Munich, Germany (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) –– The title of Christopher Phillips’ latest book, “Battleground: Ten Conflicts that Explain the New Middle East”, might scare off some potential readers. Here comes another Western man, in the worst tradition of arch-Orientalist Bernard Lewis, writing about the Middle East as a region of “perennial conflict”, beset by “ancient hatreds” and always on the verge of violence, some might think. But they would be wrong. Phillips, a Lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London, presents in “Battleground” a balanced study of the current Middle East. Although the focus is on ten different conflicts, each of them discussed in a different chapter, “Battleground” also has space for societal and economic dynamics that are not necessarily conflictual.

Phillips’ commendable balance has much to do with his commitment to multicausal explanations for conflict, avoiding all-too-common simplistic explanations. Although the chapters are relatively short, he does not sacrifice complexity for the sake of concision. Yes, he would argue, the legacy of Western imperialism and the ongoing intervention of non-regional actors such as the United States or Russia in the Middle East have created much havoc. But so have interventions from Middle Eastern countries into each other’s politics, or the poor performance of domestic political elites, too often focused on self-enrichment. And yes, religious and ethnic identities can be a source of conflict, but they only become truly destructive when instrumentalized by external powers or internal political elites. Frequently, they just take a back seat to economic interests and political ideologies.

As the subtitle of the book suggests, Phillips seeks to explain what he calls “the New Middle East.” Although many of the pre-Arab Spring dynamics have continued to dominate the region, Phillips argues that considerable changes after 2011 justify the notion of a “New Middle East.” Two of these recent developments are Washington’s limited withdrawal from the region, partly due to the US’s growing energy independence, and the increasing importance of non-state actors.

At the same time, the post-2011 Middle East has a broader range of regional powers, and they interact in a larger geographical area, Phillips notes. The Horn of Africa, covered in one of the book’s chapters, is a paradigmatic example of these dynamics. The Horn has seen a struggle for influence between Turkey, Iran, Qatar, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, not to mention extra-regional actors. Phillips writes that “while not being in the Middle East itself, the Horn has become a new arena for competition for that region’s battling powers.”[1]

Phillips’ book does not cover Northern Africa beyond the case of Egypt. If he had done so, detailing the moderate democratic advances in Tunisia before Kais Saied’s coup in 2021, the overall image of the Arab Spring’s legacy would have been somewhat less negative. Still, it is difficult to be optimistic when one sets the hopes in many Arab countries at the beginning of 2011 against the current reality. About Egypt, for instance, Phillips remarks that “Sisi has constructed a far more fearsome police state than Mubarak, arguably more so even that Nasser, making the consequences of rebelling far greater.”[2]

Meanwhile, Muammar Gaddafi was killed by rebels in October 2011, but the institutionally poor country he left behind greatly complicated the prospects of a democratic transition. The long-time dictator “had hollowed out most national institutions and there was no national army or police force to fold them into.”[3] The new interim government could not control or disarm the militias that had fought Gaddafi. Moreover, the exclusion of former regime officials from the new system, however understandable it was considering their complicity in Gaddafi’s terror state, resulted in powerful grievances within a group that retained considerable influence.

Every chapter in the book provides a historical perspective of each of the conflicts as well as an exploration of the most recent developments. When reading the different cases, the seismic changes during the last decades in the configuration of power between the states in the Middle East are certainly striking. Turkey and Iran, despite their profound internal changes, have not lost influence since the height of the Cold War. But Iraq and Egypt are two former regional powers whose sway in the region has steadily declined.

In the case of Iraq, the main reason was Saddam Hussein’s successive invasions of Iran and Kuwait and the decade of sanctions that followed, culminating in the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. The case of Egypt is more complicated. Phillips argues that the country’s internal decline had much to do with Gamal Abdel Nasser’s failed socialist policies, followed by an equally unsuccessful new approach by his successor Anwar Sadat, who liberalized the economy. Be that as it may, what is clear is that Egypt was once “the pre-eminent Arab power in the Middle East” but is now “dependent on neighbors and allies further afield -like the US- for economic support.”[4]

Christopher Phillips, Battleground: 10 Conflicts That Explain the New Middle East. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2024). Click here to buy.

For Egypt, two of these powerful neighbors are Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which together with Qatar have greatly expanded their regional influence during the last decades thanks to their wealth in natural resources. Sisi’s coup in 2013 against the democratically elected government of Mohamed Morsi cannot be understood without considering the economic and political support Sisi received from Riyadh and Abu Dhabi.

A country that showcases the multiplicity of root causes and actors that need to be considered when studying conflict in the Middle East (or for that matter, anywhere else in the world) is Lebanon. With borders that made little historical sense, separating groups that used to live together, Lebanon was established by the victors of the First World War after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

The newly established territory was ruled by France as a mandate of the League of Nations. When independence was declared in 1943, Lebanon emerged as a country with a very diverse population. There are Sunni and Shia Muslims, Alawites, Druze, Orthodox, and Maronite Christians, alongside smaller communities. Lebanon has managed this diversity with a sectarian political system that distributes high offices and parliamentary seats on a confessional basis.

The system, initially established in the 1943 National Pact, underwent some changes in the 1989 Taif Agreement but remained essentially sectarian. Both agreements were negotiated by political elites and later imposed in a top-down approach. The 1989 Taif Agreement, although deeply flawed, presaged the end of the civil war that devastated Lebanon between 1975 and 1990 and killed at least 100,000 people. Israel, Syria, and Palestinian militias heavily intervened in Lebanese politics, while the occupation of southern Lebanon by Israel opened the door to Iran through the creation of Hezbollah.

At the same time, Lebanon has never lacked a fair number of national elites eager to interact with foreign forces for their self-serving purposes. As Phillips puts it succinctly, in the 1990s the national elites transformed themselves “from warlords into businessmen.” The end of the war led to a turbo-charged neoliberalism that multiplied Lebanon’s GDP per capita fourfold between 1990 and 2000 and, once again, between 2000 and 2010.

However, per capita figures obfuscate how broad sectors of society were left behind. A UNDP study from 2017 showed that, in the private sector, the earnings of the top 2 percent were almost as high as those of the bottom 60 percent. While the popular sectors barely benefited from the growth years, the collapse of the banking system starting in 2019 hit them the hardest. The overall poverty rate moved from 30%–35% in 2019 to 85%–90% at the end of 2021.

What does the near future have in store for the Middle East and its ongoing conflicts? The threat posed by the so-called Islamic State has not disappeared, but it is far smaller after they lost their territorial base in Iraq and Syria in 2017. Meanwhile, the rivalries within the Gulf Cooperation Council appear to be relatively contained since January 2021, when the blockade imposed on Qatar by Saudi Arabia and the UAE came to an end. Tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran continue to be high but at least there is a direct communication line between Riyadh and Tehran after the restoration of diplomatic relations in 2023.

The civil war in Libya was halted in 2020 and the conflicts in Yemen and Syria have lost intensity. Still, reductions in the level of open fighting very often do not translate into significant improvements in the lives of the civilian population, and this is what we see in Libya, Yemen, and Syria. And last, but certainly not least, there appears to be no end in sight for the Gaza War. At least 38,193 people have died in Gaza as a result of Israeli military operations following Hamas’ attack against Israel on October 7.

In the long run, however, the ongoing denial of humanitarian aid to the population of Gaza will probably prove even deadlier than the bombs. A study recently published by The Lancet suggests this has already happened. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to have no hurry to conclude the military operations in Gaza and ease the siege on the civilian population. In case Biden had not been pliant enough to Netanyahu’s wishes, the Israeli premier might find an even more receptive ear in the White House after the November election.

[1] Christopher Phillips, Battleground: 10 Conflicts That Explain the New Middle East (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2024), p. 242.

[2]  Ibid., p. 164.

[3] Ibid., p. 47.

[4] Ibid., p. 142.

But the comfortable majority of the center has experienced significant changes. Firstly, it has shrunk by around 20 parliamentarians out of the 720 that make up the parliament. Secondly, it has moved to the right. The Social Democrats experienced limited losses, Renew lost more than a fourth of its members, and the European People’s Party (EPP) won 13 seats. And thirdly, and more importantly, the idea that these three parties represent a solid center that will not reach agreements with the far-right belongs to the past.

On the campaign trail, Ursula von der Leyen, European Commission President and main candidate of the EPP, announced that she would accept the votes of the far-right party Brothers of Italy to be re-elected in her position by the European Parliament, which cannot propose candidates but can turn them down. Brothers of Italy is the party of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

Both von der Leyen and the leader of the EPP, her fellow countryman Manfred Weber, have been engaged in a long-running campaign to portray Meloni as a moderate leader. They have been relatively successful, partly because the EPP’s movement to the right has bridged the gap with the far-right. Before the European elections, the EPP approved a manifesto calling for tripling the staff of Frontex, the European border agency accused of multiple human rights violations. In a proposal that echoes Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda Plan, the EPP also announced it wants to transfer asylum seekers in the EU to so-called “third safe countries”, where their asylum claims would be processed.  

Hans Kundnani, the author of the book “Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project” (a very recommendable work reviewed here for Informed Comment), provides a sharp analysis of this change. As he explains, “to understand the influence of the hard right on the EU, it is necessary to go beyond the raw numbers and to look at the way that it is shaping the agenda of the centre right. There has always been a way that the hard right could win without winning.”[1]

Two main reasons have turned Meloni’s Brothers of Italy into an attractive partner for the center-right, and none of them is related to the party’s supposed moderation. The first is that Brothers of Italy is the strongest political force in Italy, and Meloni’s 24 parliamentarians in Brussels will hold considerable leverage in a context where comfortable majorities will be difficult to assemble.

The second is that Meloni, contrary to other far-right leaders such as the Hungarian Viktor Orbán, subscribes to trans-Atlanticism and the continuation of military support for Ukraine. The recent publication of a video by an undercover journalist in which some leading members of Meloni’s party give fascist salutes should belie Meloni’s moderation, in case the politician’s self-declared admiration for Mussolini in her youth years was not sufficient.  But in an EU that is becoming increasingly militarized, support for NATO turns far-right politicians into moderate conservatives. This helps explain why von der Leyen’s European Commission is delaying the publication of a report on eroding press freedom in Italy.

Von der Leyen might eventually not need Brothers of Italy’s votes to stay as Commission President, especially if she convinces the European Greens to vote for her. But a new damn has been broken in the normalization of the far-right in Europe, and we can expect the EPP to vote more often together with the far-right in the coming parliament. At the same time, the EPP might use the threat of reaching out to the far-right to tone down proposals coming from its left on topics such as combating climate change.

In the European Parliament, the far-right is divided into two groups. The Conservatives and Reformists faction includes Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, the Spanish party Vox, and the Polish Law and Justice, which was voted out of office in 2023 after causing major damage to the rule of law. Meanwhile, the Identity and Democracy faction includes Le Pen’s National Rally or Salvini’s Lega, the other far-right party in Italy’s ruling coalition.

The combination of the two far-right groups has increased its presence in the European Parliament by 23 seats. This figure, however, fails to capture the magnitude of their rise. The far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) finished second in a German-wide election for the first time in history and is sending 15 parliamentarians to Brussels. The AfD won the elections in eastern Germany and received the second most votes in the south of the country.

During the 2019-2024 period, the AfD parliamentarians belonged to the Identity and Democracy group until they were expelled shortly before the European elections. Le Pen had long sought to dissociate herself from the AfD because the German party hurt her efforts to present a supposedly moderated image. The trigger for the AfD’s expulsion was an interview by the AfD main candidate in the European elections, Maximilian Krah, with the newspaper La Repubblica. In the interview, Krah said that not all members of the SS, the Nazi elite group responsible for the concentration camps, could be considered criminals.

One of the biggest winners in the European elections was a party whose leader, Herbert Kickl, made very similar statements about the SS in 2010. Kickl leads the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), for which the European elections represented their first win in an Austria-wide election. They collected 25.4% of the votes, closely followed by the main center-right and center-left parties. Austria will celebrate national elections at the end of September, and the FPÖ is currently leading the polls.

Journalist Paul Lendvai’s recently published book “Austria Behind the Mask: Politics of a Nation since 1945” provides valuable insights to understand Austria’s recent history, and why the far-right might be able to appoint a chancellor in the Alpine country before the end of 2024. The FPÖ, founded in 1956, was first led by Anton Reinthaller and then, until 1978, by Friedrich Peter. They were both former SS officers.

It was under the leadership of Jörg Haider in the 1990s that the FPÖ consolidated its results in successive parliamentary elections over the 20% mark. About Haider, Lendvai writes that he “catered to the shrinking group of old Nazis and the steadily growing group of radical xenophobes.”[2] In the Austrian parliament, for instance, Haider referred to Nazi extermination camps as “punishment camps”. In 1999, the FPÖ finished second in an election to the Austrian parliament for the first (and until now, only) time and entered the government as the junior partner of the center-right Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP). Haider stayed away from government positions to minimize the international anger against the new coalition. This did not prevent the EU from imposing temporary sanctions on Austria.

Such a strong response might have been counter-productive, as it contributed to the FPÖ self-portrayal as political outsiders, argues Lendvai. What is clear is that the irate EU reaction from 2000 was not repeated when the ÖVP and the FPÖ established a new coalition government in 2017. Under the coalition agreement, “the FPÖ succeeded in winning, among other things, such key portfolios as the interior, foreign and defence ministries, control over all secret services and the post of governor of the National Bank.”[3] The coalition collapsed after a corruption scandal was revealed in 2019 involving Heinz-Christian Strache, the FPÖ leader. This notwithstanding, a new coalition between the center-right and the far-right is a very real likelihood after this year’s election, and this time the FPÖ could be in the leading role.

The recent elections to the European Parliament, as well as the Austrian case, show that the far-right is not in a position to reach absolute majorities in proportional representation systems. This might be different in the French parliamentary elections that will start this weekend, where the two-round system in 577 constituencies could facilitate the achievement of a parliamentary majority for Le Pen’s National Rally.

The far-right has been increasingly normalized both discursively and in the coalition politics of center-right European parties. The EU sanctions against Austria in 2000 after the entry of the FPÖ into the Austrian government were perhaps a strategic mistake in the long-term, as Lendvai argues. Still, they were a manifestation of the feeling that an Austrian government including the FPÖ needed to be treated differently, that a red line should be drawn. When Meloni became Prime Minister of Italy in 2022, or when, last month, Geert Wilders’ far-right Party for Freedom (PVV) managed to form a coalition government in the Netherlands, the red line drawn in 2000 was nowhere to be seen.

[1] Hans Kundnani, “Confronting the New Europe.” The New Statesman, June 11, 2024. https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/2024/06/confronting-the-new-europe.

[2] Paul Lendvai, “Austria Behind the Mask: Politics of a Nation since 1945” (London: Hurst & Co., 2023), p. 62.

[3] Ibid., p. 73.

—

Featured image by Marc Martorell Junyent.

The Pegasus Project was a working group of international investigative journalists that incorporated 17 media organizations. The project included publications such as the Belgian Le Soir, the Indian The Wire, and the Mexican Proceso alongside bigger media organizations such as The Guardian, Die Zeit, or The Washington Post. Starting on publication day, the 17 media partners released in a synchronized way their reporting on the use of Pegasus to hack into the mobile phones of human rights defenders, journalists, lawyers, and politicians across the globe.

The Pegasus Project ended up involving around 800 journalists. However, it would never have been possible without an initial, individual decision. The one taken by a source whose identity, to this day, is only known by a very few. The source leaked a list of 50,000 phone numbers that had been targeted for hacking through Pegasus.

Before the Pegasus Project became a reality, there was a core group of only four people. The team consisted of two Amnesty International cybersecurity experts, Claudio Guarneri and Donncha Ó Cearbhaill, and two journalists, Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud, the founder and editor, respectively, of the non-profit media organization Forbidden Stories, based in Paris. It was Forbidden Stories that received the list with 50,000 phone numbers targeted by Pegasus. Richard and Rigaud explain the story of the Pegasus Project in their book “Pegasus: The Secret Technology That Threatens the End of Privacy and Democracy.”

In the beginning, the reporters’ main task was to corroborate, thanks to the technical expertise of Guarneri and Ó Cearbhaill, that the list they had received truly included targeted people. They initially did so by matching some phone numbers in the leaked list with journalists who had collaborated with Forbidden Stories in the past and were on the reporters’ phone contact lists.

Richard and Rigaud reached out to the journalists suspected of having been attacked, asking whether they would agree to have their mobile phones remotely scanned by the Amnesty International cybersecurity experts. Some of them also sent their mobile phones for forensic analysis.

Guarneri and Ó Cearbhaill started to discover signs of attempted or successful infection in the devices. Those who turned out their mobile phones at this early stage, brave people such as the Azerbaijani journalist Khadija Ismayilova, spied on by her own government, were fundamental for the success of the investigation.

The investigative effort had to be carried out in the utmost secrecy. This required obvious measures such as keeping mobile phones away from work-related conversations or continuous scans to guarantee that the mobile phones of those involved in the investigation had not been compromised. But it also implied very complicated equilibria, such as approaching suspected targets and convincing them to hand over their mobile phones while sharing little information about the ongoing journalistic investigation.

Previous personal acquaintances helped create the relationships of trust needed for the targeted people to feel confident enough to depart from their mobile phones and the personal information contained there. Here, the success of Forbidden Stories and the partners it later incorporated was all the more impressive against the background of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which limited international travel and face-to-face interactions.

After consulting with the German journalist Bastian Obermayer, who, together with Frederik Obermaier, had been responsible for the Panama Papers investigation, Richard and Rigaud carefully expanded the circle of people involved in the Pegasus reporting. Forbidden Stories embarked four partner media organizations on the project – Le Monde, Die Zeit, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and The Washington Post.

With this decision, the risk of NSO getting wind of the investigation and introducing changes in its Pegasus attacks – something that would have greatly complicated the work of the Amnesty International forensic team – expanded exponentially. But so did the capacity to establish the names behind the 50,000 phone numbers on the list and gain access to new targeted mobile phones for further analysis. After a period of successful cooperation with these four media organizations, and as the intended publication day approached, the Pegasus Project grew to the final 17 partners.

Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud Pegasus: How a Spy in Your Pocket Threatens the End of Privacy, Dignity, and Democracy. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2024. Click here to buy.

With the help of these partner media organizations, the Amnesty International cybersecurity experts received a constant flow of mobile phones that helped them better understand how Pegasus operated. Guarneri and Ó Cearbhaill progressively developed their own forensic tools to detect Pegasus infections with growing accuracy and detail. In the book, Richard and Rigaud succeed in making understandable the highly complex procedures involved in hacking a mobile phone as well as in detecting these infections.

What the Amnesty International forensic investigation showed was that WhatsApp and SMS messages were two of the easiest and most common avenues to get access to the targeted mobile phones, but not the only ones. The NSO had developed so-called “zero-click” attacks that did not need the targeted person to click on a fake message for the hacking to be successful. Once inside the mobile phone, the attackers using Pegasus had access to any information contained in the device. The mobile phone’s microphone and camera could also be activated to capture everything within their range.

As the investigation would reveal, Pegasus was at the hands of governmental agencies in dictatorships such as the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, or Azerbaijan, as well as illiberal democracies such as Hungary and India. The most proliferous user was Mexico, where Pegasus was deployed against drug traffickers and critical journalists alike. Among the victims of Pegasus were the closest entourage of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018, or the French President Emmanuel Macron, a target of Morocco.

But these famous names were only the tip of the iceberg, with at least hundreds of human rights advocates, journalists, and lawyers being targeted. The Pegasus Project investigation directly contradicted NSO’s long-standing claim that their cyber surveillance star product, Pegasus, was being deployed by trusted governmental agencies only to prosecute criminals and terrorists and guarantee global security. Before the Pegasus Project revelations, NSO had defended that misuse of Pegasus immediately led to the violator agency losing access to it. The magnitude of the Pegasus Project revelations put this lie to rest.

In their book, Richard and Rigaud provide an interesting portrait of Shalev Hulio and Omri Lavie, who, together with Niv Karmi – the “N” in NSO Group – founded the self-styled cybersecurity company in 2010. Niv Karmi would leave NSO only one month after its foundation. In “Pegasus”, Hulio and Lavie emerge as perfect examples of the dangers inherent in letting profit maximization trump any ethical concern.

What the book leaves relatively unexplored are the strong ties between the Israeli government and NSO. As an Israeli company, NSO’s technology exports have to be approved by the Israeli government. This is something common to many other countries with a powerful weapons industry, which similarly have little compunction about selling their technology to serial human rights violators.

But the connections between the Israeli government and NSO go further than this. As Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti from The New York Times documented, “sales of Pegasus played an unseen but critical role in securing the support of Arab nations in Israel’s campaign against Iran and even in negotiating the Abraham Accords.”[1] After the agreement in September 2020, Israel established diplomatic relations with the UAE and Bahrain.

In his acclaimed 2023 book “The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation around the World”, journalist Antony Loewenstein explains how both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank have served as a display room for the effects of Israeli weapons. These weapons are then exported worldwide securing significant revenue and influence for Israel.

Despite the efforts to keep up the appearance of a clear-cut division between the public and the private realms, Israeli cyber-arms firms, as well as traditional weapons companies, “act as an extension of Israel’s foreign policy agenda, supporting its goals and pro-occupation ideology.”[2]

In his book, Lowenstein explains that in 2020 Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman called the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after his defence ministry had decided to suspend the licensing of Pegasus to the Saudi kingdom. Around that time, reports had emerged connecting Pegasus with the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, which shed a bad light on NSO and the Israeli government. Netanyahu, for whom the new Saudi-Israeli geopolitical alignment against Iran weighed more heavily than PR concerns, made sure Saudi Arabia regained access to Pegasus.

Back to Richard and Rigaud, it is no overstatement to say that their book is an incomparable opportunity to understand what serious journalism is about. If this is the case, it is not so much because of the findings the book reveals. These, after all, are accessible through the reporting of the 17 partners in the Pegasus Project and the follow-up stories by hundreds of other media organizations. The genius in “Pegasus” is to be found in the impressive description of an even more impressive process. That is, how a single leak developed into a major-scale international investigation up to the highest journalistic standards, all the while staying below the NSO’s powerful radar.

Right before publication, when the company was approached for comment about the impending revelations, NSO’s PR armor collapsed under the weight and scope of the Pegasus Project findings. Failing to engage with the content of the allegations, NSO threatened defamation lawsuits and attempted a divide-and-rule approach toward the different Pegasus Project partners. This last-ditch effort failed to prevent the 17 media organizations from pressing the publish button when the day arrived.

The revelations by the Pegasus Project had significant consequences, such as the Biden administration’s blacklisting of NSO in November 2021. NSO has kept fighting, though. After the Hamas attack against Israel on October 7, 2023, NSO attempted to have its blacklist status in the US reversed citing the threat of Hamas and the role the Israeli company could play against it. The lobbying efforts did not succeed.

In February 2024, NSO suffered a significant defeat when it was forced to hand its code to WhatsApp as a result of a lawsuit dating back to 2019 over NSO’s hacking using WhatsApp messages. These successes notwithstanding, the lack of a global regulatory framework on the use of cyber-surveillance methods is a strong reason to remain concerned. As Richard and Rigaud themselves note in the epilogue to their book, “NSO might be crippled, but the technology it engineered is not.”[3]

[1] Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti, “The Battle for the World’s Most Powerful Cyberweapon,” The New York Times, January 28, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/28/magazine/nso-group-israel-spyware.html.

[2] Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation around the World (London and New York: Verso, 2023), p. 59.

[3] Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud, Pegasus: The Secret Technology That Threatens the End of Privacy and Democracy (London: Pan Macmillan, 2023), p. 301.

Outside the court, at most twenty people could be counted as being there to support Höcke at some point during the morning. In their conversations, they complained that the procedure against Höcke was politically motivated. This had been Höcke’s message from the very beginning. Meanwhile, around 600 demonstrators had protested against the radical right politician earlier on the morning, before the start of the judicial process. There will be hearings until mid-May, but it is already clear that the most severe punishment for Höcke would be the payment of a fine. 

Höcke, who rivals Donald Trump in his mastery of self-victimization, failed to explain in his initial “X” post why he had to appear before a court in Halle. The AfD politician, who can be openly described as a fascist according to a German court, had to answer for his use, on at least two occasions, of the slogan “Alles für Deutschland” (Everything for Germany). The phrase was employed by the paramilitary National Socialist group SA (“Sturmabteilung”, or Storm Division). Using National Socialist slogans and symbols is a punishable crime in Germany. 

Höcke, a former history teacher, promised he did not know the origins of the slogan. His repeated use of expressions with strong National Socialist connotations, such as “entartet” (degenerate) or “Volkstod” (death of the nation) in public speeches and his 2018 book, belie this claim. Furthermore, the German sociologist Andreas Kemper has long established that there are striking parallels between Höcke’s public statements and different articles that appeared under the pseudonym Landolf Ladig in neo-Nazi publications more than a decade ago. One of these articles argued that Germany had been forced into a “preventive war” in 1939. 

The lack of open support for Höcke in front of the court in Halle was all the more embarrassing because the radical right politician had been given an incredibly powerful loudspeaker by Elon Musk, the billionaire and owner of Twitter/ “X”  since October 2022. Musk reacted to Höcke’s “X” post denouncing what in his eyes was a restriction on freedom of speech and asked him, “What did you say?”. After Höcke explained he had said “Everything for Germany”, Musk asked why the phrase was illegal. “Because every patriot in Germany is defamed as a Nazi, as Germany has legal texts in its criminal code not found in any other democracy,” replied Höcke. He forgot to add that no other democracy is the successor state of a regime that killed 6 million Jewish people and set the European continent on fire, with up to 20 million deaths in six years in Europe alone. 

