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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Japan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Iran again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three other points are noteworthy.

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

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

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

New Zealand’s ‘Perfect Storm’ of food vulnerability

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A crisis on top of a crisis

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

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

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

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

Historical Points of Reference

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finally

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PS: Heavy Lifting

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

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

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

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

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

The topics discussed include:

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

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

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

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

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LIVE@ 12:30PM (NZ TIME): A View from Afar podcast. Series 06, Episode 03 – In this episode, political scientist and former Pentagon Analyst… Paul Buchanan and Selwyn Manning will deep-dive into: The End of the Liberal Internationalist Order and the Rise of Illiberalism.

The topics to discuss are:

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

Remember, if you are joining us live via the social media platforms, feel free to comment as we can include your comments and questions in this programme.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How does a country fund a war by printing money?

There are two key issues: rationing, and responsiveness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How easily can other countries print money?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

War funding under pressure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Additional features of ultra-fascism

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

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

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

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

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

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

Assassination was and is a terror tactic

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

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

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

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

Outline of a wider comparison

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

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

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

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

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

WW2 analogues

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

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

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

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

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

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

Important Note

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

Conclusion

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

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

• 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?

*******

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.)

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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.

New Zealand First has called for yet another inquiry into Covid-19 – this one focused on vaccine injuries.

The second phase of the Royal Commission of Inquiry, commissioned by the coalition, released its findings on Tuesday, unequivocally endorsing the use of vaccines.

It did, however, highlight that officials were warned about the risks of giving two doses to teenagers – and said that was not passed on to ministers.

In a statement, NZ First said the latest report did not go far enough when looking into vaccine safety and risks.

It called for a select committee to hold its own inquiry to give anyone injured a voice and to hold decision-makers accountable.

“The Crown needs to know how widespread any effects of those known risks that were mandated on New Zealanders but specifically those young people.

“The downstream health effects could be disastrous with the report identifying myocarditis as a specific health consequence.”

Speaking at Parliament, NZ First leader Winston Peters told reporters he had serious concerns about vaccine safety.

“Hundreds of thousands of people have been affected here. They need to know the truth. They need to know why they were denied the truth.”

ACT’s David Seymour said he was open to the idea of a select committee inquiry.

“A lot of people felt they were ostracized from society and if this helps them feel seen and heard, then it might not be a bad thing.”

Even with the support of NZ First and ACT, a select committee inquiry would require the backing of the National Party.

National leader and Prime Minister Christopher Luxon dodged questions over whether he supported an inquiry, saying only that there were “very serious questions” for Labour to answer.

Labour leader Chris Hipkins said two high-level investigations had already been carried out – including one commissioned by the current coalition government.

He pointed out that Peters was once a staunch advocate for vaccines, even calling for them to be a requirement for welfare and parole.

“One of the wonders of being Winston Peters is you never have to be consistent in your position on anything.”

Hipkins said the government needed to “move on” and focus instead on the cost-of-living and the country’s future.

In its report, released on Tuesday, the Royal Commission of Inquiry said the process and consideration surrounding the approval of vaccines could not have been more thorough.

“We acknowledge that some people disagree with Medsafe’s decision that the benefits of [the Pfizer vaccine] Comirnaty outweighed its risks. They consider the risks of the vaccine then, and now, well outweigh any perceived benefit.

“We do not agree with that view.”

The report said the evidence did not support arguments that Covid-19 was not “a significant threat to public health”.

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Willow-Jean Prime has lost the education portfolio, but picked up social development, as Labour reshuffles its decks ahead of the election.

Ginny Andersen will take on the education role, making her the third Labour MP to take on the role in just over a year.

Peeni Henare‘s departure from Parliament, along with Adrian Rurawhe earlier this year, has given Labour leader Chris Hipkins an opportunity to change things up.

“These refreshed portfolios ensure our team will hit the ground running when we win the election in November,” Hipkins said.

Willie Jackson, who had taken on the social development role last year, will instead take on Māori Crown Relations.

Speaking to the changes, Hipkins said Prime’s new social development role required “care, empathy, and a strong focus on improving outcomes for New Zealanders,” while Jackson would focus on running a “winning campaign” in the Māori seats.

Among the other changes are Damien O’Connor picking up Henare’s defence spokesperson role, Reuben Davidson taking over economic development, and Tangi Utikere becoming the spokesperson for state-owned enterprises.

Vanushi Walters moves considerably higher up Labour’s list, and takes over foreign affairs from Henare.

New list MP Georgie Dansey has been given the rainbow issues and regulation roles. Dan Rosewarne, who will re-enter Parliament following Henare’s retirement, has been given the rural communities and small business portfolios.

