In the first days of the war, Israeli air strikes showed an unusual pattern. Heavy attacks in Kurdish areas of Iran, just before it appears Kurdish armed groups launched ground attacks from across the border.

Air support of local insurgents has a mixed record, but it has been more successful than direct military intervention by foreign powers. We need to start thinking about the consequences of this, because the campaign being waged is far more than just bombing.

As they launched their war on Iran, both President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu called on Iranians to rise up and overthrow their dictatorship.

But while Trump gave four different reporters different timelines for bringing the war to a conclusion, Netanyahu is putting a Kosovo-style plan into practice by weakening the regime’s security forces from the air to create the conditions for local regime opponents to act.

Though the Israeli military has stated its aims are to destroy as much of Iran’s nuclear and missile programs as it can, Netanyahu has gone further. For him, bringing an end to the Iranian regime has been his life’s mission. Could it finally be within his grasp?

Read the full piece on TVP World.

NATO’s first secretary general, the British general Lord Ismay, once said NATO’s job was to keep the “the Soviet Union out, the Americans in and the Germans down”. The Germans have changed, but the other parts of the job description retain their relevance.

Yet, current secretary general Mark Rutte’s efforts to keep the Americans in are torpedoing his efforts to keep the Russians out. Instead of reducing the risk of a war with Russia, by signaling weakness, he has increased it. 

Now read the whole thing at TVP World.

As I write, Trump appears to have climbed down on Greenland, giving Davos a taste of self-pitying aggression: “I could use force on Greenland, but I won’t.”

What he could he have been? he will be wondering to himself: the man who expanded American territory, who brought that huge bit of the Mercator projection into the United States, who made America great again in a physical sense.

He feels the sense of failure, that he never managed what all those guys like Stephen Miller who told him, after Maduro was seized, that he could do anything, if only he, the Greatest President America Ever had, put his mind to it. If he shouted down opposition, used the power of the United States against his weak and craven opponents, he would get his way. He would show them — the foreign policy elite, the markets, the “international community” who was in charge. They wouldn’t laugh at him any more.

He was stopped. Stopped by an alliance of the US military, Republican Senators, European diplomats, the Danish military sending troops to Greenland to defend it, by the markets. And by his own people, resolutely opposed to this absurd adventure by mad king Don.

I say mad quite deliberately, because Trump isn’t running a machine of efficient calculating evil. His disorder is not of the psychopath who lacks all empathy but of the person who has all too much, but only for himself. He’s a man who never had love, tried to compensate for it through money and power, but who still knows deep down that what he was buying or taking wasn’t freely given, and so wasn’t affection. Normally this leads the patient into bouts of self-loathing; spirals of gloom from which bombast is a means of escape. The extraversion, the charm, the acting ability, for Trump had all these, at least when he was younger, is how he survives this depression and prepares himself to face the world again. Somehow, Susie Wiles, his chief of staff is one of the few people able to turn him around in these moments.

Rich men, and powerful men all the more so are surrounded by flatterers. Foolish men, like Trump have even less of an ability to distinguish flattery from legitimate praise than most of us. This is why he published those screenshots of Macron and Rutte’s messages: see, he wanted to tell the world, here are men, leaders of proper countries, and of NATO, saying nice things about me. The world doesn’t hate me. That they were of course just doing their jobs, flattering him not for his personal qualities, but because of his office (he’s president of the most powerful country in the world, after all) was not what he wanted to believe.

Trump however is not our wayward friend or uncle, someone to be cared for and treated for his psychiatric problems. He’s the holder of a public office that not only worsens his condition by causing him to receive the fake love given to the powerful, but one whose actions have terrible consequences for people in the United States and across the world. His tantrum over Greenland brought the transatlantic alliance, of all things, to the brink of what would have been in spirit a civil war; his assault on Minneapolis threatens the same at home. He’s not only a danger to himself and his family — though he undoubtedly is that too — but to his country and the world.

The West has some experience of a similarly deluded ruler, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, who pushed the world to the brink of war during the Agadir Crisis of 1911. The German institutions and international diplomacy of the time were only just able to contain him, as the American ones are struggling to do. Compounded by other powers’ miscalculations, the Kaiser’s erratic mind would help plunge Europe into the First World War.

Trump generates an Agadir crisis every month or so, to which are added innumerable domestic crises of his own making. He keeps everyone off balance through sheer activity, but doesn’t care about their coherence or their overall effect on the national interest, which would slow him down.

Until now the crises have been dealt with by “babysitting”: the world’s responsible leaders find ways to talk him off the ledge onto which he has got himself, and something approaching normality resumes until events — or Vladimir Putin stoke his narcissistic injury again. It’s not clear how much longer this can go on.

The orthodox constitutional solution would be for a few Republican congressmen to impeach him, and for the Senate to remove him from office, but his backing down this time means this is unlikely to happen, at least until the mid-terms, which are shaping up to produce a democratic wave in the House and an uncomfortable outcome for Republicans in the Senate.

Donald Trump is a man of authoritarian instincts: he’s terrified of everyone and can only relax when he’s able to threaten them. But he isn’t a man of authoritarian strategy. Perhaps he’s too impulsive to have anything resembling strategy at all.

