• Why did Netanyahu and Trump attack Iran and start this war?
• Why did the US decide to attack without a clear reason to do so and without strategic planning nor a legal argument for it?
• What impact will this war in the Middle East have on US Midterm Elections?
• And what of independent operators in this conflict, such as European states, why do they risk being drawn into this US-Israel Middle East War?

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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.

There is a widespread perception in Aotearoa New Zealand that the ‘Gulf States’ are similar, and closely aligned to each other. The States most familiar to New Zealanders are United Arab Emirates (‘Dubai’ to the many New Zealanders who do not appreciate that Dubai is just one of six Emirates) and Qatar.

Further we’ve long-forgotten the dispute which, not-so-long-ago, led to Qatar being isolated by the Saudi Arabia, UAE, and other Sunni Arab countries (noting Egypt in particular). This started with the Qatar–Saudi Arabia diplomatic conflict, which in 2017 escalated into the Qatar diplomatic crisis. This conflict related to allegations of inappropriate financial connections between Qatar and Hamas. While apparent resolution took place in 2021, there is now a new division; a division even more opaque to casual western observers, and noting that western observations of other parts of the world are rarely anything other than casual.

In October 2021, the popular government of Sudan (the result of a popular revolution in 2019) was overthrown by the Sudanese Armed Forces. On the eve of the coup, ‘Protestors held signs stating, “the Emirates will not govern us, nor the implementation of Sisi”.’ For Sisi, read Egypt.

Essentially the anti-Qatar nations were developing their interests in the military and economic exploitation of Sudan. Then, in April 2023, the two parties to the 2021 coup – the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces – split in spectacular fashion, creating the present Sudanese Civil War. The UAE backed the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), while Egypt and Saudi Arabia backed the SAF. This is a hideous civil war (see my War in Sudan), with most of the reported atrocities allegedly being committed by the RSF.

This present division of civil-war-sponsorship is compounded by the diverging relationships of these three Arab states – Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE – with Israel. The Trump-sponsored 2020 Abraham Accords brought Saudi Arabia and UAE (and Bahrain) into line with Egypt as an ally-of-sorts with Israel. According to this Wikipedia account:

“On August 14, 2021, the Associated Press reported that a secret oil deal between Israel and the Emirates, struck in 2020 as part of the Abraham Accords, had turned the Israeli resort town of Eilat into a waypoint for Emirati oil headed for Western markets. It was expected to endanger the Red Sea reefs, which host some of the greatest coral diversity on the planet. As Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia also share the gulf’s waters, an ecological disaster was likely to impact their ecosystems.”

Since then, relations between UAE (and Bahrain) and Israel became particularly close. Relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia (and Egypt), on the other hand have soured since the outbreak of the present Sudan war. At the same time, as revealed by Sudan, relations between UAE and these two large Red Sea nations have substantially deteriorated.

That is the backdrop to Iran’s greater hostility, at present, towards the UAE than towards Qatar. Western reports of the present conflict tend to equate Qatar, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait as ‘peas in a pod’. The reality is that UAE is a substantial – albeit understated – ally of Israel. (There has been suspicion that UAE has provided substantial secret support for Israel in its recent wars, especially Israel’s genocidal war against Hamas in Gaza. Iran will be well aware of the extent of this UAE-Israel alliance.)

UAE is now in an antagonist relationship with Egypt and Saudi Arabia. (Indeed, it’s now UAE rather than Qatar which is the isolate on the Arabian Peninsula.) In Sudan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia back the SAF. The RSF, on the other hand, is funded and supplied through an opaque deal with UAE; which means that Israel – through its UAE proxy – may in fact be the most important backer of the RSF. And we should note that Israel is, formally, the most important global proxy of the United States; though it may now be that the United States has become Israel’s most important proxy.

(For security reasons, and as a protest against the UAE’s geopolitical cynicism, I decided that I would never again fly to London via the Emirates. Tip for Air New Zealand: put on more flights to Vancouver, and publicise the route to London via Canada.)

Qatar, Hamas, and Israel

The matter of Qatar’s financial connections with Hamas are distinctly murky. I quote here from the ABC (Australian) 60 Minutes documentary Gaza, the Forever War (11 March 2024). The programme features interviews with former senior Israeli political and military personnel.

Excerpt from transcript:

JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: It now appears that Netanyahu wanted to sow seeds of division between the hardliners who ruled Gaza and the more conciliatory Palestinian Authority, running the West Bank.

AMI AYALON, FMR HEAD OF SHIN BET: We did something very, very simple. We did everything in order to make sure that Hamas will go on controlling Gaza and Palestinian Authority will control the West Bank so they will fight each other.

JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: Netanyahu allowed Qatar to give massive amounts of cash to Hamas in Gaza.

AMI AYALON, FMR HEAD OF SHIN BET: So what we did with the permission of our prime Minister is to let Qatar to transfer a huge amount of money in cash, probably more than $1.4 billion, and to make sure that they will be able to send people to work in Israel and to achieve or to get intelligence if they need. By doing it, we increase the power of Hamas.

EHUD BARAK, FMR PRIME MINISTER OF ISRAEL: That served Netanyahu who wanted to avoid any discussion of two state solution.

JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: So, are you saying Benjamin Netanyahu deliberately boosted Hamas to try to prevent a Palestinian state?

EHUD BARAK, FMR PRIME MINISTER OF ISRAEL: Yeah, sure. He deliberately and systematically even told on record, whoever wants to avoid the threat of a two-state solution has to support my policy of paying protection money to the Hamas.

JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: Netanyahu maintains the Qatar money was to avoid a humanitarian catastrophe. Having helped build up Hamas, Netanyahu has vowed to destroy it.

YEHUDA SHAUL, FMR ISRAELI ARMY COMMANDER: He fed the beast and it exploded in our face.

The Hexagon Alliance

From Netanyahu says Israel will forge regional alliance to rival ‘radical axes’ (Al Jazeera, 22 Feb 2026) we have: ‘Netanyahu, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court on war crimes charges, also referred to Greece, Cyprus and other unnamed Arab, African and Asian countries. “In the vision I see before me, we will create an entire system, essentially a hexagon of alliances around or within the Middle East,” Netanyahu said, according to the Times of Israel. “The intention here is to create an axis of nations that see eye to eye on the reality, challenges, and goals against the radical axes, both the radical Shia axis, which we have struck very hard, and the emerging radical Sunni axis”.’

In Will Ethiopia be part of Israel’s ‘hexagon’ alliance rivalling its enemies? (Al Jazeera, 25 Feb 2026): “In December, Israel recognised Somaliland’s statehood, becoming the first country to do so. Months before, there were unconfirmed talks about plans to move displaced Palestinians to Somaliland or to South Sudan, another key Israeli ally in the region. Analysts speculate that countries like South Sudan and the United Arab Emirates, another close friend of Israel, may also recognise Somaliland.”

So the hexagon would appear to be Greece, Cyprus, India, UAE, Somaliland, and Ethiopia. Ethiopia has a Judeo-Christian heritage, in sharp contract to most of its regional neighbours. (See my reference to Judeo-Christian techno-supremacism in The Greater Evil, Scoop, 2 March 2026.)