Duncan Webb, who has announced he will retire at the election, has lost all of his spokesperson roles.

His justice portfolio has been given to Camilla Belich.

Hipkins said Webb would instead take on a “mentoring role to support our team.”

The Prime Minister is also expected to announce a ministerial reshuffle in the coming weeks, following the retirement of Judith Collins and Dr Shane Reti’s announcement he will step down at the election.

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Technology entrepreneur Brian Cartmell appears to have donated at least half a million dollars to the coalition parties – and to the Opportunity party.

Cartmell moved to New Zealand in 2010 and gave up his US citizenship in 2015. His former professional background includes working for the Internet Entertainment Group, an online pornography company. It was a pioneer in live webcam shows and subscription services.

In a statement on his website, Cartmell said he had donated equally to the three coalition parties as well as to Opportunity. The ACT Party told RNZ it had received a total of $200,000 from Cartmell last year. The Electoral Commission said a $100,000 donation to Opportunity from Cartmell had been disclosed. Neither National nor NZ First would confirm donations from him.

But Cartmell himself said the current coalition parties represent “the best available chance of navigating” a period of significant economic, technological, and geopolitical change in a way that preserves New Zealand’s sovereignty, prosperity and independence.

He said he chose to donate equal amounts to National, Act and NZ First last year as none of the three represents his thinking, but he believed the three parties complemented each other. The donation to Opportunity was made because he feels healthy democracies need parties willing to put forward ideas major parties won’t.

“New ideas enter the political process from the edges, and parties like Opportunity play an important role in making sure that process doesn’t stagnate.”

Who is Brian Cartmell?

Cartmell lives in Queenstown with his partner. He says he has donated more than $1 million to a range of organisations including Starship Children’s Hospital, Cure Kids, Hato Hone St John and NZSAS Regiment Trust.

In the 1990s, he worked at Internet Entertainment Group helping it to develop live streaming technology.

Cartmell also founded a domain registry firm in 1997 which managed domain names with the .cc extension, associated with the Cocos Islands territory, an island territory with a population of around 600 people. He told the United States Senate Commerce Committee 400,000 domain names were registered to the extension. The Australian Financial Review reported the islands received no benefits from domain name sales, although Cartmell did distribute technology and grants. Cartmell sold the company to Verisign in 2001 for an undisclosed sum.

Cartmell also funded an anti-spam service called SpamAlert. This company won a court case against the food company Hormel, maker of tinned Spam, over the use of the word spam. He was also an early adopter of cryptocurrency Bitcoin and participated in the first funding round of Coinbase.

The Companies Register shows he is a director of three New Zealand companies and a shareholder in an additional 12 companies. These include crowdsourcing platform PledgeMe, food and beverage companies Angel Food and Yeastie Boys. He has a small shareholding in Invisible Urban Charging, an electric car charging company co-founded by former National Party MP Jake Bezzant.

According to Cartmell’s website he is seeking investment opportunities and is looking for innovative start-ups in transformative technologies.

Parties respond

Opportunity party general manager Iain Lees-Galloway said the cash injection, which was declared as being received on 25 February was incredibly helpful for the small party, which is not in parliament.

“We don’t have parliamentary resources to run our campaigns that sitting MPs do. So a donation like this makes a huge difference to us to be able to get our message out.”

Donations would be spent on marketing as well as travel and events. The party has received one other big donation of $50,000 from Phillip Mills, taking its currently declared total for 2026 to $150,000.

Donations made in the 2025 calendar year will be published in early May. Donations made in an election year must be declared within 20 days if they are more than $20,000.

An ACT party spokesperson confirmed Cartmell had made donations in 2025 but had not made any donations this year.

“ACT New Zealand received a donation from Brian Cartmell of $100k in December last year. He donated a total of $200k to ACT in 2025.”

New Zealand First party secretary Holly Howard said donations would be disclosed as required by law.

“Out of respect for our donors’ privacy and due process, we will not provide commentary or confirmation on individual donations ahead of the statutory reporting requirements.”

The National Party said it wouldn’t comment on individual donations, except where required by law through donation disclosures.

Information released on the electoral commission website shows coalition parties have received $750,000 in donations of over $20,000 so far this year. National has received $250,000, ACT $350,000 and NZ First $150,000.

The Greens have received $43,000 and Labour $22,000.

Cartmell’s statement says he supports transparent political donations, but will be making no further statements on the matter.

“These donations were made with that broader objective in mind – with the understanding that it is voters, not donors, who decide the direction of New Zealand.”

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand