Daniel Fried short answer to the question of the defeatr of Orbán’ ignores the fact that of all the political actors who made the defeat of Orbán’ possible! To begin think of ‘The Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ !
April 15, 2026 | Washington Examiner
Americans shouldn’t cry for Orban
Never ignore the voters. After 16 years in power, Hungary’s corpulent Prime Minister Viktor Orban lost touch with the conservative base that supported him from the start, believing he could gerrymander his way to permanent victory. A smarter conservative, incoming Prime Minister Peter Magyar, did the opposite. He used retail politics to listen to Orban’s voters and responded to their constant refrain: “Russia go home!”
Magyar’s victory is a win for Hungary, the United States, and smart campaigning. His victory created a political earthquake in Hungary. Conservatives in America should cheer this result in one of our most important Central European allies. Magyar’s new supermajority means he can amend the Hungarian constitution and roll back Orban’s worst political excesses while keeping the conservative movement alive in Hungary.
Orban’s political defeat is historic. Back in 1989, he jumped into politics as an agile, free-market friend of America. He learned how to talk like an American conservative.
Editor: The George Soros Foundation toxic meddling in the affairs of how many countries is a fact! His apologists look to him as a modern day righter of wrongs!
The Open Society Foundations in Ukraine
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has thrust the Open Society Foundations’ Kyiv-based International Renaissance Foundation (IRF) onto the frontlines of the country’s struggle for survival. As the largest independent funder of Ukraine’s vibrant array of civil society and citizen’s groups for more than three decades, IRF was immediately engaged in the vast emergency response to the Russian assault. Its evolving work has included: supporting the evacuation and relocation of civilians; funding efforts to deliver emergency medical supplies and to protect emergency personnel; backing efforts to protect independent journalists and media; and supporting investigations of war crimes committed during the conflict.
In addition to expanding its direct funding of IRF, Open Society also launched the $50 million Ukraine Democracy Fund, making a $25 million pledge in March 2022, that was then matched by other funders. Internationally, the fund has worked to expand international support for Ukraine. Within the country, it has supported a range of civil society groups, around priorities that include promoting accountable government decision making, and advocating for people most directly affected by the Russian full-scale invasion.
Open Society has contributed over $230 million in grants to Ukraine, benefiting millions of people—including more project funding over the past decade than to any other country in Europe.
While babies in Vietnam are still being born with catastrophic birth defects from the effects of Agent Orange, decades after the end of the American Anti-Communists crusade or just call it mass slaughter, The Great Man is treated to lunch by a pundit who disingenuously call him consigliere, as the-in-order-too of not sounding too much like what he is, a sycophant to The Great Man. Did Luce even mention his book ‘The Retreat of Western Liberalism’ ? Isn’t there some kind of obligation, on the part of the guest to know something of your host’s latest accomplishment? Or is the aged Great Man above that kind of social obligation?
The essay unfolds in an almost comic mode with Luce planning to waylay The Great Man into ‘spilling the beans’ on the Know-Nothing Trump. The dramatic tension is non existent, as this 95 year old is more interested in having an audience who simply listens, in awe, to his estimation and opinions about the wider historical scope of his intelligence: his specialty is Foreign Policy Metaphysics. The Great Man doesn’t disappoint himself .
Mr. Luce knows the Party Line by heart, as he helped to construct it: Russian revanchism, the end of the ‘rules based order’ meaning the erosion of NATO, in sum the ‘decline of American Power’. Or rather, the fact that Europe is no longer in need of American tutelage. The burning question is TRUMP and his chaotic practice politics and his disturbing propinquity for another political monster Putin.
This little melodrama ends with Luce helping The Great Man to his car in the rain, and the ‘server’ speaks to Luce with some pertinent information: “Dr Kissinger has been looking forward to this lunch for days,”
Thank you for your comment. Having read Habermas’ ‘The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity’, ‘The New Conservatism’ , ‘Postmetaphysical Thinking’ and Specter’s intellectual biography, your : Habermas is a weak sociologist from the Frankfurt School and their near-communist ilk dressed up as a weighty philosopher. Is not just overwrought, but reflective of ideological myopia, to be polite. Intellectuals/writers/philosophers, in Europe, don’t seem to share the animus to Marx and his epigones, that is given full cry in your brief against the heretical Habermas.
If you read ‘ Theodor W. Adorno, One Last Genius’ by Detlev Claussen, you can read Horkheimer’s scathing letter to Adorno, about Habermas failure to meet his standards as a member of the Frankfurt School. The letter is published as an appendix to the book. Habermas went his own way, as his ‘Public Sphere’ demonstrated over time.
Thank you for your revelatory post and the link! A quotation from the summery :
…
Kissinger ignored a recommendation from his top deputy on the NSC, Viron Vaky, who strongly advised against covert action to undermine Allende. On September 14, Vaky wrote a memo to Kissinger arguing that coup plotting would lead to “widespread violence and even insurrection.” He also argued that such a policy was immoral: “What we propose is patently a violation of our own principles and policy tenets .… If these principles have any meaning, we normally depart from them only to meet the gravest threat to us, e.g. to our survival. Is Allende a mortal threat to the U.S.? It is hard to argue this.”
After U.S. covert operations, which led to the assassination of Chilean Commander in Chief of the Armed forces General Rene Schneider, failed to stop Allende’s inauguration on November 4, 1970, Kissinger lobbied President Nixon to reject the State Department’s recommendation that the U.S. seek a modus vivendi with Allende. In an eight-page secret briefing paper that provided Kissinger’s clearest rationale for regime change in Chile, he emphasized to Nixon that “the election of Allende as president of Chile poses for us one of the most serious challenges ever faced in this hemisphere” and “your decision as to what to do about it may be the most historic and difficult foreign affairs decision you will make this year.” Not only were a billion dollars of U.S. investments at stake, Kissinger reported, but what he called “the insidious model effect” of his democratic election. There was no way for the U.S. to deny Allende’s legitimacy, Kissinger noted, and if he succeeded in peacefully reallocating resources in Chile in a socialist direction, other countries might follow suit. “The example of a successful elected Marxist government in Chile would surely have an impact on — and even precedent value for — other parts of the world, especially in Italy; the imitative spread of similar phenomena elsewhere would in turn significantly affect the world balance and our own position in it.”
…
Viron Vaky made the unforgivable faux pas of making a ‘moral argument’ against Kissinger’s plan: the Policy Technocrat, in due deference to the benighted Herman Kahn legacy, only formulates policy within the frame of ends,means and possible outcomes. That has proven to be utterly catastrophic, to the a world subjected to the machinations of Great Men like Kissinger, and his apologists.
While babies in Vietnam are still being born with catastrophic birth defects from the effects of Agent Orange, decades after the end of the American Anti-Communists crusade or just call it mass slaughter, The Great Man is treated to lunch by a pundit who disingenuously call him consigliere, as the-in-order-too of not sounding too much like what he is, a sycophant to The Great Man. Did Luce even mention his book ‘The Retreat of Western Liberalism’ ? Isn’t there some kind of obligation, on the part of the guest to know something of your host’s latest accomplishment? Or is the aged Great Man above that kind of social obligation?
The essay unfolds in an almost comic mode with Luce planning to waylay The Great Man into ‘spilling the beans’ on the Know-Nothing Trump. The dramatic tension is non existent, as this 95 year old is more interested in having an audience who simply listens, in awe, to his estimation and opinions about the wider historical scope of his intelligence: his specialty is Foreign Policy Metaphysics. The Great Man doesn’t disappoint himself .
Mr. Luce knows the Party Line by heart, as he helped to construct it: Russian revanchism, the end of the ‘rules based order’ meaning the erosion of NATO, in sum the ‘decline of American Power’. Or rather, the fact that Europe is no longer in need of American tutelage. The burning question is TRUMP and his chaotic practice politics and his disturbing propinquity for another political monster Putin.
This little melodrama ends with Luce helping The Great Man to his car in the rain, and the ‘server’ speaks to Luce with some pertinent information: “Dr Kissinger has been looking forward to this lunch for days,”
Newspaper Reader is reminded those Science Fiction Movies he watched in the 1950’s, at the Movie Theatre just a block away from our house, after my brother and I mowed the lawn!
The reason AI is such a disruptive invention is that it sharply reduces the cost of intelligence. It could unlock great increases in productivity, or induce mass unemployment or violent revolution — because if a skilled professional working with AI agents can now produce as much as 500 of their peers, social and economic models are in for quite a shock.
For example, Anthropic says its latest AI model, Claude Mythos, can find vulnerabilities in cyber defences at a speed beyond most human intelligence. But does Mythos live up to the hype? Maybe, maybe not, but even if it is overhyped, something like it is around the corner. AI is already really good at coding, and will only get better. It will also, therefore, get better at finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in cyber security.
The good news for anyone worried about AI taking their job is that Mythos also provides a demonstration of how the technology may create employment opportunities. As AI improves cyber security, and as deepfakes and generative AI do an ever better job of impersonating human beings online, in-person verification is going to have to bear more, not less, weight.
It’s a reminder that the development of AI is not necessarily good news for everyone else in tech — it may lead to a permanent reduction in the number of jobs in coding, and increasingly smart technology may render the internet less and less useful for everyday use, if it becomes the location of ever more sophisticated crime.
Editor: Mr. Bush hits his hysterical stride :
AI is like the atomic bomb: once you invent the technology to build one, you live in a different, and more dangerous, world than before. But it is potentially more dangerous because fission weapons didn’t possess the ability to improve the ability of a random passer-by to develop a thermonuclear weapon, but AI does reduce the gap between the professionally qualified and the “unskilled”. Even before the launch of Mythos, AI tools not only make it easier for cutting-edge companies or states to launch cyber attacks, they make it easier for otherwise unimpressive minor criminals and lone wolf terrorists to do so. Technology with the capacity to do severe damage to critical digital infrastructure will, sooner or later, become at least as easy to buy online as it is to use the dark web to purchase cannabis or cocaine.
…
Editor : The final paragraphs of Mr. Bush’s wan diagnostic intervention!
The future envisaged by the creators of so-called cyberpunk science fiction may come to fruition — a world in which computers that are smarter than humans go hand in hand with technological and physical infrastructure that has more in common with the 1980s than the 2020s.
For AI companies themselves, there is a new risk. AI is already unpopular enough due to fears about what it means for people’s jobs. On top of that, there are new worries about what the technology means for cyber security. The benefits are very real, but they are less tangible and obvious to most people than their job being at risk or having to shell out for cyber security. The political backlash when either a politician has to explain that the technology means more public spending, or when an AI-boosted cyber attack takes down critical infrastructure, may be greater still.
The Economist is part of The Economist Group, a private company with a special ownership structure designed to preserve editorial independence. Its shareholders date back more than a century, and include great names in British business, such as the Sainsburys, Cadburys and Schroders. Other shareholders today include funds owned by the Agnelli and Rothschild families. Many staff of The Economist Group also own shares, which are privately traded twice a year.
The company’s constitution does not permit any individual or group to gain a majority shareholding, and no shareholder can exercise more than 20% of voting rights. The editor is appointed by trustees, who are independent of commercial, political and proprietorial influences. This structure ensures that The Economist can take an independent view of the world—free to challenge conventional thinking and concentrations of power. Its role is to inform, not to serve vested interests.
If you’re not already a subscriber, explore our subscription offers, which include Digital only, a Digital + Print bundle or Economist Podcasts+. The Economist provides clarity in a complex world.
Jan 29, 2026
The Economist is owned by The Economist Group, a private company with a specialized structure to ensure editorial independence. The largest shareholder is Exor N.V. (the Agnelli family’s investment firm) with 43.4%, followed by other private investors including the Cadbury and Schroder families. Canadian businessman Stephen J.R. Smith acquired a major 26.9% stake in March 2026.
Wikipedia +3
Key Ownership and Structure Details:
Exor N.V.: Led by John Elkann, this investment firm became the largest shareholder after buying a 50% stake from Pearson in 2015.
Rothschild Stake: The Rothschild family previously held a major stake, which has been in the process of being sold as of late 2025.