The impulsiveness and skill at generating drama has one great advantage: it keeps everyone off balance because they jump to whatever attention-seeking grenade he throws into the public sphere: don’t use tylenol, indict James Comey, invade Portland. Nothing is too shocking, as long as it prevents people responding to the last outrage.

His genius for outrageous novelty disables the media, a social cadre equally obsessed with the new: being the first, breaking news, finding a new angle, whose very competitiveness prevents it reacting with deliberation. They rush after each new episode and, in their jargon, bury the lede.

They overlook the main story, which is that the United States is being run by a charming corrupt and dangerous lunatic, a man who fits the criteria of who knows quite how many personality disorders, who hugs his power as a shield to protect himself from his fear of his own inadequacy and who has the demonic instinct for manipulation despite apparently having little formal intellect: no matter his need to survive sharpened this aspect of his wits, and has taken him to his presidency.

Yet, the survival instinct is curiously narrow: it’s about him, and his continuous need not to be ignored. His specific deformation is not grandiosity of megalomania, although it can sometimes look like that because of his love of gold; he’s no Napoleon or Hitler: no ideology gives him strength or a purpose. Even the idea of a purpose, beyond perhaps accumulating wealth for (some) of his family, doesn’t cross his mind. So he doesn’t plan.

He returned to power with many advantages. A genuine, undisputed election victory. A booming economy. A Republican Party that supports him over the Constitution. A Supreme Court going a long way in the same direction, and an Establishment morally exhausted, like France in 1940. The Democratic leadership, the universities, law firms and corporate media owners each desperately searching for a reason not to fight a man who wants to destroy them.

Had he proceeded to slowly accumulate power, govern calmly, put his people into the large number of politically available slots the American system provides for political appointees, kept the economy going, even allowing it to overheat again, he would be well placed to pick up several seats in the Senate, and gain a proper majority in the House, from which perch he could amass complete power and dismantle most opposition.

Such machiavellianism overlooks his biggest weakness, which is his love of spectacle. It causes him to appoint complete idiots as Attorney General or Defence (now War) Secretary. Have goons attempt to invade Chicago, and then Portland. Humiliate himself in front of Vladimir Putin. He’ll never resist the urge to be at the centre of the show. This is his fatal flaw, which everyone who wants to see democracy restored to America needs to work out how to exploit.

I saw this in the Remain campaign, in the EU’s treacle-like response to Viktor Orbán’s destruction of Hungarian democracy, and the West’s semi-response to Russian aggression in Ukraine.

Two questions keep coming into my mind: why have we taken so long to do anything? And why do we keep losing?

The reason is simple: they are at war while we are not. We have two types of enemies, right wing nationalists and Russia. They’re separate but they make common cause. Whatever their disagreements, they share one belief: that they have to beat us, the liberals, the democrats, the men and women who believe in free societies and a free world. Theirs is a wartime mentality and we’re stuck with a peacetime one.

Neither Brexit nor Trump’s first victory, nor his attempted coup on January 6, or the seizure of power in which he’s currently engaged in have shaken us out of our complacency.

Complacency manifests itself in two ways: first by wondering whether something we need to do to win is worth it. If we do X, there might be knock on consequences, in burnt political bridges, lower budgets for public services or higher taxes. It might mean the Democratic Party had to have a primary and pick a candidate able to win. It might have meant capitalising on Michael Gove’s remark that Brexit Britian should model its relationship with the EU not on Norway or Canada, but on Albania. And it might have meant reducing German dependence on Russian gas slowly, starting in 2014 instead of having to do so urgently in 2022. It might have meant starting to raise defence budges in 2008, when Russia attacked Georgia, or 2014, when it first attacked Ukraine instead of avoiding spending money that wouldn’t be needed if things returned to “normal”. Or it might have meant France not holding up artillery orders for Ukraine from outside the EU before the EU could build is own capacity. Or it could mean getting F16’s to Ukraine secretly and without delay, instead of the snail’s pace with which they were actually dispatched. I don’t mean to single any particular country out here: there’s plenty of blame here that a new “Cato” can parcel around.

All these are examples of a peacetime mentality. Avoiding pushing for victory now because it might lead to unpleaseant consequences later. Thinking business as usual would continue when as usual has ceased to exist. That was then. It’s not “then” any more. Hoping that Trump can somehow be dealt with as a rational actor — he isn’t.

Guess what, world history’s full of irrational people who get into power and impose disasters on the planet. Analysts need to read more history as well as economics, and economics-style political science. “Rational economic man” may fine enough for the market place, but this is the battle not trading.

The biggest mistake of all is refraining from winning because fighting might destroy the consensus we have: too late. The consensus is gone, they’ve destroyed it. All we’ve left to do is to beat them and pick up the pieces afterwards.

The Summit

So as European leaders meet today here are ten things they need to do.

1. Make sure Zelensky’s there. Show that Ukraine is one of the major nations of Europe and has a right to be at the top table.

2. Seize the $150 billion of Russian assets in European banks. Use half of it to support Ukrainian defence production: its defence industry isn’t working at full tilt because it lacks money. Use the other half to start capitalising the Rearmament bank proposed by Gen Nick Carter and Ed Lucas.

3. All major countries should immediately increase defence spending to 3% if they haven’t already and make plans to raise it to 5% within the next three years. Don’t wait until after the German elections. Agree it with Merz and announce it now.