Re the “emerging radical Sunni axis”, this article from India – The Hexagon Alliance, by Ayaan Ahmad and Arjun Dev Singh, 26 Feb 2026 – suggests “Sunni-majority states such as Türkiye, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, alongside Jordan and Iraq”. You would have to add Egypt to that.

In this context, we should note that Israeli politicians have already been talking up Türkiye as the next “threat”. See Turkish ‘threat’ talked up in Israel as Netanyahu focuses on new alliances, Al Jazeera, 23 Feb 2026. And, noting a joint expression of Islamophobia, Modi in Israel: ‘Hexagon’ alliance and the ideological convergence of Hindutva and Zionism, TRT World, 2 Mar 2026.

And from Is Türkiye Israel’s next target in the Middle East? (Al Jazeera, 21 Sep 2025): “In Washington, Michael Rubin, a senior fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, suggested that Türkiye could be Israel’s next target and warned that it should not rely on its NATO membership for protection.”

This reflects the significance of Greece and Cyprus within the hexagon. It also points to the United Kingdom, indirectly. Part of the island of Cyprus is British sovereign territory; ie not at all a ‘foreign airbase’. And another part of the island of Cyprus has been a Turkish realm state, albeit unrecognised by the international community (as Somaliland – formally British Somaliland – is also unrecognised).

We may note that the tension between UAE and Saudi Arabia is revealed in Google Maps. Despite there being a long border between the two countries, there is only one road crossing, to the far west of Abu Dhabi. Indeed, Doha in Qatar is closer to that border crossing than is either Dubai or the city of Abu Dhabi. 95% of UAE’s population lives in that country’s northeast corner. Along most of the border, there are parallel roads, but no crossing points. In Saudi Arabia that road is Highway 95. In UAE, its road is labelled ‘Boarder [sic] Patrol Road CIVILIAN VEHICLE PROHIBITED’.

The Yemen and Somaliland affairs

As noted by Al Jazeera: ‘Saudi Arabia is embroiled in an ongoing rift with the United Arab Emirates over how to deal with the conflict in Yemen.’

Yemen is one of those many places that are geopolitically important, but completely off New Zealand’s media radar. Historically Yemen was host to an important Jewish population (Yemenite Jews). Southern Yemen – especially Aden – was, for a century, a critical cog in the British Empire. Post-colonially, Southern Yemen became a ‘radical’ country in the world order, whereas Northern Yemen was a religiously conservative society, the Shia Zaydi Imamate until 1962 and then the Yemen Arab Republic.

In more recent years, that conservative north has become a Shia ‘Iranian proxy’, the ‘Houthis’. And the internationally recognised government of Yemen – operative in the south – has become, in that same sense, a Saudi Arabian proxy regime.

On 2 December 2025, the failed 2025–2026 Southern Yemen campaign began, essentially an attempt by the UAE-backed Southern Transitional Council (STC) to overthrow the Saudi-backed government. It was in the midst of this Israeli-backed campaign that Israel became the first country to recognise Somaliland – close to the geographical Horn of Africa’, and juxtaposed to Aden – as a sovereign state.

This has to be understood in the context of Israel’s Hexagon Alliance; indeed, an attempt to impose UAE/Israeli control over the geopolitically sensitive southern coastline of the Arabian peninsula. From Why Israel’s recognition of Somaliland backfired, (16 Jun 2026) by Abdi Aynte, former minister of planning and international cooperation of Somalia: “By empowering breakaway regions, Israel, with the backing of key regional partners, especially the United Arab Emirates, has sought to reshape the regional order.”

Aynte: “What some experts describe as an ‘Axis of Secession’ is already visible in Libya, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia and Syria. Led by Israel and supported by a network of regional partners, this axis targets countries whose central governments, hollowed out by conflict, exercise only partial control over their territory. The logic is simple: weaken central authority, bolster breakaway regions, and cultivate dependent entities willing to align with Israel and sign onto the Abraham Accords.” Aynte calls these nations “emerging client polities” of Israel, though resistance remains strong in Somalia, Yemen and Sudan.

Beyond these smaller fractured nation states, there are several large nation states in the region which Israel is trying to fracture. While these attempts in Iran are all too visible, a literal smokescreen, quietly Israel is adding Ethiopia – a country with 100,000 people – to its client list. We note that Ethiopia is hosting RSF training camps, further undermining Sudan’s sovereignty. See Reuters: Ethiopia builds secret camp to train Sudan RSF fighters, sources say, 10 Feb 2026.

This is not regional geopolitics which New Zealand can naively pretend-away. Aynte adds: “Somaliland’s decision to cultivate ties with Taiwan inevitably drew Beijing’s attention”. “The result [of Israel’s meddling through client third parties] is an increasingly crowded and volatile theatre, where global power rivalries intersect with unresolved local aspirations.” “Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, once close partners, are now increasingly at odds, while Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Egypt have begun coordinating to counter what they view as a destabilising ‘Axis of Secession’.”

And we note “widespread claims that Israel is exploring resettlement of Palestinian refugees from Gaza in Somaliland”. (An echo of Britain’s former plan to settle European Jews in Uganda!)

If we look at a map of the so-called ‘Middle East’ (nobody refers to Near East or Far East anymore!) and paint the hexagon countries in ‘Star-of-David’ blue – including Israel itself and its occupied territories, and including the RSF-controlled parts of Sudan – the obvious missing links are Egypt, Türkiye, and Iran. Hence the present war in Iran, and the concerns already noted re Türkiye. But what about Egypt?

Egypt, Iran and the Bible

Even today, Israel’s reference point is the Old Testament of The Bible. Note Al Jazeera’s Inside Story episode of 2 March 2026, What dangers does the Iran war pose for Israel?, featuring Mitchell Barak, “former speech writer for Israeli PM Ariel Sharon”, noting that Sharon was nicknamed Butcher of Beirut on account of his responsibility for the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre.

Interviewer: “Mitchell, I’m going to start things off with you. Please give us a broad brushstroke of how you see things unfolding.”

Barak: “First of all, I’d like to wish a Ramadan Kareem to all of the people watching who are celebrating and commemorating this holiday. It is also a fast day in Israel, the Fast of Esther, which commemorates ironically and interestingly enough the victory of the Jewish people over an evil Persian empire 2,500 years ago.”

He is referring to the Purim holiday. Note, in these Wikipedia references, the references to Amalek, the word that Benjamin Netanyahu invoked to justify the subsequent genocide of Gaza. Refer The Biblical story of Amalek evoked by Netanyahu, ABC24 Jan 2024.

Barak did not go on to answer the “broad brushstroke” question.

Two polities which feature strongly in that biblical narrative are Egypt and (in the guise of Babylon) Persia aka Iran. To fully understand Israel’s agenda today, we really need to see that regime and its cultural acolytes as playing a long game; a very long game. Israel is trying to reverse the wrongs that it believed it suffered, around 2½ to 3 thousand years ago, at the hands of those two ancient civilisations. (The irony is that Israel denied that there was any historical context – not even a day’s historical context – to the ‘blue-sky’ shock events of 7 October 2023.)

Seen in this context, it is credible that the principal target of the Hexagon Alliance is Egypt, not Türkiye.

And, re the current role of the United Arab Emirates in that fraught region, Australia should not provide military support to Israel’s secret ally and proxy. (See Australia to provide military support to Gulf states attacked by Iran, ABC 10 March 2026.)

