talking about something comparable to the relationship between Rome and Carthage, England and France during the Hundred Years' War, or the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg Monarchy. It is not a term that should be deployed whenever a politician needs to fill the space between two press conferences.

Of course, the history of the Balkans should not be romanticized. Bosnian Serbs—and Serbs more broadly—and Bosnia’s Muslims, today known as Bosniaks, have not spent the last five centuries living in a picturesque postcard of brotherhood, love, and communal rakija-making by the river. The Ottoman period left deep scars and produced profoundly different historical experiences. Bosnia’s Muslims were largely integrated into the Ottoman imperial order, often serving as local administrators, military officers, and political intermediaries. The Serb population, meanwhile, found itself caught between the Ottoman and Habsburg empires. During the long series of Ottoman-Habsburg wars, many Serbs aligned themselves with Vienna in the hope of obtaining some form of autonomy or liberation from Ottoman rule.

Later, as the Ottoman Empire weakened during the nineteenth century and the modern Serbian state emerged, significant segments of the Bosnian Muslim political elite often sought protection from external powers in order to preserve their position and security. Depending on the historical moment, these patrons included Vienna, Berlin, and, during the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Washington and Brussels. These are historical realities that deserve serious analysis rather than sentimental embellishment.

But any serious analysis must begin with a basic understanding that historical processes cannot be reduced to selecting the darkest episodes from the past and retroactively inserting them into a theory of predetermined criminal continuity. If we were to read the history of any nation exclusively through its wars, massacres, persecutions, atrocities, and propaganda-driven hatreds, then the entirety of human history would appear as nothing more than an endless chronicle of collective madness and chainsaw massacres.

History is more complicated than that. Nations are not defined solely by the worst things their members have done, just as they are not defined solely by their finest achievements. The task of historical scholarship is to explain how societies change over time, not to construct myths of eternal innocence or eternal guilt. And that is precisely what rhetoric about “age-old enemies” tends to do: it transforms history from a field of inquiry into a reservoir of political ammunition.

This is precisely why it is dangerous to use political vocabulary inherited from the nineteenth century—or, even worse, from much earlier eras—to describe the realities of the twenty-first. Contemporary relations between Serbs and Bosniaks are not unfolding within the framework of some ancient geopolitical struggle. They take place in a world in which Belgrade, Banja Luka, and Sarajevo are all, each in their own way, deeply embedded in the same structures of external political, security, and economic dependence.

The average person in Banja Luka, East Sarajevo, Tuzla, or Zenica does not wake up each morning burdened by the threat of some medieval adversary. He lives under pressure from the same international lending institutions, the same financial obligations, the same development agencies, the same geopolitical agendas, and the same local political castes that derive their power and prosperity from those arrangements.

The greatest tragicomedy of the entire story is that the political elites of Sarajevo, Banja Luka, and Belgrade have spent decades presenting themselves as mortal enemies while simultaneously existing within the same system of dependency. All three centers rely on the same international financial arrangements, the same European integration frameworks, the same security architectures, and the same diplomatic power centers that effectively define the boundaries of acceptable political behavior.

The economies of both Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia occupy a largely peripheral position within the broader European division of labor. They depend heavily on low-cost labor, remittances from emigrants, foreign investment, and borrowing rather than on genuine technological and industrial self-sufficiency. Even when political leaders publicly swear allegiance to supposedly irreconcilable national visions, the governing classes in Sarajevo, Banja Luka, and Belgrade often function in practice as local managers of the same wider political and economic order.

That is why the rhetoric of “age-old enemies” appears so bizarre today. Historically, age-old enemies struggle over sovereignty, territory, strategic resources, and competing systems of power. Yet neither Sarajevo, nor Banja Luka, nor Belgrade exercises full independent control over the most important economic questions, the most important security questions, or, by extension, many of the most important political questions facing their societies. They increasingly resemble tenants arguing endlessly over the pattern of the wallpaper in a rented apartment—while someone else owns the building.

One side manufactures a pathological form of Serbophobia in which Serbs supposedly spent their entire history doing little other than plotting genocide. The other produces an equally pathological Islamophobia in which Bosniaks are imagined as having spent centuries thinking of nothing except how to impale as many infidels—specifically Serbs—as possible.