Other Shareholders: Shares are held by various family interests (Cadbury, Schroder) and staff.
Independent Trustees: The editorial independence is safeguarded by a board of trustees, who appoint the editor.
Ownership Rules: The constitution prevents any single individual or group from holding a majority, and no single shareholder can hold more than 20% of the voting rights.
Wikipedia is an unrealisble source of ‘information’ , just like Zanny Minton Beddoes and her cadre of Oxbridger Males! This reader of The Economist all most longs for the days of John Micklethwaitand Adrian Wooldridge? Although their ‘The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America’ was a long apologetic for Donald H. Rumsfeld & ‘Turd Blossom’ Karl Rove!
Yet there are these stake holders of The Economist : Exor N.V.(the Agnelli family’s investment firm), the Cadbury and Schroder families, Canadian businessman Stephen J.R. Smith acquired a major 26.9% stake in March 2026. Name this collection of invertors by there proper name oligarchy
Headline:Joe Biden can save global migration from the deep freeze
Sub-headline: Through example and sheer numbers, an open US could bring an open world
…
‘This criminally undersells it. Whatever their content, previous reforms were of national or perhaps regional interest. This one, by dint of timing, could nudge the world into openness at a hinge moment in history.’
…
What can be wrong with this paragraph? Has Mr. Ganesh started reading John F. Kennedy’s ‘A Nation of Immigrants’ , probably ghosted by one of his Camelot Coterie? Recall ‘No Irish Need Apply’ ? Ganesh should read Samuel P. Huntington’s ‘Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity’ in which the Mestizo Hordes are about to engulf ‘American Protestant Virtue‘. It’s focused his hysterical xenophobia.
Should the reader look to how America treated the Braceros, that picked crops beginning in WWII till 1964, as factual evidence of bad faith and mendacity. America still owes these workers $500 Million , not updated to reflect today’s accumulation of interest. Most of these Guest Workers are dead, or near it, such is/are the quioxitic nature of America’s Legal/Moral obligations?
Trump campaigned on the ‘fact’ that Mexico would pay the cost of The Wall, the realization of Fortress America, on the Southern Border. No Wall for the Northern Border, because Canadians are not Mestizos. Slavery, the Concentration Camps for Japanese citizens, the Supreme Court decisions in Korematsu v. United States, and Hirabayashi v. United States- this an historical record that demonstrates xenophobia even against its own citizens, of different ethnicities/races.
What sense can the reader make of this New York Times report?
Headline:At Least 37 Million People Have Been Displaced by America’s War on Terror
Sub-headline: A new report calculates the number of people who fled because of wars fought by the United States since Sept. 11, 2001.
At least 37 million people have been displaced as a direct result of the wars fought by the United States since Sept. 11, 2001, according to a new report from Brown University’s Costs of War project. That figure exceeds those displaced by conflict since 1900, the authors say, with the exception of World War II.
The findings were published on Tuesday, weeks before the United States enters its 20th year of fighting the war on terror, which began with the invasion of Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2001; yet, the report says it is the first time the number of people displaced by U.S. military involvement during this period has been calculated. The findings come at a time when the United States and other Western countries have become increasingly opposed to welcoming refugees, as anti-migrant fears bolster favor for closed-border policies.
The report accounts for the number of people, mostly civilians, displaced in and from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya and Syria, where fighting has been the most significant, and says the figure is a conservative estimate — the real number may range from 48 million to 59 million. The calculation does not include the millions of other people who have been displaced in countries with smaller U.S. counterterrorism operations, according to the report, including those in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali and Niger.
That American Wars of Empire has produced a Refugee Crisis of World Historical proportions, in the last two decades, demonstrates what ‘Values’? Mr. Ganesh political intervention featuring Joe Biden as Political Redeemer will not do!
Thank you for your comment. Xenophobia is about Tribalism in its many iterations, permutations. The Reader need only look to Trump and Trumpism, and the Wall that never got built! Or in the world of respectable academia Samuel P. Huntington’s ‘Clash’ and his ‘Who Are We’ are just examples of the toxic American Exceptionalism in extremis.
