The Social World

Category: International

  • Machado deserves the Nobel

    Machado deserves the Nobel

    I was fourteen when I clambered onto a boulder along Caracas’s Francisco Fajardo highway – what people called Piedra de la Libertad, the Liberty Rock – and spoke out about a government that had just ignored a referendum. “Tyranny” was more than a buzzword. To my astonishment, a woman I didn’t yet know – María Corina – helped me climb it. With her megaphone, I spoke of unifying, as a sea of flags from rival parties fluttered before me.

    Many dismissed her then. A woman who once called Chávez a “thief” to his face – too brash, too ideological, too direct for the choreography of Venezuelan politics. The old hands said she could never reach the people; she lacked the soothing tones, the feigned humility, the convenient ambiguity that defined our politicians. As a young member in the National Assembly, she was sidelined. She was too elegant, too upper-class – a sifrina, as Caracas gossips liked to say, the Venezuelan equivalent of a Valley girl. How could a man from the hills of Petare ever vote for her? She doesn’t have “the balls,” they said.

    They were wrong.

    Today, history has delivered yet another act of vindication. The Nobel Committee has awarded María Corina Machado the Nobel Peace Prize, citing her “tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.” Amid threats, bans, and intimidation, she stayed – refusing exile, unlike so many of the men once praised for having “the balls.” Though barred from appearing on the ballot, she led her movement to victory through Edmundo González, winning more than seventy percent of the vote. Now in hiding, she continues to labor, with unbroken discipline, toward a peaceful transfer of power.

    Some skeptics call her win puzzling, particularly in a moment when the world is watching Trump mediate a ceasefire in the Middle East. They argue: surely, stabilizing a brutal conflict warrants a Nobel more than the struggle of a single nation. These are understandable complaints – and one sure hopes that when peace materializes, Trump will get his Nobel. Yet to dismiss Machado’s recognition is wrong-headed. Plus, attempts to make Machado appear as a figure that opposes Trump is plainly ridiculous – she even dedicated her prize “to President Trump for his decisive support of our cause.” She knows Trump deserves his Nobel too.

    Attack the prize itself if you wish. After all, Senator Mike Lee isn’t wrong when he remarks that “apparently the Nobel Peace Prize isn’t about delivering peace anymore.” Alfred Nobel’s 1895 will defined the award as recognition for those who have accomplished “the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

    By that reading, few modern laureates qualify. Yet the committee long ago widened its understanding of peace to include those who wage domestic campaigns rather than diplomatic ones. Poland’s Lech Wałęsa, America’s Martin Luther King Jr., Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi – their prizes honored movements, not treaties; conviction, not realpolitik.

    Criticizing the prize itself has its logic – a logic I share. What makes little sense is dismissing María Corina Machado’s fight. Hers, too, is a movement – civil, disciplined and rooted in the idea that peace is not merely the end of conflict, but the beginning of freedom.

    What Machado has done is durable: she has carved out a moral pole in a country where everything else has crumbled. She is the first Venezuelan opposition leader to cement a position – not in charisma, but in principle. Though barred from contesting in 2024, it was her movement that outpaced Chavismo in hearts and minds. She is the first to deliver a genuine, stark ideological, moral and political alternative that has beaten Chavismo in recognition – even if the seizure of power remains pending.

    As she hides in an undisclosed location within Venezuela, separated from her family, Machado’s resolve stands in sharp contrast to the opposition figures who sought safety abroad. Juan Guaidó and others, once luminous names, now flicker dimly from foreign capitals. Machado stayed.

    Her struggle has always been peaceful. She called for marches and assemblies, even when many Venezuelans, understandably, chafed at the limits of nonviolence. And she did so without fear – unlike former presidential candidate Henrique Capriles, who bent under the regime’s threats and now serves as little more than a decoration in the architecture of controlled opposition. If that is not Nobel-deserving, with the modern recipients in mind, then one wonders: what is?

    When she handed me the megaphone more than a decade ago, she offered belief. I knew then that the movement she would lead would become a vessel for her country’s conscience. She aimed for a moral revolution at a time when climbing the political ladder rewarded conformity and orthodoxy. Many of those who now praise her – much like Trump – once ridiculed her.