*******

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 New Zealand Government’s response to Israel-US attacks on Iran has revealed a chasm. On one side are those who argue; that New Zealand must stay aligned with its 20th century allies right or wrong.

On the other side are those who insist; that the long fought for reputation, of a nation that stood for an international order based on law, justice and multilateralism, should be the guiding principles in good times and bad.

New Zealand has inched toward such societal rifts before; the Springbok Rugby tour of New Zealand in 1981; shortly followed by a generational shift and geo-political quake that came in the form of New Zealand’s anti-nuclear movement and subsequent enduring legislation. The United Nations security council endorsed response in Afghanistan to attacks on the United States shook the foundations of the Labour-Alliance coalition Government in 2001-02. And the fraudulently justified US-led invasion of Iraq triggered hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders to protest in the streets. (The Helen Clark Labour-led Government of the time refused to officially be included among the US-led coalition forces that invaded Iraq.)

In recent times, old loyalties and biases have been challenged with the genocidal disproportional response by Israel against Hamas and generally Palestinian woman, children, and the elderly whose only offence was to exist in the path of the military machine.

And now, the US Donald Trump Administration’s alliance with Israel has unilaterally justified its attacks on Iran – the murder of its supreme leader and the assassination of over 40 individuals in its operational chain of command – as a legal pre-emptive response to a perceived first-strike-plan by Iran. This, while negotiations were underway to address regional security concerns.

This is the backdrop to New Zealand Government’s response where Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Foreign Minister Winston Peters wrote on Sunday March 1:

“In this context, we acknowledge that the actions taken overnight by the US and Israel were designed to prevent Iran from continuing to threaten international peace and security.

“We condemn in the strongest terms Iran’s indiscriminate retaliatory attacks on Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Jordan. We cannot risk further regional escalation, and civilian life must be protected.” (Ref. https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/nz-government-statement-iran )

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LISTEN: To Radio New Zealand’s The Panel, where host Wallace Chapman is joined by panellists Sue Bradford and Phil O’Reilly. First up, is an extended conversation on the US and Israel attack on Iran. Columnist and Iranian New Zealander, Donna Miles-Mojab, delivers her take on the conflict and what it means for the regime. Then, I (Selwyn Manning) give an analysis on New Zealand’s stance and the legality of the attack.

It’s well worth a listen, as the fault line of New Zealand debate is clear.

*******

For those who are prepared to abandon the process of law and justice on international affairs, the New Zealand Government’s statement offered clarity; that their government would stand at the side of traditional security ‘friends’ as they commit to fight against another ‘evil’ empire.

For others, the statement was another example of mediocrity from a coalition that lacks a morality within its own argument – an apparent abandonment of principles such as international law and multilateralism – frameworks that have served small significant nations like New Zealand well.

The argument follows; that New Zealand’s coalition government has jeopardised the national interest, the hard won identity respected by those nations that still hold true to multilateralism and principle.

Here’s a please explain moment:

New Zealand is a small nation, but it is a significant actor in international affairs. Once, it could be relied upon – especially on matters of principle – to articulate a strong position on breaches of international law and justice. We have held positions at the United Nations security council, have been a driven advocate among general assembly nations and a persuasive arbiter among multilateral groups such as CANZ (Canada, Australia, New Zealand) that tag-team diplomacy at the United Nations and elsewhere.

New Zealand was once a staunch advocate (and remains a member state) of the International Criminal Court. And, in matters of trade, New Zealand sought to develop common ground rather than difference – tools that have been beneficial to others in times past when conflict has raged and red-mist would otherwise have dominated attempts at a diplomatic solution.

Today’s New Zealand is a myriad of conflicting arguments; its current coalition government argues that Iran’s regime is evil so therefore the powerful must bomb it to peace.

But the fact that the Iran regime is not a paragon of virtue – either domestically or regionally – does not diminish the fact that the United States’ and Israel’s governments decided to attack – decisions that allegedly and arguably breach international law.

International law: In a rudimentary sense; it comes down to whether Israel in the first instance was legally obliged to commit a preemptive strike on Iran, murdering its supreme leader and taking out over 40 of those who were in its chain of command.

Was there an imminent threat to Israel? At this juncture, it appears not.

Were diplomatic efforts underway to address regional security concerns, through US diplomatic efforts? Yes… up until Thursday February 26.

When Opposition Is Beyond Political

Back to New Zealand: New Zealand’s Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, on matters of geopolitics and global security, often appears to operate more like a CEO rather than the chair of a nation’s cabinet.

Widespread reports of the Prime Minister’s lack of coherency on this matter is reasonably consistent with a manager waiting to be guided by a governor, or board chair by way of policy, on the required pathway ahead.

The problem for Christopher Luxon is; he has no such external nor internal guidance. In geopolitics and matters of global security, policy alone does not help. Natural leadership qualities do.

Throughout his prime ministership, Luxon has displayed a tendency to outsource foreign affairs leadership responsibilities to his junior coalition partner, New Zealand First leader Winston Peters. Or, when that doesn’t work, he leans toward Australia and/or the United States to provide direction on big picture issues.

But for many New Zealanders, New Zealand can’t have it both ways; either it (the coalition government) sides with the ‘might-is-right’ Trump-led approach to chaotic global affairs, or it sides with the multitude of countries that still hold on to principles of justice and international law.

Where will New Zealand as a society tilt? It will likely be up to New Zealand voters, later in 2026, to finally decide which way this country tracks over the next few years.

US President Trump’s vanity and sense of global imperialism has become more expansive and performative this year.

These are times when countries like New Zealand, lacking persuasive moral leadership, can easily lose their souls, and, in the process of being risk averse, risk abandoning their own sovereignty, national interest, and identity.

*******

We keep hearing that Iran is an “evil” regime run by “clerics”. This conflation of an unscientific and emotive concept (‘evil’) with a cultural occupation (‘cleric’) is made in the context of picking on an ethnic or religious group of people as inferior. In this context, ‘cleric’ applies to Shia Islam, a major denomination of one of the world’s major religions. In the context of white supremacism, that word ‘cleric’ – as applied to Shia Islam – could have been ‘negro’.

Iran has been attacked by forces representing Judeo-Christian techno-supremacy; western super-elites who worship at the altar of military and surveillance technology. And the mainstream media within the imperium parrot the talking points of these supremacists; supremacists, seeking a unipolar world order (aka global hegemony) masquerading as capitalist democracy and riding on the coat-tails of progressive liberalism.

The West is as much a theocracy as is the Iranian regime. Only bigger, and vastly more lethal; and prone to excesses of cowardly asymmetric violence. (In the present event, one of the first groups of fatal victims were over 100 schoolgirls in southern Iran; most western media outlets have not even reported this.) As well as being a zero-out-of-ten on the scale of political ethics, the attack on Iran was illegal in both United States and international law. Once again, Congress was bypassed.

Further, we note that Israel is the world’s most secretive nuclear power; without even the semblance of a nuclear energy program that might act as cover for this. Why do we never hear about Israel’s nuclear hammer-in-waiting?

At the head of the attacking forces is an American President playing the role of the useful fool; himself being simultaneously played by, on the one side, the manifestly-evil regime of Benjamin Netanyau, and the forces of the Dark Enlightenment among which Peter Thiel of Palantir – a New Zealand citizen – is prominent.

Secret City, and President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address

Yesterday I watched the final two episodes of Season Two of Secret City, an Australian political thriller. [Secret City finishes on Netflix tomorrow!]

The story, filmed in Canberra and Adelaide in 2018, was about an innocent Australian family killed from the sky by a deliberately misdirected drone attack; an attack like many similar executions of civilians living in northwest Pakistan, as part of a highly secret US/Australian ‘security’ program. A central point of Secret City was to highlight the asymmetry of western sentiment, whereby the deaths of four white Australians elicit 100 times more outrage than 400 similar deaths in or near Pakistan. In the story, the fictitious American company, Trebuchet, served as an equivalent to Palantir. (We note that last month’s mosque bombing in Islamabad was barely reported in the New Zealand media; deeply ironic given the Christchurch attacks on 15 March 2019.)

The end of the last episode of Secret City replayed extracts from President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address, televised in the United States on 17 January 1961.

Note these excerpts from Eisenhower’s address:

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

And: “The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocation, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet in holding scientific discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

Much can be said about President Eisenhower’s tenure in office. I will note just this. It was Eisenhower who was able to settle a cease-fire of the Korean War in 1953, after the more-than-two years of extremely bloody stalemate – most of the blood was shed in North Korea – which endured under the previous Truman administration. Technically, that war has not finished. But the cease-fire has held since 1953, for as long as my life, and for longer than the long reign of Queen Elizabeth II.

Is Judeo-Christian techno-supremacy an imperial theocracy?

We note that the ‘First Reich’ – labelled well after its existence – was notionally an imperial theocracy; the Holy Roman Empire (800-1806). But, once created, it was not expansionist, rather it was a kind of Roman Catholic caliphate. Philosopher Voltaire claimed that it was neither ‘holy’, ‘Roman’, nor an ‘Empire’; it was essentially a German-led ‘commonwealth’ which made titular reference to the Church in Rome. It is arguable that the European Union is a Fourth Reich which references the First Reich.

The expansionist forces out of Europe, which have made the modern world – the world of the last 500 years – came from elsewhere: Lisbon, Madrid, Paris, Amsterdam, London, Washington. Until the 1990s, those European-sourced forces of dominance were increasingly secular. Whether or not Judeo-Christian techno-supremacy represents a development of these religious traditions, there can be little doubt that world dominance and appeasement is a process of empire-building.

Especially in Washington circles, there was an air of triumphalism around 1990. This was the unipolar moment. Helping to maintain the new unipolar moment, a man called Jeffrey Epstein – an alleged Israeli asset – became a conduit between the Israeli and American administrations in the 1990s. That’s where and when I see the origins of twenty-first century entitled Judeo-Christian techno-supremacy. (On Epstein and Israel, see Starmer, Mandelson & Mossad – it’s worse than you think,Double Down News, Feb 2026; and The anatomy of the Epstein network The Listening Post, Al Jazeera, 9 Feb 2026.)

The greatest ever threat to humanity and the rest of the planetary biosphere

As noted, just about everyone in elite western politics and journalism is now, without analysis or knowledge, asserting that Iran is ‘evil’. Maybe. Though this is little more than believer rhetoric; the rhetoric of religious fundamentalists, the rhetoric of inflammation rather than resolution.

If this ‘evil’ moniker is accurate in some objective sense, then Iran – in the present conflict – is the ‘lesser evil’. The greater evil is clearly the philosophy and aggression of the Judeo-Christian techno-supremacists. Further, the appeasement of this greater evil is itself a most unsavoury thing to behold; almost as bad as the greater evil itself.

(On that appeasement, in a news report on Al Jazeera on Sunday [NZ time], Berlin correspondent Dominic Kane noted – with a straight face – that the governments of Britain, France and Germany all condemned “Iran’s retaliation”; and that Spain, in addition, condemned the American and Israeli aggression. Only Spain had the guts to demur from appeasement. One of the most important forms of  media appeasement is the omission of vital information from reports. According to those chairing the ‘Peace talks’ in Geneva, Iran was just about to present an accommodation which came very close to meeting President Trump’s stated demands, and that the aggressors were aware of this. These ‘negotiations’ were not conducted in good faith.)

The nihilistic logical endpoint of Judeo-Christian techno-supremacy is apocalypse. Indeed many of the ‘Christians’ in the Americanised conflation of Israel and Christianity are fully cognisant of, even excited by, the prophecies of the last book of the Christian Bible – the Book of Revelation.

Nuclear apocalypse – if or when it happens – will not only destroy humanity. Earth stands to become like Mars or Venus, if humanity ends in this way. In today’s circumstances, would it be acceptable to allow Israel or the United States to acquire nuclear weapons; we accept their weapons because they are already there, and because too many of us prefer hypocrisy over moral consistency.

But the Dark Enlightenment is still a developing supremacist project, embedded into Judeo-Christian techno-supremacy. Resistance to it and its premises need not be entirely futile. Worse things happen when good people look away.

PS

New Zealand is scheduled to play Iran in the Football World Cup. How will the politics of Iran’s presence in the World Cup play out, especially given that, in last weekend’s events, Iran was the aggresse, not the aggressor?

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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.

I heard this on RNZ News 11am 12 Feb 2026:

“The government’s finances are in better shape than expected due to lower [government] spending and a higher tax take. Treasury figures … show a deficit of $5.2b for the six months ended December, almost $1.6b below the half-year forecast. The tax take was $138m higher, while expenses were about $1b lower, because of lower spending on core government services: health, housing programmes, and the cost of carbon units. Net debt was slightly lower than expected, at 43.5% of the value of the economy.”

It was framed as good news, or at least as “better” news: government spending less than expected (despite the many dire needs for more, better funded, government-funded services and infrastructure) and a higher tax take (despite the needs of many people to have more spendable dollars).

I mention this quote from economic historian Adam Tooze, from his 2018 book Crashed, re the downward spiral that arises from policies of fiscal consolidation.

“Not only was [Greece, in 2010] slow to push through the changes the Troika demanded, but when it did the results were counterproductive; in a classic Keynesian downward spiral, demand fell and unemployment surged further, reducing incomes.”

We note that when private incomes are reduced, then income tax receipts are also reduced, meaning government income is reduced. (In idiomatic vernacular, this is known as cutting your nose to spite your face. “The idiom is often used in political and economic commentary to describe actions by a political actor, party, corporation or nation that appear to damage the actor’s own interests”.)

New Zealand is lucky at the moment in that it is benefitting from record high terms of trade – external stimulus, a commodity-led export-led boom – which is to some extent offsetting the fiscal doom loop that Tooze describes.

What will happen when those record-high export receipts fall-off? Tooze tells us: “a classic Keynesian downward spiral”.

Note that Greece was doing these policies, not out of political free-choice but because the EU Troika demanded that Greece follow this counterproductive policy path. At least Greece resisted, conferring upon itself some dignity.

New Zealand is today implementing similar policies; partly because the government is nominally free to choose, but also because it is heavily influenced by the false narratives peddled by another powerful Troika: the New York troika of Standard and Poor’s, Moody’s, and Fitch. New Zealand governments would rather lose elections than get on the wrong side of these big three.

Democracy or empire?

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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.

