It’s commonplace, especially in The West, to think of wars in binary terms. In those terms, wars are either won or lost, like a sports match. And the symbol of victory is a trophy. In a match-up, the symbol of defeat is the loss of a trophy.

In the days of the Roman Empire, the trophy might be a ‘barbarian’ leader being paraded in chains; or maybe his head in a box. ‘Decapitation’ is a crude trophy word, still very much in vogue.

In the present Iran War, the trophy of victory might have been the ‘head’ of the 86-year-old ‘Supreme Leader’; Iran’s former equivalent of the United Kingdom’s late Queen Elizabeth II. But in reality, the Iranians were waiting for Ali Khamenei to die; and all the signs were, so long as Iran was left in relative peace, that a liberalisation process was already in place.

Further the assassination of Khamanei could never have been an adequate trophy for the United States. Because it was actually done by Israel, another country, another nuclear power, indeed a highly secretive nuclear power, a genocidal power which terrorises its part of the world. And we note that it has always been in Israel’s interest to keep Iran on a war-footing; to keep it from being anything other than an enemy. A progressive Iran would have very much stymied the Greater Israel project. Hence the need to assassinate Khamanei before he died of natural causes.

For the United States, another trophy had to be found. Having co-started the present war, the United States needs to end it, and with a victory trophy.

It would seem that the trophy being demanded is Iran’s enriched uranium. Apparently, the United States wants to be allowed to go into Iran, excavate the enriched uranium, and then to truck it and ship it to some undisclosed destination. To facilitate this, the United States is trying to make its victory arrangements with ‘negotiations’ brokered by an actual pro-China nuclear power in Southwest Asia; namely Pakistan, a country over which the United States has intruded upon its political sovereignty on a number of occasions, a country with no popular love for the United States and its proxies.

We need to note that, for Iran to allow the United States to acquire its trophy would represent a military defeat; a capitulation in the eyes of the world in general, the Iranian population (both those in favour of the present Pezeshkian regime, and those opposed to it) in particular, and to the global community of Shia Muslims. (The total Shia population is estimated to be 350 million, 250 million of whom are faithful, and 90 million of whom are resident in Iran.)

Japan

On the matter of understanding the shortcomings of binary victory and binary defeat, we may turn to the matter of Japan in 1945. The trophy at stake was Emperor Hirihito. And, on the basis of this binary, it was Japan, not the United States, which was victorious. Japan retained its trophy.

On 9 March 1945, the United States embarked on its campaign for unconditional victory; meaning that Japan had to unconditionally surrender, which in turn would mean that Hirohito would be Japan’s last emperor, and that his reign would end in 1945.

For starters, the United States slaughtered 100,000 residents of Tokyo in four hours of one night; the wee hours of 10 March. Total Japanese deaths from that spring and summer bombing campaign – including the nuclear deaths – was between 500,000 and one million people.

None of these bombings came close to resulting in Japan conceding its Emperor. The United States was preparing to drop three more atomic bombs on Japan that year – production criteria meant that these bombs were scheduled for November and December 1945. If Japan still refused to give up its trophy, the city of Kyoto was scheduled for removal from the United States’s non-hit list. Also, to note, the United States kept up its non-nuclear aerial assault on Japan until the day before the deal was signed.

In August 1945, communications were not good in Japan. The leadership in Tokyo had heard that there was an unusually large explosion at Hiroshima, and then another in Nagasaki, but they didn’t really have time to process their limited information. They had already been hit by plenty of other big bombs. Meanwhile, the people on the ground in Hiroshima were able to restore electrical power within three days of that explosion; locals did what locals do everywhere, pick themselves up if they can, and try to keep living.

What happened to finish the war was the threat from the Soviet Union. After the end of the war in Europe, the Soviet Union returned its attention to the East. There had been longstanding territorial disputes – and cold dispute still continues in the Kuril Islands – between Japan and Russia. Russia, having been embarrassed in the 1904/05 Russia-Japan War, potentially had a score to settle; Manchuria, for much of the first half of the twentieth century, had been territory contested between Russia, China and Japan.

But it was the United States which most feared the Soviet Union’s advance into Northeast Asia. In Europe, the United States was pushing the narrative that the Soviet Union, which had ‘liberated’ Eastern Europe from the German Nazi regime, was intent on pushing Communism onto Western Europe, and would use military means to do that. The hoary trope in Paris and London, that the Russians would soon be at their front-doors if they could not be held behind an iron curtain within Germany, was a narrative very much adhered to by the Americans with regard to the Far East as well as to the Far West. Indeed, by the time of the end of hostilities in August 1945, Soviet Russia had already ‘liberated’ half of the Korean Peninsula; Korea was a mirror image of the emergent East-West faultline within Europe.

So, the Americans caved in. They agreed that Japan could keep its Emperor. Japan saved face. Hostilities in the Pacific War ended the next day.

Iran again

2026 hostilities could end as soon as the United States removes its demand for a trophy which the Americans know the Iranians cannot accept. The barrier to ending the war is that the American regime would lose face without a compelling victory trophy. In the earlier Japan situation, by contrast, the American occupation after August 1945 meant that the United States could easily obscure the fact that it had had to make a major concession to secure the end of that war.

Enemies of Convenience: On the matter of Non-Binary War

At one level there is the matter of stated and unstated goals, criteria for ‘success’ (which is not necessarily ‘winning’), and knowing how and when to ‘vacate the arena’. Re the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs, they contributed very little to ending World War Two, but were successful examples of ‘live testing’, and had the huge impact on the new Cold War arena in Europe as ‘demonstration devices”. With the Cold War setting in, Japan proved to be a World War Two enemy of convenience.

Of particular interest is Is war more profitable than peace? David Keen explains, Talk to Al Jazeera, 5 April 2026 (and on YouTube).

Introduction: “What if ‘who is winning’ is the wrong question? Because in many modern conflicts victory is not the only or even the main objective. … It opens streams of profit, and, for many, it creates a constant state of threat that justifies its own continuation. … Wars evolve, adapt, and sometimes sustain the very actors fighting them. … To understand why some wars don’t end, we turn to a leading voice in the political economy of conflict, Professor of Conflict Studies at the London School of Economics, David Keen.”

Keen suggests that some of the benefits of war include “making money”, “suppressing dissent under the cover of war”, “divide and rule”, “painting dissent as disloyalty”, “turning your enemy into the image that you’ve put about in your propaganda”, … “taking actions that are predictably counterproductive”. For certain aims “the enemy can be surprisingly useful”.

David Keen (unassuming, quiet, thoughtful): “This division of people into ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ is incredibly simplistic, and goes back as far as the Vietnam War.” (And further, of course!)

The Soviet Union had proved so useful to the West, that from 1991, after the Cold War, a new bogeyman – convenient enemy – had to be invented. (Note Samuel Huntingdon’s influential 1992 thesis, The Clash of Civilizations, which facilitated the multi-decade employment of many people in high-paid jobs in Washington DC, and no doubt other federal capital cities with otherwise underemployed think tanks.) Iran had already become the enemy-in-waiting in the 1980s, albeit with a degree of secrecy, when a proxy leader for American interests (called Saddam Hussein) was called upon to deal to Iran. Saddam obliged; indeed, he over-obliged, taking his cut in the form of Kuwait.

In the midst of that Iraq-Iran War, in 1987, there was the Irangate scandal.

‘”Soon after taking office in 1981, the Reagan Administration secretly and abruptly changed United States policy.” Secret Israeli arms sales and shipments to Iran began in that year, even as, in public, the Reagan administration presented a different face, and “aggressively promoted a public campaign […] to stop worldwide transfers of military goods to Iran”. … After a leak by Mehdi Hashemi, a senior official in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Lebanese magazine Ash-Shiraa exposed the arrangement on 3 November 1986″.’ From Wikipedia.

Revolutionary Iran (the new Islamic Republic of Iran, under Ayatollah Khomeini) was becoming an enemy of convenience. It was, in the 1980s, being armed by Israel and the United States. Some of those arms will have gone to Hezbollah, established as a Shia resistance movement in 1982, in response to an Israel-led genocide in Lebanon. We note that, today, Hezbollah is a critical and convenient element justifying Israel’s grand expansionist venture.

Today, Russia and Iran – even China – are enemies of convenience to a few; and of great inconvenience to the many. Indeed, re Russia and China, there is talk of the New Cold War. See, for example, The New Cold War: A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, Fred Saberi, The Times of Israel, 19 April 2026.

Re Russia, the Cold War of the twentyfirst century represents the Third Cold War. In The First Cold War, historian Barbara Emerson discusses the ‘war’ against Russia that led to New Zealand’s fortifications on North Head and other places in 1885. (I also draw attention to this 2016 extended critique of President Obama’s ‘weakness’: War by Other Means: Geoeconomics and Statecraft, by Robert Blackwill and Jennifer Harris, and its unsavoury ‘adversaries of convenience’ premise.)

Modern history (which includes 1885) matters very much; Biblical history (or even the slightly more recent Koranic history) matters less. But ancient history can still matter; it tells us some pithy stories about war trophies.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

My first paragraphs here feature Steve Keen, Australian economist, who was a panellist on Al Jazeera’s Inside Story 12 April 2026 (Could the Iran war pose lasting risks to global food security?, or here on YouTube):

Interviewer: “You’ve warned that the world could face famine within months … an extraordinarily stark prediction.”

Keen: “Thirty percent of the world’s fertiliser passes through the Strait, which has now been disrupted for over a month. There’s no sign of this war stopping any time. … There’s not going to be enough fertiliser available. Without fertiliser the carrying capacity of the world is about two billion people. Six billion of us are alive because fertiliser flows freely. … This could have catastrophic effects in all sorts of countries which could not ever imagine that they might face a famine. … That could apply to places like England. … The usual bias we have is that it’s always going to be a problem for brown people; let’s be frank, we’ve got masses of racism in the way we think about the world, and the West doesn’t worry when brown people die; well, what will happen when white people start dying; people might pay more attention.”

While Keen overstates the case, given that seventy percent of the world’s fertiliser flows through other pathways or is used near to where it is produced (though high transport costs, more generally, impede fertiliser flows; not just the blockade of the Hormuz Strait). Thirty percent of six billion is potentially 1,800,000,000 people at risk. And of course there is much food wastage at present. And many people, indeed most people in ‘England’, could survive eating less than half of what they do eat; they may even be less malnourished, by eating better food. Keen later acknowledged the issue of first world food wastage.

Nevertheless, when there are food shortages, ‘rational’ market behaviour – as understood by ‘game theory’ – means that much food would be bought up by speculators and hoarded; profiteering, in other words, a not uncommon feature of famines. (This is similar to the issue of ‘ticket scalping’.) Keen is correct to point out the problem of Euro-supremacism. One feature of the new world food order, noted by the Indian panellist on the program – Avinash Kishore – will be export bans. India, for example, is an important exporter of wheat and rice.

Keen: “Because it has such a market-oriented non-government approach to virtually everything, the United Kingdom has insufficient stocks of fertiliser, diesel fuel, and it imports about forty percent or more of its food. It’s very vulnerable to being told ‘we cannot supply you’. And it doesn’t really have any bargaining ploy in the opposite direction [unlike Australia].”

People assume that, whatever happens, Aotearoa could always feed itself; after all it’s a ‘specialist’ food producer, isn’t it? I’ll come back to that. But we note that the United Kingdom could survive foodwise with a reduction of 40% of its food supply, given that its domestic food production is in better domestic-international balance than is New Zealand’s. The fertiliser question becomes the bigger issue for the United Kingdom, and I’m guessing that it has nearly enough fertiliser stocks for 2026 spring planting, and could redirect some food exports to the domestic market. 2027 though? Incidentally, in the later 1980s, under pressure from Rogernomics, New Zealand got by for a few years with substantially reduced fertiliser usage.

Interviewer: “Just how vulnerable are modern food systems to international shocks like this?’

Keen: “The Trump administration [ie regime] had no idea what it was blundering into when it started this war. … We have a mindset of ‘perfect competition’ which implies numerous different sources, if one supplier gets knocked out then others can [immediately] take its place [as in the case of the New Zealand apple crop after Cyclone Gabrielle in 2023]; there’s no sense of urgency for the physical imports to production. … [Most] economists are completely naïve about the production systems. … There is such a thing as a critical input, and four of them pass through the Strait of Hormuz. … Yes, it’s too late to fix it, you cannot make up for missing ships.”

Keen: “I’m not overstating the potential. It might not happen, we might be lucky, shipments might arrive just in time. … The other possibility is still there. Now what happens if you don’t talk about it. … I would rather have people be too alarmed than too ignorant.”

Keen: “We think we eat green stuff. Ever since we invented fertiliser, we’ve been eating brown stuff. The green wrapping on the outside is basically us turning fossil fuels into food. … We think we have enormous resilience, but in fact we have enormous fragility. This was going to be exposed by global warming, but Donald Trump is like a Force Six cyclone coming in before the natural ones start turning up. … Our production systems are very dependent on specific inputs from specific locations. They cannot be easily replaced once damaged, and at the moment the supply is shut down completely.

Avinash Kishore, from the Indian ‘Food Policy Research Institute’: “The worst outcome would be if production itself suffers and then trade also suffers; [for example] with export bans. … China is the largest producer of fertilisers. If it restricts exports of both urea and phosphate … that makes the situation [much] worse. If trade keeps flowing, we’ll have less vulnerability, as we saw after the Ukraine crisis.”

Interviewer: “If the Strait of Hormuz were somehow to open tomorrow, and calm somehow holds, does this crisis end quickly, or has lasting damage already been done?”

Keen: “Lasting damage. One of the urea plants has already been damaged, and is not producing urea. We have to replace that facility, and these things take time. … This is showing the danger of the ‘just in time’ efficiency versus robustness [business model].’

I would note that ‘just-in-time’ can be robust, given the prevalence of the specific conditions which Keen mentioned; the conditions that most economists presume to be almost always true.

But geography can be capricious, and so can concentration of production reflecting the giant international economies of scale we see in production and transport; economies which minimise cost when disruptive forces are not at play. I would also note that many components of supply chains come as complements; thus, air freight remains largely a complement of passenger movements, fertiliser is a complement of fuel, and shipping works best when ships can carry a return load or an onward load.