‘Often it is very rational and you ignore it at your peril.’ The fear and hatred of ‘The Other’ is the murderous toxin, that has infected ‘Western Civilization’ since the Greeks and Romans. Aristotle and his defense of Slavery: The Politics Chapter 4 Slavery under the rubric of the Association of the Household.
Cicero and his xenophobia: ‘Representations: Images of the World in Ciceronian Oratory’ by Ann Vasaly and ‘ Romans and Aliens‘ by J.P.V.D. Balsdon Chapters 2 through 4
‘Know the adversary’ is the first law of politics, as of war. But how should such knowledge proceed? In examining the thought-worlds that informed American foreign-policymaking, the young Anders Stephanson was drawn to the moments of flux, when the country’s overseas stance was in contention; pre-eminently, the turn of 1945–47, from war-time military and economic alliance with the Soviet Union to nuclear confrontation and high Cold War. A key figure in articulating the premises for that switch—and endowing them with the force and urgency that could animate an ideology—was George Frost Kennan. Wisconsin born, an unlikely recruit for the us Foreign Service, he was a staunch conservative and trained Russianist who had been posted to Moscow after stints in Geneva, Hamburg, Riga, Prague, Berlin, Lisbon. A convinced opponent of the Soviet regime from the 1920s, Kennan had described the Bolsheviks as ‘spiteful Jewish parasites’, declared when Hitler invaded in 1941 that the ussr had no claim on Western sympathy and observed in 1945 that ‘ten good hits with atomic bombs’ could finish its war-making capacity for good. Asked by the State Department in February 1946 for an interpretive report, he dictated from his sickbed in the Embassy the 5,000-word Long Telegram that electrified Truman’s Washington with its account of a regime fanatically committed to the destruction of the American way of life (somewhat contradicted by its reading of Stalin as ‘cautious’). Returning to the us as an intellectual hero, Kennan expanded in his ‘X’ article in Foreign Affairs on the Soviet leaders’ particular brand of fanaticism and the Russian-Asiatic world from which they had emerged, making them impermeable to the Anglo-Saxon tradition of compromise. Active us ‘containment’ and the use of counterforce at every juncture—ideally with measures short of war—was the indicated response.
Whatever the Bolsheviks’ hopes in 1918–21, this was an empirically false description of the ussr in 1947, exhausted from the War, whose main aim was to retain its defensive buffer against a resurgent Germany and to carry on the Big Three understanding affirmed with Churchill at Yalta. Yet the notion of an inherently expansionist Soviet threat, which only America’s superior power and vigilance could prevent from overrunning the world, would be a core claim of Cold War ideology for the next twenty years. Meanwhile us expansionism had ringed the ussr, its forces implanted in Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Turkey, Greece, the Persian Gulf and Western Europe. Within a year of the X article, however, Kennan, alarmed by Truman’s belligerence and America’s new global role, began to change his mind. The leading spirit of the early Cold War became one of its most powerful critics, shocking Western establishments with his eloquent case for military disengagement and nato drawback from Germany; later, from his berth at Princeton, opposing the renewed drumbeat against Moscow under Carter and Reagan. When Stephanson approached the old man for permission to quote his papers, he was therefore something more complicated than an opponent.
In the selection of letters between the student and the grandee, published below, Stephanson rather disarmingly shares the conceptual harvest he has gleaned from, broadly speaking, the Western Marxist world, as more productive than either Anglo-Saxon empiricism—mere reporting—or an ideological reductionism that fails to register the relative autonomy of mid-level structures. In Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy, Stephanson’s lethally precise use of his voluminous writings, expertly stitched together by the running contextualization and courteous but highly critical evaluative commentary, provides a fully historical portrait of both his sensibility and his function, illuminating why he was—and where he wasn’t—in tune with us global expansion. It is an achievement that makes Kennan’s respectful reception of the book and recognition of himself in it, registered in these letters, all the more remarkable.
Trump is playing the madman. But he’s doing it all wrong
As the Iran war veers in and out of apocalyptic brinkmanship, there are reasons to think unhinged bombast will prove even less successful than in the past.