Over the last few days, there has been plenty of media chatter in relation to the government’s proposal to pass a law enabling police to forcibly shift street dwellers from Auckland’s CBD. (Refer ‘Move On’ orders penalise those with the least, Scoop 22 Feb 2026.)

While Labour likes to express outrage, neither Labour nor National have given as much as a hint as to a solution they would commit to implementing. National sees street vagrants in much the same way as the Israeli government sees Palestinians; in both cases, they just want the ‘problem people’ to go away.

New Zealand, like most countries, has a long history of vagrancy, and of mean-spirited laws to deal with it. New Zealand, however, in 1938 introduced a universal welfare state; a political contract which gained broad bipartisan support until 1984. Over the 1938 to 1984 period the vagrancy problem was minimal. I remember being shocked at seeing beggars in Ireland in 1976; that was depression-era optics, which I thought had long passed in the developed world.

The most recent time I ventured out of Australasia was in 2019, on a trip to Canada, Scotland, and London. I remember remarking that Vancouver seemed to have fewer homeless people than Auckland. The next day I changed my mind; I discovered that the problem in Vancouver was more on the edge of the CBD, whereas in Auckland it had already become normalised around Queen Street and the city’s main library. I note this point, because the problem cannot be blamed on the Covid19 pandemic, and it was a problem that neither Labour’s Jacinda Ardern nor Phil Goff were willing to prioritise during their terms in office (as Prime Minister, and as Mayor).

(In Scotland, while Aberdeen did have a problem, it was less obvious than in Auckland; and even less obvious in Edinburgh. In London, I stayed in Stepney Green, a social housing area close to Whitechapel, and did not particularly sense a ‘street dweller problem’ there; nor in closer-to-the-City and now-gentrified Spitalfields.)

The current chatter focuses on homelessness, while only noticing in passing that many street occupiers are also beggars; meaning that, at its core, the problem is one of income insecurity.

Hardly anyone has connected the dots between begging and the regression of social security in New Zealand. The universal welfare state has lost its way since 1984. My sense is that many of today’s vagrants are not receiving any social security money; and that that may be in large part because it is too difficult – and humiliating – for them to deal with a Kafkaesque system that calls beneficiaries ‘jobseekers’, and is forever looking for ways to not support vulnerable people into constructive engagement. While the general public would regard vagrants as being unemployed, Statistics New Zealand does not even count them as unemployed. Our governmental systems are oriented around the ‘labour force’, and are largely blind to working-age people ‘not in the labour force’.

It is not my role here to analyse the way that our untweaked version of capitalism creates vagrancy. Rather, it is to note that our vagrants need these three things: an amount of unconditional income, a place better than the street where they can sleep and wash, and something fulfilling – maybe, even, productive – to do.

While, for the rest of this essay I’ll focus on the former, I’ll just mention the latter briefly. Minimum wage laws put most of these people out of the reach of the formal labour market. That leaves them two choices for something societally connected to do; voluntary work, or petit-entrepreneurship (aka non-criminal hustling). (Two other options, both disconnected from mainstream society, are: ‘hanging out’ in ways that intimidate, or participating in underworld crime.)

A Very Basic Universal Income (VBUI)

As our income-tax scale stands at present, a Very Basic Universal Income of $150 – payable to every tax-resident aged over 18 – could be mostly funded by abandoning the 10.5% and 17.5% tax rates. All annual personal income below $78,100 would be subject to a 30% tax rate.

Non-beneficiaries earning less than $53,500 would gain, because their VBUI would be more than their extra tax. (For these people in fulltime work, the gain would be small; $12 per week for a minimum wage worker working 40 hours per week; $16 per week gain for a minimum wage worker working 37½ hours per week.)

In technical economists’ language, the VBUI would be called a ‘refundable tax credit’, or maybe a ‘demogrant’.

People earning more than $53,500 per year – and beneficiaries – would have an unchanged net income situation. (For beneficiaries, the first $150 of their benefits would become universal; an accounting change only, from a costing point-of-view.)

People on benefits would have the first $150 per week of their benefit recategorised. People losing their jobs would continue to receive their VBUI, unconditionally. People not in the labour force would have their VBUI payments made directly, and there would be an opt-out mechanism; not an opt-in.

The biggest gains come to non-beneficiaries aged over 18 defined in the official statistics as either ‘underemployed’, ‘part-time’, or ‘not in the labour force’. The most important gains are that the $150pw VBUI constitutes an unconditional safety-bridge for those in danger of becoming redundant, or of having their hours reduced to part-time; and that it thus acts as an ‘automatic stabiliser’, meaning that people who lose their incomes can still maintain some of their usual spending.

The VBUI also means that people who gain work, or who gain extra work, still get to keep all of their Very Basic Universal Income. There is no income or poverty trap (as there is now), whereby gains in income from a new source lead to reductions in income from existing sources.

And it also substantially reduces the cost of administering social security, if people who lose their jobs automatically retain a very basic income to help tide them over losses in market income. The only information needed about non-beneficiaries in New Zealand would be their date and place of birth, their bank account number, and their immigration status. People receiving no publicly-sourced income other than a VBUI would at no stage be required to provide the authorities with any further information; they would pay tax at the going rate to the IRD based on market income connected to their IRD number.

Very Basic Universal Income is an ‘opt-out’ mechanism, which means that everyone receives it unless they have specifically asked to not receive it. And, even then, opt-outs should be managed as ‘temporary’. (All people legally allowed to earn income in New Zealand would have at least an IRD or NHI [Health NZ] number; ‘bank accounts’ at Kiwibank could be opened by Inland Revenue or Health New Zealand for people without other known access to banking facilities.)

In addition to reduced administration costs, there are several other ways that a miserly government could recoup its not-very-onerous outlays on VBUI. The two most obvious ways would be to raise the company tax rate from 28% to 30%, and to reduce the income threshold for the 39% tax down from $180,000 per year. A centre-right government which has done all these things – all very much consistent with centre-right philosophy – might then aspire to removing the 33% tax rate. That would leave a two-step tax scale: 30% and 39%.

We note that the introduction of a VBUI would, in itself, mean only one change to the existing benefit structure. That one change would be the accounting formality to categorise the first $150 per week of a benefit as a universal income, as a ‘duty-of-care’ income integrated into both the tax system and the benefit system.

A VBUI is not generous, and it’s not a Universal Basic Income (UBI). But it does act as an income that acknowledges both human rights and economic efficiency. Once the mechanism and mindset are in place – noting that the ‘mindset’ issue is analogous with that associated with the introduction of proportional-representation voting in New Zealand in the 1990s – then it becomes comparatively easy to tweak the numbers. In time, the VBUI might become a BUI, a Basic Universal Income; more like $250pw than $150pw. We need to start at a low amount, to sooth the apprehensions of the professional naysayers; those unimaginative people too ready to block social and economic progress.

A Teenage Basic Universal Income (TBUI) for adolescents

Late in 1979, Robert Muldoon raised the universal family benefit to $6 per week – a benefit (which commenced in 1946) payable on behalf of all children without any means testing. If we adjust that $6 by the CPI changes we get an equivalent of $42 today. Or if we adjust by GDP per capita – a better measure than the CPI, a measure which allows for economic growth – that $6 in late 1979 becomes $70 today.

My proposal is to pay a TBUI of either $42 or $70, to all New Zealanders aged from 14 to 17. For many of these teenage recipients, the amount would be paid directly to the recipient, and deducted from the Family Tax Credit payment presently paid to their caregivers.