Al Jazeera English Video: “German far-right politician on trial for alleged use of banned Nazi slogan”

Höcke has made abundantly clear in public statements how he understands Germany’s National Socialist past. He has referred to the monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin as a “monument of shame” and said that history is not black-and-white when asked to comment about Nazism. Elon Musk’s apparent support for Höcke should not come as a surprise given their shared antisemitic and Islamophobic views. The South African businessman has launched antisemitic tropes against Hungarian-American billionaire and philanthropist George Soros. According to Musk, Soros “wants to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity.” The AfD, like so many other far-right movements around the world, has also targeted Soros. Furthermore, Musk recently espoused the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jewish communities push “hatred against Whites.” Musk’s Islamophobia does certainly not lag behind. The “X” owner agreed with a far-right blogger who said France has been conquered by Islam. Again, Musk’s Islamophobia is a perfect fit for the AfD. The party was accurately described as having “a manifestly anti-Muslim program” by an independent commission established after a right-wing terrorist killed nine people, who had originally come as migrants, in Hanau in February 2020. 

Musk and the AfD have supported each other in the past. In September 2023, the billionaire criticized the German government’s funding of NGOs rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean and called people to vote for the AfD. Three months later, the co-leader of the AfD, Alice Weidel, said Musk’s takeover of Twitter was good for “freedom of opinion in Germany.” One of the deputy leaders of the AfD group in the German parliament, Beatrix von Storch, has supported Musk in his ongoing confrontation with the Brazilian Justice Alexandre de Moraes. The judge is demanding that “X” close accounts spreading fake news in Brazil. Since then, Musk has become a hero for the Brazilian far-right backing former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. 

The mutual sympathies between Musk and German-speaking far-right radicals also extend to the Austrian political scene. According to Harald Vilimsky, a member of the European Parliament for the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), Musk’s overtake of Twitter represented an end to censorship. The FPÖ, founded in 1955, has a far longer history than the AfD, established in 2013. Their political programs, however, defend similar far-right positions and both parties are members of the Identity and Democracy Party group in the European Parliament, one of the two far-right groups at the European level.

Meanwhile, in March 2024, Martin Sellner, the leader of the radical right group Identitarian Movement in Austria, was interrupted by the local police while delivering one of his racist speeches in the small Swiss municipality of Tegerfelden, close to Germany. When Sellner posted about the police action against him, Musk replied by asking whether this was legal. Sellner, taking a page from Höcke’s self-victimization, said that “challenging illegal immigration is becoming increasingly riskier than immigrating illegally.” The local police were simply enforcing a legal provision that allows them to force people out of the region if they “behave in a prohibited manner.” Sadly enough, Sellner is used to spreading his racist propaganda with impunity.

Martin Sellner and the Identitarian Movement’s hatred against migrants knows no limits. This transnational group of radicals hired a ship in 2017 to prevent NGOs in the Mediterranean from assisting boats in distress. Once they ran into technical problems, the Identitarians were helped by Sea Eye, a German NGO that normally rescues migrants instead of radical racists. The Identitarians have directly benefited from Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. After Musk bought the company, Sellner’s account on the social platform, and also that of his Identitarian Movement, were reinstated. Twitter had blocked the accounts in 2020 as they violated the rules to prevent the promotion of terrorism and violent extremism that the social platform had in place back then. In his first post after his Twitter account was reinstated, Sellner explicitly thanked Musk for “making the platform more open again.” Sellner was denied entry to the United States in 2019 because he had a $1,700 donation from the right-wing terrorist who killed 51 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, also in 2019. 

In January 2024, the independent German investigative platform Correctiv reported that Sellner had presented his proposals for the deportation of millions of migrants with foreign citizenship and Germans with a migration background in a secret meeting in November 2023. The encounter in Potsdam, organized by two German businessmen, counted with the participation of Roland Hartwig (who at the time was the personal aide of the AfD co-leader Alice Weidel) and Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD parliamentary leader in Saxony-Anhalt. Some members of the “Werteunion” (Values Union), an ultra-conservative group within the center-right CDU, were also in attendance. The findings by Correctiv finally led the CDU to cut its ties to the “Werteunion”. 

The lack of open displays of support for Höcke in Halle last week was comforting. Even more positive were the mass protests against the far-right politician and the AfD in front of the court. However, recent polls in both Germany and Austria are reason for great concern. The AfD would currently receive around 18% of the votes and finish second in an election to the German parliament. Meanwhile, its Austrian counterpart, the FPÖ, would be close to 30% of the national vote and emerge as the strongest party. Austria will vote this autumn, whereas elections in Germany should take place at the end of 2025. 

In both Germany and Austria, as well as in other countries such as the United States and Brazil, the far-right is benefiting from Musk’s support and open-door policy to radicals on “X.” Needless to say, though, Musk is just offering a new platform to very old ideas. The far-right’s threat would hardly be less serious if the billionaire had a sudden political conversion. What to do, then? One of the banners at the demonstration against Höcke in Halle pointed to the holistic approach that will be needed to counter the far-right. The banner read “AfD Stoppen! Juristisch, Politisch, Gesellschaftlich.” In English: “Stopping AfD! Judicially, Politically, Socially.” 

Munich (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – The figure of Mohammad Mosaddeq, Prime Minister of Iran from 1951 to 1953, is an uncomfortable one for both sides of the US-Iran rivalry. For the US, Mosaddeq is a constant reminder that the dictatorial reign of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi after 1953 came into being with a US intervention to overthrow the constitutionally elected Mosaddeq. The US would provide strong support for the Shah in the coming decades. Mosaddeq is someone who challenged Western powers to defend Iranian national interests. This alone should, a priori, afford him a place of honor in the Islamic Republic established by Ruhollah Khomeini after his return from exile in 1979. However, Mosaddeq’s nationalism was grounded on democratic secularist convictions that are at odds with the ideology of the Islamic Republic, which in recent years has shut down its already limited avenues of democratic participation within the system.

In their book “The Struggle for Iran: Oil, Autocracy, and the Cold War, 1951–1954”, David S. Painter and Gregory Brew revisit Mosaddeq’s nationalization of the Iranian oil industry, the ensuing tensions with the US and the UK, and the Western powers’ final decision to remove Mosaddeq. As the title of the book already suggests, the oil dispute was the obvious point of contention but the early 1950s events in Iran would not have unfolded as they did absent the weight of much larger conflicts.

Among them was the desire of many Third World nations to manage their natural resources. In the age of decolonization, newly independent countries found themselves in a paradoxical situation. For the first time, they enjoyed political sovereignty but were tied to their former metropoles by long-term contracts to exploit their natural resources. Iran was never formally colonized. Still, the original oil concession Britain obtained in 1901, with very disadvantageous terms for the Persian state, had much to do with Persia’s internal weakness at the time. This fragility had been exacerbated by imperial competition between Russia and Britain for influence over Persia.

The oil dispute in Iran in the early 1950s took place against the background of an increasingly intense Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union. In a time of strong ideological polarization, there was little place for a leader such as Mohammad Mosaddeq, who followed a policy he called “negative equilibrium” as he did not want to align Iran with either of the two blocs.

Mosaddeq became prime minister in 1951 after the Majles (the Iranian parliament) decided not to ratify the so-called Supplemental Agreement negotiated by the Iranian government and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC). The British company, founded in 1909, had been exploiting Iran’s oil for four decades. The Supplemental Agreement fell short of what most Iranians demanded. The Majles appointed Mosaddeq as prime minister after his proposal to nationalize the Iranian oil industry was unanimously approved by the parliament.

When nationalization was implemented, British leaders became convinced that Mosaddeq would have to go for the oil dispute to be settled in terms favorable to London. In October 1951, after Iranian troops took over the Abadan oil refinery in southern Iran, the last AIOC personnel departed the country. Mossadegh had Iran’s oil infrastructure in his hands but faced the major challenge of keeping the oil industry running without foreign technicians. Finding export markets for the oil products was even more complicated as Britain imposed an oil boycott and sanctions on Iran.

Diverging from the British position at this point, Washington “sought a solution that would restart the oil industry and preserve Iran from communist control while not endangering U.S. interests in the region”, write Painter and Brew.[1] At the same time, the Shah did not dare make a move against Mosaddeq since both his political figure and the cause of nationalization were widely popular in Iran. US officials acted as mediators between Mosaddeq on the one hand, and the AIOC and Britain on the other. There was no common ground to be found, however. Mosaddeq argued that Iranian oil belonged to the country after nationalization. Consequently, he wanted international companies to buy Iranian oil at a price higher than that offered to other developing countries where Western companies controlled the oil industry.

David S. Painter and Gregory Brew, The Struggle for Iran: Oil, Autocracy, and the Cold War, 1951–1954. Click here to buy.

Mosaddeq was open to international companies returning to Iran to help operate the oil infrastructure as long as it was under Iranian control. British diplomats in Tehran sought to destabilize the Mosaddeq government and have it replaced with a new one that would be more amenable to British interests. The crisis escalated in October 1952, when Mosaddeq ordered the British embassy to close and its citizens to leave the country.