The following conversation was tape-recorded in the Oval Office some 55 Aprils ago. Richard Nixon is authorising his envoy, Henry Kissinger, to take a message to the North Vietnamese, with whom the US is at war. The message is that Kissinger’s boss is unhinged.
Nixon: “You can say, ‘I cannot control him’. Put it that way.”
Kissinger: “Yeah. And imply that you might use nuclear weapons.”
Nixon: “Yes, sir.”
The president’s aide, HR Haldeman, in his memoirs, recalled another chat to the same effect. And so the “madman theory” – that making extreme threats can bring opponents to the bargaining table – took root.
Editor: Has Janan Ganesh run out of ideas, the reader might ask herself? Or does Nixon, as portraid by Ganesh, read as if Nixon were not the master of the Vietnam War, but an assistant to masterful Kissinger? This essay seems to wander, yet still recognisisng Nixon’s use of ‘private channels’ as some how repesents a more rational approach to Americas criminal aventurism in Vietnam?
Editor: Ganesh assertions take wing! The reader might note that Janan Ganesh was born in 1982, and the Vietnam War ended in April 30, 1975. Ganach’s attempts to weave together something that attempts to resemble History, that seeks to place the reader within a mere backdrop for the faultering American Hegemony?
Donald Trump was practising it almost by name even in his first term. As the Iran war veers in and out of apocalyptic brinkmanship, there are reasons to think the ploy will be even less successful now than it was then.
For one thing, Nixon made his threats through private channels. If he decided to back down from them, he would not lose face in front of the entire world. In contrast, Trump’s threats to erase a civilisation could scarcely be more public.
Another difference is that mid-20th century Vietnam was not central to the world economy. Early-21st century, Iran unmistakably is.
If a few weeks of bombing can trigger the worst energy crisis for half a century, a “mad” escalation might turn oil-price inflation into outright oil shortages.
There is already infrastructure damage that European Central Bank chief Christine Lagarde fears will take years to mend. And none of this touches on the likely refugee exodus in the event that Iran becomes a failed state.
This tends to be the problem with madman-ism. The threat is too extreme to be entirely credible. On the other hand, if it is carried out, then by definition, the strategy has failed.
“A Trump apologist could string together a circumstantial case that his ‘worst’ traits – the aggression, the amorality – act as deterrents.”
There is something else that Trump should have learnt from the Nixon experience. Public opinion matters. To even threaten, let alone perform a mad action, would alienate domestic and international audiences.
Unpopular wars
Had Nixon used nuclear weapons in a war of choice, the already vehement anti-war protests at home might have tipped into total civil breakdown. Allies would have recoiled. The communist bloc would have been given a leg-up to the moral high ground.
Similarly, Trump cannot allow a war that now commands the support of 34 per cent of Americans to become much more violent. Autocracies can read the domestic politics of democracies. Just as North Vietnam spotted and harnessed America’s divisions over the war, so could Iran.
(Democracies have a much foggier window into public opinion in closed societies.) Nor can Trump ignore allied countries, as he tacitly concedes whenever he scolds them for not helping to secure the Strait of Hormuz.
We have to reach back into the previous century for the last unambiguously successful US-led war. The failures since then happened in part because there wasn’t enough domestic or foreign buy-in to sustain the scale of force required in, say, Iraq.
In other words, there is an operational case for behaving attractively, not just a moral one. You cannot – whatever the MAGA refrain – “just do things”.
How might a madman theorist respond? What is the strongest case to be made that erratic leadership does work?
Well, Trump is the one US president elected this century under whose watch Russia has not launched a foreign invasion. Vladimir Putin attacked Georgia under George W. Bush, Crimea under Barack Obama and Ukraine under Joe Biden. The sample size is small enough to suggest that nothing more than coincidence is at work here.
But a Trump apologist could string together a circumstantial case that his “worst” traits – the aggression, the amorality – act as deterrents. No state wants to test a man who might respond with sadistic force.
Likewise, Ronald Reagan’s forward nuclear posture in the 1980s seemed unconscionable at the time. Before the decade was out, the Soviets had folded with hardly a shot being fired.
“Circumstantial” is the word, however. Good luck establishing cause and effect here with much confidence. What a thin evidential basis on which to rest such high-stakes statecraft.
