Editor: What is not supplied to the reader is an actual redable transcript of this conversation, that might lead the reader to look upon this conversation, as an exercise in political propaganda!
Neo-Con Zanny Minton Beddoes and her cadre of men explore such questions: ‘After 46 years of theocracy and a brief but bruising war, where does power now lie? What are the regime’s nuclear ambitions? And with the prospects of a succession crisis, has Iran been permanently weakened—or is it storing up trouble?’
This Reader observes that there is no actual trascript, with which to follow the arguments as each of Beddoes employees, as they make their argumanments/ contrbutions?
Episode summary
Nicolas Pelham, our Middle East correspondent, and Adam Roberts, our digital editor, are just back from a rare reporting trip to Tehran. They join our top editors in the studio to discuss what they learnt from an interview with Iran’s foreign minister and consider the future of the Islamic Republic. After 46 years of theocracy and a brief but bruising war, where does power now lie? What are the regime’s nuclear ambitions? And with the prospects of a succession crisis, has Iran been permanently weakened—or is it storing up trouble?
StephenKMackSD.
Just to establish my credentials a long time reader of The Economist, I hold in my hand a Book Review of A.W. Alschuler’s ‘Law Without Values: The Life ,Work, And Legacy Of Justice Holmes’ from page 86 dated Febuary 24, 2001.
Editor: Since his ascedancy via his‘The Collapse of the Dream Palaces’David Brooks has self- presented as a Public Moralist, while acting an apologist/advocate via his wan protagonist Joey Tabal Rasa, as the central actor of his advoacacy for the The Iraq War. Note Mr. Brooks total disdaine of the questions raised by Jeffrey Epstein, and his political/social/mobility within the the Elites, of a not too distant past! Here Brooks acts a later day Cotton Mather, on his Pulpit in The New York Times.
Never before have I been so uncertain about the future. Think of all the giant issues that confront us: artificial intelligence, potential financial bubbles, the decline of democracy, the rise of global authoritarianism, the collapse of reading scores and general literacy, China’s sudden scientific and technological dominance, Russian advances in Ukraine. … I could go on and on. So what has America’s political class decided to obsess about over the last several months?
Jeffrey Epstein.
This is a guy who has been dead for six years and who last was in touch with Donald Trump 21 years ago, Trump has said.
Why is Epstein the top issue in American life right now? Well, in an age in which more and more people get their news from short videos, if you’re in politics, the media or online, it pays to focus on topics that are salacious, are easy to understand and allow you to offer self-confident opinions with no actual knowledge.
But the most important reason the Epstein story tops our national agenda is that the QAnon mentality has taken over America. The QAnon mentality is based on the assumption that the American elite is totally evil and that American institutions are totally corrupt. If there is a pizzeria on Connecticut Avenue in Northwest, D.C., it must be because Hillary Clinton is running a child abuse sex ring in the basement.
The Epstein case is precious to the QAnon types because here, in fact, was a part of the American elite that really was running a sex abuse ring. So, of course, they leap to the conclusion that Epstein was a typical member of the American establishment, not an outlier. It’s grooming and sex trafficking all the way down. (A previous generation of John Birch Society conspiracists were not content to claim Alger Hiss was a communist spy, which he was. They also had to insist that President Dwight Eisenhower was a paid Soviet agent.)
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Editor: The final paragraphs of Brook’s diatribe are utterly indicative of his relation to Cotton Mather! As not just scolding, but of defamation about ‘the other’ as not just undesirerable, but that must be eliminated with urgency: though Brooks does not place Women as the carriers of the toxin! Reader the prevaling tone of Brooks’ essay reeks of a Pulpit of another time and place !
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These are genuine challenges. If I were a Democratic politician, I might try telling the truth, which in my version would go something like this: The elites didn’t betray you, but they did ignore you. They didn’t mean to harm you. But they didn’t see you in the 1970s as deindustrialization took your jobs; in the ensuing decades as your families and communities broke apart; during all those decades when high immigration levels made you feel like a stranger in your own land.