By the end of 1952, the US presented to Mosaddeq the so-called ‘package proposal’, which would have recognized Iran’s ownership of the oil industry but still envisaged Iran selling most of its oil to a consortium of international oil companies. The thorniest issue was compensation payments to the AIOC for Iran’s oil nationalization. As the authors note, the US and the UK insisted that “payment could not be limited to physical assets but also had to cover lost future profits.”[2] Mosaddeq rejected the ‘package proposal’. The reason was not that the Iranian prime minister failed to understand the specifics of the oil trade, as it has often been suggested. Rather, Painter and Brew argue, Mosaddeq understood very well the risks of being trapped in continuous compensation payments to AIOC if it agreed to the terms of the deal. Iran would have been in nominal control of its oil industry but, in truth, once again dependent on the British company’s compensation wishes.

Painter and Brew situate the US decision to consider the forceful removal of Mosaddeq around April 1953. With the British forced out of the country, the US operatives in Iran stepped in to mobilize the Iranian clerical and political groups that opposed Mosaddeq as well as the military. Bribes were a common means to achieve the desired result. Although there was no love lost between the Shah and Mosaddeq, the monarch had to be talked into the coup by his Western backers as he feared a failed move against Mosaddeq could backfire. The Shah finally signed two firmans (royal decrees): one dismissing Mosaddeq and the other one appointing General Fazlollah Zahedi as the new prime minister. While street mobilizations headed by bribed local gang leaders took place in Tehran, significant sectors of the army carried out an operation against Mosaddeq on August 16, 1953.

The prime minister had been alerted of the impending coup and loyalist troops defended his residence and the army headquarters. After the failed coup attempt and the Shah’s departure from Iran, the Tudeh Party took to the streets and used the opportunity to call for a republic. The US ambassador to Iran convinced Mosaddeq to order the police and the army to repress the Tudeh protests. As Painter and Brew remark, “ironically, Mosaddeq’s decision to crack down on the Tudeh, which illustrated his anti-communism and his desire for U.S. support, helped seal his fate.”[3] On August 19, 1953, with the streets empty of Tudeh demonstrators, the army moved once again to overthrow Mosaddeq, who was not prepared for a second coup attempt. Soldiers took the ministerial offices and Radio Tehran, while Mosaddeq was finally captured. The former prime minister was later sentenced to three years of prison and would die under house arrest in 1967.

Although the Shah returned from his short exile and General Zahedi was installed as prime minister, the removal of Mosaddeq did not immediately solve the oil dispute. Nationalization was a popular cause in Iran, and Mosaddeq’s forced departure from the scene did not change this. Negotiations dragged on until late 1954 when the Iranian government agreed to pay limited compensations and retain a largely symbolic control of its oil industry. The US sweetened the deal with a military and economic aid package of $120 million.

“The Struggle for Iran” partly draws on documents about the US role in the coup first released in 2017 and is particularly strong in covering the economic dimension of the conflict. Painter and Brew’s work helps debunk some of the most common myths about the coup. Although anti-communism and opposition to nationalization were strongly connected, the authors explain Washington viewed nationalization as the biggest threat. Successful nationalization in Iran could have resulted in other Third World nations following the same path.

Painter and Brew also note that it is unfair to portray Mosaddeq as an irrational and stubborn leader who was unwilling to compromise. Orientalist tropes were rife in contemporary assessments of Mosaddeq by British and American leaders. Mosaddeq was described as “incapable of rational thought”, “dominated by emotions and prejudices,” or a “reckless fanatic”, among many other condescending and offensive remarks.

Painter and Brew argue that the British were never interested in finding a negotiated solution to the conflict and “used talks as a stalling tactic to buy time”[4] for Iran to experience the negative economic impact of Britain’s oil boycott and allow covert actions against Mosaddeq to run their course. In “The Struggle for Iran”, Painter and Brew importantly reflect how the tragedy of the coup was not only that the US and Britain removed a constitutional leader in a foreign country, but also that the intervention “halted the progress Iran had been making toward representative government. Autocracy was the outcome.”[5]

[1] David S. Painter and Gregory Brew, “The Struggle for Iran: Oil, Autocracy, and the Cold War, 1951–1954,” (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2023), p. 64.

[2] Ibid., p. 129.

[3] Ibid., p. 170.

[4] Ibid., p. 208.

[5] Ibid, p. 212.

The court was unanimous in determining that neither Colorado – which had banned Trump from the ballot – nor any other US state is qualified to decide on the eligibility of a presidential candidate. Furthermore, a majority opinion coming from the five conservative judges – three of them nominated by Trump himself – determined that only the US Congress can disqualify an individual from running for office on the grounds of insurrection.

This majority opinion, the three progressive judges in the minority warned, risked closing the door to any possible future US Supreme Court decision to ban an insurrectionist from becoming President. An indictment against Trump for his role in inciting the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, is still possible but the Supreme Court would probably not act on it.

On the other side of the Atlantic, in Germany, media attention is focused on a judicial proceeding taking place in Münster, a city in the West of the country. At the core of the dispute, we find the far-right party “Alternative für Deutschland” (Alternative for Germany or AfD) and the “Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz” (Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution or BfV), a domestic intelligence agency that has no clear counterpart in other European countries.

The agency’s role is to police anti-constitutional extremism. The BfV, however, has often been unable or unwilling to fulfill this vital task. From 2012 to 2018, when the president of the agency was Hans-Georg Maaßen, the AfD – founded in 2013 – grew more powerful and more radical. Maaßen recently founded a right-wing party called “Werteunion” (Values Union) that is willing to reach agreements with the AfD and embraces part of its agenda.

In 2021, the BfV determined that the AfD merited the category of “suspected case of far-right extremism.” The far-right party appealed against the decision and the case has dragged on until now. The hearing in Münster is the second and last appeal. The AfD is likely to lose the appeal, but that would not imply its illegalization. A win for the BfV would bring further rights to investigate and surveil the activities of the party.

Both Trump and the AfD have been following the same legal strategy when forced to appear before the courts: delay, delay, and, if possible, delay even further. CNN reporter Stephen Collinson notes that Trump “appears to want to also forestall jury verdicts until after the general election – likely because polls have suggested some voters would be less keen to vote for him if he is a convicted felon.”

Meanwhile, the AfD wants to prevent for as long as possible a final decision on whether the BfV was right in qualifying the AfD as a “suspected case of far-right extremism.” This could negatively affect its electoral performance. There are elections to the European Parliament in June and regional elections in the three Eastern states of Saxony, Thuringia, and Brandenburg in September. In the European elections, the AfD is polling second with around 20% of the vote, whereas in the three Eastern states, the radical right is polling first with over 30% of the vote.

After the September elections in three of the five eastern states, broad coalitions, or at least tacit alliances from the left to the center-right will be needed to avoid that the far-right reaches its highest level of power in Germany since the end of the Second World War. In this sense, it is very worrying that the leader of the center-right CDU, Friederich Merz, continues to equate the left-wing party “Die Linke” with the AfD, announcing it will reach agreements with neither of these forces. Unless the pre-election polls are wrong by a huge margin, the CDU will soon be forced to pick a side.

By delaying the legal process in Münster, the AfD does not only seek to preserve the pretense that it is just as legitimate as any other German party – if not more, according to their discourse. The far-right party also seeks to prevent the BfV from taking the next step and qualify the whole AfD as “proven right-wing extremist”. The regional AfD groups in the eastern states of Saxony, Thuringia, and Saxony-Anhalt are already classified in this category.

DW News Video: “Why is Germany’s far-right AfD party so successful? | DW News”

The AfD has close ties with openly neo-Nazi groups and some of its leaders, especially in eastern Germany, have adopted a language very often reminiscent of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party. Björn Höcke, the regional leader of the AfD in Thuringia and powerbroker within the national leadership of the party, has used multiple times the expression “Everything for Germany”, the motto of the SA, a paramilitary Nazi group that was key in Hitler’s power takeover in 1933.

Höcke has said that Africans have a biological reproduction strategy different from Europeans or, about Adolf Hitler, that “there is no black and white in history.” The AfD often employs terms such as “Volkstod” (death of the German nation), as well as “Stimmvieh” (voting cattle) for voters of opposing parties.

The AfD has often fantasized about the possibilities of “remigration”, a common term among far-right European groups. The concept refers to the deportation of people with a migration background and has been popularized by Martin Sellner, an Austrian neo-Nazi. The Austrian ideologist is banned from entering the US because he accepted money from – and probably met – Brenton Tarrant, a white supremacist terrorist. In 2019, Tarrant killed 51 people and injured 40 more in his attack against two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. On March 19 it became known that Sellner had been banned from entering Germany.