    Her prize is not a consolation; it is a spotlight – and it is deserved. Her moral clarity, her endurance, her refusal to yield to bitterness are rare forms of courage in an age addicted to cynicism. Let us be careful not to undermine Machado’s merit. Her victory need not diminish Trump’s successes. They both deserve their Nobels.

  • Canada’s assisted suicide laws are out of control

    Canada’s assisted suicide laws are out of control

    Death, somehow, seems like the wrong word. So Canada’s euthanasia doctors have adopted other terms for what they offer: each lethal injection is called a “provision.” Stefanie Green, a Vancouver Island doctor who used to work in maternity services, prefers “delivery.”

    Canada has sleepwalked into a moral maze with no exit, where euthanasia becomes a solution for social problems

    Since Canada’s parliament introduced euthanasia in 2016, a new vocabulary has arisen. Those with a terminal illness, whose death is “reasonably foreseeable” are “Track 1”; those who have no such diagnosis but qualify through “grievous and irremediable” conditions are “Track 2.” And assisted suicide has become, not merely “assisted dying,” but “Medical Assistance in Dying,” which some patients understandably believe means palliative care as opposed to lethal injection – and which is universally referred to with a jarring and faintly macabre acronym. If you want to die, you “ask for MAID.”

    With such a large-scale outbreak of euphemism, you might speculate that people are trying to avoid thinking about some major injustice or terrible atrocity. And so they are. Canada has sleepwalked into a moral maze with no exit, in which euthanasia becomes a solution for its social problems. The homeless, the depressed, the poor, the chronically ill, those let down by the system or stuck on long waiting lists: all are at risk of finding themselves on Track 1 or Track 2.

    Overall, one in 20 Canadian deaths comes at the hands of MAID, with a total of 60,000 between 2016 and 2023. The horror stories, at first shocking, have become almost routine. Roger Foley, a disabled man, was told by hospital staff that his care would cost $1,500 a day and did he want to discuss MAID? Sathya Dhara Kovac, who couldn’t afford home-care services wrote, before the assisted death she chose as a result, that “ultimately it was not a genetic disease that took me out, it was a system.” Rosina Kamis, who told the assessing doctors that her suffering was physical but confessed to her two dozen YouTube subscribers that her real motive was loneliness (“I think if more people cared about me, I might be able to handle the suffering.”)

    Then there’s the woman whose only condition was a hip fracture and was dismayed at what her last decade might look like. The depressed man whose qualifying medical condition was a hearing problem and whose family claim he was effectively “put to death” under pressure from medical staff. The anonymized “Ms. B,” who had a chronic illness but whose request for MAID was motivated by housing problems. The many patients who have had doctors or nurses, entirely out of the blue, ask them if they have considered making an early exit.

    Such stories make clear that MAID can be a substitute for care. Carla Qualtrough, a former disabilities minister in Canada’s Liberal party, remarked bluntly that in parts of the country “it’s easier to access MAID than it is to get a wheelchair.” Or, more generally, to die than to go on living.

    Last November, when the British parliament first debated its own assisted suicide bill, the Substacker Rose Lyddon published a remarkably candid polemic against the proposal. Relating her long history of mental illness, she wrote: “When you’re deep in it, it’s very hard to argue against suicidal logic. The pros seem to vastly outnumber the cons. Living through each day is unbearably painful and you can see the pain and material damage you inflict on those who care for you. You’re a drain on state resources, the NHS has nothing to offer and considers you a nuisance who’d probably be better off dead, you lack the skills even to get dressed or feed yourself let alone change anything about your state of life. Loss of income and housing happens easily and it feels like nothing can stop the decline. It’s very difficult to feel hope or to attribute any value to your continued existence, which seems a net negative on every level. The only defence against going through with suicide is its not being on the table to start with.”

    An assisted suicide law, Lyddon wrote, would shatter the taboo which puts suicide out of the question. “Enshrining a right to suicide in law will initiate a cultural shift that can never be undone.”

    That single, decisive shift is still playing out in Canada. Almost half of those killed cite feeling like a burden as a reason for choosing MAID. An estimated 40 percent qualified for disability services. In one small-scale study, two-thirds of Track 2 applicants surveyed turned out to have a mental illness. The program has been denounced by the UN’s disability rights committee and described as “social murder” by Sonu Gaind, a professor of psychiatry at Toronto University. “Canada,” proclaims a headline in the Atlantic, that house journal of self-consciously reasonable liberals, “is killing itself.”