One camp wakes its people every morning with stories about the so-called Neo-Ottoman “Green Transversal,” a supposedly existential Islamic geopolitical project stretching across the Balkans. Yet upon closer inspection, this terrifying dragon turns out to consist largely of the Bosniak-majority portion of Bosnia and Herzegovina—a territory comprising roughly 23 percent of the country under the Dayton constitutional framework- burdened by catastrophic demographic decline and a population emigrating faster than it can reproduce itself.

The other camp lulls its followers to sleep with tales of an impending Greater Serbian hegemon that is allegedly always on the verge of reappearing. Yet the object of this fear is a state whose political class has spent decades carefully listening to the views of foreign embassies—above all the American embassy—on virtually every major strategic issue, to the point that critics have often accused it of informally accepting realities that previous generations of Serbian politicians would have regarded as unthinkable, including the effective accommodation of Kosovo’s separation from Serbia.

The disaster is always announced in installments, like an endless television soap opera written for a politically immature audience that never quite grasps what is happening. The next catastrophe is always just around the corner. The next betrayal. The next conspiracy. The next historical reckoning. There is always another episode. There is never a conclusion.

Which is why, before invoking the phrase “age-old enemies” once again, it might be worth asking a simple question: if Bosniaks and Serbs truly are each other’s greatest historical adversaries, how is it that both now find themselves subordinate to many of the same centers of power, dependent on many of the same external arbiters, and trapped within the same political circus?

One does not normally describe two passengers sitting in the same carriage as mortal enemies simply because they are arguing over which window offers the better view.

Perhaps the real problem is that the owners of the circus tent disappeared from view long ago, and the audience never even noticed. Their attention has remained fixed on the clowns, who for more than thirty years have been throwing the same rotten tomatoes at one another while presenting each performance as a unique and earth-shattering historical event.

After all, let us consider the future offered by the merchants of “age-old enemies.” Serbs are expected to believe that behind every Bosniak political initiative lurks a conspiracy aimed at their disappearance. Bosniaks are expected to believe that every Serbian political demand conceals yet another blueprint for their destruction. The result is a society in which people read fewer books but become increasingly convinced that they can read one another’s minds; a society in which fewer and fewer citizens understand how economics, state institutions, or international politics actually function, while more and more are certain that they have deciphered the secret centuries-old plans of their neighbors.

It is a perfect world for demagogues, party-controlled media outlets, and political entrepreneurs who profit from fear.

That is why the first prerequisite for any serious Serbian-Bosniak politics of reconciliation is the rejection of idiotic interpretations of history. Not merely because they are offensive, but because they are intellectually impoverished. The history of a people is not a criminal case file in which a permanent culprit is identified once and for all. Nor is it a catalogue of national character defects. It is a complex historical process shaped by competing interests, empires, economic forces, religious traditions, ideological movements, collective fears, and the simple struggle for survival.

Anyone—and this includes a substantial portion of the political elites on all sides—who offers you a simple explanation for five hundred years of Balkan history is almost certainly trying to make a fool of you.

And the Balkans already have more than enough people who earn a living from other people’s gullibility. There is little reason to keep providing them with customers voluntarily.

For if Serbs and Bosniaks collectively were truly what their respective demagogues claim them to be, there would long ago be neither Serbs nor Bosniaks left. They have had more than enough opportunities throughout history to destroy one another—and yet they did not. The reason is simple: dark historical regimes, episodes of violence, and periods of hatred are not permanent features of any people’s history. They are moments within history, not its entirety.

The real historical process has always been far more complex than the propaganda caricatures drawn by political entrepreneurs of fear. Which is precisely why it is time for the politics of both peoples to move beyond the vicious circle of mutual accusations and the endless competition over collective victimhood.

The history of the small nations of the Balkans contains one striking constant. For most of their existence, they have been objects of other powers' geopolitical projects far more often than they have been autonomous subjects of their own history. Empires, great powers, international alliances, and competing ideological blocs have repeatedly shaped the region’s destiny to a far greater extent than the ambitions of the local populations themselves.

For that reason, the fundamental political question of the twenty-first century is not how to prove that the other side is an age-old enemy. The real question is how to develop enough political maturity to resist, together, the mechanisms of dependency, division, and manipulation that have kept both peoples—albeit in different ways—confined for so long to supporting roles in other people’s dramas.