New Zealand’s food security depends on its exports continuing to justify high two-way shipping capacity. What if, due to consumer prioritisation, demand in say China for New Zealand’s exports falls away; the reverse of the recent booms? This is the capriciousness of ‘income elasticity of demand’.

Some sobering statistics about New Zealand’s food and fertiliser imports

These ‘harmonised trade’ data (from Statistics New Zealand’s soon-to-be discontinued Infoshare database) cover, for us, in particular the period from 2000 to 2025. Inflation for imported food has been low for that period, given that the exchange rate for the $NZ was at an all-time low in 2000, and that not-so-high New Zealand inflation has been consistently dominated by non-tradable items. We also note that New Zealand’s population has grown by 40% since 2000.

These data are ‘value-for-duty’, meaning for our purposes (and given that New Zealand is a free-trading nation) that they are exclusive of transport and insurance costs. Of course, we now know that transport and insurance costs are going to increase dramatically; especially for a geographically marooned population.

New Zealand’s spending on imported staples has increased from 3½-fold to five-fold since 2000. Annual increases in spending on food imports were even more dramatic in the 1990s, though tradable CPI-inflation will have been higher then. (New Zealand’s data on tradable inflation only commences in the late 1990s.)

New Zealand is dependent on Australian wheat. For other staple food items, the huge increases in food imports have come from other countries. Rice, the best staple food of all, soon will become much harder to get from the non-Australian sources we now prevail upon. Pasta, rice, and pre-prepared vegetables have become dinner-staples of student flats and other income-poor or time-poor households. Further, firms which process New Zealand grown vegetables – Watties and McCain – are planning to scale back their domestic operations. (See my Frozen Vegetables, Food Security, and the New Zealand Dollar, Scoop, 312 March 2026.)

Three other points are noteworthy.

First, spending on imported fodder – imported animal food – has increased dramatically, nearly fourteen-fold, since the three years centred on 2000.

Second, most imports of fertiliser, which have increased more than threefold since 2000, are not from our neighbour across the ditch. (They – the unassembled food matter which underpins the supermarket food we eat – are byproducts of the petroleum industry; hence they come to us from Singapore and South Korea.)

Third, total imported food is now 12% of all imports, up from 6% in 1990 and from 7% in 2001; and now less than 30% of it comes from Australia. ‘Total food’ includes a huge category of imported food simply labelled ‘miscellaneous’. (We also note that little more than ten percent of New Zealand’s total goods’ imports now come from Australia.)

New Zealand’s ‘Perfect Storm’ of food vulnerability

New Zealand’s worst – or at least most immediate – problem might not be fertiliser. Rather, it might be dependence on imports of both human food staples and animal feed. New Zealand’s food production system is now so specialised re the international marketplace, that the short-run and even medium-run supply costs of pivoting to a robust more domestically-oriented model are probably prohibitive.

New Zealand’s main source of staple food is still Australia, but to a much lesser extent than in the 1990s. (Before the 1980s, New Zealand produced most of its own starch-carbohydrates.) How well will we be able to persuade Australia to keep sending us food when there will be many more other mouths to feed in the Indo-Pacific region? And how much will Australia’s food production be curtailed by restricted fertiliser and other supplies?

In terms of the Indo-Pacific food and fuel supply chain, we already see most other (indeed much bigger) nations facing major impacts from the supply-chain crisis, and putting their domestic interests ahead of international considerations; they are effectively queue-jumping, undermining the rationing process by reducing fuel taxes and by increasing food subsidies and export barriers. (Note RNZ today about Asia.)

Not all governments are as complacent as New Zealand’s. The reduced fuel taxes do not only lead to queue-jumping; they also constitute a fiscal stimulus which may help in the process of a reorientation towards more secure staple food supplies. The New Zealand government is obsessively and irrationally opposed to any kind of fiscal stimulus.

Since 2000, New Zealand has enjoyed an export windfall and rising terms of trade, thanks to the high income elasticity of demand for dairy and other protein-rich foods. That’s due in particular to high per capita growth in East and South Asia. The problem for New Zealand is that when those economies stop growing – indeed when they recess – the fall in demand for luxury foods can be equally dramatic.

On RNZ’s Business News this morning, Corran Dann noted: “For a country like New Zealand, we’re a trading nation, we need to see growth in our trading partners because they buy our goods. That is how we make our way in the world. And likewise, for them.”

Reciprocal trade – ie multilateral exchange – is economics’ foremost example of a win-win ‘game’. But humans can be capricious, narcissist, supremacist. ‘Win-win’ competitive games can be disrupted by stupid players, or even by advocates of disruption as a greater good; giving way to rivalrous zero-sum, negative-sum, or ‘lose-lose’ games. (On ‘stupid players’, we may note, in passing, Carlo Cipolla’s 1976 essay – recently republished – The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity.)

New Zealand’s highly specialised export-oriented food production system can be expected to face sudden and simultaneous supply and demand shocks. Supply shock because New Zealand farming is now so dependent on imported fuel, fertiliser, and fodder. Demand shock because New Zealand specialises in the production of luxury foods, not staples, and faces a steep fall in the demand for luxury foods.

So, in terms of Steve Keen’s comments, New Zealand is arguably much more food-vulnerable than the United Kingdom, which Keen cites. And note Avinash Kishore’s comment about the food consequences of a general breakdown in international trade. (Unlike Keen, Kishore is an optimist!)

A crisis on top of a crisis

On present food insecurity in New Zealand, this from Google’s AI overview (search: ‘NZ food insecurity’): “Food insecurity is a widespread issue in New Zealand, affecting 1 in 3 households (33%) in 2025, with 18% facing severe insecurity.” See One in Three New Zealand Households Faced Food Insecurity in 2025, IPSOS, published by Scoop15 April 2026.

It can only be regarded as disgraceful that when, under the most favourable of circumstances in the food-supply system, a food-specialising country such as New Zealand has such record-high levels of food insecurity before the coming food crisis. This ‘insecurity despite abundance’ reality is not helped by Australia also having higher levels of food insecurity than most so-called developed nations. Continued access to Australian-produced staples is New Zealand’s main means to famine-avoidance.

Another part of the possible perfect storm is New Zealand’s lack of inclination and ability to queue-jump. When staples are scarce, ‘game theory’ comes into play. The staples of game theory are scarce-product-hoarding, joining queues to gain access to these staples, and a willingness to pay a bounty for such scarce essentials. New Zealand – marooned in the South Pacific – can expect to be at the end of the queues this country finds itself having to join.

(Other concepts of game theory include: ‘arms race’, ‘race to the bottom’, ‘prisoners dilemma’, ‘tragedy of the commons’, ‘survival of the fittest’, and Hobbes’ ‘war of all against all’. Game theory assumes that individuals and nations adopt ‘economic man’ postures of ‘rational self-interest’; meaning selfish strategies. Other thought perspectives suggest that such strategies are ‘stupid’ rather than ‘rational’, and that they miss out the widely-held concept of enlightened self-interest which incorporates visions of the public good and the public interest. Adherents of rationalism usually dismiss their academic adversaries as ‘altruist’; whereas they are really public-minded, not the same thing.)

Historical Points of Reference

New Zealand faced a similar trading and shipping crisis almost exactly 100 years ago. Though it was not a food crisis then; New Zealand was not then reliant on imported food staples, though it was reliant on other imports.

The issue was the 1926 British General Strike, which focussed minds in New Zealand then on how dependent New Zealand had become in its crucial trading relationship with the far-side if not the dark-side of the world. The New Zealand economy started to tank in late-1926. 1927 then became New Zealand’s own particular annus horribilus.

New Zealand already faced very high levels of private debt, falling export prices, and a tightwad government. With the shipping constraints tipping the country over the edge, farmers walked off their farms in greater numbers than during the later Great Depression, rural New Zealand depopulated, bank balances plummeted, and the country went into a sharp recession.

The Reform (think National) government had been elected in 1925 with 47% of the votes and 69% of the seats. In the 1928 election, that government was unceremoniously turfed out of power, falling to 34% of the vote and 34% of the seats. The faded Liberal Party – under the new name of United – formed a government with the support of the new Labour Party. The economy recovered. Though the new governing arrangements didn’t last; Reform came back into government as the junior coalition partner. Eventually – in 1936 – United and Reform joined forces to create the National Party.

Another historical story of relevance is about how Germany lost World War One, through hunger. That war, in full, lasted 4¼ years; an amount of time the present Russia-Ukraine War will soon surpass. Essentially, Germany – on the battlefield, and with its lethal submarines – won the first four years (including a comprehensive defeat of its main adversary, the Russian Empire) but lost the last three months.

The critical factors in the end were the British Royal Navy blockade on German shipping, a staunch French fightbackin July 1918, and an influenza pandemic arising from an existing battlefield flu strain combining with a new strain brought over by greenhorn the American latecomers. The shipping blockade induced severe famine in Germany. That famine was so severe that it was later used to justify carpet bombing (aka area bombing) in World War Two, on the basis that no amount of RAF bombing could be as bad for German civilians as that blockade-induced famine.

Finally

The supply chokepoints around the Arabian Peninsula – the southwest of Southwest Asia – might ease sooner rather than later. Though I, unlike New Zealand’s Prime Minister, wouldn’t bet on it. New Zealand has engaged in a slow game of Russian roulette; there is now an extra bullet in the revolver’s chambers, and the pace of the game has quickened.

Will New Zealand, having played its game of chance, become collateral damage? New Zealand almost certainly was not Binyamin Netanyahu’s target.

Steve Keen focussed on the fertiliser chokehold; the core of the world’s food supply which is in fact a byproduct of the petroleum industry (and of the discussion about refined oil supplies). New Zealand’s plight is actually significantly worse than that; it’s a potential and dramatic shortfall of imported human and animal feed – a shortfall that would precede a fertiliser shortage.

What happens if or when the food ships are redirected elsewhere? Those ships burn a lot of fuel coming to and going from New Zealand. Would the world prioritise five million whitish lives, marooned in the South Seas, over ten million brown lives more easily saved? Should it? I guess not. Will future historians refer to the Great Aotearoa Famine of 2027?

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

On 14 April, TV3 News ran an item (15 minutes in, not in the sports section) about how the Crusaders rugby team will, with the new Christchurch stadium, no longer be able to parade its horses and knights circuiting the sportsfield. Many of the fans, despite now having a more spectator-friendly stadium, were quite upset about this; they loved the pageantry of medieval knights heading off to invade the Levantine lands occupied by the infidel (meaning Arabic people whose ancestors had converted to Islam).

At the end of the story, the reporter said: “The horses’ symbolism has created controversy. The sword-wielding knights represent the Crusades, a series of religious wars between Christians and Muslims dating back to the 11th and 13th centuries. In 2019 the Crusaders dropped the horses following the Christchurch Mosque attacks, but reinstated them later that year minus the knights.”

So, from 2011 to 2026 they have been cowboy knight-lookalikes brandishing flags rather than swords. It was never enough to cleanse Canterbury rugby of its imagery of religious imperialism. At the very least, the Crusaders needed to change their name – and image – immediately after the 2011 terror attack. The new stadium has given them another opportunity to remove the crassness from the Crusader brand, by no longer using the ‘Crusader’ moniker.

In the twentyfirst century, the crusader-problem continues to be more real than ever to the Muslim populations of the ‘Middle East’; of Southwest Asia. And those present populations continue to understand the occupiers and interferers of their lands as Crusaders. The Crusader issue is far from being an issue confined to the Middle Ages.

We can think of there being three series of Crusades: in the Middle Ages, the Modern Age, and the Current Age.

Crusader History: Medieval Era

The first series of Crusades were the Catholic Crusades of the late Middle Ages.

The first of these – which was largely a French crusade – ran from 1096 to 1099, and resulted in the conquest and brutal genocide of Jerusalem; and the establishment of a Crusader-state – Outremer – which lasted in its full form for 88 years.

The next crusade – ‘Second’ Crusade (1147 to 1149) – was a major failure, led by the French King and the Holy Roman Emperor, in response to the Crusader State’s loss of some of its northern territory. It was a major failure.

The ‘Third’ Crusade was waged in the time of Robin Hood (1189 to 1192), by the French king of England Richard Coeur de Lion. It was an attempt to resuscitate the Crusader State, and was partially successful, though failed to recapture Jerusalem.

The ‘Fourth’ Crusade of 1202 to 1204, waged largely by the Doge of Venice, was the most historically consequential of all the Medieval Crusades. It was effectively diverted to the one city which had been the beacon for western civilisation for over 1,000 years; Constantinople, formerly Byzantium – only half the way from Venice to Jerusalem – now Istanbul.

Constantinople was the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, and the religious centre of Orthodox Christianity, the dominant branch of the Christian Church before 1204. Constantinople was comprehensively sacked by the Crusaders in that year. So, from 1204, the Roman Catholic branch of Christianity became dominant within Christendom. And the now latinised Christian ‘Middle East’ became so weakened that it was only a matter of time before the Ottoman or some other Muslim warlord conquered the lands of the Eastern Roman Empire; creating – in 1453 – the Ottoman Empire. The 1204 inter-Christian ‘event’ became Christianity’s eastern suicide debacle.

From 1453 to 1915, the Muslim Ottomans reigned in that part of the world; a Turkic Muslim caliphate.

Crusader History: the modern British Era

The next epoch of Western Crusading was the Anglo-French era of 1915 to 1948. It started with the Dardanelles Campaign (Gallipoli); meaning that the ANZAC soldiers had effectively become mercenary Crusaders, enlisted by Winston Churchill. Gallipoli was a failed Anglo-French operation, whose aim was the reconquest of Constantinople/Istanbul. New Zealand soldiers fighting for Britain’s crusade fought alongside, among others, Senegalese solders (fighting under the banner of France) in the bloody Second Battle of Krithia (6 May to 8 May, 1915).

There was much British Empire action in the whole of the ‘Middle East’ during World War One. This included Kiwi troops (who were heavily involved in at least one massacre of Muslims; at Surafend in 1918), Australian ‘Light Horsemen’, and Britain’s successful invasion of Iraq in 1917.

After WW1, Britain – the United Kingdom – formally occupied the lands that are now Israel, Palestine, Jordan, and Iraq. Iraq was occupied by Britain, in various guises, from 1917 to 1947, with a brief intermission from 1 April to 2 May 1941. And Iran from 1941 (with the Soviet Union) and, among other things, creating the conditions for a famine in 1943 which killed perhaps 300,000 Iranians.

France’s interests were particularly in the lands that are now Lebanon and Syria; the Northern Levant; including the early bronze and iron age Phoenician ports of antiquity, Tyre and Sidon, which are now being battered to a pulp by Israel.

This series of Crusades was a less overt religious conflict than the earlier and the more recent series. The major ‘religions’ were Empire and Oil; with the whole of Southwest Asia being of strategic significance to the United Kingdom in the context of India being the Jewel in the Crown of the British Empire.

Crusader History: the current Israeli-American Era

In 1948, the British/French crusader imperium gave way to the creation – with massive impetus from the United States – the new Crusader State of Israel. In many ways, 1948 was a repeat of 1099.

Like its Christian forebear (1099-1187) the present Crusader State has never considered itself to be secure; and once again the main reason for its insecurity is its overt belligerence towards both its indigenous population and its neighbours; a belligerence which precedes the formation of the stroppy United States’ client state. As in the 1099 to 1187 case, the present Crusader State has tenuous trumped-up historical claims to exclusive ownership of the site it occupies, and has deep financial and technical support from the furthest reaches of the (then and now) West.

In the case of the present Judeo-Christian Crusader Empire, the Americans have deep presence beyond the periphery of the formal Crusader State; as the British did from 1915 to 1948 re Mandatory Palestine. In particular the countries of the Arabian Peninsula have been deeply penetrated by the United States and/or Israel; most particularly the Gulf States, and noting that the United Arab Emirates presently acts very much as an under-the-radar proxy of Israel. These states –  ‘beyond the periphery’ of Lebanon and Jordan – now constitute the present American Crusader Empire. They are the most significant Eastern Hemisphere components of the United States’ contemporary geopolitical empire, a Southwest Asian empire that it’s currently trying to expand.

The events of this decade constitute the most momentous events since 1948 in the history of the current Crusader State and Crusader Empire.

Property Rights

The Crusader meme is far from a nostalgic looking back to the times of Robin Hood. It’s today’s very consequential conflict of religion, theft, unipolar ideology, and naked technological power. For the city whose mosques featured New Zealand’s worst ever terrorist attack, direct association with crusader Judeo-Christendom is not a good look. That association is illiberal, insensitive, disrespectful, and Euro-supremacist.

Western crusaders – including religious and secular imperialists – have been a major source of trouble for West Asia and West Asians, through the ages. The DNA of present-day Palestinians is remarkably close to the ancient DNA of people who died in the Levant thousands of years ago.

Indigenous Southwest Asians deserve better today, including freedom of choice of religion; and the established political right to resist, and defend themselves. Today, almost all New Zealanders respect the Ottoman (Turkish and Syrian) forces (and their leaders, such as Ataturk) which, in 1915, resisted ANZAC attempts to conquer them.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

On 14 April 2026 I heard this on TV3 News (about 8 minutes in):

Sharon Zollner, ANZ Bank chief economist: “We were earlier picking that the Reserve Bank wouldn’t need to hike until December, but the news out of the Middle East has kept getting worse. It does seem clear that disruption is going to continue for quite some time. Oil prices are going to remain elevated. It is counterintuitive that you would raise interest rates when the economy is already struggling, but that’s why these people are appointed, they don’t need to worry about getting elected because they are basically paid to take the longer-term view; to accept the short-term pain for the long-term gain.”

What!!! We should have been thoroughly alarmed by such anti-democratic anti-liberal pro-bureaucratic sentiment, justifying reckless technocratic adventurism. And we note that the long-term gain never seems to come for the populace; only for the elites who inflict the pain. (Zollner, by the way, has had a past record of pressurising the Reserve Bank to go early, by making similar ‘predictions’, and has been willing to apologise later for inaccurate predictions.)

Towards the end of an earlier interview Zollner (RNZ, Morning Report, 14 April 2026) said: “How high inflation goes in the initial direct impact isn’t the key point for the Reserve Bank. The key point for the Reserve Bank is how quickly it comes down again.”

Let’s look at some facts, using Trading Economics’ 10-year charts for interest rates and inflation. Take United Kingdom, Australia, and Norway. Their interest rates stayed high after their 2024 peak, and their CPI-inflation rates stayed high too. Now consider New Zealand, Canada, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland. Their interest rates came down much more from their 2024 highs, and their CPI-inflation rates came down much more as well. This is simple comparative economics; economics that any schoolgirl could do. This directly contradicts what Zollner has been saying.

There’s more. On RNZ’s Business News this morning:

John Campbell: “Kiwibank is coming out swinging against interest rate hikes. They are essentially having a go at the ANZ, right, and Sharon Zollner in a way; the economists.”

Coran Dann: “Yes, sort of the hawks versus the doves, and Kiwibank would sit in that dove category. They are basically saying that it’s way too soon to be calling the potential interest rate hike in July, there’s not enough data, it runs the risk of throwing New Zealand back into a recession, it’s just too fragile to do that. The Kiwibank chief economist, he’s saying that it would heap pressure on already struggling households and businesses.”

Kiwibank chief economist [Jarrod Kerr]: “I think that, given the shock that we’re feeling, what we are hearing from our customers – businesses and households – is that this is just another cost that they [must] absorb; this is not a demand-push [sic; should have said ‘demand-pull’], this is a supply-shock, and its hurting … So, to increase interest rates at this time we think could be reckless [emphasis added], actually, and it’s definitely unwarranted.”

Two-and-a-half years of government idleness, following one very bad call

The worst thing the present NZ Government did was the first thing it did; ie after the 2023 election. The government changed the (monetary) Policy Targets Agreement to require the Reserve Bank to do what it believed it had to do to keep CPI-inflation between one and three percent, and to follow no other objective.

The government knew that the Reserve Bank (and most of the other banks’ economists) believed that – and as a matter of faith, not evidence – whatever the actual state of the economy was, CPI-inflation rates above three percent should trigger a policy intervention in the capital market to raise the cost of capital. So, it was the government’s intent that, in the event of a situation like we have at present, the Reserve Bank should override an otherwise efficient market to raise one of the most critical costs in any capitalist economy. As the common-sense ‘schoolgirl’ data mentioned above shows, this policy increases CPI-inflation (or keeps it high when it otherwise would fall) when we are fraudulently told that it will decrease inflation. It’s a wonderful game for the loud-squawking hawks within the economic-policy community; their policy generates the very inflation expectations that the policy is supposed to snuff out. It keeps them in work; at the centre of public attention as ‘experts paid [well] to inflict pain for long-term objectives which never seem to materialise.

The government does not know that such interest-raising policies raise CPI-inflation (above what it would otherwise have been) – not lower it. But it should know that; this is the ignorance of convenience. Like Donald Trump, on certain matters our governments just listen to a very close coterie of self-promoted advisers. A coterie whose advice would have been considered mad by most mid-twentieth-century economists. A coterie who waged a successful academic coup d’etat in the United States and United Kingdom in the 1970s, and in New Zealand in the 1980s.

This kind of monetary policy doublethink and groupthink is an example of orwellian tyranny. See my Binyamin, Adolf, and Benito, Scoop, 10 April 2026. War is peace. ‘Higher costs’ is ‘lower inflation’. Israel is conducting a defensive war.

Don’t believe the veracity of what Binyamin Netanyahu says. Don’t believe what Donald Trump says. And don’t believe Sharon Zollner either. All three talk the totalitarian talk, while pretending to be in some sense liberal or democratic.

PS: Heavy Lifting

Some other strange language came from that same TV3 story. This time it is the suggestion that increased ‘fuel costs’ have done ‘heavy lifting’! Zane Small: “The retail association … has looked at electronic card spending data … which showed a 0.5% increase in spending in March. Their analysis has found that it’s actually fuel costs that are doing the heavy lifting. After accounting for that rise in fuel costs, retail spending has actually dropped by 1.2%.”

At least Zane Small did not try to deceive TV3 viewers. But the framing here was quite confused.

The story is that, while retail purchases have decreased by 1.2% in March, higher prices have created the illusion of a spending increase. While more money may have been parted with, that’s entirely illusory and largely misses the point. Consumers spent more to buy less; inflation and recession in one hit. Stagflation.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Recorded Live – A View from Afar podcast. Series 06, Episode 03 – In this episode, political scientist and former Pentagon Analyst Paul Buchanan and Selwyn Manning deep-dive into: The End of the Liberal Internationalist Order and the Rise of Illiberalism.

The topics discussed include:

• A Global Transition Process – What is this exactly and Why is this happening?
• Why is conflict used as a global systems regulator and agent of change? And what does this mean for 2026?
• The US has been the core of two pillars of liberal internationalism – its security system and system of trade.
• Why then has the United States decided to break the very system it has benefitted from, and risk advancing its own demise?

Paul and Selwyn invite you to subscribe, like, and click notifications in the YouTube link so that you don’t miss another live episode.

Remember, if you are joining us live , you can comment and lodge questions but remember we may include your comments and questions in our programmes.

Also, we encourage you to join us via YouTube, as on YouTube live interaction is especially efficient. See you there.

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Despite the mega-commentary about the Israel-Iran war, and especially the United States’ participation in that war, almost nothing is being debated about how the war is being funded.

I’ll make some comments about Iran later. But we need to focus on the United States, which is by far the most profligate party to this war. And Israel is being funded, like a charismatic and entitled teenage brat, by its (American) sugar daddy.

Most of us should have noticed that, with the exception of new tariffs which are not a significant source of United States government revenue, there has been no move to raise taxes. (The President has clearly invoked the use of tariffs as means of leverage through extortion; though he doesn’t properly appreciate that these taxes are paid by American residents.) Nor has any explicit ‘war loan’ or ‘war bond’ been floated in Wall Street.

The United States is ‘printing money’ to fund the war. This expression is both pejorative and a misnomer. Because printing money is an unmentionable, it’s hardly ever mentioned! Though it should be, because it’s an important financial mechanism, and it is not as sinful as it’s made to sound.

‘Printing money’ is not a literal expression; actually printed (or photocopied) money, counterfeit money, is illegal. Printing money, a figurative moniker, is in fact the day-to-day business of banking, with billions of dollars printed every day (and a near-similar number of dollars unprinted). The technology of printing money is that of double-entry-bookkeeping. Money is a social technology, as is double-entry bookkeeping.

What matters most to us is the role of the central bank – the Reserve Bank – in creating new money. And in particular the relationship between the Reserve Bank and its privileged customers, most of which are governments’ Treasuries and commercial banks. Even more particularly, we are interested in the most highly privileged relationship of all, that between the United States Federal Treasury and the United States Federal Reserve Bank. This exceptional relationship arises because the United States Dollar is the world’s reserve currency.

The War

Here are two quotes from Al Jazeera’s This is America: War on Iran: Cost of weapons and shift in the nature of warfare, 1 April 2026

Richard Gaisford: “It’s a significant contribution being made to the US economy by the defence industries. The last figures we have were for 2024, and that showed that it generated [?] something near one trillion dollars …”.

This comment reflects a wide belief that money is made by economic activity, and that the United States makes money by making, among other things, military hardware and software. The reality, of course, is that the money is made first, and is then used to purchase such hardware and software.

Interviewer: ‘Who has got the means to keep fighting at those levels the longest?’ Kenneth Katzman (a former senior analyst on Iran at the US Congressional Research Service): “The US Dollar is the main reserve currency of the globe, which means that the United States basically has the capability to manufacture money. Your viewers may not understand the mechanics of it, but basically the United States can print money.” (Actually, not only the United States.)

He goes on to address the military asymmetry between Iran and the United States: “The United States is a 28-trillion-dollar economy; Iran is a 400-billion-dollar economy”. Here he is talking about each country’s capacity to produce goods and services; not its capacity to manufacture money. Any amount of money can be made by any country’s banking-government nexus, and at trivial cost.

The interviewer (New Zealand’s Anna Burns Francis), and the other panellist did not respond to that seemingly provocative comment about printing money; there was no further discussion about how the war is being financed, only about how much it is costing. Discussion about the mechanics (and constraints) of printing money would go against the grain that most of us are fed. The public is not supposed to know – and generally does not know – that money is itself costless and can be manufactured, at will, in smaller or larger quantities.

Kenneth Katzman’s comments are not controversial; they are a statement of fact that no economist would disagree with. All countries’ banking systems (of which the central government is a component) have the capacity to print money; indeed, the New Zealand system (and other countries’ systems) necessarily did so in 2020.

The United States has fewer constraints on printing money than do other countries, but not zero constraints.

We note that money, like all financial and financialised assets, is not wealth; it is claims on wealth. So, the affordability of money – in practice – is measured by the ability of the economy to meet those claims, in the event that those claims are presented. (Indeed, the world can afford an octillion dollars’ worth of financial claims if it can be 100% certain that those claims will not be exercised; will not be spent on goods or services. The current world is awash with massive private holdings of financialised assets which, for the most part will not be spent on anything other than other financial assets. In technical language, such money has a very low ‘velocity’.)

We note also that newly printed United States’ dollars permeate into New Zealand through exports, including New Zealand made supplies to America’s war industry; to the United States’ military/industrial complex, which includes the space industry.

How does a country fund a war by printing money?

There are two key issues: rationing, and responsiveness.

The liberal critique against governments’ printing money is a general claim that governments are untrustworthy and spendthrift. In the eighteenth century when the liberal critique emerged, one principal concern was government adventurism in the form of warfare. This classical liberal critique presents one consequence of such government largesse as inflation (extra spending coming up against finite resources), and also presents any instance of general price increases as a consequence of government largesse. When governments consume relatively more resources, then – through the catalyst of inflation – private households and businesses consume relatively less.

The classical liberal critique emphasises this rationing issue, known as crowding out; in doing so, that critique presumes that private spending on goods and services is, per se, more efficient than public sector spending and redistributive transfers. There are two parts to this rationing argument: first, private parties are deemed to better assess (compared to bureaucrats and politicians) which items of spending translate to greater utility (ie happiness); second that relatively more private spending can be classified as ‘investing’, meaning spending for future rather than for present happiness. (Neither of these two propositions is generally true.)