    Once, it was possible to claim that a few troubling cases had been exaggerated into a trend by sensationalist newspapers. That notion was exploded by the journalist Alexander Raikin, who obtained recordings of MAID doctors conducting seminars among themselves. Repeatedly, the doctors discussed the regular cases of (as one put it) “people who would opt to die, because the social supports are so poor.” Chillingly, Raikin found that the doctors were unable to muster any real disquiet over their own role in the process.

    Advocates for “assistance in dying” tend to operate on two settings. They present themselves as moral crusaders for “autonomy” and a “right to choose” which has been outrageously denied to those in serious suffering. But when pressed on the unintended consequences of this new “right,” they switch quickly from passionate advocacy to stonewalling (“That will never happen”) and handwaving (“That’s what the safeguards are for”).

    So in 2015, when Canada’s Supreme Court ruled in favor of assisted suicide, the judgment dismissed concerns: assisted dying was for “limited and exceptional circumstances,” and there was no evidence from abroad of “a disproportionate impact…on socially vulnerable groups.”

    In response, Canada’s parliament passed a law limited to those facing a “reasonably foreseeable” death; but in 2019, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the law would have to expand to cover grave but non-terminal illness. “People would be evolving as a society,” Trudeau explained, in another example of the mutant language which has provided the voiceover to Canada’s death march; but nobody should fear being pressurised into MAID “because you’re not getting the supports and cares [sic] that you actually need.” Of course not.

    The emptiness of these assurances should come as no surprise. Advocates for euthanasia and assisted suicide always proclaim the importance of safeguards and strict criteria, but they can rarely outline a coherent case for why the righteous cause of “autonomy” should suddenly be cordoned off – why, say, those who are suffering but have no terminal diagnosis should have their requests refused. There will always be hard cases just beyond the cordon: the expansion of the law became near-inevitable after a legal challenge in Quebec, where a paralysed man asked for the right to die.

    Such is the forward momentum of assisted suicide and euthanasia laws. After a few years, the politicians who insisted on “safeguards” have begun to forget why they were ever so squeamish. Isn’t this a legal right? Didn’t we all agree that denying people the freedom to choose is regressive?

    Likewise, the requirements for strict monitoring come, in a short space of time, to seem pointlessly burdensome. A Freedom of Information request by the BC Catholic newspaper uncovered 2,833 paperwork errors in British Columbia in a single year – more than the total number of assisted deaths in the province.

    After a few years the politicians who insisted on ‘safeguards’ have begun to forget why they were ever so squeamish

    These errors are not merely procedural. Christopher Lyon, a Canadian academic, discovered in 2021 that his father – who had a long history of suicidality – was scheduled for an assisted death in two days’ time. He had been classed as terminally ill on the grounds that he had an elevated white blood cell count which (in Lyon’s words) “might be an infection that, if untreated, might become lethal, despite being a common side effect of his arthritis medication.”

    Lyon pressed for a psychiatric assessment, which was granted but came back “full of errors”: it claimed, for instance, that there was no evidence of his father being depressed, although antidepressants were listed among his medications. After his father went through with the assisted death – “the worst day of my life” – Lyon pressed for an investigation. But the local health authorities blocked it.

    The system, in short, has an institutional bias toward MAID. Doctors “are expected to facilitate access to death,” according to a joint statement from five senior academics and palliative care specialists, even if they know that the applicant hasn’t been offered “reasonable options” that might help to alleviate their suffering. Those who point to the abuse and neglect of safeguards are “dismissed as being “anti-MAID’” or accused of blocking patients’ autonomy.

    Even now, Canada finds itself traveling toward new horizons. In 2027, the government plans to introduce MAID for those whose suffering is purely psychological. A parliamentary committee has also called for under-18s to be granted eligibility. And, as the Atlantic reports, everyday Canadian life increasingly incorporates this new culture of death. There’s an app to help you design rituals around your demise. There’s a podcast, Disrupting Death, where the hosts discuss “subjects such as normalizing the MAID process for children facing the death of an adult in their life – a pajama party at a funeral home; painting a coffin in a schoolyard.”

    Most notorious was the glossy advertising campaign by the fashion chain La Maison Simons, featuring a woman, Jennyfer Hatch, reveling in her last days and her impending MAID appointment. “Last breaths are sacred,” Hatch intoned over images of her enjoying a final bittersweet party with friends on the beach. “When I imagine my final days, I see music. I see the ocean. I see cheesecake.”

    Only later did it emerge that Hatch, too, had turned to euthanasia because she was struggling to find treatment for her chronic illness. “If I’m not able to access healthcare,” she had told an interviewer, “am I then able to access death care?” The ad, it turned out, was a euphemism too.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 13, 2025 World edition.

  • Introducing Japan’s own Iron Lady

    Introducing Japan’s own Iron Lady

    Japan is still in many ways a traditionalist – not to say a sexist – society. But the times they are a changing, and the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) have just chosen Sanae Takaichi as its leader, which means that she will become the country’s first ever female Prime Minister, and it’s most stridently right-wing one.

    Takaichi, 64, revels in the nickname the “Iron Lady” and is a hardline patriotic right-winger who is an avowed admirer of the original Iron Lady – Britain’s Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who Takaichi has cited as her role model. She was elected President of the LDP, the center-right party that has dominated politics since Japan became a democracy after World War Two, which means she is certain to lead a new government as the first ever female PM. The LDP currently rules as senior partner in coalition with the Buddhist Komeito or “Clean Government” party.

    A strong supporter of Japan’s close alliance with the USA, which has been the keystone of the Island country’s constitution and foreign policy since Japan’s defeat by America in the war in 1945, Takaichi is nevertheless a staunch nationalist who believes that Japan’s aggression back then was largely justified as “a war of security and national self defense.” She wants teaching in Japan’s schools changed to rid education of what she sees as a bias that burdens Japan with a guilt complex over its war crimes, which she claims were anyways exaggerated. She also wants Japan to take a stronger stance against its Asian rivals and neighbors China and North Korea, supports Taiwan’s independence from China, and is in favor of revising the pacifist parts of its postwar constitution so Japan can have a proper army instead of its existing Self Defense Force.

    Born in 1961, Takaichi was first elected to the House of Representatives, the lower chamber of the Japanese Parliament or Diet in 1993, as an Independent. Three years later she joined the LDP, which has been the leading force in politics for more than half a century. She was a protege of Shinzo Abe, Japan’s longest serving Prime Minister, who was assassinated in 2022, serving as his Interior Minister, and backed his policy of “Abeconomics” which was designed to lift Japan’s economy from the stagnation in which it has languished for thirty years by a mix of fiscal stimulation with boosted government spending and structural reforms.

    Fiercely ambitious in a society in which women are still often expected to play second fiddle to men, Takaichi repeatedly ran for the LDP leadership and finally succeeded on her third attempt when she narrowly beat the more centrist candidate Shinjiro Koizume, and is therefore sure to become Prime Minister when the Diet votes to fill the post in the middle of this month. In order to win the contest with Koizume and attract moderate votes, Takaichi rowed back on some of her more extreme positions, such as a pledge to visit the Shinto shrine that honors Japan’s war dead if she becomes PM. She described herself as a “moderate conservative“ rather than the ultra right-wing stance which had previously been her usual position. Her election is in line with the recent worldwide trend towards right-wing patriotic populism, and like other hardline right wingers  Takaichi opposes mass foreign immigration into Japan. She is also a social conservative and has criticized same sex marriage.

    Takaichi’s personal life has also differed from the modest style which Japanese women are usually expected to adopt. A fan of baseball and homegrown Japanese rock music, in 2004 she wed Tanu Yamamoto, a fellow LDP lawmaker. Though the couple had no children of their own, she adopted the children that Yamamoto has from his previous marriage. The couple divorced in 2017, blaming personal and political differences for the breakdown, but remarried in 2021 when Yamamoto allowed his wife to retain her maiden name. Since he suffered a stroke earlier this year which has left him partially paralyzed, Takaichi has also become her husband’s carer.

    Takaichi is a member of Nippon Kaigi, an influential nationalist society, that advocates a more proudly patriotic attitude to Japan’s often controversial history. As Prime Minister, she is expected to adopt a more stridently assertive line with both Japan’s friends and potential enemies, but as her pragmatic tactics showed when she was fighting for the top job, she can be flexible in attaining her goals when the situation demands it.

  • Did Bibi miscalculate?