But over the last decade you have made yourself seen. Now the question is: Who is actually going to work with you on your problems? Which party is actually going to help you improve your health outcomes or your kids’ educational outcomes? Which party is actually going to help you achieve the American dream? Will Trump’s war on scientific research or any of the other stuff he’s doing actually do anything to help American workers?
If I were a Democratic politician (this role-playing is kind of fun) I’d add that America can’t get itself back on track if the culture is awash in distrust, cynicism, catastrophizing lies and conspiracymongering. No governing majority will ever form if we’re locked in a permanent class war.
I’d try to recognize that no political moment is forever. Right now, the dark passions are ascendant. But after one cultural moment, voters tend to hunger for its opposite, which in this case means leaders who project integrity, unity, honesty and hope.
The smart play, I’d say, is to rebut conspiracymongering, not abet it. When the giant issues like A.I. and Chinese dominance come crashing down on us, we will look back on the Epstein moment and ask: “What the hell were we thinking?”
Here is the concluding paragraph of Mr. Bromwich’s wan, almost apology, for Mrs. Clinton, he seems torn. Trump is such an easy target, he is always the Ringmaster of television fame. But Bromwich is a writer of the school of Murray Kempton, who married his talent as a political moralist, with a writing style that sometimes was hard to decipher, as to meaning, although it resembled a kind of poetry, at least to my younger self. Bromwich is easier to understand, his is a self-consciously literary style: sometimes arresting, at other times expressing superfluous garnish. But he seems to descend, in this last paragraph, into the demotic, that is surprising for such a practiced stylist.
The domestic state of the nation is so unpropitious in October 2016 that one may pity the winner of this election as much as the loser. We are living in a country under recurrent siege by the actions of crowds. There is the Tea Party crowd with their belief that global climate disruption is a scientific hoax; there is the Black Lives Matter crowd with their ambiguous slogan “No Justice, No Peace”; and there are more ominous developments, such as the acts of serial defiance of the federal government by the Bundy family in Nevada and Oregon. Whoever comes next will have the task of restoring respect for the law and a common adherence to the Constitution—the heaviest of burdens, even for a candidate prepared by training and disposition to carry it.
Post-election, the liberal argument veered away from Trump and turned to the important question of whom to blame. The initial target was the director of the FBI, James Comey, who in July had refused to indict Mrs Clinton, but criticised her use of an insecure email server while she was secretary of state. A few days before the election, Comey gave notice of another possible violation only to clear her again. A more popular and reliable target was Vladimir Putin, the preferred ‘enemy on the horizon’ for neoconservatives, adepts of humanitarian war and the national security state as far back as the Sochi Olympics. It is possible that Trump’s defiance of this multifarious establishment actually helped his popularity with non-political voters. Damage more telling than any emanation from the FBI or Russia probably came from Hillary Clinton’s remark that half of Trump’s supporters were ‘a basket of deplorables’ – an unforced error that was rightly read as an expression of contempt, addressed to her audience at the LGBT for Hillary Gala held at Cipriani Wall Street, and overheard by undecided voters in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
Mr. Bromwich style is very readable in this instance, I don’t know that Bromwich has modeled his style on that of Murray Kempton, but it sometimes reads if it were. The essay seems quite straight forward, except that the shifting roles of hero and villain in The American Political Melodrama begins to fatigue the reader. Although the claim of Hillary Clinton as ‘victim’ is one of the comic aspects of this debacle.
We are supposed to take the word of Edward Snowden that Comey deserves our support. Quite frankly I admire Mr. Snowden, but he did not live through the Dark Age of J.Edgar Hoover! A closeted paranoid hysteric who had unquestioned power from 1935 to 1972. The FBI is his creation, and its culture of political oppression allied to its claim to be self-righteous upholders of The Law. It even qualified for a long running television show, that was Hollywood’s contribution to the FBI Myth.