The concept of “remigration” is not a new one, and Höcke and other members of the most radical current within the AfD have been toying with the idea for years. However, many Germans became aware of how specific the concept of “remigration” has become in recent times when it was revealed that Sellner had presented his racist theses in a secret meeting in Potsdam organized by two businessmen. The meeting was attended by high-ranking AfD cadres – among them Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD leader in Sachsen-Anhalt – and some low-ranking members of the center-right CDU, who were later forced to resign. According to research by the independent investigative platform Correctiv, Sellner proposed that a far-right government in Germany should plan the deportation of asylum seekers, non-Germans with residency rights, and “non-assimilated” German citizens.

The Correctiv revelations triggered a wave of massive demonstrations in Germany against the far-right. They also renewed the discussion on whether a process should be started to ban the AfD. A call for a party ban can be issued by the German government, the parliament, or the Bundesrat, an institution where the different German states are represented. The final decision would always be in the hands of the German Constitutional Court. The process could take years and there would be no guarantee of success. The openly neo-Nazi National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) was deemed too politically irrelevant to be banned when the Constitutional Court decided on the matter in 2017.

There is no consensus between the different German parties on whether an attempt to ban the AfD is the path to follow. The differences of opinion are also found within the parties. Whereas a parliamentarian for the center-right CDU was one of the early proponents of banning the AfD, the leader of the party Frederich Merz is against this. The neoliberal FDP is generally against the ban. Meanwhile, the Social Democrats of Chancellor Olaf Scholz have not taken a clear position, as views diverge on the issue. Within the Greens, banning the AfD would probably find wider acceptance. Every case is different, but the governing coalition in the northwestern state of Bremen, where the Social Democrats lead a government with the Greens and the left-wing “Die Linke”, has asked for an AfD ban.

German society appears to be equally divided on the appropriateness of initiating a process to illegalize the AfD. According to a poll from February 2024, 51 percent of the population was against starting such a process and 37 percent was in favor. The percentages change significantly when citizens are asked whether the AfD should continue to receive public funding as the other parties do. 41 percent are in favor while 48 percent want public funds not to reach the AfD.

On February 23, I attended a counterdemonstration against Martin Sellner, the neo-Nazi who has been pushing for “remigration”, when he visited the city of Chemnitz, in the state of Saxony. The protest was organized by “Chemnitz Nazifrei”, a group that has been mobilizing against the far-right for fourteen years in a city that represents a radical right stronghold.

Before the march against Sellner, I discussed with two activists of the “Chemnitz Nazifrei” movement their views on whether a procedure should be started to ban the AfD. They told me this had been a major issue of discussion within their group in recent times. Although more members of the “Chemnitz Nazifrei” movement are in favor of an AfD ban than against it, there is no clear majority.

One of the strongest arguments in favor of a ban, the activists I interviewed remarked, is the significant consequences this would have for the AfD’s financial situation, which could be forced to reduce its activities. At the same time, they fear that AfD followers could become more violent if a ban was implemented. They did not discard that something similar to the assault on the Capitol in Washington could take place in Germany if the AfD was banned. The open question for the members of “Chemnitz Nazifrei”, as for many others, is: If you ban the AfD, what about the situation afterward? A poll from February 2024 shows that only 43 percent of those who plan to vote for the AfD would be willing to consider voting for another party in the coming years.

It is certainly urgent to discuss whether Trump should be able to run again for president, or whether the AfD should be banned by the Constitutional Court. But the key issue is that broad sectors of both German and US society – a far stronger one in the latter case – have radicalized themselves to the extent that they are ready to use the instruments of democracy to undermine its foundations. This does not mean that every Trump or AfD voter is anti-democratic, and part of these voters can still be convinced to move to less extremist positions. But a considerable percentage of them, and maybe even the majority, have crossed the point of no return.

Democracy is not only destroyed through authoritarian power grabs or military coups but also through free and fair elections. While Germany has known this for a long time due to its historical trajectory, this does not necessarily imply that it is better prepared than other countries. The poor performance of the BfV in protecting the Constitution is proof of this.

While democratic systems offer many opportunities that right-wing radicals can exploit, they are not defenseless and have mechanisms to combat radicalism. If all democratic forces in Germany take the right-wing threat seriously – and here the center-right CDU needs to play a responsible role – and focus on what unites them, the AfD can still be kept away from the main centers of power in the country. It might be too late for the US, where Biden has recovered some ground in the polls in recent months but lags behind Trump in the states that will probably decide the November election. Germany, meanwhile, still has a strong anti-AfD majority but should not be too complacent.

Munich (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Everything is going well in the “Special Relationship” between the US and the UK. After an American chemist dared to suggest that adding salt to the quintessential British cup of tea could represent an improvement, the US embassy stepped in and calmed restless audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. “We cannot stand idly by as such an outrageous proposal threatens the very foundation of our special relationship,” posted the US embassy in London in January 2024. The embassy noted that “the unthinkable notion of adding salt to Britain’s national drink is not official United States policy. And never will be.”

There was never a risk of a diplomatic conflict, of course, because two countries that agree to jointly strike Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen continuously for almost two months are not likely to create a tempest in a teapot. The long-running dynamics in the US-UK relationship that help explain their joint strikes in Yemen, not frivolous discussions on tea, are part of Tom Stevenson’s latest book, “Someone Else’s Empire: British Illusions and American Hegemony”, a collection of articles published by the author over the years for the London Review of Books (LRB).

Stevenson, a contributing editor at the LRB, discusses Yemen in the book concerning the US-UK support for the bombing operations Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have carried out in Yemen for seven years. Stevenson obviously could not have had the US-UK joint strikes against the Houthis in mind when his book went to press at some point in mid-2023. Still, his assertion that, within the British establishment, “nostalgia for global influence has produced a compulsive Atlanticism and a reflexive resort to military actions that the UK is near incapable of actually performing”[1], could also serve as a clever analysis of the most recent events.

Facing its decline as a global power, “the dominant trend of late twentieth-century Britain was not resurgence as an independent power but a new surrogacy” to the US.[2] With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the supposed “end of history”, following Washington’s lead seemed more self-evident than ever. This was the case even if it implied invading Iraq under the false premise that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Tom Stevenson, Someone Else’s Empire:British Illusions and American Hegemony. Click here.

Tony Blair was perfectly content to become George Bush’s junior partner. He was not alone among European leaders in embracing America’s turbocharged bellicosity after the 9/11 attacks. In Spain, for instance, Prime Minister José María Aznar from the center-right Popular Party was only too happy to meet Bush and Blair in the Portuguese Azores archipelago four days before the invasion to support the US-UK alliance. The Spanish press referred to Bush, Blair, and Aznar as “El Trío de las Azores” (The Azores Trio) and Spain sent 2,600 soldiers to Iraq between August 2003 and May 2004. Eleven of them would die there.

The Spanish participation in the Iraq War ended after the Socialist José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who had campaigned on the promise to withdraw the troops from Iraq, defeated Aznar in the national elections of March 14, 2004. The Iraq War was key in Zapatero’s victory. It will soon be exactly two decades since March 11, 2004, when Madrid suffered a series of terrorist attacks in commuter trains that killed 193 people.

Aznar’s government blamed the Basque separatist group ETA for the attacks despite knowing early on that everything pointed at al-Qaeda. The terrorist group had attacked Spain due to its involvement in the Iraq War. When the truth was eventually revealed right before election day, Zapatero’s Socialist party won a surprise victory. In an interview three years ago, Aznar continued to defend that his decision to join the conflict in Iraq “represented Spain’s most important role in many decades.”

In the early 2000s, the UK was not the only country with a vanished empire overplaying its relevance at the international level by seeking to stay close to the US. Whereas Spain soon shifted course, the UK has tied its future even closer to the US after Brexit, notes Stevenson. One of the examples the author provides is the trend in British weapons acquisitions. During the last twenty years, the UK has almost uninterruptedly procured more than 50% of its weapons imports from the US. However, this has recently only intensified. The data offered by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) shows that in the period from 2020 to 2022, the last year for which data is available, weapons imports from the US represented 95% of British total expenditure on weapons produced abroad.

One of Stevenson’s main arguments regarding the US-UK relationship is that London has often been conducting a foreign and defense policy that makes little sense in terms of promoting British national interests. For instance, Stevenson points to Britain’s commitment to deploy patrol vessels and a frigate in the Indo-Pacific area with the vague objective of “projecting power.” This is the kind of investment London has often committed to despite it more likely benefiting the US than the UK, if at all.

In this sense, the case of the US-UK joint strikes against the Houthis is exceptional. If we accept, for the sake of the argument, that US-UK attacks against Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen are the most effective way to ensure freedom of navigation in the Red Sea, then it would be the UK that would profit more from this. The economic interests of the US are hardly directly affected by the attacks on ships in the Red Sea, whereas the Suez Channel is a key trade artery for cargo either coming from or going to Europe.