    In her new memoirs, 107 Days, Kamala Harris recounts that in July 2024 she had an important meeting about Israel and the Gaza Strip. Harris, who was running for the presidency, hoped to show that she could pressure Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu into reaching a ceasefire with Hamas. “Netanyahu’s hooded gaze and disengaged demeanors,” she writes, “made it clear to me that he was running out the clock.” His only goal was a temporary ceasefire and to undermine the Biden administration. “He wanted Trump in the seat opposite him,” Harris recalls. “Not Joe, not me. Netanyahu wanted the guy who would acquiesce to his every extreme proposal for the future of Gaza’s inhabitants and add his own plan for a land grab by his developer cronies.”

    But did Bibi miscalculate? Right now, Trump is pressuring him to stop bombing Gaza and to reach an accommodation with Hamas as the two sides negotiate in Egypt. On Truth Social, Trump declared, “I am told that the first phase should be completed this week, and I am asking everyone to move fast.” Trump was right. Speed is of the essence. The longer the negotiations last, the greater the chance of a hiccup.

    But for Netanyahu and his chums, Trump’s pressure could not be more unwelcome. The dream of expelling the Palestinians from the Gaza strip and even annexing the West Bank remains just that. For Netanyahu’s truculent coalition partners it is a cold dose of reality administered by an American president prepared to strong-arm his Israeli counterpart.

    Trump’s sudden embrace of a peace plan shouldn’t come as a big surprise. It is further testament to his unencumbered approach to foreign affairs, whether it’s Ukraine, NATO or the Middle East. “The heart wants what it wants,” Woody Allen once remarked. Something similar could be said about Trump. He wants what he wants. And he often gets it.

    Netanyahu should have been more perceptive. The Middle East was Trump’s proving ground in his first term, the region where he struck the Abraham Accords. Now Trump wants to build on them in the hopes, however evanescent, of securing a Nobel Peace Prize. To accomplish that goal, he has no compunctions about chastening Netanyahu and insisting upon an Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

    How successful he will be remains an open question. Hamas is apparently demanding the release of some of its most sinister figures – terror chiefs Marwan Barghouti, Ahmad Saadat and Abdullah Barghouti.

    Will Hamas actually surrender its remaining hostages, not to mention its weaponry? Will it accede to an international board running Gaza? Its sanguinary record provides ample reason for doubts about its intentions, no matter what Trump and his vice president J.D. Vance may aver about the prospects for an agreement.

    Meanwhile, Israel is about to release further members of the Global Sumud Flotilla. Led by the activist Greta Thunberg, the flotilla had hoped to break the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip. The convoy of 42 boats was intercepted by Israel and the prisoners are alleging inhuman conditions. They will be able to amplify their claims to a receptive western press when they are deported to Greece today.

    Their self-appointed mission, however, is likely to be overshadowed by the ongoing negotiations in Egypt. Even Iran has welcomed the termination of the conflict, though it was careful to stipulate that any agreement “does not negate the responsibility of governments and competent international institutions to pursue legal and judicial action against the crimes of the Zionist regime.” Zionist regime? Some things never change in the Middle East.

  • What can we learn from Singapore?

    I was in Australia last week, having been invited to give the annual oration by the Robert Menzies Institute, and stopped off in Singapore on the way home. I’ve always been curious about this Southeast Asian city state, having read so much about Lee Kuan Yew, its Cambridge–educated founding father, who holds the record of being the world’s longest-serving prime minister.

    When he assumed office in 1959, Singapore was a fading outpost of the British Empire, seemingly destined to be swallowed up by one of its larger neighbors. The population was impoverished, illiterate and riven with racial conflict. It had no natural resources and most of its 224 square miles was swampland. Yet by the time Lee stepped down 31 years later, it had been transformed into an Asian tiger with the second-highest GDP per capita in the region. Today, it is arguably the most successful, best–governed country in the world.

    For someone like me, who believes western liberal democracy is the best system of government, Singapore poses a challenge. Lee ruled with an iron fist, exiling political opponents, muzzling the press and introducing severe penalties for low-level anti-social behaviour such as spitting, littering and – famously – chewing gum. Like many post-colonial countries, only one party has been in power since independence and Singapore is dominated by a dynastic ruling family: the previous prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong is Lee’s son. The model has been described as “enlightened authoritarianism” but it’s not that enlightened. Caning is a regular occurrence, drug traffickers are executed, and homosexuality was only decriminalized in 2023.

    Lee Kuan Yew boasted of being unburdened by ideology and was ruthlessly pragmatic

    Yet you only have to set foot in the place to realise just how well run it is. It took all of 20 minutes to get to my hotel from the airport, not because it was close but because traffic jams are virtually unheard of. If you look at the quickest way to get from A to B on Google Maps, buses are often a better option than the subway, although the metro is remarkably clean and reliable. The carriages are decorated with posters featuring smiling cartoon characters telling you how to behave – cute authoritarianism – and among the verboten activities are feet on seats, loud music and consuming food or drink. Hard to argue with that.

    Singapore is a low-crime, high-trust society, which is remarkable given that it’s largely made up of different immigrant populations. Lee Kuan Yew put various measures in place to end the racial tension that threatened to boil over in the 1950s and 1960s, the most important of which was to desegregate neighbourhoods. He recognised the dangers of multi-culturalism, insisting that the schools teach children to be proud of their country and introducing national service. It helps that annual growth has averaged about 7 percent since 1965. Widespread home ownership was made possible by the Housing and Development Board, a state agency responsible for swamp clearance, land reclamation and building tower blocks.

    Lee boasted of being unburdened by ideology and he was ruthlessly pragmatic, with a suck-it-and-see attitude to public policy. If something worked, great, but if it didn’t he’d abandon it. Everything was subordinate to transforming Singapore into a modern economic powerhouse. That inevitably meant he was drawn to conservative measures, even though he originally described himself as a socialist. The highest rate of income tax is 24 percent, there’s no capital gains tax and inheritance tax was scrapped in 2008. He ensured that education and health, while heavily subsidized, are not 100 percent free. Social security works differently, too, with employees able to keep track of their payments in different pots and even use some of the money to put down a deposit on a flat.

    I could go on. Singapore is a powerful argument not just for one–party rule, but for centralised planning – every technocrat’s dream. Yet I’m not convinced we should abandon democracy quite yet. The 20th century is littered with less successful examples of this model, from Stalin’s Russia to Mao’s China. It works in Singapore because it’s a city state and Lee Kuan Yew was a political genius. The test will come when one of his less gifted successors comes to power, which could turn out to be the current PM. As Aristotle pointed out, the problem with the best kind of rule – a virtuous and wise monarch – is it can devolve into the worst: tyranny. Democracy is more limited, but also less risky.

  • The celebrity guide to selective outrage

    The celebrity guide to selective outrage

    In the West, outrage has become performance art. It’s not about real causes, but about carefully branded ones that play well in pastel Instagram carousels. Climate change? Of course. A vague plea for “justice”? Naturally. A curated “Free Palestine” hashtag? Absolutely. But when it comes to standing with their peers in the Middle East – singers, actors, writers who are literally jailed or executed for their art – the voices vanish.

    This isn’t about Israel. The point is larger: why do so many Western artists reserve their outrage for one convenient villain while ignoring regimes that jail, torture and kill their peers? Syria’s Christians and Druze are being ethnically cleansed. Yemen is enduring a famine. The Uyghurs in China and Christians in the Congo suffer horrors that make Western protest slogans look like parody. But those crises don’t trend on TikTok. And so our moral guardians stay silent.

    Take Turkey. Pop star Mabel Matiz was dragged into court, slapped with a travel ban for a song with LGBTQ themes – branded as “immorality” by Erdoğan’s government. Where was Lady Gaga, a self-proclaimed advocate for the LGBTQ community, when this happened? Actor Cem Yiğit Uzumoğlu, known from Netflix’s Rise of Empires: Ottoman, faces seven years in prison for posting an Instagram story calling for a boycott after Istanbul’s opposition mayor was arrested. Where were Mark Ruffalo and Javier Bardem? These are not rebels with guns – they are artists with words, punished as if they were criminals.

    Iran is even darker. Musician Mohsen Shekari was publicly hanged in 2022 – his “crime” nothing more than protesting against the regime. Rapper Toomaj Salehi was sentenced to death the same year for lyrics critical of the authorities, accused of “enmity against God.” He was spared only after global outrage forced the regime’s hand. Where’s Hollywood when this happens?

    These are the true causes that should evoke outrage: a song punished as immoral, a post punished as treason, lyrics punished as blasphemy. In the Middle East, art itself can be a death sentence. And yet from Hollywood? Silence.

    Contrast that with the U.S. this month. Jimmy Kimmel faced backlash for comments about Charlie Kirk’s murder. His temporary suspension triggered an avalanche of headlines. Disney reportedly lost between $4 and $5 billion in market value. That was one man, one career, one late-night show. Meanwhile, artists across the Middle East aren’t just losing jobs – they’re losing their freedom and their lives. Where was the celebrity chorus for them?

    Mark Ruffalo and Susan Sarandon have plenty of time for press conferences about Gaza. Billie Eilish can summon her fans to demand a ceasefire. But for their fellow artists – their actual peers – who risk prison or the gallows for a song, a lyric, or a post? Not a word. Apparently solidarity stops where the headlines end.

    The truth is that many of these artists aren’t radicals or rebels at all. They are brand managers. Their conscience extends only as far as their fanbase and their ticket sales. They pick causes the way others pick outfits: whatever flatters them, whatever gets applause, whatever comes risk-free. Supporting Gaza? Safe. Supporting Uyghurs? Risky. Speaking up for a jailed Iranian rapper? Not worth losing a Spotify stream.

    Artists were once dangerous to tyrants. Solzhenitsyn in the Soviet Union, Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia – their art was truth-telling in the face of power. Today’s artists, by contrast, pen open letters to guarantee free PR and social media applause. They confuse hashtags with heroism.

    And so one can’t help but wonder: do these celebrities care about justice at all? Or is it simply self-interest, attaching themselves to a fashionable cause to stay relevant? As long as the slogan looks good on a T-shirt and the cause is safe to support, they’ll perform their outrage. But when bravery is required – when it might cost them something – they retreat into silence.

    Art is supposed to speak truth to power. Today’s celebrities speak only to the algorithm. And for their fellow artists, silence isn’t neutrality. It’s betrayal.

  • What Trump really wants from Venezuela

    What Trump really wants from Venezuela

    When the headlines scream “narco-wars” and pundits wag their fingers about “fentanyl,” it is tempting to reduce Donald Trump’s Venezuela policy to one issue: drugs. A convenient shorthand – but also a red herring. Read closely and a very different logic emerges. 

    Drugs matter, and the effort is to some degree about exactly that. Yet so does immigration. Venezuela’s hydrocarbons also matter – and they matter even more in a world where OPEC has been deliberately constraining supply to keep oil prices high.  

    Deploying narcotics as a public justification is smart politics. It communicates a moral urgency that resonates at home (the drug crisis is real) and offers a legal-rhetorical peg overseas (designating cartels as terror proxies, authorizing kinetic steps under counter-terror authorities). But policy is not simply argument; it is incentive architecture. 

    Trump’s operation in Caracas is being built around a set of incentives – for the United States, for Caracas’s elites, for regional partners – that are designed to minimize the chance of an expensive occupation while still extracting tangible leverage – maybe for regime change but also maybe for a great deal. Think of it as the art of coercion without conquest: pressure applied across multiple vectors until the cost of continued behavior exceeds the benefit. It’s actually pretty straightforward. 

    First: Trump dislikes regime-change wars in the classic sense. The “America First” portfolio is transactional by design: fewer open-ended nation-building campaigns, more calibrated use of force or diplomatic pressure where the legal and political cover exists. Analysts who assume he secretly dreams of invasions are projecting a familiar neocon fantasy onto an administration that, in practice, is stingy about long ground wars. Evidence? You don’t need it, just look at recent history. 

    Second: Immigration is leverage. Policy signals link security operations to deportation and migration enforcement. In recent moves, naval deployments and strikes on alleged trafficking vessels have been accompanied by rhetoric and, at points, explicit linkage to deportation policies. Military pressure, then, functions as bargaining power in a broader domestic political market.

    Third: Venezuela is about oil. The South American country has long been known as a hydrocarbon state, and for good reason. In World War Two, Venezuelan crude was indispensable to the Allied effort, fueling ships, planes and entire campaigns across the Atlantic. Today, by contrast, the United States trades virtually nothing with Caracas – a startling reversal given that Venezuela still holds the largest proven reserves in the world. If brought back into the US market, and modernized, its output could rival Gulf producers and alter the balance of supply. 