The FBI over its history has shown itself to be criminally incompetent and utterly mendacious: its targeting of dissidents, and ‘fellow travelers’ of the McCarthy/Nixon era, the JFK assassination, the Black Panthers in the 60’s , the notorious letter to Martin Luther King, and its ‘Crime Lab‘ this is jut to name a few of the FBI’s many crimes!:
Forty years ago, Bob Dylan reacted to the conviction of an innocent man by singing that he couldn’t help but feel ashamed “to live in a land where justice is a game.” Over the ensuing decades, the criminal-justice system has improved in many significant ways. But shame is still an appropriate response to it, as the Washington Post made clear Saturday in an article that begins with a punch to the gut: “Nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000,” the newspaper reported, adding that “the cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death.”
The article notes that the admissions from the FBI and Department of Justice “confirm long-suspected problems with subjective, pattern-based forensic techniques—like hair and bite-mark comparisons—that have contributed to wrongful convictions in more than one-quarter of 329 DNA-exoneration cases since 1989.
This history of the FBI is utterly relevant to the construction of Comey as Hero. How can one be that hero, if one heads an institution so riddled with corruption , not to speak of covered with lies and an impasto of Public Relations. The rise of The American National Security State asphyxiated the the Republic, and the FBI one of the nascent institutional strongholds of autocracy in the person of J. Edgar Hoover, now succeeded by Comey’s replacement. Aided by Trump’s jurisprudential catamite Rod Rosenstein.
Mr. Bromwich’s style is very readable in this instance, I don’t know that Bromwich has modeled his style on that of Murray Kempton, but it sometimes reads as if it were. The essay seems quite straight forward, except that the shifting roles of hero and villain in The American Political Melodrama begins to fatigue the reader. Although the claim of Hillary Clinton as ‘victim’ is one of the comic aspects of this debacle.
We are supposed to take the word of Edward Snowden that Comey deserves our support. Quite frankly I admire Mr. Snowden, but he did not live through the Dark Age of J.Edgar Hoover! A closeted paranoid hysteric who had unquestioned power from 1935 to 1972. The FBI is his creation, and its culture of political oppression allied to its claim to be self-righteous upholders of The Law. It even qualified for a long running television show, that was Hollywood’s contribution to the FBI Myth.
‘The FBI over its history has shown itself to be criminally incompetent and utterly mendacious: its targeting of dissidents, and ‘fellow travelers’ of the McCarthy/Nixon era, the JFK assassination, the Black Panthers in the 60’s , the notorious letter to Martin Luther King, and its ‘Crime Lab‘ this is jut to name a few of the FBI’s many crimes!:
Forty years ago, Bob Dylan reacted to the conviction of an innocent man by singing that he couldn’t help but feel ashamed “to live in a land where justice is a game.” Over the ensuing decades, the criminal-justice system has improved in many significant ways. But shame is still an appropriate response to it, as the Washington Post made clear Saturday in an article that begins with a punch to the gut: “Nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000,” the newspaper reported, adding that “the cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death.”
The article notes that the admissions from the FBI and Department of Justice “confirm long-suspected problems with subjective, pattern-based forensic techniques—like hair and bite-mark comparisons—that have contributed to wrongful convictions in more than one-quarter of 329 DNA-exoneration cases since 1989.
This history of the FBI is utterly relevant to the construction of Comey as Hero. How can one be that hero, if one heads an institution so riddled with corruption , not to speak of covered with lies and an impasto of Public Relations. The rise of The American National Security State asphyxiated the the Republic, and the FBI one of the nascent institutional strongholds of autocracy in the person of J. Edgar Hoover, now succeeded by Comey’s replacement. Aided by Trump’s jurisprudential catamite Rod Rosenstein. StephenKMackSD
‘Had this been a normal criminal investigation, and had Comey been a special agent in the field, the memo he would have written would have been known, in the FBI’s parlance, as an FD-302. The FBI does not record conversations with subjects related to criminal investigations. Instead, FBI agents, using their memory and sometimes handwritten notes, draft memos that summarize the conversations and include purportedly verbatim quotes. Federal judges and juries have consistently viewed these memos as indisputable fact. For this reason, Comey’s memo is no normal government memo. It could do lasting damage to Trump’s presidency, if not contribute to costing him the nation’s highest office altogether.’