The second issue, less emphasised by classical liberals, is responsiveness or ‘supply elasticity’. Classical liberals tend to assume that spending enabled by printed money does not elicit new production; ie does not bring-about a supply response. While this is true by definition for a hyper-taut economy, for the most part, economies are not hyper-taut and are indeed responsive to additional spending.

In the present case of the United States, the Israel-Iran War – on the pro-Israel side – is being funded substantially by new money printed for the United States government by the United States federal banking system; in the public accounts, this shows up directly as a huge increase in the United States’ fiscal deficit.

While prices are rising faster in the United States than before, this increase in general prices would appear to be substantially due to the supply-side cost-impact of the war itself, and not by increased aggregate demand inside the United States and the countries the United States imports goods and services from.

The United States domestic economy is not as supply-elastic as it might have been, given what ICE is doing to that country’s labour force. Nevertheless, the United States’ economy has been sufficiently depressed that it is now able to increase output without much difficulty. Hence, extra United States’s government spending has not in itself caused consumer prices in the United States to rise. The present chokehold on imports – a result of the war – is however causing CPI-inflation in the United States and the rest of the world. Prior domestic underemployment is one reason why money-printing may not be inflationary.

The second component of a country’s economic responsiveness to wads of newly printed money is that much production can be outsourced to the rest of the world. Thus, United States’ imports increase, the United States’ current account deficit increases, and the rest of the underemployed world gets to benefit from this as an economic stimulus. So, if the New Zealand banking-government nexus refuses to print money as a form of stimulus, the present Trump-printed money does create an alternative stimulus in New Zealand.

Certainly, New Zealand has very high visible and hidden unemployment, so (at present) is easily able to respond to the Trump stimulus. On that basis, New Zealand’s economic growth this year may not be as slow as is widely anticipated; though domestic confidence – in itself, a form of stimulus – may be countering the stimulus coming from the United States. In New Zealand too, any rise in CPI-inflation will be almost entirely due to the global supply chokeholds, and not to the American president’s money printing largesse.

Essentially, the United States is funding its war through its twin deficits: the United States fiscal deficit, and the United States current account deficit. The war is being funded through increased utilisation of underemployed resources throughout the world. In New Zealand’s case, we can see this easily and directly, by observing New Zealand’s increased exports to the United States.

How easily can other countries print money?

Technically, it’s as easy to print money in New Zealand as it is for the United States. However, the New Zealand dollar is not a global reserve currency, so a flood of new New Zealand dollars into the global economy is likely to generate financial risk; or at least perceptions of financial risk. ‘Investors’ – that is, financial traders – out there most likely would be more cautious about holding large quantities of New Zealand dollars (or $NZ assets) than they would be about holding large quantities of United States dollars. That caution generates an exchange rate risk; a risk that would be communicated to financial-asset-holders by the New York based rating agencies such as Standard and Poors.

When the exchange-rate risk is not widely seen as a matter of concern, New Zealand benefits mainly through its routinely-high current account deficit; that is, just the same way as the United States is able to benefit from printing money and enjoying the economic bounty of the world.

If the exchange rate risk becomes a concern however, the world would discount New Zealand dollar assets, and New Zealand would experience high levels of domestic inflation; that is, higher inflation than most other countries. The resulting low New Zealand dollar would confer a ‘competitive advantage’ on New Zealand; the current account deficit would close, exports increase, and reduced imports would create an increased demand for New Zealand- made goods and services.

The issue then becomes how responsive (ie supply elastic) the New Zealand economy is. If the domestic economy is able to respond to these new circumstances (which is the more common experience of other countries), then New Zealand would recover and soon prosper. The alternative is that New Zealand would go into an inflationary tailspin; that is, if its productive system is so hamstrung that it cannot respond to the stimulus of a low dollar exchange rate. One bad sign is over-dependence (as distinct from over-reliance) on imports. A dependent economy cannot switch away from imports. A country which relies on imports by choice, because imports are easily funded by exports, can usually pivot – if required to do so – towards more ‘tradable production’.

So, New Zealand can print money too, though printing in the proportion that the United States does certainly would be unadvisable. However, if a country overprints money, the normal situation is that the extra money just sits there in the banking system. (The brief real estate boom of 2021/22 has been widely attributed to excessive printed money stimulating a process of real estate speculation; though the unique circumstances of that few months – including labour and capital pandemic lockdowns – have not been properly researched. The government could easily have borrowed and then parked that money, but chose not to.)

Generally, the rest of the world is accommodating when some countries print more money (though not when all countries print too much money). The world has been very responsive to the United States for the entirety of post-WW2 history; it was American spending of new money that drove the economic growth of the capitalist world for 80 years.

The present US money printing to fund a globally-significant regional-war can be expected, sooner or later, to encounter an inflationary wall of its own making. The consequences of this war are to make the world economy much less responsive (ie are breaking the world’s economy) just as the American military-industrial complex – indeed the world’s expanding military-industrial complexes – are placing so many extra demands on the world’s economic environments.

War funding under pressure

Countries’ invaded or otherwise attacked on the perception that they are ‘easy meat’ tend to be much more capable of defending themselves than is widely understood. Their monetary systems are not integrated into the orthodox channels of the wider capitalist system; but their domestic monies work to keep domestic economies fully employed while on a war-footing. Yes, Iran will be printing money, and Iranians will be facing substantial visible and suppressed inflation. For Iran, that monetary process is a necessary part of its own defence. Money printing facilitates both necessary rationing in favour of the public sector, and also necessarily pushes the production system to its limits.

War times, historically, have shown that our economic systems are generally much more responsive than we presume them to be. Surprisingly often, the bullies neither win nor even achieve a limited range of objectives. Syria may be coming right today, despite rather than because of the nation which set off that 2010s’ war; a war which cruelly sandwiched the Syrian people between foreign bullies and a consequently more oppressive domestic tyranny.

We note that, when the United Kingdom was under threat during the first years of World War Two, it was able to import much on credit – especially from the United States, which was then a neutral country. China has played a large role in facilitating the United States’ more recent wars, through its current account surpluses. This time China will be helping to fund Iran’s war; as well as accommodating the United States through its ongoing – almost infamous – trade relationship with that country.

Indeed, when the Israel-US-Iran War is eventually over, it will be China’s version of the Marshall Plan which will revive the degraded world economy; part of that revival will be to write-off war debts, just as the United States – through plenty of printed money – eventually accommodated Germany’s reparations bill after World War One, and the West’s war debts after World War Two.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

It’s time that the obvious is stated explicitly. Binyamin Netanyahu and 2020s’ Israel need to be compared with Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. And consider the narcissist, Italy’s dictator Benito Mussolini. On the matter of language, we may call Benito Mussolini a fascist leader, and the Italian state under Mussolini – indeed the Italian Empire, which expanded under Mussolini – as history’s Fascist State.

While Nazi Germany is generally regarded as having been more extreme than the Fascist State, the word ‘fascist’ has commonly been applied to the former National Socialist regime of Germany. My language preference is to designate Nazi Germany as an ‘ultra-fascist’ state. (I would also note that Bolshevik Russia – the Soviet Union from November 1917 until the death of Josef Stalin in 1953 – might best be designated as an ‘orwellian tyranny’; and that there is a considerable overlap between an ultra-fascist state and an orwellian tyranny.)

Stacking-up Binyamin Netanyahu in 2026 against Adolf Hitler in 1940

Before conducting this simple exercise, we should note that the best perspective is one of academic detachment. Such detachment can be difficult in times of global conflict, in which most governments and probably most people take sides, explicitly or implicitly; the sides they take tend to be based upon the narratives which they have been repetitively exposed to.

We might imagine, as a detached observer in 1940, a Professor of World Affairs at the University of Chicago. And, for 2026, a Professor of World Affairs at the University of Guangzhou.

Having already designated Adolf Hitler as ultra-fascist, here are the three principal points that I would argue define ultra-fascism:

• a deep and intense racism
• an expansionist agenda, in the sense of Lebensraum
• a genocidal mix of hatred and indifference to selected other ‘peoples’ (where ‘peoples’ most commonly represents a conflation of ethnicity and religion)

It’s easy to see that Adolf Hitler ticks all three boxes, though, by 1940, Hitler had not yet committed genocide.

It’s also easy to see that Binyamin Netanyahu also ticks all three boxes; indeed, Netanyahu has already committed genocide. Unlike Hitler, Netanyahu’s career is not over, and we can have little confidence that he will not direct future genocides.

On these three bases, there can be no question that Binyamin Netanyahu and the present state which he presides over are ultra-fascist; worse than the Fascist State (and Italian Empire in Africa and the Mediterranean Sea) which Emperor Mussolini presided over.

Additional features of ultra-fascism

My first such feature is the use of pogroms, acts of terror by loyal private militias and hooligans acting with impunity. Germany before the 1940s was, in particular, characterised by judeophobic pogroms; the most famous being Kristallnacht (with at least 90 deaths) in November 1938. (There had been a substantial nineteenth century history of judeophobic pogroms in the former Russian Empire, especially in places like Ukraine with large Jewish population clusters. And also, in Western Europe in late medieval times; Jews were often blamed for the Black Death of 1347 to 1352, especially in lands which today would be classed as western Germany.)

In East Jerusalem and especially the West Bank (of the Jordan River), Netanyahu-supporting militias and hooligans commit regular and frequent pogroms on the indigenous Palestinian population, who in the main resist passively. The Palestinian death toll from these pogroms, just since October 2023, has been well over 1,000 people.

And, over the years, there have been no shortage of pogroms in Lebanon, many of which have been Israeli-incited. The worst was probably the Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1982, which precipitated the formation of the Lebanese Shia resistance organisation Hezbollah. The 1982 pogrom death toll, mainly Palestinian refugees, was almost certainly in excess of 3,000; the principal perpetrators were Christian Lebanese Phalangists of the Kataeb Party, though aided by the Israel Defence Forces.

My second such feature is that these leaders – Hitler and Netanyahu – had and have extreme ultra-fascist henchmen. Most obvious were Goebbels and Himmler on the Nazi side; BenGivr and Smotrich on the present ultra-fascist Israeli side. These henchmen tend to blunt the malign edge of the leaders of their packs.

My third such feature is the role of propaganda and incitement through propaganda; in particular the context is that the propaganda of ultra-fascists includes overt and blatant lying – complete indifference to factual accuracy – and not simply the omission of inconvenient truths. The incitement includes, through precisely targeted narratives, the secretive and personalised incentivisation of historically allied regimes and potential new allies to participate in the ultra-fascist project.

My fourth such feature is the widespread use of assassination squads, and execution squads, to enforce a terror regime – especially but not only with respect to occupied populations. Hitler’s execution squads did most of their worst after 1940. We note that 2026 Israel has just last week passed the legislation to impose the death penalty on non-Jewish resistors and dissidents. And Israel is world-famous for its Mossad-facilitated assassination squads, even before the ascendancy of the Netanyahu regime.

Assassination was and is a terror tactic

Assassination came to be a favourite terror tactic of the Russian terrorists whose ideology found fertile ground there from the 1860s. Given that most of the most ardent of Israeli citizens today are descendants of people well familiar with the Russian political and literary landscape, the awareness and adoption of this terror tactic should be no surprise to us today.

We might note that Vladimir Lenin’s terrorist brother Alexander was executed for attempting to assassinate the Tsar of Russia, Alexander III, in 1887. A member of the same terrorist organisation, Narodnaya Volya, had successfully assassinated Tsar Alexander II in 1881. Lenin (aka Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov) himself adhered to the same terrorist principles as his brother, as is reflected in his disturbing parody of the equally disturbing What Is to be Done, 1863, by Nikolay Chernyshevsky.

(The dark character of Chernyshevsky’s book is called Rakhmetov. When reading about Rakhmetov last year, I was eerily reminded of another malign character I had read about earlier in 2025; Friedrich Lindemann. And, in Rakhmetov delighting in Isaac Newton’s obscure work Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John, I am reminded of Peter Thiel and his obsession with the Antichrist. See my Barbecued Hamburgers and Churchill’s Bestie 17 April 2025, and Peter Thiel: Was The John Key Led Government Taken For An April Fool? 1 April 2026.)

Two other assassinations to note are that of Pyotr Stolypin – Russia’s modernising Prime Minister, Russia’s greatest reformist politician before Gorbachev – in Kiev in 1911; perpetrated by Dmitry Bogrov, a Ukrainian Jewish leftist revolutionary lawyer. And that of Winston Churchill’s friend Walter Guinness, 1st Baron Moyne, British Minister of State in the Middle East, who was assassinated in Cairo in 1944 by two members of the terrorist group Lehi.

Outline of a wider comparison

My comparison here is between the two current Eurasian geopolitical conflicts and the two historical Eurasian geopolitical conflicts which conflated into World War Two.

Re World War Two, the two Eurasian conflicts were of course Japan’s war on China and Southeast Asia, which, after Pearl Harbour, became the Pacific War. And the war of aggression by Nazi Germany which began in 1938 with the annexations of Austria and Czechoslovakia.

Today the Russia-Nato conflict in Ukraine is one of the two Eurasian geopolitical conflicts. The other of course is the Israel-Iran-Lebanon-Gulf conflict, aided and abetted by the United States.

Re World War Two, I’ll rate some of the leading figures on a ‘badness’ or ‘malignity’ scale – some may call it a scale of ‘evilness’ – in which a ten is the absolute maximum (which might be applied to a person of power attempting to use that power to achieve Armageddon, the end of the world) and zero represents the most saintly version of Jesus Christ. Considering the four protagonists of the European War of World War Two, I would rate Josef Stalin a 9, Adolf Hitler an 8, Benito Mussolini a 7.5, and Winston Churchill a 7. While Churchill is the one whose terror crimes have been the least acknowledged so far, he still comes out as the least malign – the lesser evil – of these four characters.

In relation to the present situation, and by virtue of my analysis above, Binyamin Netanyahu comes out as at least an 8. I will also mention some of the henchmen. Goebbels, Himmler, BenGivr, and Smotrich would each come out as a 9 by my estimation. Two people would qualify for a 9.5 rating: Stalin’s henchman Lavrentiy Beria, and Churchill’s little known close friend and advisor Friedrich Lindermann (aka Lord Cherwell). German-born Lindemann – an Oxford University Professor of Physics, and a deep racist – engineered the massive 1943 famines in India and Iran through contemptuous indifference to those populations. He was the principal voice in Churchill’s ear; advocating the carpet bombing of German civilians (euphemism: dehousing) and civilian infrastructure, and the erasure of German civilisation.