Some exceptions notwithstanding, there is a clear general dynamic of British subordination to Washington. As Stevenson argues, this can also be observed in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance that comprises the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Whereas the US National Security Agency (NSA) automatically receives the feed from intelligence stations in other countries, the NSA “sometimes withholds what it knows.”[3]

Stevenson discusses the changing character of war from the perspective of the US and the UK. The author is deeply knowledgeable of varied topics such as the overuse of economic sanctions by Western countries, the details of nuclear competition, or the militarization of space, with satellites and space missions becoming increasingly important.

But Stevenson often pushes too far the book’s generally convincing main argument, that Britain has become subservient to American power. For instance, he writes that “one must wonder whether Britain retains an independent foreign policy at all itself.”[4] “Someone Else’s Empire” also tends to overplay the influence of Washington, and by implication London, in the Middle East. Writing about the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, Stevenson argues that “since the West installed the monarchs, and its behavior is essentially extractive, I see no reason to avoid describing the continued Anglo-American domination of the Gulf as colonial.”[5]

It is difficult to see how a colonial power would not have replaced Crown Prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Salman following his implication in the murder of the Saudi journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul. Bin Salman’s role in the assassination of Khashoggi was a huge embarrassment for his Western supporters. Neither would a colonial power have allowed Saudi Arabia and the UAE to impose a blockade on Qatar, a Western ally, between 2017 and 2021.

Stevenson is sometimes hyperbolic about US power. Still, it is true that, for all talk of American decline, “the shadow of American power still casts over the rest of the world is unmistakable.”[6] The UK has been enveloped by this shadow while also contributing to making it larger. From Iraq to Yemen and, once the controversy around Britain’s national drink has been happily resolved, over a cup of tea.

[1] Tom Stevenson, “Someone Else’s Empire: British Illusions and American Hegemony” (London: Verso, 2023), p. 4.

[2] Ibid., p. 15.

[3] Ibid., p. 55.

[4] Ibid., p. 234.

[5] Ibid., p. 160.

[6] Ibid., p. 232.

Munich (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – At the end of 2019, there was no shortage of articles looking retrospectively at the events that had shaped the decade of the 2010s. One of them was aptly titled “A decade of revolt.” From Tunis to New York, Madrid, Hong Kong, Tehran, or Khartoum, the past decade was marked by protests, demonstrations, and uprisings. If the notion that history is an almost continuous march towards the progress of human kind (a popular view among Western intellectuals in the 1990s such as Francis Fukuyama) still had some currency, the last decade should have put this idea to rest.

That is because, in hindsight, it is difficult to be optimistic about the results of this decade of revolt. This is a feeling shared by many and examined in the book “If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution.” The author, Vincent Bevins, is a US journalist who was highly praised for his previous book, “The Jakarta Method”, which discusses the US support for human rights abuses during the Cold War in the name of anti-Communism.

The question at the core of Bevins’ second book, “If We Burn”, is a very straightforward one: “How is it possible that so many mass protests led to the opposite of what they asked for?”[1] With the temporal focus set on the 2010s, but having a global geographical scope, Bevins conducted around 200 interviews in twelve different countries with activists, politicians, and other people with key insights on this decade of mass protests.

“If We Burn” discusses many different cases of protests during the last decade, but special attention is paid to Egypt, Hong Kong, Chile, and, above all, Brazil. This is no coincidence because, from 2010 to 2016, Bevins worked as a foreign correspondent based in São Paulo for the Los Angeles Times. The chapters on Brazil are a pleasure to read, but the strong focus on the country is somewhat disproportionate when considering that the book is presented as a work of global history. An alternative approach would have been to focus on a smaller number of cases, perhaps narrowing it down to a few Global South countries.

Bevins appears a bit uncomfortable when moving away from the countries he knows best. For instance, when he refers to the protests in Istanbul’s Taksim Square in 2013, Bevins writes that after coming to power in 2003, Turkey’s ruling party AKP embraced “more conservative Muslims and small business owners (as long as they were ethnic Turks).”[2] This is actually not the case, as the AKP has historically outperformed the main opposition party CHP – which has a much stronger Turkish nationalist discourse – in the Kurdish areas of Turkey.

Notwithstanding this inaccuracy, and the fact that the geographical scope of the book often works against the final result, there is much to be praised in “If We Burn.” A key success of the book is that Bevins strikes the perfect balance between critically examining what protests achieved in terms of tangible results and remaining deeply respectful of the protesters and their sacrifices. Tunisian President Kais Saied might have entrenched himself in power after 2021 and established a dictatorship similar to the one headed by Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, brought down by mass demonstrations in 2011. But this does not take anything away from the personal stories of people like Jawaher Channa, a university student who joined the protests against Ben Ali in December 2010. Jawaher explains to Bevins how she was tortured for her political activity in a Tunisian police station before the regime collapsed.

Bevins’ reporting allows us to see how relatively unknown people shaped and were shaped by this decade of protests. Take the example of Mayara Vivian, who was a teenager when in 2005 she joined the Movimento Passe Livre (MPL) that demanded free transportation in Brazil. In 2013, Fernando Haddad, the mayor of São Paulo from the center-left Workers’ Party, announced a rise in the price of public urban transportation. Mayara and her colleagues at MPL mobilized the streets against Haddad’s decision, forcing the mayor to cancel the price increase. Mayara and other members of the MPL were even granted a meeting with then-Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, also from the Workers’ Party, who was trying to understand the growing discontentment with her government.

Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. Click here.

The likes of Mayara would soon be replaced in the streets by right and far-right-wing groups. These protesters, in conjunction with sympathetic judges like Sergio Moro and media conglomerates like Grupo Globo, pushed for Rousseff’s impeachment on flimsy charges. Rousseff was ousted in 2016. Two years later,  Fernando Haddad, the Workers’ Party candidate, was defeated in the presidential election by far-right and Brazilian dictatorship apologist Jair Bolsonaro. Mayara, then living in Santiago de Chile, wept while lamenting the election loss of the man she had opposed in the streets, explains Bevins.

Mayara soon joined the protests against the conservative Chilean President Sebastián Piñera, who was forced to accept the election of a constitutional assembly to reform the constitution inherited from the Pinochet dictatorship. After two referendums, Chile still does not have a new constitution. What is has, though, is Gabriel Boric as president, someone who became famous in the student protests of the early 2010s. Boric represents like no other the difficult relationship between activism and institutional politics, which is often manifested in the tensions between protesters who want to use their leverage to gain political concessions and those who prefer to keep pushing for maximalist objectives. A congressman since 2014, Boric was seen as a traitor by many protestors when he agreed to a constitutional referendum as a way to resolve the conflict with the Piñera government in 2019. After he was elected president of Chile in 2022, many of those who perceived Boric as too compromising in 2019 saw his decision in a more positive light, observes Bevins.

A key topic covered in “If We Burn” is the importance of traditional and social media in defining the protests of the last decade. Their relevance was accentuated by the fact that these were mostly de-centralized protest movements with no clear spokespersons. The protesters who had the opportunity to present their views to the traditional media were not necessarily those who put their bodies on the line when it mattered or were more representative of the whole movement. Instead, those who were interviewed were usually the more Western-media friendly. Writing about the protests in Egypt that led to the fall of dictator Hosni Mubarak in 2011, Bevins graphically explains that despite how bravely street youth had fought against the police, Western journalists “were not likely to grab a teenager who lived on the street, addicted to drugs.”[3] Equally relevant was managing the narrative in social media platforms. In the case of the Occupy Wall Street movement, open fights emerged over who controlled the movement’s social media accounts.

“If We Burn” does not provide any conclusive answer on why so many protest movements failed to achieve their objectives during the 2010s, and this only makes the book better. Anyone claiming to have a perfect explanation for such a complex puzzle should be approached with caution. Still, Bevins presents reflections that help us make sense of what he calls ‘the mass protest decade.’ One of them is that horizontally structured, leaderless mass protests are “fundamentally illegible.”[4] As Bevins sees it, “movements that cannot speak for themselves will be spoken for”, with the ensuing danger that the protesters’ goals will be misrepresented. [5]

Strongly connected to this idea is the fact that successful protests will lead to a momentary political vacuum. Influenced by the experience of Brazil, where reactionary forces took the streets against Rousseff using some of the protest repertoire of the MPL movement advocating for free public transportation, Bevins notes that “unclaimed political power exerts an irresistible gravitational pull on anyone who might want it.”[6] Therefore, he argues, a protest movement that believes in creating a better society needs to be ready to enter the political vacuum that will emerge if successful.

In the absence of a plan, someone else will step in, most likely with a very different agenda but equally relying on the power of street mobilizations. The greatest merit of Bevins’ latest book is that it leaves a deep imprint on the reader and will serve as a prompt for many fruitful discussions. We cannot know which kind of retrospective articles will be published by the end of 2029. Still, it is reasonable to assume that protests in the 2020s are likely to play at least as important a role as they did in the previous decade.