History offers little evidence that Serbs and Bosniaks are eternal enemies. It offers abundant evidence that they have repeatedly been persuaded to see one another that way by those who benefited from the arrangement. The challenge of the present century is whether they can finally learn to recognize the difference.

The Chinese Ministry of Commerce announced on Monday, 22 June, its decision to put 10 US companies on its export control list, following the US government’s “wrongful act” of blacklisting major Chinese firms.

According to the Commerce Ministry, the move aligned with China’s export control law, as well as regulations on the export of dual-use items.

“The measure was taken to safeguard national security and interests and fulfil international obligations such as non-proliferation,” the ministry stated.

Among the 10 US entities on the export ban list, most are related to weapons manufacturing and technology sectors. It includes motor manufacturer Aveox Inc, rare earth mine operator MP Materials Corp, drone manufacturer Teal Drones, robotics firm Jaia Robotics, and others.

The order bars the Chinese companies from exporting any material of Chinese origin to these entities. It also bars companies in third countries from exporting any Chinese material to these entities in the future, apart from halting all ongoing contracts to do so.

In a related order, the Chinese Ministry of Finance barred all government procurement from 46 other US companies, including subsidiaries of weapon manufacturing giants such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Boeing.

Retaliation for US actions

In early June, the US had announced adding around 80 Chinese companies, some of them quite well known and among the largest in their respective sectors, such as the electric car maker BYD, e-commerce giant Alibaba and search engine Baidu, to a blacklist called “entities identified as Chinese military companies operating in the US.”

The US officials alleged that these companies have direct links with China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and pose a threat to national security.

China had objected to the move, calling it discriminatory, and demanded the US end the repeated suppression of its legitimate business interests in the name of national security.

Last week it was reported in the media that the Trump administration had decided to add more than 100 Chinese companies, including the AI startup DeepSeek and memory chip maker CXMT, to its restrictive entity list.

Similar accusations of these companies having collaborations with the Chinese military were cited as reasons.

If a company is put on the entity list, no US entity can sell goods, software, or technology to it without a prior licence to do so. Such licence requests are often denied.

No end in sight to Trump’s trade war

Reuters had reported, however, citing some unnamed US officials, that the Trump administration refrained from putting these 100 companies on the entity list at the last moment, in an attempt to avoid further escalation in the ongoing trade war with China.

Responding to it, Lin Jian, official spokesperson of the Chinese Ministry of External Affairs, reiterated during a regular press conference on Wednesday that “the US should stop politicising, instrumentalising and weaponising trade and tech issues.”

“China consistently opposes the US overstretching the concept of national security, abusing its entities list and other export controls, and suppressing Chinese enterprises,” Lin further added.

Monday’s Chinese retaliation is widely considered symbolic too. Most of the companies in the export ban list or procurement ban list have very little or no business with China, according to an Al Jazeera report.

It is speculated that the Chinese move to avoid stronger measures may be an attempt to avert further escalation and to encourage decisions like the one taken by the Trump administration last week to avoid hostile actions against more Chinese firms.

After assuming power for the second time in January last year, Trump resumed the trade war against China that it had started during his first term. It has imposed arbitrary reciprocal tariffs on Chinese goods and restricted the export of high-technology goods to the country, including crucial chips, along with blacklisting some of its major companies.

In retaliation, China has imposed counter tariffs and restricted the export of rare earth materials which are crucial for the defence, auto, and chipmaking industries.

Two consecutive meetings between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, the first in October in South Korea and the second in May in Beijing, as well as a trade deal signed last year have failed to stop the economic war between the world’s two largest economies.

It is one of the most remarkable ways to fall from grace. Leading British Labour to a deceptively crushing victory over diddling, muddling, decrepit fools. Asserting a period of stable rule, if not exactly dull then at least reliable after several stints of lunacy under the Conservatives gone to the bad. But it was not to be. Sir Keir Starmer, who announced his resignation as Prime Minister on 22 June, turned out to be inept in several ways, not being able to communicate well, not being particularly fluent (fudging “hostages” for “sausages”), an appalling lack of judgment (the appointment of the Epstein-soiled Lord Peter Mandelson to the ambassadorial post in Washington), unable to put together that most yearned for thing—a capturing narrative, a glued unity however specious. Economic growth was the agenda, but where did it go?