4. Increase nuclear weapons production. France and Britain have the weapons and technology, but can’t afford to increase it on their own so other large countries should chip in. Some of the effort should also go on sub-strategic weapons, which France has through air-launched cruise missiles. Russia might still try and divide Western Europe from East here, so find a way to have give the Nordic-Baltic 8 and/or Poland the ability to take part in deterrence.

5. Sweden should send all its Gripens to Ukraine. It should divert the order Hungary has made to fill the gaps this creates, and in the meantime the UK, possibly with help from France, Spain and Italy, should cover Swedish airspace.

6. Norway should use the extra profits its oil fund has made from higher energy prices caused by the war to fund the war effort. Maximisng current European 155mm artillery production would be a good use for some of this money. Spare capacity exists at a number of sites.

7. The UK should reopen an artillery shell production plant. That it hasn’t done so since 2022 is sheer carelessness.

8. Impose secondary sanctions on Russia. Do it as a coalition of the willing so the UK is included, and Hungary/Slovakia can’t block.

9. Establish a new EU/Occar procurement vehicle to centralise procurement of strategic enablers (air defence, lift, etc)

10. Begin (if it hasn’t begun already) contingency planning for how European armies would fight Russia without the United States. This has implications for doctrine, use of air power versus land power, command and control and logistics. These need to be worked out.

Two things got me thinking. The first came from David just about Trump and the “Little Tech Manifesto”: the big tech oligarchs weren’t there to exert power, but to protect their position from disruption. The second from Tim, that the real value is in data. The third, provoked by Christine, that we need to separate tech dominance in general from social media dominance in particular.

And what a day for the debate. Just 48 hours later, $1 trillion had been wiped off US tech stocks after the markets finally discovered what had been known since May 2023 — large-scale general purpose AI companies have no moat. A moat is business jargon for the barriers a company can put up against competition. The moat can be access to resources, superior technical skill, or even, like with Coca-Cola, just branding. Just how dominant American tech — as opposed to American tech finance — actually is, will become clearer after the markets find their bottom.

Large Language Models suffer from their generality. They’re all trained on essentially the same text, and this gives them essentially the same ability (and flaws — they’re all vulnerable to the same kind of prompt injection attacks). This makes them, in the end, commodities. LLM companies have no way of distinguishing their product because they all do the same thing, and so have no pricing power. It’s easy for developers to switch from one language model to another. The only “secret sauce” is the weights that the trained models have. But Facebook released the weights to its llama models — knowing, I suppose, this would eventually undercut the competition. Deepseek, the new Chinese model, appears to have based its model on some of these open weights and trained its own to the same level, but for far less money, apparently as little as $5 million, than OpenAI and its rivals. It released the model’s weights publicly, so anyone with enough hardware (the model has 650 billion parameters) can use it on their own equipment. Then it released technical documentation allowing anyone else to retrain another model using its advances.

Find The Value

This brings me to Gordon’s observation about data. The optimisations Deepseek used dramatically cheapened the cost of transformer-based models (transformers power language models, but can also be used for other statistical pattern recognition), but while clever, they are not revolutionary. Faced with limited access to chips they thought how to make AI more effcient. Like the Japanese cars of the 1970s and 80s, they’ve shown American LLMs to be gas guzzling monsters. (It’s not a little embarrassing that not a single European AI company was able to exploit the Americans’ corpulence).

Their effect is even more dramatic. Language models are just one, dramatic and relatable, use of GPU-powered statistical pattern recognition. In principle they can be used to discover patterns in very differerent kinds of data. Many of the optimisations DeepSeek developed are so general they can be applied to other kinds of problems and AI architectures. Their work will dramatically increase the number of problems to which statistical reasoning can be applied. If you want something done, by the way, I recommend the brilliant Bulgarians at Vector Labs.

The market advantage comes from having access to specific data relevant to one particular problem, like detecting enemy drones so they can be shot down, optimising traffic flows in a large city or finding new drugs. Its acquisition and organisation provides competitive advantage. It is less clear that sheer scale matters as much as we had thought.

This should make big tech, whose advantage is scale, more than a little uncomfortable.

The CEOs found their way to the front of Trump’s inauguration, having donated what is to them pocket change to fund the celebrations. In Bluestone’s view they were there not to show their own power, but because they were afraid. They came to kiss the ring, not tell the boss what to do.

Though they probably won’t have to fear regulation, which would stand little chance of getting through Congress, they ought, he said, to be worried about competition. Another tech figure close to Trump is Marc Andreesen, of the legendary Silicon Valley venture firm Andreesen Horowitz, which styles itself the champion of the Little Tech Agenda. Little tech exists to dethrone incumbent firms grown old and fat:

A startup is what happens when a plucky group of outcasts and misfits comes together with a dream, ambition, courage, and a particular set of skills – to build something new in the world, to build a product that will improve peoples’ lives, and to build a company that may go on to create many more new things in the future.

Apart from relative age, these companies’ strength is in two businesses: cloud computing (Amazon and Microsoft) and targeted advertising: Facebook, Google and, if you can call it strength, Elon Musk’s X. But as the rise of Bluesky shows, their raw material is users’ attention, and it could easily be lost, just as Yahoo, and MySpace lost it to them. They need Trump to protect them from the Little Tech poised to overthrow them.