[1] Vincent Bevins, “If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution” (New York: PublicAffairs, 2023), p. 3.

[2] Ibid., pp. 108-109.

[3] Ibid., p. 68.

[4] Ibid., p. 276.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., p. 263.

Barcelona (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – The war in Ukraine is being fought at two different levels. The first one is the military confrontation, where developments are measured in numbers of casualties, kill ratios, and square kilometers changing hands from one belligerent to the other. The second level of the conflict is economic, and here the key aspects are GDP growth, the value of foreign assets seized or companies under sanctions, and the prices of gas and oil. Needless to say, both levels are deeply interconnected. However, for the purpose of this review, it might be useful to look at them separately at first.

The military situation in Ukraine can be best described as one of stalemate when looking at the conflict maps. Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, General Valery Zaluzhny, admitted as much on November 2023, when he said that “there will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough.” During 2023, the frontline barely moved and, on the few occasions it did, the changes came at the cost of enormous human losses. The battle of Bakhmut, which continues around the city after Bakhmut itself was taken by Russian troops following almost seven months of fighting, is paradigmatic of these dynamics.

If the war is slightly tilting in any direction, the current situation would suggest it is in Russia’s favor. Some analysts point out that, while the conflict maps show stability, Ukraine might be slowly exhausting its limited supplies of soldiers, weapons, and ammunition. The recent struggles in both Washington and Brussels to approve supplies for the Ukrainian armed forces lend further credibility to this thesis.

On the economic front of the war, which has pitted Russia against Ukraine and its Western supporters, it is similarly difficult to reach any definitive conclusion on who is coming out on top. What is clear is that neither the West nor Russia achieved their maximalist goals in the economic struggle. Russia did not financially collapse in the face of incremental Western sanctions and Europe had less trouble than expected to surmount last winter’s energy crisis despite Moscow’s resort to cutting gas supplies.

This economic dimension of the war, which in recently published books has received less attention than the military and political dynamics of the conflict, sits at the core of “Economic War: Ukraine and the Global Conflict between Russia and the West”, authored by political risk analyst and consultant Maximilian Hess. Hess does not look for winners or losers in the current economic war but provides a broad context to understand what is at stake on the economic front. Hess devotes half of his book to the prelude of the current military and economic war, covering the period that followed Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the establishment of two Russia-supported separatist republics in the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.

Maximilian Hess, Economic War: Ukraine and the Global Conflict between Russia and the West. London: Hurst, 2023. Click Here.

After the pro-Russian Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych was toppled in the context of the Euromaidan protests in 2014, his successor Petro Poroshenko took a more pro-European course. Changes in geopolitical orientation notwithstanding, corruption continued to be rife. As Hess notes, “the revolution and subsequent conflict recast the networks of Ukraine’s politicians and oligarchs” but “failed to break the system that enabled them to rotate in and out of business and politics.”[1] Meanwhile, the Obama administration imposed sanctions on Russia for its expansionist behavior but Western European countries limited their extent. In 2017, the Trump administration would also tone down US sanctions.

Germany, with its heavy reliance on cheap Russian gas for industries and households, was the main European proponent of retaining economic ties with Russia after the annexation of Crimea. Hess is very critical of Germany’s political leaders during that period. He argues that Berlin pursued economic interdependence but failed to realize “Putin did not oversee a democracy or have to answer to economic pressures from his own business community” after Putin disciplined unruly oligarchs.[2] With the benefit of hindsight, it is obvious that Europe’s energy dependency on Russia was an enormous mistake.

Even so, countries like Germany were probably not betting so much on the liberal ideal of trade driving cooperation in the political realm but rather on the high loss of revenue Russia would suffer if it stopped selling gas to Europe. After all, the Soviet Union had been a reliable provider of gas to West Germany during the Cold War. Back in 2019, German economist Michael Wohlgemuth argued that Moscow was more dependent on its gas exports to Germany than Germany was on Russian deliveries. This certainly did not stop Putin from attacking Ukraine, but the numbers supported Wohlgemuth’s analysis. In 2021, Russia exported 203 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas via pipeline. Among these exports, almost 146 billion cubic meters (bcm) were going to EU customers and around half of this volume, to Germany.

Hess explains that, although the sanctions imposed on Russia in the wake of the annexation of Crimea had very limited effects, the Kremlin’s reaction to them “asserted firmer control over Russia’s economy and increasingly sought to undermine the West’s influence both at home and abroad.”[3] As part of these efforts to increase its global geoeconomic power, Russia looked to Latin America (especially Venezuela), Africa and Asia.

But the most important partnership was arguably the one established with Saudi Arabia, the only oil exporter bigger than Russia. Riyadh and Moscow had engaged in an oil price war during the oil glut at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, by 2022 Putin had secured an alliance with the Saudi leader Mohammad bin Salman to reduce oil production and ensure higher and more stable oil prices. Thus, Putin felt that Russia’s energy flank “was secure ahead of the all-out economic war that would ensue when its forces attacked”, explains Hess.[4] Russia’s total gas exports fell around 50 percent in 2022, and a further 25 percent in 2023. Although gas prices in 2022 reached historical heights and helped Russia offset the effects of the loss in export volume, in 2023 the prices returned to levels similar to those in 2019 or 2020. It has been oil, not gas, that has sustained Russia throughout the war.

Since the invasion of Ukraine, Moscow has often been selling its oil at a discount price. The reasons behind this are the limited number of countries willing to buy Russian oil and the oil price cap imposed by the G-7 and the European Union. The oil price cap prohibits G-7 or EU-based finance companies from providing services to Russian oil companies selling their oil above $60 a barrel. Still, China and India, the latter moving in 2022 from barely buying Russian oil to being the second largest importer after Beijing, have kept Russia’s oil exports afloat.   

Hess identifies some key weaknesses in Russia’s position in the economic war against the West. Moscow underestimated the willingness of the EU to stop buying Russian oil and introduce major reductions in its gas imports. Also important, Russia has suffered greatly from the power of the dollar, which allows US sanctions to have a much greater impact than the US share of the global economy would allow. Too often missing in Hess’ “Economic War”, however, is the fact that the West’s economic war against Russia is not supposed to be an end in itself but a means to achieve political results, which so far have been lacking.

A political success would arguably mean either a significant weakening of Russia’s war effort or forcing Moscow to negotiate an end to the war on favorable terms for Ukraine. In one example among many, President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen announced in December 2022, when the oil price cap on Russia was introduced, that “the decision will hit Russia’s revenues even harder and reduce its ability to wage war in Ukraine.”

Hess fails to engage with literature that adopts a critical approach towards the effectiveness of sanctions. To understand why sanctions on Russia have had only modest effects on the country’s war capabilities, it useful to search elsewhere. Nicholas Mulder, the author of “The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War”, explained in an op-ed that “both the deterrent and the compellent effect of US sanctions have fallen dramatically amid rampant overuse.” Writing about the current sanctions against Russia, Mulder has noted that “the lure of cheap raw materials from Russia is spurring sanctions avoidance on a previously unseen scale.”

The use of economic sanctions in modern times, from post-revolutionary Cuba to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, has consistently impoverished civilian populations but has a poor record in forcing policy changes. Sanctions, as seen in the case of Iran, have also incentivized circumvention tools that are certainly suboptimal but keep sanctioned regimes going, especially when the state has a reliable coercive apparatus to deal with protests over decreasing living standards. Sanctioned states also tend to cooperate with each other. Iran, with a long experience in dealing with sanctions, has provided drones and drone components to Russia for its use against Ukraine.

Hess concludes his book by noting that “Russia cannot win the economic war with the tools at its disposal. The West, however, could still lose it.”[5] The important question, nonetheless, is whether Russia needs to win the economic war to achieve military successes in Ukraine, or, at least, to prevent Ukraine from recovering territory. Everything seems to indicate that not losing the economic war is more than enough for Russia to fulfill limited military objectives and could even be sufficient to make major advances if external material support for Ukraine decreases. Soon before the EU passed the 12^th package of sanctions against Russia in December 2023, the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) published a report on the effects of the oil price cap on Russia. The report noted that “the impact of the price cap has been limited due to inadequate monitoring and enforcement.” It added that “the sanctions have not reduced the Kremlin’s resolve for war.”

Hess’ “Economic War” offers the lay reader an accessible but detailed account of the economic war between Russia and the West. The book is particularly valuable for its long-time approach, which allows Hess to carefully explore connections between the post-2014 and post-2022 contexts. “Economic War”, however, would have benefited from a stronger focus on the close relation between the economic war and the political/military war and a more skeptical approach to the power of sanctions to alter state behavior.

[1] Maximilian Hess, Economic War: Ukraine and the Global Conflict between Russia and the West (London: Hurst & Co., 2023), p. 20.

[2] Ibid., p. 62.

[3] Ibid., p. 2.

[4] Ibid., p. 127.

[5] Ibid., p. 201.