WW2 analogues

The analogues which I suggest are as follows (and relating in particular to the years 2026 and 1940): Israel is an analogue to Germany, the United States maps to the Italian Empire, Iran (plus proxies) maps to the (white) British Empire, China maps to the United States, Nato (at least its core 16 members) maps to Japan, Russia maps to Nationalist China (including Vladimir Putin as an analogue of Chiang Kai-shek), India in a few respects maps to Soviet Russia (especially its initial uncertain alignment), Ukraine maps to Romania, and the Gulf States map to occupied Western Europe (with UAE mapping to Vichy France).

This becomes a useful thought-exercise, in that it can help us today to see some of the possibilities and outcomes arising from possible escalations in the present conflicts.

A word of note. In 1940 and 1941, it was said that it was just the British Empire resisting the German-Italian Axis. There is much truth in that. Churchill’s United Kingdom did not appease Nazi Germany, just as Iran in 2025 and 2026 refused to appease Israel. Britain paid for its non-appeasement by enduring The Blitz. Both resistances to ultra-fascism contained a mix of characters with a mix of agendas. For most of the first three years of the WW2, the British did not take the fight directly to Germany (the defensive Battle of the Atlantic excepted).

Most of Britain’s fighting was against Italy, at least before and upto the 1942 invasion of Madagascar; be it in Greece, North Africa, or Mandatory Palestine. In Libya, initially at least, Germany was fighting alongside Italy and under Italian command.

And the Italian Air Force bombed the then ‘British’ city of Tel Aviv in 1940. Italy effectively withdrew from the war in 1943, and, for its troubles, was occupied by Germany; hence the 1944 Battle of Monte Cassino. Note that 1940 bombing of Palestine; the victim was the United Kingdom (analogue today of Iran), and the perpetrator was Italy (analogue today of the United States).

The final important learning from my analogy between the present conflicts and World War Two, is that – if the wars escalate and conflate – then China will emerge as the big winner (as the United States was in and after 1945) and the Axis-forces (and their allies such as UAE and Ukraine) and Nato will be the losers.

Important Note

I must emphasise that, while the two ultra-fascist regimes discussed here had and have many domestic supporters, there can be no conflation between regime-supporters and the ethnic or cultural groups which those ultra-fascist adherents identify with. ‘Germans’ as a collective never were ultra-fascist because of their nationality or their faith; though some Germans and non-German fellow travellers were, like the nazi regime, ultra-fascist. Likewise, in 2026, neither Jewish citizens of Israel, nor the wider Jewish population, can be characterised as ultra-fascist (or ‘far-right’ of any form) just because the present leaders of Israel are ultra-fascist.

Conclusion

We need to call a spade a spade. When too many good people pretend that ultra-fascists are not ultra-fascists – or choose to look away when ultra-fascism is gaining ascendancy – the world can too easily cross over a totalitarian tipping point, into something like orwellian tyranny.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

President Donald Trump’s acceptance of a Pakistani proposal for a two-week ceasefire in the war with Iran brings a sigh of relief to the international community.

Just hours before, many had been alarmed by Trump’s threats to bomb Iran back to “the stone age” and destroy its “civilisation”.

The ceasefire provides a breathing space for hammering out a “definitive agreement concerning long-term peace with Iran, and peace in the Middle East”, according to Trump.

However, the road to a final settlement will be complex and bumpy, though not insurmountable.

Underestimating the enemy

After six weeks of escalating war and rhetoric, starting with joint US-Israel attacks on Iran and the latter’s robust response, the three combatants have not only inflicted serious blows on each other. The region and the world have also suffered from a massive oil, liquefied gas and inflationary crisis as Tehran closed the Strait of Hormuz.

This was not something Trump had expected. He initially anticipated the combined US and Israeli military power would rapidly prevail. This would force Tehran, which had suppressed widespread public protests early in the year, to capitulate and thus open the way for favourable regime change.

But the Iranian government proved to be more resilient, entrenched and resourceful than anticipated. The government was also strategic in fighting back by hitting US assets across the Persian Gulf and Israel, as well as closing the strait.

Meanwhile, Trump could not solicit active support from US allies for his joint war endeavours with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu is under indictment by the International Criminal Court for war crimes in Gaza.

The allies had not been consulted. They didn’t consider it to be in their individual national interests to participate in a war contrary to international law and the United Nations Charter.

Costing billions

Further, the United States’ global adversaries, Russia and China – both having strategic cooperation agreements with Iran – vehemently opposed the war. They joined scores of other countries around the world in calling for de-escalation and measures to avoid more economic repercussions.

The conflict widened. Israel unleashed a campaign to occupy southern Lebanon in response to attacks from Iran-aligned Lebanese paramilitary group Hezbollah.

The costs of the war then soared for all sides. For the US alone, the price tag amounted to at least US$1billion (A$1.4 billion) a day. This added substantially to the federal debt of close to $40 trillion (A$56.6 trillion).

The situation evolved into a race between missiles and interceptors; it would just be a matter of who ran out first.

It was recently reported that Israel was getting low in interceptors and the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) faced a shortage of manpower.

Unpopular in the US

On the other hand, despite the US and Israeli decapitation of its leadership, air supremacy and bombardment of thousands of military and non-military targets, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) maintained a sustained retaliatory capability. It managed to fire dozens of advanced missiles and drones on a daily basis against targets in the Gulf and Israel.

More importantly, the war proved increasingly unpopular in the United States. As the public felt the effects of it on the rising cost of living and at the petrol stations, some 61% of citizens opposed the war. Trump’s ratings plummeted in the opinion polls.

In view of these variables, Trump could not possibly stand by his promise of escalating Operation Epic Fury to the level of erasing such a sizeable country as Iran. Iranian cultural and patriotic features, as well as the devotion of the country’s many citizens to Shia Islam, mitigated against outside aggression, as in previous occasions in its history.

Long road ahead

This is not to claim that negotiating and concluding a comprehensive agreement for an enduring peace between the US and Iran will be easy.

But a crucial section of Trump’s acceptance of the ceasefire, which gives us an insight into his thinking, is as follows:

we received a 10 point proposal from Iran (in response to the US 15-point proposal), and believe it is a workable basis on which to negotiate. Almost all of the various points of past contention have been agreed to between the United States and Iran, but a two week period will allow the Agreement to be finalized and consummated.

The ten points include a secession of hostilities on all fronts, including Lebanon, though Israel has since claimed Lebanon is not included in the ceasefire.

Some of the other key elements are:

• the US must fundamentally commit to guaranteeing non-aggression
• the continuation of Iran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz
• removal of primary and secondary sanctions on Iran
• and acceptance of Iran’s right that it can enrich uranium for its nuclear program (for peaceful purposes).

It is now incumbent on Trump to pull into line Netanyahu, who has toiled for a long time not only to destroy the Iranian government, but also to reduce the Iranian state as a regional actor.

If this happens and all the parties negotiate in good faith, there is room for optimism. We could potentially see the dawn of a post-war regional order based more on a localised collective security arrangement than on a regional supremacy of one actor over another.

– ref. The US-Israel ceasefire with Iran presses pause on a costly war, but can peace last? – https://theconversation.com/the-us-israel-ceasefire-with-iran-presses-pause-on-a-costly-war-but-can-peace-last-280147

Based on my reading of the latest upscaling of US rhetoric, one of the military options being considered by the Israeli-American axis is the nuclear option. Refer Trump says a ‘whole civilization will die tonight’ if deal isn’t reached, One News, 8 April 2026.

The possibility of Netanyahu and Trump thinking this way would reflect a widely-held understanding that World War Two ended not only with the atomic bomb, but because of those nuclear strikes on Japan. In particular, the prevailing American narrative is that Little Boy and Fat Man saved the United States from having to make a ground invasion of Japan.

My sense is that if Israel and/or the United States go for a nuclear strike, soon or sooner, it will be on a city or some other quasi-military site in the northeast of Iran, closer to Afghanistan than to the present Persian Gulf warzone; away from the energy infrastructure of the Gulf.

Not only is the northeast the birthplace of the late Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, it is also the part of Iran which gave least support to President Masoud Pezeshkian in the 2024 presidential election. Pezeshkian, a former heart surgeon, was elected as a moderniser. In 2024 and 2025 he was committed to evolving Iran away from being a Shia theocracy and towards being a typical BRICS’ middle-range geopolitical power. (See my The Enigma of the Iranian President, Scoop, 27 March 2026.)

If we look at the map here – the second round of the 2024 Iranian presidential election – we see that Pezeshkian’s support was most in the more secular northwest and least in the more Islamist northeast. I suspect that the Axis’ military planning will be to inflict as much damage as possible – in one or a few dramatic strikes – on the present Iranian civilisation which draws heavily on Shia Islam; hence focussing on the Shia heartland.

Finally, here, I draw attention to the movie Don’t Look Up. In that movie, the threat was an asteroid, not a nuclear war. The key theme was the widespread dispassion that prevailed, especially in the mainstream media, towards a known and imminent catastrophe. In the case of a nuclear strike on Iran away from Tehran or the Gulf or the Pakistan border, the present lack of mainstream outrage at the aggressions of the last month will probably continue on and beyond the day after.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

One puzzling feature of the present Israel-Iran war is the almost complete absence of reference – in the western media at least – to the Iranian President, Masoud Pezeshkian.

The American president claimed that Israel had killed the Iranian President, but he was referring to the Supreme Leader. Killing Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Shia Islam – and, when he was alive, the Patriarch of Iran – was comparable to the assassination of Pope Leo or King Charles. (These last two are both ‘supreme leaders’, though neither of these two are anything like the administrative or military leader of a nation state; they are moral and morale leaders.) Iran’s President, Masoud Pezeshkian, is still very much alive; and would prefer to build bridges than bombs.

Admittedly, the Iranian constitution is somewhat complex – especially to casual western onlookers – having distinct power centres for religious, military, and civilian authority. Do we dismiss Pezeshkian simply because he is neither a ‘cleric’ nor a ‘revolutionary guard’? I think there is much more to our dismissal of him than some consideration that he’s unimportant.

Ali Khamenei was, during the 1980s, the third President of Iran. His two predecessors had fewer religious credentials than Khamanei, reflecting the comparatively secular nature of the role of president. Their presidencies were short-lived however; the first president was impeached in mid-1981, and his successor was assassinated by bombing four weeks later; revolutionary Iran was a tumultuous place.

President Khamenei clearly played a critical role in the 1980s’ Iran-Iraq War, from which Iran survived; unexpectedly to many, and stronger from having been tested through a war in which the western powers supported the other side and its president Saddam Hussein.

The Presidency of Iran is clearly a very important political role. Problematically for the West, who wishes to cast Iran as an anti-democracy, it’s a highly-contested democratically-elected position of power. Indeed the President has featured in most political news stories throughout the history of the Islamic Republic, at least until the election of the present president in 2024 (following the death of his predecessor, Ebrahim Raisi, in a helicopter crash).

In the 2024 election, Pezeshkian, the ‘progressive left’ candidate defeated Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and Saeed Jalili, the ‘conservative right’ candidates. I heard recently that, when Ingrid Hipkiss asked who the Americans might negotiate with, given President Trump’s claim to have killed several tiers of Iranian leadership, the answer suggested by Simon Marks was Ghalibaf, who was high up in the regime and had even stood for president. Not a single mention of the actual President! (Refer Morning Report, RNZ 24 March 2026, Trump suspends strikes on Iran’s power plants.)

I would argue that Pezeshkian’s success was more reflective of popular preference than the other elections that year, which delivered Donald Trump in the United States and Keir Starmer in the United Kingdom. Both Trump and Starmer were widely disliked by their countries’ electorates (now even more disliked than in 2024), only winning because the only other options for political leadership were deemed by voters to be worse.

Pezeshkian, on the other hand, was a progressive and genuinely popular choice; not a person wanting to align Iran with the West, but a person wanting to build strong relationships. Through, for example, Iran joining the BRICSnetwork of economically powerful countries which favour geopolitical multipolarity rather than Western unipolarity. (See this picture of BRICS 2024, with Pezeshkian very prominent, and neither looking like a Shia cleric – as Raisi had looked – nor conforming with western dress codes.) He comes across as a statesman, certainly not a demagogue.

My take on the Iranian presidential enigma is this. Politics is substantially propaganda – aka ‘narrative’ – and geopolitics involves such messaging on a global scale. Much narrative is conducted through images rather than through words, and is largely shaped by which images are missing; propaganda is as much about deamplification of unwanted messages as it is about amplifying regime (and prevalent media) narratives.

President Pezeshkian does not present the imagery of smarminess (being unpleasantly suave) or of evilness or of rigid fundamentalism; he does not present the images that Israel and the West would like to portray in conveying their story about Iran. Rather, he presents as honest, pragmatic, constructive, and electable. He is quietly spoken. I have heard mention that one of Iran’s political strategies is the so-called good cop, bad cop strategy. If so, Pezeshkian is certainly the good cop. I think he is a good cop, period.

Pezeshkian is neither a clerical ideologue nor a shouty military spokesperson. He is not a newsreader with head covered, dressed all in black. Those are the images which western media push about Iran. Too moderate to assassinate; such grotesque (albeit routine) geopolitical violence would increase Pezeshkian’s profile in the West, which the West seems not to want. Better to just pretend he doesn’t exist, even though he’s the President. (Though some – including Al Jazeera’s Israeli-born political analyst, Marwan Bishara – suggest that Israel prefers to assassinate their more moderate opponents, given that such people [when alive and visible] might distract us from consuming Israel’s dehumanising narratives.)

To glean a semblance of truth in contentious times, you often have to hear what is not being said, and see what is not being shown. You have to look out for softly spoken messages; looking past caricatures and scapegoats, and looking past CAPITAL LETTERS and !!!

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

One of the United States’ navy ships heading towards the Persian Gulf is the USS Tripoli. (USS = United States Ship.) How the heck did it get that name? (Will the next two United States’ naval ships be called the USS Abbottabad and the USS Santo Domingo?)