The wonder is that madman theory is still discussed with a straight face. Nixon practised it about as well as possible – working in secret, threatening a country of little global significance – and still achieved next to nothing. To the extent that he did go feral, bombing Cambodia and Laos, it sullied the US more than it forced concessions from the other side.
There is a desperation out there to see cunning and forethought in Trump’s wildest behaviour. This has skewed financial markets, which were too optimistic at the start of the war, and in Lagarde’s view still are.
If something good is to come of the present chaos, it might be a new realism about the US leader. Even if Trump does have a strategy that can be called madman theory, that doesn’t mean it is a good one. It just means that he has a weird reading of the past.
Four years after the Oval Office conversation between Nixon and Kissinger, the North Vietnamese took Saigon. Of the 58,220 US deaths in the war, over 20,000 occurred under the genius pair.
Newspaper Reader.
Saturday, April 11, 2026
Editor: Ganesh is by any measure a Flâneur as my comments over time will demostrate !
Newspaper Reader. stephenkmacksd.com/ Mar 05, 2026 Middle East war Be glad of Starmer’s caution over Iran Bellicose critics of the UK prime minister have learnt nothing from the recent past Janan Ganesh Newspaper Reader.
Newspaper Reader offers ‘A Janan Ganesh Cornucopia’! stephenkmacksd.com/ Feb 18, 2026 Headline: Maga will regret embracing Europe’s hard right Sub-headline: Nationalists on the continent have historically opposed America more than anything else https://www.ft.com/content/0baf4e30-3501-4aec-a189-5c49e40908aa Some selective quotation from Ganesh’s essay, for … Continue reading →
stephenkmacksd.com/ Feb 15, 2026 Life & Arts Liberals should mourn the passing world Why apologise for what was the most successful international order in history? Best regards! StephenKMackSD
Newspaper Reader. stephenkmacksd.com/ Feb 11, 2026 Opinion Keir Starmer Britain should pray that Starmer survives The country did not and would not vote for the Labour left An unsustainable situation can be sustained for quite a long time. John Major, Gordon … Continue reading →
Newspaper Reader comments. stephenkmacksd.com/ Oct 04, 2025 Opinion Life & Arts The war against the quite good The bidding war for geniuses will antagonise those just below Janan Ganesh https://www.ft.com/content/0fc44c6b-277c-4472-a235-65f59a9195f3 Editor: Janan almost pulls out all the stops, for his … Continue reading →
Political Observer and my other critical guises ! stephenkmacksd.com/ Oct 01, 2025 Reader I can’t quite break my habit of critiquing Ganesh… Yet I am unable to break the ban, that FT has imposed upon me, to be again a … Continue reading →
Posted on February 3, 2021 by stephenkmacksd stephenkmacksd.com/ Aug 29, 2025 Title this ‘The Enlightenment of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’ ? Mr. Ganesh doesn’t need to dust off his Madame Arcati shtick, he uses C-Span to demonstrate that Bill Clinton’s utter … Continue reading →
Political Reporter. stephenkmacksd.com/ Aug 21, 2025 At The Financial Times: Janan Ganesh demonstates The Myopia of the Winner, a comment by Political Reporter Posted on October 20, 2015 by stephenkmacksd Mr. Ganesh demonstrates that the enemy of the political winner is the inability … Continue reading →
Literary Observer re-aquaints himself with Ganesh as *flâneur? stephenkmacksd.com/ Jun 25, 2025 Headline: How Los Angeles made the modern world Sub-headline: The troubled city has done more than most to shape how people now live https://www.ft.com/content/7f416e2b-a89b-4083-b3c2-77461d3986c4 It’s been sometime since … Continue reading →
StephenKMackSD. stephenkmacksd.com/ Mar 03, 2025 Janan Ganesh’s Hipster L.A. American Writer comments Posted on September 6, 2020 by stephenkmacksd Mr. Ganesh is my favorite flâneur! He can write a feuilleton, the rhetoric of the Sunday Supplement’s decorous chatter, like no other writer in … Continue reading →
Newspaper Reader comments. stephenkmacksd.com/ Feb 07, 2025 As usual Janan Ganesh has a lively and insightful conversation with himself -its like a fast moving current in a river of ideas, speculations, and just plain political chatter – some call this … Continue reading →
Newspaper Reader comments. stephenkmacksd.com/ Jan 02, 2025 Headline: Things have to get worse to get better Sub-headline : Voters can’t be sold on change until their nation is in acute trouble https://www.ft.com/content/c9a8d92a-0c1d-424e-83be-c3469c370c19 Editor:The Reader of Mr. Ganesh’s latest essay is … Continue reading →
Editor: Even the utterly tepid Sherman McCoy as imagined by the long forgotten Tom Wolfe, captured the imaginations of America of circa 1987? But Stephens unremarkable chatter, is at best a collection of political moments, offered as somthing more that itself !