The cloud computing businesses are the utilities of the age. The social media companies are quite different. They’re companies whose great wealth generates huge externalities.

Make Information Polluters Pay

Like oil companies, whose main activity pollutes the air and drives global warming, social media fills the public sphere with toxins. Its sins are two: first, it’s currently designed to maximise engagement, and so tilts towards the tabloid; second the advertising revenue that used to support journalism, and cultural production now goes to these technology companies fundamentally uninterested in the media. Even notorious newspaper barons were interested in some sense in the media as a teller of stories. The tech bros couldn’t care less.

This was bad enough when the platforms were neutral, if lowbrow. But now some of our main sources of information are controlled by men dependent on Trump. Facebook’s Meta has swiftly joined his culture war against “DEI”. Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post is fast losing staff and credibility. X openly meddles in other countries’ politics, as Anne Applebaum shows. Tiktok is under the control of the Chinese government (and unlike DeepSeek, keeps its algorithms hidden).

These platforms now control a vast portion of information distribution in Europe. Their content is corrupting our public discourse, promoting division (because hatred is a form of engagement). They have become an engine of populism, allowing charismatic but shallow candidates to leap into power. That might not be too big an issue if charisma were correlated with the ability to govern, but it isn’t, and the ancient tension in democracy between persuading people to elect you, and then governing in the national interest is starting to tilt too far towards persuasion and against successful governing.

The old world of 1990s Western Europe isn’t coming back. Print newspapers are disappearing, and timed news bulletins will be watched more and more rarely. Decentralised algorithmic distribution is here to stay. But the social media model we’ve grown has started to endanger the survival of our democracy.

Europe, at least, is far from powerless to stop it. Even Meta recognises this, and is keeping fact checkers on in the EU. It’s scared of fines. But judicial processes are slow, and we should get more creative.

An obvious move is to make it easy for people to move to new platforms, like they can move between phone networks without losing their number. This was blocked by the Council when the Digital Markets Act was passed. The Act is up for review soon. Time to force them to allow people to move networks but take their “social graph” with them. Bluesky’s AT Protocol shows how it could be done in practice. Competition drove Deepseek’s to make its new model, and competition is needed to create alternatives to MAGA- and China-controlled social media.

So wrote Kipling in If, and if the reaction to Donald Trump’s foreign affairs press conference was anything to go by, most of us aren’t ready to “be a man, my son.”

Troll-in-chief

Trump was doing what he does best, which is trolling. Seeing whether he can get away with taking over Greenland or incorporating Canada into the United Atates. He did this because he enjoys it. He gets off on appearing to have arbitrary power, and watching the little people run around trying to placate him. How he must have loved Canada’s Conservative opposition leader, Pierre Poilievre, insisting on X that “Canada will never be the 51st state” and that he will “fight for Canada” if he wins the election this year. Journalists at the press conference played into his hands, by asking if he would rule out the use of force to take over Greenland. Of course he didn’t rule it out.

Trump quite obviously doesn’t care about the western alliance, or America’s national interests, but is this really the end of the international order, as some of the more excitable commentators have been saying?

He’s been in the public eye long enough to know a few things about him. First, he craves attention, and he’ll say anything to get it. Second, he likes to shoot his mouth off, but doesn’t see himself as anyway committed to anything he says. Third, he always gives himself an out. You know what he’s getting at, but if you read his words carefully, you’ll find some sort of an excuse: “people have been saying…”, “maybe…”. The man hates confrontation, because there’s always a chance he’ll come across a loser. Give him a face saving way to back down, Ideally by making him look like a dealmaker, and he often will.

Poilievre understood this, which is why he drew attention to Canada’s energy supplies to the united states delivered at “low prices”. He didn’t have to add “for now”.

He’s not a King: just head of one branch of one level of government

Trump won the election, but he won narrowly, with less than 50% of the popular vote, the smallest ever congressional majority, and a slim margin in the Senate. The US has fifty states, with their own governments and the separation of powers. Even in foreign policy, he’s constrained by legislation: most obviously the War Powers Act, and it’s Congress that has to vote money, increase the debt ceiling.

Opponents of his policy, foreign and domestic, have plenty to work with to slow things down, and buy some time to defuse this particular crisis.

Remember that America’s government has branches and is a federal union of states. This needs to guide both strategy and communications.

Strategy: which means building up allies in Congress including within the Republican Party, particularly in districts with small majorities or which depend on European investment; or among governors and in the private sector.

Communications: Trump is not “The United States”. He is, in EU terms, one of “three co-legislators” and head of the executive branch. Millions of proud Americans oppose him and everything he stands for. Millions more want him to concentrate on growing the economy, not picking fights with Europe. So talk about our strong relationship with the US, while taking issue with the “executive branch” of the “federal government”.

America’s not the world

Greenland may be largely empty - but it’s part of Denmark, an EU member state. The French foreign minister has promised that the EU would defend its borders. One doesn’t need to imagine the Foreign Legion freezing in the snows near Nuuk, but one should note that picking a fight with the world’s second-largest economic bloc would be very expensive for the United States.