I have calculated that recipients of a $42 (or even $45) TBUI should face a special flat tax rate of no more than 20% of their market income. And recipients of a $70 TBUI should face a special flat tax rate of no more than 23% of their market income. I favour fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds – all still legally at school – to receive the $42; and sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds to receive the $70 and pay a bit more tax.

The TBUI acknowledges that a significant minority of New Zealand’s vagrant population is in the 14 to under-18 age range. They would receive payments in the same way as older vagrants; if necessary, through an account opened for them by the IRD or Health NZ.

Call it ‘pocket money’, if you like. All New Zealand residents would receive this from when they turn 14, unless they opt-out. Fourteen is the age, in New Zealand, when children may be legally left-alone, unsupervised. Thus, it is the first age to directly signal that a young person should have a degree of independence, of economic autonomy.

Finally

All of the payments I have suggested are very basic and somewhat stingy. What matters is that they are unconditional, and confer a sense of citizenship onto our most vulnerable adults and semi-adults. There are no poverty traps; no impediments to recipients from ‘bettering themselves’, from being aspirational. Universal Incomes are not withheld when persons’ circumstances improve.

I personally would prefer less parsimonious payments; deficit-funded payments which would give an underdone economy a necessary bit of stimulus, realising that the arising increase in collective prosperity itself recoups such fiscal deficits. (The 1938 introduction of Universal Superannuation and other reforms turned out to have a fiscal cost significantly less than the projected costs. Refer Elizabeth Hanson’s 1980 book: The Politics of Social Security…) I note that we live in austere times; without really knowing the reason for these fiscal blindspots. Nevertheless, I am suggesting that, even with Scrooge in charge, we can do much better than we do today.

Further, with these universal incomes in place, everyone will know that everyone else will know that all of our vagrant population is in receipt of at least some income. (Refer Steven Pinker’s 2025 book: When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows…) As it is, some of the beggars on the streets may be receiving substantial benefits, while others are receiving absolutely nothing; today we, in the public, are unable to tell any individual vagrant’s actual level of need.

There are solutions to these ‘all-rhetoric no-solution’ difficulties. It just takes the political will to see past our blindspots. Some form of rights-based universal income guarantee is a necessary but not a sufficient solution to the compounding vagrancy problem; and to other problems too, especially those problems affecting young people. (Note: Youth facing more psychological distress…, RNZ, 25 Feb 2026.)

Note on the Politics of Achievement

When Michael Joseph Savage in 1938 proposed (and then legislated for) a universal welfare state – with special emphasis on an initially very basic Universal Superannuation – he converted what could have been a political losing hand in that election year into New Zealand’s greatest ever electoral victory. There were many on the left and on the right of Savage’s parliamentary caucus – political people without political nous – who seemed to be eager to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Fortuitously, Savage was not one of them. By not being one of them, by not losing courage, he became the New Zealander of the twentieth century. Savage didn’t solve every problem. But he did make a difference, for the better; and was loved for that. While a modest man himself, his political leadership for New Zealand was far from austere.

Do our current lot of politicians even want to win in November? My advice to both National and Labour is to pursue the politics of success, and not the politics of nihilism.

(In this regard we might note that the Labour Opposition in 1931 suffered an ignominious election defeat, despite the appalling economic catastrophe which was then taking place. Labour went on to win in 1935, by promising a universal welfare state. It came close to electoral embarrassment in 1938; it came close to failing to deliver on its 1935 promise.)

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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.

Imagine if the Olympic Games were currently being held in Wuhan, China. There would be widespread mentionings of it having been the starting place of the Covid19 pandemic, in December 2019.

But pandemics (not ‘global pandemics’; pandemics are global by definition, as are world wars) have two places of origin, though those two places could be the one-and-the-same. For Covid19, Wuhan was certainly the first place; the root source, to use a tree analogy. The second source is the base of the stem, the place from where a pandemic fans out and becomes almost unstoppable.

In the case of Covid19, the events in February 2020 in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo – the jewel of the Italian Alps – were the origins of the pandemic. Without their role, Covid19 might have been a contained epidemic such as SARS (2003).

Since the near-run-disaster that was the SARS-Cov1 panic in 2003, the amount of useful epidemiological work on coronaviruses has been minimal. There was clearly research work being done, including in Wuhan. But that was mainly on the zoonotic origins of coronaviruses, and not on the administration of outbreaks. SARS-Cov1 was a severe novel coronavirus. Novel respiratory viruses – such as the 1918 influenza pandemic – are lethal, spread fast, and are hard to contain. More lethal than Sars-Cov1 was MERS which emerged around 2012. Yet preparations for a respiratory-illness pandemic were focussed almost entirely on a new strain of influenza. No prep for a new novel coronavirus. SARS-Cov2 was ‘tricky’, in that – less lethal but more transmissible than SARS-Cov1 – it fell on the cusp between being dangerously lethal and dangerously transmissible.

Geographic Analysis

The pandemic events of 2020 were not – at least not in any popular awareness – subjected to a proper geographical analysis. Most of the initial outbreaks of the SARS-Cov2 virus which escaped China were largely contained. There were relatively small outbreaks in Japan, Hong Kong, Australia and Seattle in the United States’ northwest; in some cases transmitted by passengers from a few cruise ships. And larger but still largely contained outbreaks in South Korea and in Iran. These outbreaks came directly from China. The containment of the Iran outbreak was facilitated by the West’s generally hostile attitude towards that country as a geopolitical ‘bad guy’; Iran was easier than most countries for the West to quarantine.

More problematic were the outbreaks in Spain and Italy, which can also be traced back to January 2020. In Spain the initial outbreak, direct from China, was more in the south; most likely linked to escapees from China. There was relatively little subsequent movement across the land border into France, though Andorra experienced a separate outbreak. The main risk from the south of Spain was the United Kingdom, given that, for many British people, southern Spain is either their first or second home. It would have been relatively easy to quarantine British arrivals from Spain; the British authorities ‘dropped a ball’ by being tardy here.

The main blind spot was that Spain is a western country, and westerners had become ingrained in the supposition that pandemics (and all things bad) come from other countries; or, more accurately phrased, ‘countries of others’. Guard rails that were up for China or Iran or even Japan and South Korea, were not there for ‘threats’ from West European countries.

The notion came about that the pandemic radiated out of southern China, rather than having flowed out of all of the places which had experienced outbreaks. When eyes should have been watching Spain and Italy, they were still firmly focused on China, and in a finger-pointing way.

The West could have learned much from China’s data about the impact of the new virus in terms of the demographics of victims and non-victims, and the extent and duration of their exposures and their symptoms. However, the western countries were more predisposed to put up the shutters with respect to that amazing country.

A large part of the problem in the 1918 influenza pandemic was the high numbers of younger adults who caught it and died from it. Covid19 was never like that. Data from China showed that few younger people had died from Covid19; unless, that is, they had had sustained exposures. For younger people, and for society as a whole, it was better for otherwise healthy non-allergic people to have early and tentative exposures to Covid than to be on tenterhooks awaiting what became the inevitable, and would become worse the longer the wait.