The answer will be a surprise to many. The American Revolution which began in 1776 was completed in 1783, with the British capitulation to the American patriotic forces. So, the history of the United States as an independent sovereign state goes back to 1783. The British and Americans fought again from 1812 to 1815, during the Napoleonic Wars (what I suggest is better called either World War Zero or Great World War One, and my favoured dates are 1798 to 1815, with Waterloo being the final battle; Great World War One contextualises 1914 to 1945 as Great World War Two). Wikipedia describes the outcome of the War of 1812 as ‘inconclusive’.

We may note that Encounter Bay, in South Australia, is named after a World War Zero encounter between British and French naval ships – Investigator and Géographe. The encounter was in 1802. The name Tripoli dates from another encounter (a much more violent encounter) within World War Zero, in this case a war between Libya (then known as Ottoman Tripolitania) and the United States. That encounter, a war within a war, was the First Barbary War (1801-1805).

The genesis of the Barbary Wars (see this famous picture of the USS Philadelphia in Tripoli Harbour, depicting the saving-from-capture of that ship in February 1804) was an earlier war. The American-Algerian War of 1785 to 1795was the first foreign military adventure of the United States since its independence in 1783. Wikipedia lists the ‘result’ of this war as an ‘Algerian victory’. It will be a surprise to many people that America’s first foreign war was so soon after independence, and in the Mediterranean rather than somewhere close to home; independent America has a long history of violence in the ‘Middle East’. It will be no surprise that, in 1795, the United States lost that war.

The context of the 1785-1795 war was that Great Britain, piqued by the loss of its American colonies, refused the United States the ‘protection’ of the British Navy.

We note here that imperial nations traditionally extracted ‘tribute’ from both their subjugated territories, and other populated territories which might otherwise be candidates for subjugation. Further, smaller maritime states traditionally extracted rent from passing ships.

These ‘clipping-the-ticket’ relationships still exist, of course. Egypt, for example, extracts monopoly rents from its possession of the Suez Canal; as does Panama re the Panama Canal. As would New Zealand if South American merchant ships were to transit through Cook Strait on their way to Australia. Indeed, as international airports charge landing fees. Further, the extraction of imperial tribute has become apparent once again, as the American president tries to use import taxes – tariffs – and bilateral ‘deals’ as ways of ‘making lots of money’; as a way of leveraging imperial power. This is extortion through protection money, in the very worst sense of that concept of power.

In the 1780s, and before, Britain and Algeria ‘scratched each other’s backs’. Britain let Algeria – literally a ‘pirate state’ – do its thing, so long as it did not charge rents from ships under the protection of the British Empire. Thus, after 1783, American ships ceased to benefit from British protection. The conflict ended in 1795, with the United States agreeing to pay rents to Algeria, and – by implication – to other ‘pirate kingdoms’ on the North African Barbary Coast.

The Barbary Wars began when newly elected president – Thomas Jefferson – refused to pay rents to Tripolitania, aka Libya. As a result, Tripolitania declared war on the United States. The United States sent a number of frigates, including the USS Philadelphia.

To this day, the United States commemorates the 1804 burning of the USS Philadelphia by Stephen Decatur as a heroic rescue, an act of derring do which Lord Nelson reputedly claimed was “the most bold and daring act of the Age”. It was this action which led to the naming of three United States naval ships, including the current ship, as ‘Tripoli’. Decatur went on to become a hero, once again, in the 1812 to 1815 war with Britain. And many American towns came to be named after him. (We may note that, in another ‘heroic’ action in World War Zero, in 1812, the Russian military burned the city of Moscow in order to save it from Napoleon’s invading army. One significant aftermath was a literary novel: War and Peace.)

This war was not an American victory; importantly for the United States, it was not the ignominious defeat that it might otherwise have been. The United States – or at least mercenaries in the pay of the United States – did win the subsequent 1805 Battle of Derna, which the USS Tripoli officially commemorates.

The First Barbary War ended inconclusively in 1805, with a deal. Wikipedia says: “In agreeing to pay a ransom of $60,000 (equivalent to $1.3 million in 2025) for the American prisoners, the Jefferson administration drew a distinction between paying tribute and paying ransom.” Jefferson agreed to pay a ransom. We should note that the Second Barbary War of 1815, also involving Decatur, lasted just two days, and was an American victory (under President Madison).

Another reason for the naming of the USS Tripoli, which is essentially the same reason.

In 2011, the United States (as NATO), under President Obama, fought in another war against Libya. This was a successful war of ‘regime change’, this time through air power rather than sea power; though few would say that the replacement regimes have improved either the stability of Libya or of the Eastern Mediterranean. This war of ‘decapitation’ of Libya was Obama’s dress rehearsal for an even more ambitious attempt to do the same in Syria. The subsequent Syrian Civil War was another distressing failure of United States’ foreign bellicosity. At least Obama asked Congress, and as a result he was unable to escalate; Obama was thwarted in his further attempts to become a decapitating conqueror (noting Abbottabad as well as Tripoli). Much of Syria descended into anarchy, until Russia intervened.

The USS Tripoli was commissioned in 2012, as much in commemoration of recent American adventurism as it was in commemoration of that country’s earliest acts of violence in a land far far away.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

A minute after my radio-alarm went off this morning, I was ‘privileged’ to hear this deeply scary interview with the Deputy Prime Minister: Deputy PM Seymour on NZ, Iran and fuel relief, RNZ 24 March 2026. For most of the interview David Seymour outlines why Ruthanasia politics is essential for New Zealand, even as a global existential crisis may be unfolding. While he didn’t use the word ‘Ruthanasia’, he may as well have.

(Ruthenasia was supposed to have been a policy to deliver relatively ‘more money’ to younger New Zealanders; that is, such policies of fiscal austerity are commonly conducted in the name of intergenerational equity, though that notion – as represented by the ‘financial literacy’ community – is a logical fallacy of the first order. Money, a set of claims on wealth, a social technology, is regarded by austerians such as Ruth Richardson and David Seymour as a form of intrinsic wealth. Seymour claimed that “the previous government maxed out the credit card”; New Zealand is about 105th out of 190 countries for government debt. Turkmenistan, Brunei and Kuwait are the top performers by Seymour’s criterion (with Afghanistan, Haiti and Russia also in the top 10); Sudan and Japan are the worst. According to Trading Economics, New Zealand now has a projected 47% government debt to GDP ratio, up from 39% in 2023. Truth is becoming an increasingly scarce commodity.)

NATO and the Greater Evil

The real problem though, contained in this interview, is in the presenter’s introduction, and also in the quasi-acceptance of the alarming content of that introduction.

In the recording, Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte claims that New Zealand has signed up to a 22-country Nato-led initiative “to implement his vision [referring to the President of the United States] of making sure the Strait of Hormuz is free, is opening up as soon as possible”.

First, we should note that the Strait of Hormuz is presently open to all neutral countries; it is not open to those countries waging a war of aggression on Iran (a country along with Oman which has, by virtue of geography, sovereignty over that narrow Strait). (Much as Egypt has sovereignty over the Suez Canal.) Although there is some ambiguity regarding countries (such as New Zealand) which condemn Iran but choose to not-condemn Israel or the USA.

What New Zealand should do, if it really wants trade access to the Persian Gulf, is to condemn – equally – all the belligerents in this war. Beyond that, the paucity of ships passing through the Strait is an insurance matter; a matter that can be most easily resolved by the aggressors stopping the present war rather than (literally and figuratively) inflaming it. Does New Zealand want to be safe, and to have safe access to the Gulf States, or does it want to be egregiously stupid?

Regional Wars too easily become World Wars

At present there are two ‘regional’ wars of global significance in ‘play’. We note that in World War Two there was something similar. In November 1941 there was an all-out European war in which Germany was fighting the Soviet Union on one front and fighting the United Kingdom on the other. And there was a war in the western Pacific in which Japan was fighting China and Indo-China; kind of a world war in that most of Indo-China was ‘colonies’ of the European powers France, Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.

Then, in December 1941, Japan attacked the United States’ fleet in Hawaii (noting that Hawaii was not a part of the United States then). Three days later, Japan sank two British battleships – Prince of Wales, and Repulse – in the South China Sea, effectively declaring war on the United Kingdom. And then, another day later, German Chancellor Adolf Hitler declared war on the United States – his biggest strategic mistake. Two regional geopolitical wars had become a world war.

Goliath 2.0; a modern-day unsophisticate and anti-intellectual, and his band of orcs

In 2026, the two wars are between Nato and Russia, with most of the action taking place in the territory of the Nato proxy-state, Ukraine. The second war is between Israel and Iran, with Israel being helped out by its much larger proxy with its Goliath president. Much of the violence is taking place in other countries; countries either sandwiched between Israel and Iran or coveted by Israel as part of its Greater Israel project.

What is now connecting these two wars – both being fought in parts of central Eurasia – the war in Europe and the war in the ‘Middle East’? First is that Ukraine became involved, earlier this year, as a military ally of Israel. Second is that Nato, one of the combatants in the Ukraine War, is now trying to join in the Middle East War as a formal ally of Israel and its subservient Goliath. And little New Zealand is showing all the signs that it is trying to become a formal ally of Nato, a willing participant of both regional wars; awestruck by Goliath and his band of merry orcs.

When two globally significant regional wars combine today to become a single war, we have World War Three. Why, on Earth, would New Zealand want to be a part of that? Why would we want to be a party to both ecocide and economic suicide? And why would we want to become a target in a nuclear war? Is that egregiously stupid?

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

The human world changed twice during the twentieth century. The first transition lasted from 1914 to 1945. The principal cause of World War Two was World War One. So, to understand the drivers of that long transition, indeed a great levelling event, it is necessary to investigate the causes of World War One. What happened between those wars was not inevitable, of course. But those inter-war events formed part of a comprehensible transitional sequence.

The next transition began, I would argue, in 1967 and lasted until 1980. Though key pre- and post-transition events took place in 1948, 1953 and 1956; and 1989/1990. The 1967 to 1980 transition significantly involved both Israel and Iran. As a result, the post-war world of cold war and decolonisation gave way to a neoliberal world order in which the new financial and political elites increasingly ruled under the titular covers of ‘liberal democracy’, ‘global rules-based-order’, and the ‘unipolar moment‘.

Are we today in a new transition, away from neoliberalism; maybe into a bleak zero-sum order (or negative-sum) of right-wing identity politics? An order in which national or cultural identity groups seek to harm other such groups more than they benefit their own group. An ultra-Hobbesian world in which individuals and groups gain pleasure directly from the pain they cause to others? Or will such gratuitous and predatory behaviour be limited to a transition now under way? While such behaviour happened markedly during the last years of the 1914 to 1945 transition, there were also substantial precursors to it in the lead-up to World War One. Not least the Judeophobic pogroms in Ukraine and some of its neighbouring territories.

These remain open questions. My aim here is to outline the 1967 to 1980 transition, noting some parallels between that transition and present times.

Before that, I’ll just mention that, in 1948, Israel and Palestine were both granted, by the new United Nations, the status of sovereign nation states. The Palestine nation was stillborn, for a number of reasons, one of which was that the eventual borders of Israel split the Palestinian territories. And I’ll mention that, in 1953, the United States instigated a political and military coup in Iran, converting a developing independent democracy into an absolute monarchy whose role was to acquiesce to Washington’s stated and unstated interests.

Suez Canal: the First Crisis

Most wars start with a pretext, an event manufactured or exploited by the true belligerent to justify its aggression.

One country which had been subjugated – indeed occupied – by the United Kingdom for many years was Egypt. That’s why Egypt came to be so important for the New Zealand military in both WW1 and WW2.

The critical strategic asset in Egypt was the Suez Canal, built by French interests, opened in 1869, and effectively wrested by the British from 1882 (though France maintained a strategic interest). For the steamship age, that canal became the critical conduit for the British Empire, connecting London with India (which included modern Pakistan and Bangladesh), East Africa, the ‘Middle East’ (meaning the Persian Gulf), the ‘Far East’, and the Australian colonies which became Australia.

The Egyptian Revolution took place in 1952, and Egyptian president Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal in July 1956. The result was a war in the latter part of 1956, in which the British and French persuaded Israel (only created in 1948) to invade Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. (These events were covered in an episode of The Crown.) The Israeli attack took place as Operation Kadesh. Less than two days after this pretext, presented as a threat to Israel’s security, Britain (and France) started bombing Egypt at Port Said, in an operation to ‘secure’ the Canal.

The end result was an ignominious defeat for Britain and France, unsupported by the US, but with no meaningful withdrawal by Israel; the Israel-Egypt border had become permanently militarised, noting that Gaza had been (by agreement) under Egyptian control since 1949.

The Suez Canal was closed for nearly six months, until April 1957.

Suez Canal: the Second Crisis

Ten years later, in June 1967, Israel went for broke. This was the much bigger second crisis for the Suez Canal. In six days, Israel conquered the entire Sinai Peninsula – therefore including Gaza – meaning that Israel had annexed the eastern side of the Canal. In addition Israel conquered East Jerusalem, which in 1948 was supposed to have become the capital of an independent Palestine, the West Bank (which the State of Tennessee, in an act of appeasement towards Israel, now wants to call Judea and Samaria; refer Bill requiring Tennessee to use ‘Judea and Samaria’ instead of ‘West Bank’ advances, Fox17, 6 March 2026), and Syria’s Golan Heights.

The principal consequence was that the Suez Canal, an even more important waterway than the Gulf of Hormuz, was closed from 1967 to 1975.

With hindsight, we can see that the global economic crisis of the 1970s began in 1967. It is understood as a crisis of inflation which morphed after 1973 into a crisis of stagflation; for an overview, biased towards the US and towards the received narrative, refer to The Great Inflation, in Federal Reserve History.

The closure of the Suez Canal had little impact on oil prices. But it did lead to a surge in the cost of international transportation, as Asia to Europe trade had to be diverted to the South African and Panama routes. The other two drivers of that inflation-surge in the late 1960s were the escalations of the Vietnam War, and the prevalence of a corporate structure – outlined by John Kenneth Galbraith in The New Industrial State (1967) and Economics and the Public Purpose (1973) – which made the global marketplace less responsive towards increases in global spending. That last point means that large corporate firms, like today’s energy companies, became predisposed to respond to increased demand by raising prices rather than by raising the quantities of output supplied.

Wartime is almost always associated with inflation, because it both raises costs and constrains the supply of consumer goods. (American wars since the 1970s can be an exception, because they are financed by instant money and readily-available imports; by US government-deficits and US economy trade deficits. Deficits which the rest of the world is eager to facilitate.)