The recollections of FBI agents are treated as fact! Its not Law but Political Theology! StephenKMackSD
Comey’s memoir has now surpassed the combined sales of Michael Wolff’s portrait of the Trump White House, Fire and Fury, and Hillary Clintons’s election elegy What Happened. The book, written in an idiom identical to the one he uses in interviews and press briefings, is clearly the work of an un-ghosted author, and it contains passages most unusual for an official memoir:
There is a place I have visited on the coast of North Carolina where two barrier islands come close together. In the narrow passageway between them, the waters of the Atlantic Ocean meet the waters of the huge and shallow sound that lies behind the islands. There is turbulence in that place and waves appear to break even though no land is visible. I imagine that the leaders of the Department of Justice stand at that spot, between the turbulent waters of the political world and the placid waters of the apolitical sound. Their job is to respond to the political imperatives of the president and the voters who elected him, while also protecting the apolitical work of the thousands of agents, prosecutors, and staff who make up the bulk of the institution. So long as the leaders understand the turbulence, they can find their footing. If they stumble, the ocean water overruns the sound and the department has become just another political organ. Its independent role in American life has been lost and the guardians of justice have drowned.
This depth of formal piety cannot be faked; the passage shows the burden (as Comey sees it) of maintaining constitutional and legal restraints on Donald Trump.
All the loose talk of the mainstream media about Mueller and Russia may have hidden the gravity of the contest between Trump and legality. And it is by no means certain that legality will win. The larger question is therefore whether law-abidingness will remain the pattern of American society. No doubt, the election of Trump was the efficient cause of the crisis, but it is worth considering the likely state of the nation had Hillary Clinton won. Depending on the appetite for mayhem that Trump himself chose to unleash, the country might easily have become as ungovernable as it is today; and that prospect was in Comey’s mind when he wrote about the necessity of keeping one’s footing in the turbulence.
Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.
Headline: After Catalans, Italian regions step up autonomy call
Sub-headline:Northern League uses Lombardy and Veneto referendums to push for special status
Its not just the European Project that is under threat from the dreaded Populist Monster , but the Nation State, the very foundation of Monnet’s Coal and Steel cartel, that suffers from the pretensions of Democracy, as it has evolved. First the long historical evolution of Catalan, and now the lukewarm votes in Lombardy and Veneto for ‘more autonomy’, approved by the Italian Constitutional Court.
This ambiguous position is reflected in Sunday’s referendums, which are consultative and non-binding. They are carefully phrased to ask voters if they want more “autonomy” without threatening “national unity”. Unlike the Catalan vote they have been approved by the Italian constitutional court.
As informative as this news story by Rachel Sanderson is, as to the political actors in the Italian politics of the present, should the reader look to Daniel T. Rogers’ book ‘Age of Fracture‘, written in an American political/historical/economic context, for a telling simile/metaphor for the evolving European crisis? That describes both the EU and the Nation State, caught in the rip tide of history, exacerbated by the utterly failed Neo-Liberal Dispensation?
I write today about an epidemic. It’s not biological. It’s an epidemic of cowardly, immoral and unprincipled decisions by leaders across the political spectrum
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Three examples preoccupy me personally: The Republican Party today has a neo-Nazi problem that it refuses to confront. The progressive left today has a pro-Hamas problem that it refuses to confront. And the Jewish people and Israel have a radical Jewish settler problem that they refuse to confront.
Editor: Where can and when will the reader confront the vexing question of The Gaza Genocide? Mr. Friedman presents this carefully taylored descriptor.
And the Jewish people and Israel have a radical Jewish settler problem that they refuse to confront.
Editor: It’s not ‘a radical Jewish settler problem’ itsa problem with the very question of what the Zionist Project is, was and remaines! This quote from Maximilien Robespierre is bound is bound to raise the hackles of respectable bourgeois opinionators like Friedman and his followers !