Remember: the US struggles to get Turkey to do what it wants. What chance does it have for the whole EU?

Trump promised the voters prosperity, not spurious national aggrandisement.

The need is for European leaders to show a united front and communicate that madness would not be tolerated, and a world were European companies continue to invest in the US, and buy US weapons, would be vastly preferable to one of confrontation.

A face-saving deal, involving some US rare earth mine and continued oil sales from Canada can probably be cooked up.

But in the meantime, better start upping that defence spending. 5% was what he wanted. That could pay for a big foreign legion indeed.

Eye on the ball

Then, keep focused on what really makes him get up in the morning, which, apart from looking strong on TV, is corruption and theft. Time spent talking about invading Greenland is time not spent scrutinising Pete Hesgseth’s nomination to be Defense Secretary, or Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence.

Instead European countries need to build up their allies on the Hill and in American industry, reduce their dependency on parts of American policy that are in Trump’s arbitrary power, and above all stick together to impose costs on the Trump executive branch.

South Korea’s democrats showed they know how to oppose an elected leader plotting an “autogolpe”, or self-coup.

1. They contested his narrative. Don’t take his bizarre theory that there is a fifth column of South Koreans sympathising with the North seriousy.

2. They acted fast - the coup was over in two and a half hours - even though it was planned in the middle of the night. The Parliament impeached the president immediately.

3. They understood normal processes couldn’t be followed. So they climbed over police barricades and voted against the martial law. They might not have had formal constitutional authority to block martial law: but the symbolism of their vote was clear.

4. Members of the president’s party put country before loyalty to him. They understood their democracy was more important than party structures.

These rules are not the rules of idealised politics. In idealised politics you’re supposed to

1. Respect the other side’s narrative, and reach consensus with them.

2. Act deliberately, after due consideration, to achieve the best outcome.

3. Follow process, because if procedure is by the book, your opponents can’t object to its conclusions.

4. Support your party leader, because party policies, rather than individual candidates, are what voters choose

But even if those rules are right in normal times — they’re a suicide note when faced with a determined populist autocrat.

Yes, president Yoon was so inept that South Koreans were playing on easy mode: but like a good tutorial, the ease clarifies what you have to do. Are your pro-democracy leaders doing the same?

Isaiah Berlin, the Riga-born philosopher best known for his Two Concepts of Liberty, said it came down to his identification of two separate moral codes, one Christian, and private, the other pagan and civic,

What he institutes…is a differentation between two incompatible ideals of life, and therefore two moralities. One is the morality of the Pagan world…against this universe stands in the first and foremost place Christian morality.

This is from The Originality of Machiavelli, and I’ll have more to say about those two moralities, in another piece, because of the way they play into the radicalism of the contemporary right, but here I want to bring out the Machiavellian ideal and ask whether its absence has made the west relatively defenceless against demagogues.

Machiavelli thought a statesman’s main aim was the glory of his state (he wrote in the sixteenth century, but was sexist even by the standards of the time). Not peace or standard of living, or, necessarily liberty of its subjects, though he thought the two were normally connected, but greatness and success, in competition with others. Your state should be admired — but also able to defend itself from covetous neighbours.

And this glory was public — it wasn’t about being a good husband, or father or decent in his relations with his friends: choosing a public life came with public obligations, and a moral cost, at least if measured against the standards of private (Christian) morality.

Yet, different though it may have been from private morality, the moral code of public life was no less stringent. He condemns sloth, corruption, avarice, pointless cruelty, and the amassing of power for its own sake. The Prince is a manual for the new man who takes a corrupt state and wants to remake a better one out of its ruins (here Machiavelli appeals to the entrepreneurs and disruptors of our age) but the objective for which the blood is to be shed has to be the making of another great, public, good: a republic. He doesn’t think hereditary rule can last more than three generations.

Here Machiavelli departs from the crooks and thieves our demagogues become. The state isn’t a piggy bank to be looted or a private market whose spoils become the property of the office holder. He stood against the rent-seeking “stationary bandits” whose avarice was as much a sign of weakness as Christian pacifism would be.

An aspect of greatness for Machiavelli is the attitude of militant democracy: being able to seize opportunities as they present themselves, to preserve the republic even when they might depart from the formalism of fair play. An example is the Romanian president’s astute reaction to anti-NATO Calin Giorgescu’s surprise first round win. Raising the spectre of cyberattacks, together with a losing candidate’s suit for a recount, galvanised the electorate in the parliamentary elections held a week later. Turnout jumped 20 points compared to the last parliamentary vote, while the far right share was around five per cent less than in the first round of the presidential elections.

A greater hero is Georgia’s president Salome Zourabichvili, fighting to her last breath against the thugs in thrall to pro-Russian oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvilli who took power in parliament after a rigged election in October. As the police beat Georgian protesters demanding freedom from corrupt Russian influence, and break Georgia’s constitution by calling off EU membership negotiations she takes her people’s case to the world and does what she can to restrain security forces under the control of the rigged parliamentary majority.

The contrast with the United States couldn’t be clearer. It doesn’t lie in the evil of democracy’s enemies, but the moral weakness of its supporters. Biden stayed too long in office, preventing the Democratic Party having a primary to choose a new leader able to beat Trump; now he pardoned his son. It was the act of a good father, protecting his son from prison, but of a bad president. Biden picked private morality over the public at just the moment when Americans need the example a good president provides — because they won’t have one for the next four years.