Imagine, for a moment, that you are a gifted midcareer intelligence officer in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. Because of the nature of your work, you have access to foreign sources of news. Because of your intellect, you preserve a capacity for independent judgment even as you remain loyal to the regime.
How’s the war going? To read various accounts in the Western press, remarkably well — for Iran.
For all the damage the United States and Israel have inflicted on Iran’s leadership ranks and war-making capabilities, the regime remains intact, unbowed, functional. There has been no mass uprising, thanks to the brutal crackdown that followed protests in early January. Closing the Strait of Hormuz, which required minimal military effort by Iran, has exercised maximum leverage over the global economy while boosting your oil revenues. The war is even more unpopular in the United States today than it was at the start; it is also causing more Americans to rethink the wisdom of their reflexive support for Israel. President Trump’s expletive-laden social media posts increasingly sound more desperate than they do fierce. And the I.R.G.C. is more powerful than ever.
One insight, repeatedly cited by Western pundits as evidence that Iran has the upper hand in the current war, has led you to its source, a 1969 critique of U.S. policy in Vietnam from none other than Henry Kissinger.
This should bring you comfort. It doesn’t.
Though Iranian military doctrine often resorts to guerrilla-like means, Iran itself is a conventional state, with a government that works out of office buildings, oversees infrastructure projects, pays its bureaucrats their salaries, runs an airline and so on. Nor (until the war) did the regime normally embed and hide itself within the general population, as guerrillas do. On the contrary, it lords over them with a ferocity that, in moments of honest self-reflection, shames you.
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Editor: Here are the final paragraphs of Stephens unimpressive exercise of cut and paste! The Readers of Wolf’s novel will recall the escape from the father and son duo, to the safety of Sherman McCoy’ home, if I recall correctly, ends or better yet is awash in Presbyterianism : in sum the most forgetable sexual coupling ever alluded to in American Fiction!
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There’s always a chance the Americans and Israelis could blunder militarily in ways that hurt them strategically. It was a shame that the two American Air Force officers shot down over Iran last week were able to evade capture, denying you valuable bargaining chips while again underscoring your military’s relative weakness and incompetence.
More promising is the prospect of American bombs falling on civilian targets, which is why your superiors are now urging young Iranians to form human chains around power plants. You are decent enough to recognize the cruelty of the tactic — and cynical enough to appreciate its potential efficacy. As the war in Gaza made clear, Western public opinion won’t support bombing children, no matter who’s to blame for putting them in harm’s way. And a U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign that kills hundreds of civilians could give the regime the one gift it would not have had otherwise: an Iranian public that’s on its side.
Right now, there’s no telling what will happen. But as you survey where Iran stands now compared with where it stood just three years ago, you are overwhelmed with a sense of loss. Your once-powerful proxies in Gaza, Beirut, Damascus: decimated, deposed or dead. The Arab states: increasingly on side with the Americans and Zionists. Your nuclear program: set back for years or decades, if not forever. Your economy: in even deeper crisis than it was before the war, with no turnaround in sight. Your most capable leaders: dead. Your own people: waiting for the war and the state of emergency to end so they can rise against you again.
It’s a solace of sorts that sophisticated Western commentators think you’re winning this thing. From wherever you are now hiding — since it’s not safe to go to work — it doesn’t feel that way.
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