Israel 1967 to 1973

With the partial exception of Syria’s Golan Heights, Israel did not formally incorporate the other conquered territories. This retention of these territories as subjugated territories was partly due to international pressure to not recognise conquests, but was probably more to do with their implications for the demographic balance of Israel. Integration would have led to the possibility of Jews becoming a minority of Israel’s population, and Arabs a majority.

(We should note that, for the secular Jews who run Israel, to be Jewish is understood more as an ethnicity than as a religious faith. Hence, Israelis tend to juxtapose Jews and Arabs, whereas people in the rest of the world juxtapose Israelis (understood to be mostly Jews) and Palestinians. Israelis favour the word ‘Arab’ over ‘Palestinian’, because of a popular Israeli narrative that the indigenous population of Palestine is descended from immigrants from Arabia.)

The 1973 Arab-Israeli War happened in October 1973, beginning with a surprise attack by Egypt, during the Yom Kippur holy day (and noting that the 2026 attacks on Iran occurred during Ramadan, Islam’s holiest period). Basically, Egypt wanted its Sinai Peninsula back, in part so that it could reopen the Canal. Other nearby countries joined-in, especially Syria, but also Jordan and Iraq. Not Iran, which was then under United States hegemony.

Despite Egypt’s initial advantage of surprise, Israel not only fought back defensively, but counterattacked. The counterattack included an Israeli army contingent crossing the Suez Canal and marching on Cairo; ie approaching the Nile River. Potentially this war could have led to the creation of a Greater Israel; from the Euphrates (in Syria and Iraq) to the Nile. But again, the problem of conquest becomes the problem of having to incorporate supposedly ‘inferior’ populations into the expanded nation state.

(We note that surprise attacks often do not bear fruit; noting the American president’s tasteless and quasi-triumphant comparison between 28 February 2026 with the ultimately unsuccessful attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. See Trump jokes about Pearl Harbour in meeting with Japan’s PM, TVNZ, 20 March 2026. For a brief moment, I wondered if the President was going to refer to the surprise attack of 6 August 1945, or that of 10 March 1945.)

Further, the international community had interests other than appeasing Israel. The biggest of these concerns was the price of oil. In the end the international community got its way, but at a cost of making Israel itself into a significantly more belligerent state than it had been hitherto.

Oil Prices

The 1973 Oil Crisis led to a quadrupling of crude oil prices by 1977, most of that taking place in 1974. Given the general inflation, much of it instigated by the oil price increases, real oil prices only increased by 150 percent in United States’ dollars.

The main reasons for the huge price increases of oil were the roles of the likes of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait – through the Vienna-based OPEC cartel – being able to push back against the encroachment of the Zionist project in their region, by using their effective near-monopoly power. In turn, these high prices led to the further development of the petroleum industries in the Persian Gulf, and of the Gulf States themselves. Additionally, we should note that oil was underpriced prior to the 1973 war; much as it can be argued that oil was underpriced in January 2026.

This had a much bigger economic impact on countries like New Zealand than anything we’ve either seen or projected in the present March 2026 crisis. (In my case, it brought forward my OE plans. At the end of 1973, for $400 I bought a ticket to sail to England via Acapulco, Panama, Curaçao and Barbados. By time the ship sailed in April 1974, the fare had been subject to two surcharges and I ended up paying more like $480. It could have been worse if the ship had not had access to cheap Venezuelan fuel in Curaçao.)

The result was a series of massive financial imbalances across the world; between oil-importing and oil-exporting countries, and also within larger oil-producing countries such as the United States. (New York’s loss was Texas’s gain.) While those 1970s’ financial challenges were navigated by the world’s finance ministers and central banks with a large measure of pragmatic success, the turmoil of the times let in a new and simplistic narrative around money and inflation; an unnuanced narrative that harked back to the classical stories about money during World War Zero (that’s the Napoleonic Wars of 1798 to 1815).

That new narrative was monetarism/neoliberalism, and placed itself perfectly to exploit the economic crisis – the Great Inflation– to create the neoliberal anti-intellectual hegemony which has ruled over the western world and hence over the whole world since the early 1980s. The guru of monetarism was a Chicago School economist; Milton Friedman. As an academic, Friedman and his acolytes had been plugging away through the 1950s and 1960s; well-placed to take advantage of a good crisis, especially a crisis centred around the word ‘inflation’. Chicago School economists experimented on Chile following its 11 September 1973 military coup.

If Israel had simply returned Sinai to Egypt in say 1970 – in circumstances similar to the eventual return of Sinai – allowing the Suez Canal to reopen, then the 1970s and 1980s could have turned out very differently.

Revolution, and Oil Prices again

One of the consequences of the political crisis in the Middle East was further crisis in the Middle East. Various latent nationalisms in the region intensified markedly; these intensifications turned for inspiration to the common faith in the region, Islam.

Hence, there was a direct – albeit convoluted – pathway from the 1973 war to the 1978/1979 Iranian Revolution. In February 1979 the Imperial State of Iran gave way to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

(I could have gained a personal glimpse of revolutionary Iran. Returning from my OE in September 1978, my partner and I were on a PanAm flight from Rome to Istanbul. The flight originated in New York, and terminated in Tehran, and was running late. Many of the passengers were agitated, because the flight was now projected to arrive in Tehran during the evening curfew. I guess it was always possible that PanAm would take the decision to overfly Istanbul, in order to arrive in Tehran on time. The plane did land in Istanbul, later than scheduled, so I know not about what dramas may have unfolded in Tehran later that evening. I expect that the return flight out of Tehran was fully booked, given the deteriorating situation there for American citizens.)

An important result is that oil from Iran, a founding member of OPEC, came off the world market for a few years. (Although, Aotearoa New Zealand, in its own pragmatic navigation of the crisis, came to do a swap deal with Revolutionary Iran. Despite the fact that, for a few years instances of capital punishment in Iran came to exceed those in the United States, New Zealand negotiated a sheep-meat for oil swap, thereby saving this country’s critical sheep-farming industry.)

The result of the loss of Iranian oil from the word market led, in 1979, to a further doubling of the world price of crude oil. In the second half of the 1970s, many countries – including New Zealand and United States – cut their speed limits to 80kph (or 50 miles per hour). (I still remember, in October 1976, riding in a Greyhound Bus in Pennsylvania, watching big trucks traveling very slowly along the United States’ interstate motorway system.)

In 1979, the crisis became so difficult that the New Zealand government made the sensible though since-derided decision to ration petrol by requiring motorists to observe carless days each week.

Governments in oil-importing countries made the pragmatic decision to both conserve oil and, for balance of payments’ reasons, to develop their own oil, gas and exportable reserves. New Zealand electrified its North Island Main Trunk Railway, doubled its aluminium production capacity (in order to export renewable energy), substantially expanded its oil-refining capacity, developed the Maui gas field; and developed the Glenbrook steel mill as a means to gain export receipts from the sale of west coast iron-sand.

Eventually, in 1986, the world oil price collapsed, ushering in a new (and environmentally discordant) era of cheap oil. Inflation-adjusted oil prices in 1999 were even lower than in 1972.

The Great Deception

World price-inflation was on a substantial downward path once the leading economies’ central banks allowed interest rates to fall (through liberalising monetary policies) in the years 1983 to 1985, and once cheap oil resumed. But in some countries high consumer-price-inflation persevered until the end of the 1980s’ decade, especially as they shifted towards goods and services taxes.

New Zealand pioneered a particular form of illiberal monetary policy in 1989, when inflation was already falling back to normal levels; and claimed that the new simple-minded monetary policy was the sole cure. This policy, which was in fact very much associated with the aforementioned monetarist project, became akin to a biblical truth; and was successfully exported to the consolidating globalised political and financial elites, making this new quasi-biblical truth into a bedrock policy-of-faith in the post-1980 world order.

Today, we can easily observe how false this ‘truth’ of faith is. By looking at the United Kingdom and Australia, two countries which have minimally reduced interest rates since 2022, we can see how their inflation rates have remained stubbornly higher than those with lower interest rates.

The next political and financial world order?

Are we in a new transition? Probably yes. Will it take a decade or so? Probably yes. While there are many calamities that could happen – and remembering that the world faced the possibility of global nuclear war early in both the cold war world order and the neoliberal world order – an optimistic take is that the world will move into a multipolar principles-of-engagement world order in which no single polity (or alliance) can dictate terms to the rest of the world with apparent impunity.

A unipolar world order is an illiberal geopolitical monopoly. Present events may either entrench or destroy the forces pushing for geopolitical illiberalism. Multipolarity is geopolitical liberalism.

The next world order should not be reliant on cheap oil nor indefinite economic growth nor the idolatry of money. Money is a means, not an end; it is a technology, not a commodity. Capitalism can become a peaceful private-public partnership. If enough of us want it to be.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Iran is a crucial country in Southwest Asia. Not only is it strategically placed with respect to maritime transport, it also has land borders with seven countries. Most of these countries have been in the world news in the last decade, generally in relation to some conflict or other.

Two of these are currently at war with each other: Afghanistan and Pakistan (refer ‘I heard a huge blast’: Afghan journalist describes Kabul rehab hospital strikes, Sky News, 16 March 2026). Two others were at war a few years ago: Armenia and Azerbaijan. And Iraq has been in five separate wars, one against Iran itself, and one against Iran’s near-neighbour Kuwait, two against the wider West, and one against ISIL. Türkiye, by contrast, has been a sea of relative stability, and is indeed the main recipient of Iranian refugees at present.

But what about Turkmenistan, a country which has a 1,000km border with Iran; and important demographic and cultural links with Iran? A country successfully hiding in plain sight.

Korea was dubbed the ‘Hermit Kingdom’ in the nineteenth century, and since the Korean War (ceasefire in 1953) North Korea is not uncommonly still called that. But, at least in our awareness, Turkmenistan makes North Korea seem rather gregarious in terms of its relations with the world. I understand that it’s harder to get a visa to visit Turkmenistan than to visit North Korea.

Google: “Ashgabat, the capital, was rebuilt [after a big earthquake in 1948] in Soviet style in the mid-20th century and is filled with grand monuments honouring former president Saparmurat Niyazov.” This architectural gigantism is reminiscent of North Korea. BBC, 17 Sep 2016: “Turkmenistan has unveiled a gleaming new international airport with a roof in the shape of a flying falcon. … Ashgabat [the capital, and close to the Iranian border] boasts several other unique structures, including a publishing house in shape of an open book [and] two giant golden statues of both Mr Berdymukhamedov and his late predecessor Saparmyrat Niyazov.”

Economy

Turkmenistan, on the southeastern side of the Caspian Sea, has an ancient history in terms of trade along the Silk Road; it was indeed a land of transit in the times of caravans and camels.

In 1881 it was annexed and fully incorporated into the Russian Empire. And, during Soviet Union times, it was a full republic of that Union. Since the Soviet split-up, Turkmenistan, in true Orwellian fashion, has largely denied that it was ever part of the Soviet Union. Its population, believed to be just over six million, is kept in perpetual ignorance of the wider world. There is a relatively large regional diaspora of Turkmen people.

That ignorance is mutual. The West knows as little about Turkmenistan as Turkmen subjects know about The West. Interestingly, I looked up the CIA Factbook – a widely favoured reference resource for political geography – to verify my own knowledge. And I found this; the Factbook was closed last month (though see the wayback machine). Not widely reported, but note this on CNN: CIA terminates its World Factbook, overthrowing reference regime, 6 Feb 2026.

I found some maps still on the CIA website: https://www.cia.gov/resources/map/india/ and https://www.cia.gov/resources/map/turkmenistan/. While the maps on India are reasonably current (2023), this map of Turkmenistan dates back to 2008. Not exactly state-of-the-art intelligence.

Turkmenistan is not a poor country. It has substantial oil reserves, and has huge barely tapped natural gas reserves, comparable to those of Qatar. Despite contrived inequality between rulers and subjects, its people are not as poor as North Korea’s. Its long-distance trade nowadays passes mostly either to The West via the Caspian Sea, then Azerbaijan and Georgia; or to China via just one other country, Kazakhstan. There will also be regional trade with its four land neighbours: Iran, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan.

Strategic Matters

For reasons fully beyond its control, Turkmenistan finds its most natural neighbour and most natural ally, Iran, in fullscale war with both regional and global hegemons. I suspect that there are very few Iranian citizens seeking refuge in Turkmenistan, even though many living near Turkmenistan – including in bombed nearby cities such as Mashhad (refer Iran’s Mashhad Airport Targeted Amid Ongoing Israeli Strikes, The Caspian Post, 1 March 2016) – are now living in considerable danger.

Wars typically spill over, in one form or another, into neighbouring countries. Further, Turkmenistan might now become coveted for its geopolitically strategic location and resources. War might come in more than a local spill.

Airspace

Once upon a long time ago, the most strategic spaces in the world were land-spaces, especially central Asian steppes such as those of Turkmenistan. The last incursions from the East into Europe came from these lands: those invasions by Genghis Khan in the twelfth century, and Tamerlane in the fourteenth.

The last incursion from the East into Western Europe was that of Attila the Hun in the fifth century. Since those invasions – and since earlier western conquests, eg those of Alexander the Great – there have been many Western megalomaniacs invading Asia. The main opportunity for the West arose from the strategic development of seaspace trumping landspace.

Nowadays, airspace to a considerable extent trumps both landspace and seaspace. There are two components of this. The first is the military exploitation of airspace, a form of warfare favoured by most modern tyrants. The second is the civilian – and peaceful economic – use of airspace for long-distance transit and trade.

My guess is that, at least up until now, long-haul flights will have avoided overflying Turkmenistan. (Avoidance of countries’ airspace is not uncommon: in 2008 I flew Cathay Pacific from Hong Kong to Seoul return, and the flights avoided Chinese airspace. And I flew from Shenyang in China to Seoul by Korean Airlines, a flight that took a wide circle route to avoid North Korea.)

As it is now, if civil flights want to avoid both Turkmenistan and all countries currently at war, a flight from Singapore to London (say) would have to fly over Nepal, China, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and then over the Black Sea. That’s a very narrow corridor for two-directional long-haul flying. Turkmenistan airspace would ease this constraint somewhat. But how safe can we expect any of Iran’s neighbours to be in the future? Certainly, with airspace now being the geopolitically dominant space today, Turkmenistan comes at a premium; potentially a new aerial Silk Road.