Machiavelli makes the “detestable tyrant” Caesar the villain of his Discourses on Livy, but tars those who lacked the strength of character to defeat him, as much of the blame as his actively corrupt supporters.

But the right to oppose is the most important right in a democracy, and what distinguishes it from electoral dictatorship. Every country gives effect to this right in its own way: Britain though its parliamentary tradition; France through its politics of the street; Ukraine that fights its oligarchs with every bit of the tenacity it has visited on Russian invaders.

The US is no exception. It has the separation of powers: two separately elected parliamentary chambers as well as the presidency, together with the courts. 50 states rule independently on most of the things that matter to people.  It has a civil society second to none, funded a by a broad base of donors from across America, large and small. They all have the right — if they want to exercise it — to oppose.

In democracies, we don’t elect kings. We elect people to specific offices, and regulate the powers by law.  And Trump’s victory was clear, but narrow.  Trump won the electoral college 312 to 226, a shade more than Biden, 306 to 232, but nothing compared Obama’s or Reagan’s or even Nixon’s 1972 victories.

Make America Latin Again

About three thousand miles due south of Philadelphia, and a hundred and fifty years after the Constitutional Convention, in Quito, Ecuador, José María Velasco Ibarra would personify a different political tradition,  rhetoric-fuelled populism. Give me a balcony, and I’ll be president (dadme un balcón y seré presiente). He would come and go from the office five times, proclaiming himself dictator twice.

His power came personally from the people, and this, he thought, gave him the right to do what he wanted. He first came to power in 1933, a good vintage for this kind of politics, in which balcony speeches would be augmented by radio. (Some food for thought in Peter Pomeranzev’s superb How to Win an Information War:  the Nazis won power despite being banned from the national airwaves).

Velasco Ibarra was a classic elected autocrat, who perverted institutions to promote his own power. And this has been the difference, until now, between politics in North and South America.

Democracy works on two levels: the rules that put people in power, and the rules we use to determine the first set of rules, and what powers they have when we elect them.

We call these the constitution, or maybe just norms, and they only work when everyone makes a reasonable attempt to uphold them. If one side sticks to them while the other doesn’t, they’ll lose.

So when you oppose Trump, remember that your job isn’t to live by the norms, but to restore a world where those norms are upheld. Stay within the law, but don’t give his administration the benefit of the doubt it doesn’t deserve. He’s out to destroy the  North American constitutional tradition, and replace it with the South American one.

And there was a reason, when I was growing up in Argentina, we had regular power cuts, you couldn’t make international phone calls unless you went to a special phone booth and the bank notes had 000’s and 000’s on them: populism is just a worse way to run a country than a liberal democracy with a separation of powers and a market economy.

Narrow victory

It would be one thing, if Trump had won by a massive landslide, and all America had chosen his policies. But this is not true. As the counting continues, it’s clear he got less than 50% of the vote. His lead over Kamala Harris is about 1.5% of the vote. In the House of Representatives, the Republicans will likely have a majority of 2. In the senate the Democrats won races in Wisconsin, Michigan and Arizona. Had Harris carried those, she would have lost by only 4 electoral votes. Had she carried North Carolina, where the Democrats won the governorship, she would have won narrowly, with 278 electoral votes to Trump’s 260.

This was not a two-party landslide, like Obama, in 2008, who won 365 to John McCain’s 173 (Bill Clinton’s electoral college votes were inflated by Ross Perot, the Trumpist avant la lettre), or HW Bush’s 426-111 against Mike Dukakis, let alone Reagan’s 525-13 thrashing of Walter Mondale.

Let’s not forget that Nixon won 520 electoral votes to George McGovern’s 17 (and 60% of the popular vote). That didn’t stop Americans opposing him, and he was out. impeached and convicted by the Senate, two years later.

Sure, Trump’s control over the Republican party appears stronger than we remember Nixon’s to be.  But he’s only strong as long as he’s popular. When he stops being popular, the Senators and Congressmen will look after their own reelection first.

Trump won the right to govern, but not to change the system of government. And even the right to govern doesn’t give him the right to override other constitutionally defined powers. You have every right — maybe the duty — to oppose.

Oppose the Trumpists, wherever you find them

Now the job is to make things as difficult for him as possible. Ukrainians in New York and Poles in Illinois: call your Republican congressmen. Don’t let them abandon Ukraine. Meat-packing plant owners: demand they resist his attempts to deport your workforce. Pore over the careers of the incompetent loyalists he wants to appoint to the executive branch and run ads in swing districts about them.  He won by an edge, and that edge can be taken away.

But don’t forget, the purpose of opposition is not to scream and shout at the system but to assemble a majority at the next election to beat Trump, and that means some people who voted for him this time, will have to vote against him in the 2026 mid-terms.

Trump thrives on his ability to get people to imagine he wouldn’t actually do the stuff that he does — but he will.  His special power is his ability to fool people with his goofiness.  So be nice to the people he fooled, make them feel good about changing their minds and repudiating him. Use every opportunity to persuade them he’s let them down.

Oh, and drop “Latinx” - you can’t pronounce it in Spanish.