What the British voter got, instead, was the July 2024 decision to axe winter fuel payments for 10 million pensioners, which was followed by an about turn in May last year. He retained the policy introduced by the Conservatives in 2017 restricting benefits to the first two children of a family, only to be abandoned in last year’s budget. To target the rise of Reform, he took rhetorical pickings from its leader, Nigel Farage, and promised a mandatory digital ID card to be stored on mobile phones as proof of a person’s right to work in the UK. This policy, too, was abandoned.

In foreign affairs, where he was supposedly at greater ease, Starmer proved sickeningly amenable to Israel’s ruthless campaign in Gaza, explicitly approving the withholding of power and water supplies from Palestinian civilians as means of “self-defence.” The real terrorists, it would seem, were to be found at home, incarnated in the direct action group Palestine Action, which the Starmer government banned, placing it in the same league as ISIS or Boko Haram. He also seemed to feign ignorance about the ongoing International Court of Justice genocide case commenced by South Africa towards the end of 2023 against Israel, or the issuing of arrest warrants by the International Criminal Court against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant.

Starmer came to power in the aftermath of Jeremy Corbyn’s defeat to Boris Johnson in 2019, after which he went about purging his party of the radical influence left by his predecessor. Nothing he did suggested he was anything but an establishment creature, whatever his trumpeted credentials as a progressive lawyer respectful of human rights. Where there was an abuse of power, he was likely to be there to be defending it. Oliver Eagleton’s cutting biography, The Starmer Project (2022), is relentless on this: Starmer combined “intervention abroad with repression at home.” As Director of Public Prosecutions, he pursued the hacker Gary McKinnon (Starmer was enraged when then Home Secretary Theresa May halted the extradition to the United States) and the WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange while sparing, for instance, the police responsible for killing Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell tube station and frustrating efforts to charge Home Office officials liable for the death of migrant Jimmy Mubenga.

Other works on Starmer do little to stir feelings of sympathy for this apparently decent figure. Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire of The Times, for instance, offer the devastating Get In (2025). Starmer, the authors show, became the choice of spear for Morgan McSweeney, the founder of the think tank Labour Together and later Starmer’s Chief of Staff. That particular man of the shadows had a world view characterised by “a certain fanaticism, paranoia and moral certitude.” (The slime of the Mandelson affair was ample enough to make McSweeney fall on his sword.) The purpose of the spear was unambiguous: to target Corbynism on the pretext of combating antisemitism, becoming, effectively, “the great deception.” Paul Holden’s The Fraud (2025) expands on the theme, exposing McSweeney and Labour Together’s use of undeclared donations to the Electoral Commission from hedge fund managers and pro-Israeli figures to discredit Corbyn. Throughout, Starmer’s decency remains well concealed.

The victory of Andy Burnham announced, at least for Starmer, the coming of a slaying spirit. The now former Mayor of Greater Manchester had shown exactly what he thought of his constituency by taking the plunge in the seat of Makerfield, which he won with almost 25,000 votes (55%) to the 15,696 votes for Reform (35% of the share) and 3,111 (7%) votes for the even more rightist Restore. Much is being made of it: Burnham as knight armed against the reactionary forces of Reform and Restore while restoring Labour’s focus. But Burnham is old newspaper wrapping, an echo of the Blair years, one who voted for the Iraq War and against an inquiry into its legality but was sure some two decades later to do some politicking in suggesting regret.

The fall of Starmer is also another reminder about how the political context of popularity and demise has changed. Britain, after Brexit, seems to be in the mood of torching its prime ministers, seeking kindling sooner than a leader can find the necessary bearings. (Seven PMs in a decade is a scorching rate.) That, at least, is the impression the strategists, focus group apparatchiks and party wallahs give us. The social media saturated public are fickle and will turn, sampling the next morsel of misinformation, the next tasty bite of disinformation.

A notable pattern in the aftermath of the by-election was an utter disregard to what might be politely called the factual record. Rumour, gossip, blather and wispy nonsense filtered through the bulletins with wearying force, featuring alleged conversations between Starmer and his wife regarding his future. Starmer loyalists demonstrated their deathless loyalty by telling the press how the man was feeling over a weekend of anguish. The press stable had effectively anointed Burnham in advance of any party vote or decision. Here was an inexorable sense of a position being vacated, its occupant removed, the baton passed on. And not a single British vote was involved in the process. Yet another PM dud. What democracy, and what fine Westminster democracy at that.