“To defend the oppressed against their oppressors, to plead the cause of the weak against the strong who exploit and crush them, this is the duty of all hearts that have not been spoiled by egoism and corruption… It is so sweet to devote oneself to one’s fellows that I do not know how there can be so many unfortunates still without support or defenders. As for me, my life’s task will be to help those who suffer and to pursue through my avenging speech those who take pleasure in the pain of others. How happy I will be if my feeble efforts are crowned with success and if, at the price of my devotion and sacrifices, my reputation is not tarnished by the crimes of the oppressors I will fight.”
Editor: Reader let me focus my attention to Mr Friedman’s recapitulation of the actors in his self-apologeic exercise in historical revisionism, wedded to mendacity, and the cultivation of an audience habituated to his partucular brand of ‘story telling’ !
Of course, President Trump also didn’t even whisper a hint of condemnation. Just as he had no problem with the recent love-fest/interview between Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, promoting Fuentes’s white nationalist neo-Nazi sympathies.
Not surprisingly, Trump’s defense of Carlson centered mainly on his own ego. He’s “said good things about me over the years,” the president said of Carlson. So nothing else should matter?
Trump could have said that Carlson has a right to interview anyone he wants, something that should never be suppressed, but that he was very troubled by the open contempt being directed by Fuentes at Jewish Americans. But neither Trump nor Vance said that — because they undoubtedly know that a not insignificant minority of their voters hold these racist, antisemitic views and they don’t want to alienate them before the midterms, which are expected to be very close.
How far we have fallen. We’ve had political movements in the past use antisemitism to try to get to the White House — for example, those who wanted the well-known antisemite Charles Lindbergh to run for president in 1940 — but until Vance and Trump we have not seen it being normalized to try to stay in power. We have seen Jewish supremacists, like Rabbi Meir Kahane, get elected to the Israeli Knesset, but we have never seen them setting Israeli defense policy, until Bibi gave them the keys. We have seen pro-Palestinian demonstrations aplenty over the years, but never ones, that I recall, which gave such a complete pass to Hamas after its mass murder of Israeli civilians.
This is how norms collapse — and take their societies down with them.
So, to Trump, Vance, Netanyahu and the pro-Hamas protesters, I have one message. It’s the one offered by Liz Cheney to her fellow G.O.P. House members who gave Trump a pass for stoking the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol: “I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”
Editor: Liz Cheney is the eventual measure that Friedman offers his readers as exemplary!
The opening of Edward Carr essay relies on History
N JUNE 10TH 2026 the fighting between Russia and Ukraine will have lasted longer than the first world war. That conflict, too, was supposed to have been over in a few weeks. As in Ukraine, fighting became bogged down and the high command squandered men’s lives in one doomed assault after another. In August 1918 the allies used new tactics to break the German lines. Today, by contrast, Ukraine will not surrender and Russia does not know how to win.
Even in a dictatorship, a leader who has no theory of victory is storing up trouble. As Tsar Nicholas II learnt to his cost in the first world war, sooner or later there will be a reckoning.
Editor : Should I check my copy of August 1914 THE RED WHEEL 1? Though I am moored on page 573 ‘66’ ? I’ll quote Mr.Carr’s paragraph on the Russian casualties without acompaning data about the five Russian soldiers are dying for every Ukrainian.
The numbers tell this terrible story. In the year to mid-October, Russian casualties grew by almost 60%, to somewhere between 984,000 and 1,438,000. The dead now number between 190,000 and 480,000. Perhaps five Russian soldiers are dying for every Ukrainian. And yet over the summer Mr Putin’s armies failed to take a single large city. Russia is advancing, but to occupy the four oblasts it claims as its own would require five more years. If the killing continues at 2025’s rate, total Russian casualties will reach almost 4m.
Editor: Mr. Carr is a Neo-Conservative like Zanny Menton Beddoes, his editor:
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Edward Carr is a highly-respected writer and commentator on global strategic affairs and business and is based in London with the leading weekly international newspaper, The Economist. He currently provides the editorial leadership for The Economist on international affairs, and is uniquely placed to relate these topics to reflect the implications for international business – he has the wealth of experience of previously being Foreign Editor, Business Affairs Editor (covering science, technology, industry and finance and various other portfolios. He was also previously the Editorial Director with oversight of the quarterly magazine Intelligent Life, published by The Economist Group.
Edward speaks and moderates on a wide range of issues including international strategic affairs, business, industry and trade as well as energy, climate change and the environment.
He has carried out numerous live and recorded radio and television appearances over the years and is occasionally invited to co-host CNBC’s Squawk Box, once hosting with guests Jack Welch and Charles Elson featuring a discussion about executive pay. He regularly chairs seminars and debates for Economist Conferences and other top level events.
He also engages in client events, where he presents or moderates at customer forums – e.g. McKinsey Global Leadership Conference, or for organisations’ internal strategy sessions.
As Deputy Editor of The Economist, has editorial responsibility across the entire print side of the newspaper. During his journalist career, which saw him first join The Economist as science correspondent in 1987 and then go to Paris to write on European business, he briefly left The Economist in 2000 to write for the Financial Times where he worked as foreign news editor, and then as the news editor overseeing the front page and the newspaper’s news operation.
Edward studied Science at Cambridge University, winning The Bronowski Prize for his work on 18th Century French Chemistry.
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Mr Putin also had hopes that America’s president, Donald Trump, would tip the balance in his favour. By withdrawing vital American support—in particular, on intelligence and for air-defence—Mr Trump could indeed impose a bad peace on Ukraine. Early in 2025, he briefly tried to do so.
Yet those tactics no longer look likely. The peacemaker in the White House continues to blow hot and cold with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, whom he dislikes. But Europe is now paying Ukraine’s bills, neutralising MAGA’s main gripe that America was being exploited. And Mr Trump seems to have concluded that throwing Ukraine to the bears would ruin his aspiration to become a Nobel prize-winning statesman. In October he even imposed sanctions on Lukoil and Rosneft, two Russian oil companies.
Lastly, Mr Putin may hope European resolve will crumble. The money Ukraine needs to keep on fighting will run out in February. The prospect of populist governments that are less hostile to the Kremlin already hangs over the continent. A divided and dysfunctional Europe will struggle to give Ukraine the long-term backing it needs to thrive once the fighting stops.
But that is not the same as abandoning Ukraine in the heat of battle. The case that Ukraine is the key to European security is iron-clad. If Kyiv falls, Mr Putin will have control over Europe’s biggest army and a formidable arms industry. Work is afoot to set up a credible multi-year financing mechanism that goes beyond seizing Russian assets. If it succeeds, Mr Putin will know that Ukraine’s economy can outlast Russia’s.
Some people think the Russian president must believe time is on his side, or he would have already sued for peace. Yet the lesson of Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq is that leaders cling on in the hope that something—anything—will turn up. So the chances are that Mr Putin will continue to fight in 2026, waiting for his generals to find a new way of waging war, for Ukraine to run out of men, for Mr Zelensky’s government to collapse, or for Mr Trump or Europe to lose patience.
But if none of these things happen, Mr Putin will be storing up a terrible reckoning. Russia has mortgaged its economy, harried Finland and Sweden into joining NATO, subordinated itself to China and scythed through a generation of young men. And for what? The moment this question forms on Russian lips, the world will face a new danger. Mr Putin could accept defeat abroad and impose terror at home. Or he could escalate.
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Editor: The reader has to wonder at this Call To Arms in The Economist?
Why funding Ukraine is a giant opportunity for Europe
The bill will be huge. It is also a historic bargain
Political Observer marvels at the ever bumptious Neo-Con Zanny Menton Beddoes, who has never fought in a War. Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel (1920) provides a fractured but usable model?
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Editor: Beddoes and her minions have refined the call to battle, as a necessay imperative for Europe. The very thought of an Oxbridger, or its equiveilent, serving in any Army, offers a certain puerile potential? ‘Europe’ seems to have reached an Age of Fracture: Macrons wayward politics is the paradigm?
Question: What will Macron, Merz, Starmer and Ursula von der Leyen do in the face of the coming defeat? Not to speak of the Billions spent on proping up Zelenskyy, and the political toxin of the Azov Battalion and Azov International?