Naturally, Viktor Orbán was also on the list and the jamboree got generous support from various taxpayer funded offshoots of the Budapest regime.  The cops had been sent in on the orders of the mayor of the commune, where the conference had been displaced after other more salubrious venues had disinvited it under political pressure.

It exposed the ugly face of some of the supposed defenders of liberalism, and played into the populist right’s self-image as a oppressed freedom fighters rather than a well funded political movement able to invite the current and former ministers to its events.

It raised questions about the rule of law in Belgium, though the Belgian Prime Minister had the sense to denounce the raid as unconstitutional, and the Council of State issued a late-night injunction to allow the conference to continue.

And it compels us to ask whether the supposed friends of the open society know what they are supposed to be defending.

There’s a practice, called “militant democracy,” that argues that sometimes antidemocratic parties need to be banned in order to protect the constitutional system. Some of the speakers at the conference, including former Prime Minister of Poland Mateusz Morawiecki have done huge damage to constitutional democracy, but they are European citizens with normal political rights. He was removed at the ballot box and accepted defeat. He didn’t for example, lead a mob to the Polish parliament to try and have the result overturned.

The Brussels meeting wasn’t a coup attempt — it was a conference of political speeches that belongs in a free society. If you disagree with the national conservatives set up your own conference to argue against them, don’t send the police in to have it shut down.

Participants in democratic politics need to be able to take disagreement and personal criticism. We elect people because of their character, not only their policies. Even though it doesn’t amount to policy debate, there’s no problem lampooning the national conservatives: here are supposed free marketeers going to a conference funded by the outgrowth of a crony-capitalist state; believing Christians sharing a stage with the leader of a government in trouble for covering up paedophilia pardons.

The irony of hard right nationalists having their conference surrounded by police sent by a mayor expelled from his own party for hosting a conference of …hard right nationalists; or of opponents of judicial review being able to resume because a judge has overruled the local democratically elected mayor should be savoured, slowly and deliciously, like the best Belgian chocolate truffle.

But it is completely unacceptable to put political pressure on venue not to host the event — that’s what the national populists do, and what we criticise them for. And it’s certainly outrageous to send police to break up the meeting.

So remember that it is democracy you’re supposed to be defending against  populist elected dictators, not using their tactics against people you don’t like.

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This instinct isn’t wrong, but it is secondary. The most important thing is to have people who believe democracy serving in both elected and unelected institutions, including courts, security forces and broadcasting authorities.

That’s part of what saved democracy in Israel and the United States in 2020 and 2023. In Israel, the defence minister stood up against the Netanyahu’s judicial coup and public demonstrations prevented him being fired. The Supreme Court then preserved its right to strike down unconstitutional legislation.

Democracy is the system we use to give some of us power over us all. It’s a way to choose who gets to make the rules or apply them to us. If the wrong people get in, they’ll take this freedom away from us and, because they’re human after all, help themselves to what they can get.

Liberal democracy isn’t just about choosing who gets to rule: it’s also about setting the rules people have to obey when they exercise power over us. They hold offices with specific powers, and they can be stopped, or punished if they exceed them. They are supposed to disclose information so that we can decide what we think, and, ultimately, vote them out if enough of us don’t like what they’ve done.  Governing power is huge, we’ve learned it needs to be constrained by constitutions, law courts, parliamentary opposition, the media and civil society, and an independent private sector as well as elections.

Elected dictators tear down this web of checks and balances.

They do so by abusing another mechanism: patronage. Patronage greases the wheels of power. If all those checks and balances worked to the max, nothing would ever get done. Patronage is how people with power incentivise and control those below them. They hand out rewards for loyalty, effectiveness and determination. It’s one of the forces that holds political parties together (the other is ideology, which can be a countervailing force;  I’ll talk about in a later piece), and we tolerate it in limited quantities.

But it doesn’t take a genius to see how patronage can be abused. The minister who appoints incompetent officials. The lackey entrusted with running the “impartial” board.   It easily shades into corruption. If competence is less relevant, what’s the problem with people buying their way into positions of power?

Elected dictators go further. They appoint people to subvert checks and balances: to ensure public contracts go to their friends, that independent-minded journalists are fired from public service TV and radio.

As the rot goes deeper, government-friendly businessmen buy up independent media, as happened to Origo and 888 in Hungary, turned into government mouthpieces. Poland’s Law and Justice government instructed the state oil company to buy local newspapers.

All this happened because people hostile or just indifferent to democracy won political power, and it means the focus for democrats needs to be on making sure that elected — but also unelected — political office is in the hands of convinced democrats.

Mid-20th century Communist coup-plotters would talk about seizing the “power ministries” from their opponents. In a modern democracy under attack from wannabe elected dictators the range of agencies to watch is broader: media authorities, anti-corruption bodies, civil service leadership councils, regional governments, are as important as the chief of police, the judiciary and elected parliamentarians.

The more of those posts that are held by convinced democrats, the harder it will be for a demagogue to transmute one election victory into dictatorial power.

The enemy goes by a number of names: illiberal democrats, authoritarian demagogues, hybrid regimes, I’m going to call them elected dictators, and I’ve chosen that name deliberately. We’ll see why in a minute.