Safe national airspaces are important, not only to avoid being shot-down as Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was in 2014, but also as potential emergency landing sites. How will long-distance civilian air travel function during a twenty-first century world war?

Conclusion

Most of us have some geographical blindspots and many historical blindspots. Some places and historical events are blind to most of us. If democracy is to survive in any form, we need populations – not just ‘experts’ – with more knowledge of the world. And, if not unbiased knowledge (very difficult to achieve), then at least knowledge with relatively balanced biases.

Turkmenistan is a strategically placed nation towards which most better-informed people have almost no knowledge. For us in the West, that lack of geographical knowledge is ignorance by choice, or by having priorities determined by our not knowing what we don’t know, even when those places are in plain sight. For the Turkmen subject people, their ignorance is different; it’s by design.

*******

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

On Tuesday, I wrote UAE, Israel, And The Hexagon Alliance which illuminated Israel’s duplicity in relation to Hamas, and the understated but very strong alliance between the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Israel. And Israel’s agenda to divide and rule the ‘Middle East’ by creating its own encircling alliance; and setting up two rival Muslim axes (a Shia axis, and a Sunni axis) which Israel would like to see weaken and damage each other.

Here I begin with other candid comments, by recent Israeli leaders, from the Australian 2024 documentary The Forever War. Themes include a mix of empathy and contempt for the indigenous Palestinian population, Benjamin Netanyahu’s trustworthiness, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich as “messianic” “terrorists”, Israel’s hold over the United States, and Israel’s self-inflicted diminishing security.

Excerpts from the Australian ABC documentary

TZIPI LIVNI, FMR FOREIGN & JUSTICE MINISTER: They hate us. We saw the results. The idea of eradicating Hamas completely from Gaza is a just cause.

YEHUDA SHAUL, FMR ISRAELI ARMY COMMANDER: That the IDF is doing everything to avoid civilian casualties is a blunt lie. Straight lie.

YEHUDA SHAUL, FMR ISRAELI ARMY COMMANDER: Y’know, [in the] the beginning I was also full of rage. I also had the feeling that these are animals, we need to go there and bomb the hell out of them. But then you stop for a second and you think, you say to yourself, what did we think is going to happen after 16 years of siege.

AMIRA HASS, OCCUPIED TERRITORIES CORRESPONDENT, HAARETZ: I was surprised and not surprised because I kept warning that people cannot stand the accumulated cruelty accumulated over so many decades. And somehow there will be an explosion. Somehow there will be an outburst. I couldn’t imagine what it would be, but there it came.

…

JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: You’ve spent a lot of time studying this obviously as head of Shin Bet. Could you describe what is the reality for Palestinians here?

AMI AYALON, FMR HEAD OF SHIN BET: It was a life of people who dream about freedom, and don’t see it. Whether we liked it or not, we control the life of millions.

JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: If you were a Palestinian living in the West Bank or Gaza, what would your view be of Israel?

AMI AYALON, FMR HEAD OF SHIN BET: I would fight against Israel in order to achieve my liberty.

JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: How would you fight? How dirty?

AMI AYALON, FMR HEAD OF SHIN BET: I would do everything in order to achieve my liberty. And that’s it.

EHUD BARAK, FMR PRIME MINISTER OF ISRAEL: Look, I once was asked some 30 years ago what I have been doing if I were a Palestinian and 30 years ago. I was new enough in politics to tell the truth that if I were born Palestinian probably would’ve joined one of the terror organisations.

…

JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: Israel’s famous for its targeted assassinations. I mean you yourself dressed as a woman famously and went into Beirut and met up with Mossad and went and killed a Palestinian leader. Israel’s done that over the years. Why couldn’t they have tried to strategically target Hamas leaders rather than kill those thousands of children?

EHUD BARAK, FMR PRIME MINISTER OF ISRAEL: I never deluded myself to believe that by killing any individual you solve the problem, you give them a blow and they will recover in a way it just delayed the real decision. Real decisions at the end are not about how to kill mosquitoes more effectively. It’s about how to drain the swamp [my emphasis].

…

JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: Do you trust Benjamin Netanyahu?

TZIPI LIVNI, FMR FOREIGN & JUSTICE MINISTER: Never.

JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: Can there be peace while Benjamin Netanyahu’s the leader here?

TZIPI LIVNI, FMR FOREIGN & JUSTICE MINISTER: No. No.

JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: Can the world trust Benjamin Netanyahu?

EHUD BARAK, FMR PRIME MINISTER OF ISRAEL: I don’t think that anyone can trust him. So basically, he lies to everyone and no one trust him.

…

EHUD BARAK, FMR PRIME MINISTER OF ISRAEL: BenGvir and Smotrich, the two racist messianic guys that seems to be to very strong leverage on Bibi. They want to turn it into a major religious war between Israel and the Islam.

JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: Are they dangerous?

EHUD BARAK, FMR PRIME MINISTER OF ISRAEL: Sure, they’re dangerous.

JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: How powerful are BenGvir and Smotrich and what do you think of them?

AMI AYALON, FMR HEAD OF SHIN BET: I see them as terrorists and as Jewish messianics, they represent only a small minority within the Israel society, but they get their power because of our coalition system.*

JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: But can I just check something? Are you calling the Minister for National Security and the Minister for Finance in Israel? Are you calling them terrorists?

AMI AYALON, FMR HEAD OF SHIN BET: Of course. They are.

JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: Is the brutal reality that Benjamin Netanyahu wants to continue this war for his own political survival?

EHUD BARAK, FMR PRIME MINISTER OF ISRAEL: Look, I cannot penetrate his soul and tell you for sure, but it’s clear that he acts as if the main objective of this whole event is his survival. He understands that if fighting will have a pause for six weeks or two times six weeks, the Israeli republic will demand accountability in spite of the fact that there is no word in Hebrew for accountability. It was not needed in our culture, but the public will demand it and he might lose his role, the prime minister.

…

excerpt from U.S. PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: The state of Israel was born to be a safe place for the Jewish people.

JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: President Biden is a lifelong supporter of Israel.

excerpt from U.S. PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: If Israel didn’t exist we’d have to invent it.

EHUD BARAK, FMR PRIME MINISTER OF ISRAEL: Israel cannot fight this regional war without having close relationship with the Americans. We need their support, not just in munitions that we do not produce in a high enough space to supply the needs of such a regional war, but we need them also to protect us in the UN Security Council. We needed them at the beginning of the crisis to deter Iran from getting involved or from activating the Hezbollah against us. And we will need them even in the Hague, to block the prospect that… Israeli commanders or even politically, they might find themselves as a criminal in the Hague or demanded to be broke. Only America can help us to avoid all this.

JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: Pro-Israeli lobby groups in the US wield immense power.

NATHAN THRALL, FMR DIRECTOR INTERNATIONAL CRISIS GROUP: Every politician in the United States knows that they can pay a major price with their jobs for not toeing the line. And the level of devastation that we are seeing now has so horrified the world and has so horrified the American public that now we have half of the people who voted for Biden saying that Israel is perpetrating a genocide in Gaza.

…

JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: Do you now fear for the future?

TZIPI LIVNI, FMR FOREIGN & JUSTICE MINISTER: I am worried. I am worried about the future of Israel. Yes, more than ever.

AMI AYALON, FMR HEAD OF SHIN BET: You cannot deter a person or a group of people if they believe that they have nothing to lose. We Israelis, we shall have security only when they will have hope.

JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: What’s the future for Palestinians

AVI DICHTER, CURRENT ISRAELI CABINET MINISTER: Supporting death will not bring you anything. If you don’t believe that the Jewish presence here between the Mediterranean and Jordan Valley is forever, you are going to lose more than you’ve lost till now.

*Coalition System

All electoral democracies – ie with parliamentary or congressional elections – face the problem of a very close electoral result in a partisan House. And, as Keir Starmer is finding out, political parties in traditional duopoly systems (generally ‘First Past the Post’) are themselves coalitions. In 1984, under FPP, New Zealand went to the polls early, because a minority faction of two within the governing National caucus – Marilyn Waring and Mike Minogue – had (or seemed, to Prime Minister Robert Muldoon, to have had) gained the effective balance of power. In Israel today, it is BenGivr and Smotrich who have that balance of power within the parliament, the Knesset.) In the US Senate under Joe Biden’s presidency, it was Joe Manchin of West Virginia.

In the Israel case, Netanyahu is the bigger problem. The BenGivr and Smotrich tails are not wagging the Netanyahu dog.

Ehud Barak and Jeffrey Epstein

Al Jazeera’s The Listening Post episode The anatomy of the Epstein network (9 Feb 2026) noted this 15 Jan 2026 article – “Praise Allah, There Are Still People Like You”: Jeffrey Epstein Nurtured Israel-Emirates Ties Before Abraham Accords – from Drop Site News, and then interviewed one of its authors, Murtaza Hussain. As well as emphasising Israel’s links with UAE, it also outlines Jeffrey Epstein’s longstanding links to both UAE (especially Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, former head of DP World) and to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Yes, the very Ehud Barak who intimated that Gaza and the West Bank (and presumably much of Lebanon to the south and west of Beirut) were swamps in need of draining.

Barak, Prime Minister from 1999 to 2001, was the most recent Labor Party leader of Israel. Labor-constituent parties led Israel from 1948 to 1977, and also for some years in the 1990s. Yitzhak Rabin, a Labor Prime Minister, was assassinated by a Zionist terrorist on 4 November 1995.

From Wikipedia: “According to Barak, they first met in 2003, and no evidence of an earlier meeting has been published to date. Barak stayed at Epstein’s apartments in New York several times over the years. … A large portion of the funds invested by Barak was supplied by Jeffrey Epstein. … In 2023, it was revealed that Barak had visited Epstein around 30 times from 2013 to 2017. … Barak said [in 2015 that] he currently earns more than $1 million a year.”

From the Drop Site News article:

“In the last two decades of his life, American financier Jeffrey Epstein acted as an informal diplomatic bridge between Israel and the United Arab Emirates.”

“Epstein’s … claim of having an intimate friendship with Sulayem is now corroborated by a flood of his emails from the House Oversight Committee, a U.S. federal court case, and the hacked inbox of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.”

It appears that much of Epstein’s correspondence with Sulayem was cc.ed to Ehud Barak; keeping Israel – if not Netanyahu – fully in the loop of UAE’s deepening links with Epstein, a man sufficiently notorious as a child sex offender to bring down the likes of the former prince, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. (The Epstein Affair has close parallels with the 1963 Profumo Affair, which brought down the British government and also came close to entangling the Royal Family; as viewers of The Crown will appreciate. I’m surprised that the Andrew-obsessed British media seems to downplay this parallel.)

The article adds:

‘In a November 2022 interview about the Abraham Accords, Epstein’s close friend Ehud Barak told journalist Afshin Rattansi, “I’m glad that the Emirates and Bahrain went ‘out of the closet’ and are ready to formalize relationships with us [Israel], and I hope that others will follow. It’s a positive development; of course, it’s not a real peace, it’s not a major breakthrough. We know these people for 25 years, and we have a very intensive relationship with them in many arenas”.

‘The relationship between Israel and the UAE has only deepened in the years since, even as the Israeli genocide in Gaza has provoked global outrage. In December 2025, the UAE signed a $2.3 billion defense deal with Elbit Systems, one of the largest arms sales in Israeli history.’ [What are the odds that the RSF in Sudan are now using some of those weapons?]

‘Although Epstein did not live to see these agreements come to fruition, the private channels he helped cultivate between Emirati and Israeli elites helped make them possible.’

Epstein’s Ponzi Scheme

How did Epstein make his massive fortune and become so influential and entitled? The whole story is of course murky, especially in the years of the 1990s and 2000s. Most of the information we have today relates to the post-2008 period, after Epstein’s conviction for ‘procuring for prostitution’.

I discovered a very interesting story relating to an earlier part of Epstein’s life, when he was working closely with Steven Hoffenberg. From Epstein’s Wikipedia page: “In 1993, [Hoffenberg’s] Towers Financial Corporation imploded when it was exposed as one of the biggest Ponzi schemes in American history, losing over US$450 million of its investors’ money (equivalent to $1 billion in 2025). In court documents, Hoffenberg claimed that Epstein was intimately involved in the scheme.” Epstein worked with Towers Financial Corporation, which perpetrated that Ponzi scheme in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

From CBS (Jeffrey Epstein worked at financial firm that engaged in massive Ponzi scheme in 1980s and 1990s, by Brian Pascus and Mola Lenghi, 13 Aug 2019): ‘Hoffenberg’s financial crimes in the 1990s drew major public attention, as the Towers Financial Ponzi scheme was the largest financial fraud in American history prior to Bernie Madoff’s crimes a decade later, according to The New York Times. … “Jeffrey was my partner in what we did raising the billion dollars. He worked with me every day, seven days a week and he was in the mix with everything that I did,” Hoffenberg told CBS News. “I was the CEO of Towers Financial Corporation, a public company, and Jeffrey was my main assistant, associate, or partner. And the company did do a billion dollars in raising money. And it was criminal”.’

And note How Epstein got so rich, by Timothy Rooks for Deutsche Welle, 16 Feb 2026.

Conclusion

By focussing on Jeffrey Epstein’s sex crimes, we may be letting him and his contacts off lightly.

Epstein was a money man; a miner of money, paying minors while playing majors. An Israel man. A scholar, majoring in influence, with particularly strong links to politicians and businessmen on the right of the political left; people like Peter Mandelson and Ehud Barak. A Hexagon Alliance man, who died ignominiously before his work came to its present fruition. A man trading in big guns and little women. A man serving what has become the world’s most lucrative and secretive industry; the high-tech high-chat world of asymmetric warfare, geopolitics, and draining swamps. Many of Epstein’s many contacts, now distancing themselves from him, will have imbibed the same Kool-Aid.

Epstein was a man who did much towards creating the new circum-Arabia circular economy, whereby Israel facilitates the UAE to supply military tech to the RSF to extract gold and materials from Sudan so that Israel (and its proxies, big and small) can devise, manufacture, and test more military tech to sell to the UAE to supply RSF terrorists …

*******

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.