Milano-Cortina

More problematic than Spain was the coronavirus outbreak around and to the east of Milan – the ‘tech’ centre of Italy, and the fashion centre – and the connection of Milan to the ski resorts during the peak of the ski season; indeed during the February school holidays in Europe. Milan is the most monied city in Italy. It is an important entry-point for affluent techies on business, and for sundry one-percenters. Once the epidemic began in Wuhan, many of the monied of and around Wuhan (many were foreign nationals) had the nous to ‘escape’ – including to Macao and Hong Kong – before the Chinese central government closed the ‘stable doors’.

Milan and environs became a hotspot for witting and unwitting coronavirus refugees – affluent exiteers – just at the time Europe’s ten-percenters were heading to and from the ski resorts.

Further, there was the World Economic Forum, at Davos, Switzerland; a one-percenter retreat. A few of the delegates may have, unknowingly, arrived with Covid. Following the Forum, many delegates – coming straight from a transmissible environment – will have visited the other hotspots for the rich and famous; the other alpine resorts, and the principalities Monaco, Liechtenstein, Andorra. And San Marino, which is a centre for the world’s semi-licit arms trade. All of these places had significant outbreaks of Covid19 during February and March 2020. These were perfect environments for the rapid spread of SARS-like coronaviruses. While coronaviruses are not winter viruses as such – compared to other cold and influenza viruses – they nevertheless thrive in winter when not obstructed by those other winter pathogens.

Essentially the most significant locations for amplifying Covid19 were greater-Milan, the Italian skifields centred on Cortina and Livigno; though Torino in the northwest – host of the 2006 Games – probably experienced its share of the unchecked Italian Covid19 flow. From these places it spread to neighbouring countries: Austria, Switzerland, France, and Bavaria in Germany.

Who else was there at those resorts? The managerial class – the bureaucrat and technocrat nine-percenters of the most affluent cities of northwest Europe, especially those cities hosting international (Geneva, Brussels, Luxembourg and Strasbourg) and national (eg Stockholm for one; and Paris and Berlin of course) governance organisations – were there with their older children. Fly-in, fly-out; a week’s break from the office with the family. In many cases parents on their own with the children while their spouses and ex-spouses enjoyed time apart from their children; elite parents and teenagers who would take the opportunities to socialise during the long après-ski evenings. They would mostly be back in their home countries by the first week of March.

Visitors from the Americas – from those same socio-business milieux – would have also been in these resorts at that time, and also in the capital cities of western Europe.

Covid19 didn’t stream into New York from China or from Seattle. It streamed in from the affluent centres of and close to alpine Europe, and from the business and political capitals of northwest Europe. Covid19 came into the Americas directly or indirectly from Italy to a much greater extent than it came from anywhere else.

Missing Maps

What was needed was good flow maps, much like those devised by John Snow, in London around 1850, to chart the cholera epidemics of 1849 and 1854. Instead, the statistics most available were nationally-compiled accumulations of cases and deaths; not international flow maps showing the sequences as Covid19 moved from some places and then on to other places. Individual countries were making their own imperfect maps, with their own make-believe boundary walls. In reality these European borders were for administrative purposes only. Herein lay the problem of visualising the flows of infection; unjoined maps. Further, these case-maps were often unadjusted for the population sizes of each country or province; many maps simply showed that there were cases where there were more people.

For flow maps, you must remove the dots which represent cases resolved by time or, for a small minority of cases, by death. And you must provide per capita data.

These administrators literally failed to join the dots between their own patches and their neighbours’ patches. A glance at any Europe-wide case-map would have shown, by April 2020, a large cluster of cases from Geneva north towards Strasbourg and Luxembourg, and then west towards Maastricht and Brussels; this cluster straddled six separate national borders. (Seven countries if you include Italy, which is close to Geneva.) The conclusions from such a map would have been as obvious as those revealed by John Snow’s case-map of Soho (London) during the 1854 cholera outbreak there.

In early 2020, it was senior public servants, their families including their elderly parents, their staff, and the people they had meetings (and eatings) with who had been most effectively spreading and succumbing to the virus.

First and Second Waves

By July 2020, the Covid19 outbreak was largely contained in Europe. But at a cost, not only in terms of disrupted income-earning opportunities to the small-medium businesses personnel who contracted the virus from the holidaying returnees and who were most disrupted by stay-at-home orders. And also, the latent cost of the first wave included the loss of those many natural immunisations that commuters in large cities experience most days of their working lives; especially cities with international airports.

Thus, the countries which had experienced multi-month shutdowns rebuffed the pandemic virus at a significant hidden cost; a weakening of the immunity of the population, increasing the susceptibility of the so-far uninfected to a new wave of respiratory contagion. Populations in urban centres – historically, and especially immigrants to those cities from the provinces – have always been vulnerable to transmissible diseases. By August 2020 this was especially so, especially in those countries in Eastern Europe (with older and poorer populations) which had been minimally exposed to both the first wave of Covid19 and the other pathogens they would normally have come into frequent contact with.

While the pandemic was contained in Europe by July 2020, it was far from contained in the United States. In the United States, the covid curve was flattened, but at a high plateau. The downside of flattening-the-curve is that you get an extended curve, creating a pathogen reservoir for a second wave of infections.

The Grand Tour and the second wave of Covid19

In the eighteenth century, a time of very high economic inequality in the British Isles and other parts of Europe, a tradition developed among the sons of the then one-percenters to do a Grand Tour. For a few, that tour was somewhat intrepid; Joseph Banks did his grand tour on the Endeavour with James Cook. Lord Byron was another, whose tour was somewhat intrepid and was never completed.

For the majority of these entitled young men, there was a tourist trail that developed; the grand tour became a kind of hedonist pilgrimage. Principal stops included Paris, the Rhine lands (including Heidelburg) and Switzerland. Some of these early bohemian tourists headed directly from Switzerland to Italy; others ventured into Austria (especially Vienna) and the Bohemian capital of Prague.

In Italy there were several must-visit cities, including Milan, Venice, Florence, Rome and Naples. The homeward journey likely included Sicily, southern France and places in Spain and Portugal.

Some grand tourists would also visit the ‘Near East’, the areas – including the Holy Land – defined by the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean Seas.

The twenty-first (and late twentieth century) version of the grand tour is undertaken by the sons and daughters of American ten-percenters. In the United States in particular, working-life career-building requirements and surprisingly little annual leave strongly encourage this somewhat-elitist comparator to New Zealand’s OE. Young Americans have much less time than young Europeans to travel as tourists during their working lives.

In the modern Grand Tour, which lasts from mid-July to mid-September, young university-educated Americans with both left-elite (nine-percenter) and right-elite (one-percenter) backgrounds descend upon Europe. In 2020, this timing coincided with the re-opening of Europe after what the Europeans optimistically presumed was the end of the Covid19 pandemic. Further, European tourist hotspots were keen to welcome new waves of spending visitors, to help with their economic recoveries.

The second wave of the Covid19 pandemic began in August 2020, though this was not fully apparent until late September. The second wave was much more lethal than the first, and especially in Eastern Europe, where the (generally older) populations had largely escaped the first wave, but were particularly immunity-compromised as a result of the stay-at-home orders during the pandemic’s first wave.

The second wave began in places like Amsterdam, Paris, Barcelona, Switzerland, Czechia (especially Prague). And in Israel, another popular destination for American grand tourists. It was the American Grand Tour which brought the pandemic back to Europe, and with a vengeance; and which in turn instigated the further lethal waves of Covid19 around the world in 2021.