They’ve emerged everywhere: in new post-communist countries, and the oldest democracy of them all: the United States; in the Philippines and Brazil; they threatened one of the oldest parliamentary systems, in the UK, and menaced what could be the most robust constitutions, in Italy.

When we think of a dictator we imagine someone like Saddam Hussein, Ceaucescu or maybe even Mobutu Sese Seko. He’s a man in a military uniform, who took power by force. But there’s another type, one who doesn’t seize power, but slides his way into it. Doesn’t demolish the institutions, but hollows them out.  Julius Caesar perhaps — but certainly Mussolini or Milosevic. And these all started as ordinary political figures. Even in Yugoslavia, which wasn’t a democracy, Milosevic still had to maneouvre around institutions before he could actually take control.

It’s normal for a dictator to be elected, at least the first time.

What’s new about the current crop not that they take power without violence, but that they’ve learned to stay in office without using much.  They control the economy, hand out contracts to friends, and deny them to enemies. These enriched friends buy up independent media, which then toes the government line. Judges, are subject to disciplinary regimes to ensure reliability (or if that fails, labeled “enemies of the people”). Civil society groups with funding from abroad are denounced as “foreign agents” while the regimes themselves grow fat on EU funds or FDI from Russia and China. The normal rules of the democratic game where the “government of the day” is in charge of the state, not synonymous with it, are replaced what former Hungarian Supreme Court Judge András Sájo calls “ruling by cheating”, and I have called “political monopoly.”

Yet we now know enough about this kind of regime to understand how it works, what it wants to achieve — and how it can be beaten, even at the ballot box, in an unfair playing field.  This fifteen part series will mine our experience of fighting populist elected dictators to discover what doesn’t work, and what does.

So why elected dictators? Because politics is a game of persuasion not dispassionate neutral observation. When Orbán calls himself an illiberal democrat, he wants to claim a democratic legitimacy he doesn’t deserve. It’s fine for political scientists to use terms like “hybrid regimes”, they need to be neutral, at least in their academic role, but we’re not, and using language that describes what we’re really up against is the first step to victory.

This series, published every few days over the next month, will be divided into three sections.

Part 1  - 3 briefings that will look at the overall situation we’re in, and what we need to do to keep democracy safe.

Part 2 - at least 4 briefings that will cover mistakes to avoid

Part 3 - at least 5 briefings that will focus on what democrats need to do to win

Slovaks vote for president this Saturday, March 23rd. Autocrat Robert Fico’s ally Peter Pellegrini has a narrow lead. Now it’s emerged that Hungary’s Viktor Orbán had tried to help him back in 2020 — by organising a visit to Moscow.

The Arguments

• Robert Fico, whose government collapsed after it was implicated in the murder of investigative journalist Jan Kuciak, who had exposed corruption in Slovakia’s elite, was re-elected Prime Minister last year, and has set about dismantling checks and balances.

• His main aim is to protect the corrupt. He has disbanded the special anti-corruption prosecutors unit, copied Berlusconi’s Italy by shortening the statute of limitations on corruption-linked crimes and weakened whistleblower protections. His next target is the public media, which he wants to turn into a propaganda mouthpiece, like in Hungary, or Poland during Law and Justice rule. Now he wants his ally in the presidential palace.

• But the biggest danger is Fico’s pro-Moscow position. Like Orbán, Fico can wield a veto in the European Council to block EU sanctions on Russia, and a friend for Orbán to help block aid to Ukraine.

Now Read…

• Investigative outlet VSquare’s exposé of Orban’s interference in Slovakia’s parliamentary election, where he helped Pellegrini by organising a visit to Moscow.

• A useful summary of Fico and Pellegrini’s pro-Moscow tilt

• DemocracyHub’s Zselyke Csaky argues Europe needs a strategic rethink to defend democracy.

What happened?

• Emanuel Macron dramatically shifted French policy on Ukraine. Though he began the war saying Putin shouldn’t be “humiliated,” Macron has now moved significantly. The beginning of 2024 is “time to wake up.”

• He orchestrated a vote in the National Assembly from which far-right Rassamblement National members ran away and abstained, while far-left NUPES deputies found themselves divided. He then gave an interview in which he described a Russian victory as existential for Europe and France.

The Arguments

• Welcome Macron’s change of position. He has overcome a century of French policy that saw Russia as an ally against Germany, and a bulwark against “the Anglo Saxons”.

• Germany — or rather Chancellor Sholz — is now the weakest link in the Western Alliance. He, and the “Russia-understanding” faction of the SPD are preventing Germany acting in the European interest.

• The majority of Germans and the majority in the German parliament supports it: the SPD need to stop blocking vital weapons, in particular Taurus missiles, that Ukraine needs to defend itself.

Now Watch…

• Macron’s Interview (clip – English subtitles) (full video - French).

• Speech by Friedrich Merz (clip - reasonable AI translated English).

…and Read

• This trenchant piece by European Policy Centre Analyst Amanda Paul: Europe Must Wipe the Smile of Putin’s Face. (Disclosure: I’m head of communications at the EPC)

• Sophia Besch on Europe’s New Defence Industrial Strategy: good timing, but far too small.

• My own analysis of the Portuguese Elections in Conservative Home. How far-right Chega won ex-communist voters by promising to triple the state pension.