Unfortunately, thanks to inadequate specific-location-mapping and flow-mapping of the abundant Covid19 statistics, this flow of infections was only apparent to those who looked under the bonnet. By then, the national Wikipedia sites for Covid19 had lost their energy, showing increasingly outdated maps, and misplaced emphases on first-entry cases during the first wave. The accessible information was either too technical or too stale.

Popular Lore

In popular lore, the Covid19 pandemic was essentially a 2020 phenomenon. TV dramas and documentaries still emphasise that early period of the global crisis.

It was from the lethal second wave that the nasty new variants evolved, in 2021; and spread into and then from India, as the most spectacular example. Remember the Greek Alphabet soup, with the (British) Alpha and (Indian) Delta variants having been especially problematic.

The older Swedish scientists who emphasised the need to take a path – a path which accentuated the need for natural immunity to facilitate an early and complete end to the pandemic’s most dangerous phase – were proved correct as the pandemic raged through its most serious phase in 2021. Though you wouldn’t know it, probably too many interests did not want to make comparisons. Sweden’s politicians had been too slow to address the Stockholm outbreak in early 2020, when that country had an especially vulnerable elderly population; so, it looked as if the world had little to learn from that country. (Sweden had had significantly less influenza than most other countries, in 2018 and 2019; meaning that Sweden had unusually low death rates in the winters of those two years; meaning that they had plenty of ‘fuel’ for a tragic pandemic ‘fire’ in the spring of 2020.)

2021 also became the year of the Covid19 vaccine race; whereas 2020 had been the year of the missing PPE. The public health industry tends to place too much emphasis on immunisation through intervention versus immunisation through monitored natural exposures. This emphasis is valid for the most lethal of infectious conditions; the conditions for which we routinely vaccinate today. But for the below the radar circumstances of categories of common respiratory viruses with high complexity and low lethality – including known circulating viruses such as RSV, coronaviruses (the descendants of previous lethal coronaviruses), rhinoviruses, and influenzas –medicalised immunisations came to be emphasised while, with little awareness, simultaneous processes were lessening immunity to these types of virus. It was like taking one step forward and two steps back.

In the end, the pandemic was resolved through a natural immunisation process. 2022 was the year of Omicron. In 2022 the non-lethal Covid-Omicron variant ‘ripped through’ New Zealand and other places with previous minimal coronavirus exposure. This was a direct result of the failure and subsequent redundancy of the border-quarantine and other barrier methods of protection which were still in force in January 2022. Most New Zealand residents were exposed to covid that year.

Omicron had evolved in southern Africa in late 2021, from the earliest strain of Sars-Cov2. It became a natural immunisation force. Omicron was the invisible cavalry coming to the rescue; favoured in evolutionary terms over the Delta nemesis because it was more highly transmissible while being much less lethal than the previous covid varieties. More like the familiar but under-studied ‘common cold’ coronaviruses. Omicron stopped Delta dead in its tracks; a more effective weapon than the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

Lessons

I don’t think that western society has learned very much from the Covid19 pandemic. The importance of good mapwork and monitored natural immunisation barely formed any part of the long but largely useless narrative. Sweden’s alternative scientific path was forgotten, or derided, rather than learned from.

The next pandemic will probably also catch us unawares. It will be as different from the contemporary preoccupations of epidemiology, as Covid19 was. It may already be ‘hiding in plain sight’, as the coronavirus threat was in the 2010s. Family doctors should be routinely testing for all the various ‘bugs’ out there, and passing-on data about the various pathogens and cross-immunities which keep us healthy in daily life. We could perhaps have knocked out Covid19 in its early stages, by facilitating natural exposures of healthy people to low doses of already-circulating non-covid coronaviruses.

I think that future government-overreach mandates around lockdowns and mask-wearing will be hard to enforce, given the huge rightwards shifts in western politics this decade. But there may be opportunities for short smart protective measures, undertaken at local levels and in places such as retirement villages and rest homes. In particular, making high-grade (ie the more expensive types of) facemasks available to the vulnerable, with the warning that these should be worn mainly in high-risk environments, and not everywhere all the time.

Meanwhile

It’s great that Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, still popular hangouts of the rich and the not-so-famous, have been able to host a magnificent sporting event. These places have not been tainted by their association with the still recent pandemic. Despite being the places from which an outbreak of a significant new coronavirus fanned out to create a three-year pandemic that changed the world. That outbreak was probably containable, if we had acted with more nous and more knowledge of the common pathogens of daily life.

But who was looking at the Italian Alps in those heady ski-holiday days of February 2020? We were transfixed by China.

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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 RNZ news bulletin of 10pm on 18 February stated: “New Zealand and Australia are outliers in having three-year parliamentary terms, with four or five year terms far more common … politicians have over the years expressed frustration at how much can be achieved in a three-year cycle.”

This is a common but not really valid belief. This year the world’s second largest democracy – United States of America – is holding its election for its House of Representatives. That country has – and has had – a stable two-year term. For some reason it is never mentioned in these discussions.

Below is a table showing average term lengths for comparator countries. We note that in countries with flexible electoral terms, which is all of these except United States, it is commonly only the more unpopular governments which go full-term.

We note in particular that elections in the United Kingdom have been on average 3.7 years apart, despite that country having a five-year term limit. And that that country presently has a governing party for which popular support, as consistently measured by opinion polls, has so far registered below 20% for much of the so far short life of its rule. The fact that the likely date for the next election is more than three years away is a major source of political instability there.

Most importantly, in the table above, New Zealand is not an outlier.

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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.

For this, the sixth series of A View from Afar, political scientist and former Pentagon analyst Paul Buchanan and Selwyn Manning deep-dive into geopolitical issues and trends to unpick relevancy from a world experiencing rapid and significant change.

And, in this episode, the topic will be: How to Define A Way Forward When the World is in Chaos.

Since the re-election of the US President Donald Trump, Paul has been doing a lot of work… a lot of reading… and a huge amount of thinking.

Today we hear from Paul about:

1. The US Trump Administration’s “Authoritarianism at home, Imperialism abroad” currency.
2. How to deconstruct the entire “spheres of Influence” nonsense.
3. About United States fears of the rise of the Global South in a poly-centric world.
4. And Paul and I will lean-forward and consider; what to expect in the medium and longterm.

If listeners enjoy interaction in a LIVE recording environment, you can comment and question the hosts while they record this podcast. And, when you do so, the hosts can include your comments and questions in future programmes.

With this in mind, Paul and Selwyn especially encourage you to join them via YouTube, as on YouTube live interaction is especially efficient.

You can join the podcast here (and remember to subscribe and get notifications too by clicking the bell):

OK, let us know what you think about this discussion. Let the debate begin!

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SIGNIFICANT QUOTE PAUL G. BUCHANAN: “The sad fact, though, is that the US is the center of our earthly geopolitical universe, serving as the first rock to drop in the global pond whose ripple effects are extensive, negative, and washing up in unexpected and unforeseen ways. That rock, in fact, is a black hole sucking the remnants of the rule based order into oblivion, or if not oblivion, irrelevance in a new age of power politics (might makes right, etc.). It is a dark force from which things as they exist cannot return.”

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