    Fixating on crude alone, however, misses the resources that also matter in 21st-century geopolitics – the critical minerals that feed electric vehicles, batteries and telecom. Beijing’s interest in Venezuela, for one, is not sentimental. It is a modern scramble for inputs. Washington’s policy calculus therefore has an industrial logic as well as a geopolitical one: deny adversaries secure access, protect supply chains, and leave a neighboring state structurally unable to become a reliable client of a rival power.

    Unlike Ukraine, Venezuela’s resource wealth doesn’t need to be inflated – it is obvious, vast and sitting in plain sight. Unlike Iran, despite Maduro’s theatrical boasts of millions of “militiamen,” the country has no real military capability. Unlike Taiwan, we don’t need to invoke the complexity of semiconductors; Venezuela’s importance is more tangible, rooted in immigration, drugs, oil, gas and minerals. And unlike the myth of a population united in anti-Americanism, Venezuelans’ resentment of Washington is overstated – their hatred of Maduro certainly runs far deeper. 

    Seen from this angle, the narco-terror narrative is a tool – a great one. Declaring networks as terror or terrorist-adjacent reconfigures the legal playbook. It widens authorities, attracts military assets and legitimizes potential strikes that would be harder to justify under other rubrics. It also performs a diplomatic service: it makes pressure acceptable to partners who would recoil at a naked campaign aimed at regime decapitation. The subtext is surgical: apply pain without promising occupation. 

    A full-scale invasion or a prolonged occupation would be catastrophic for the United States politically and logistically; it would also play straight into the hands of Caracas’s propaganda and regional rivals. So if you cannot replace Maduro through direct warfare, how do you change his cost-benefit calculus? You make continued rule more expensive, more dangerous, and less useful: target revenue streams, hinder patronage, sap his ability to reward subordinates and increase the political price of belligerence. See the logic?

    Critics who treat Trump’s approach as incoherent are often reading intentions without seeing incentives. They assume that because the rhetoric is muscular, the endgame must be militarized. But policy is a transaction between ends and feasible means. Trump’s approach always aims to maximize leverage while minimizing open-ended commitments. That is not a cautious liberal policy of benign persuasion; it is a hard-nosed transactionalism that prefers calibrated coercion to costly conquest. By contrast, Biden relied too much on goodwill and “good gait” diplomacy – noble on paper, disastrous in practice.

    Trump’s policy welds legal cover, domestic political salience, asymmetric pressure, and an appreciation for resources into one instrument. The risks are real: escalation through miscalculation, the entanglement of law enforcement and low-intensity military force, and the moral hazard of normalizing extraterritorial strikes. But proceeding with prudence – not cowardice – has great potential. As Trump fans love to say, “trust the plan.” 

  • Trump has boxed in Netanyahu and Hamas

    Trump has boxed in Netanyahu and Hamas

    Hamas did not wait long to accede to Donald Trump’s 20-point Gaza peace plan – or at least accept it with conditions. It didn’t really have a choice. The same can be said for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu who was forced to accept a deal that he never wanted in the first place. Give credit where it’s due: Trump boxed in both Netanyahu and Hamas. For Trump, the pending agreement is a big accomplishment. It may not win him a Nobel but the aim is noble.

    With his usual flair for the dramatic, Trump responded to Hamas’ offer to release the remaining hostages by declaring, “I believe they are ready for a lasting PEACE.” He stated that “the bombing of Gaza must stop immediately.” He added that the details are being worked out, but breathed optimism about the outcome.

    Netanyahu, who presides over a fractious right-wing coalition, has been intent on prolonging the war. The crafty prime minister may have preferred to continue pounding Hamas, but his very audacious moves have created the context for Trump’s peace plan. He neutered Hezbollah in Lebanon. He attacked Iran. Add in the ouster of the Assad regime in Syria and you have a far more propitious moment for an actual Middle East peace deal.

    The blunt fact is that with the horrific October 7, 2023 attack, Hamas ended up isolating itself. The terrorist organization believed that it could topple Israel. The reverse occurred. Hamas was forced to accept the Gaza agreement because the Arab world has largely united against it. In particular Egypt and Qatar have pushed for a resolution to the conflict, one that will preclude Israel going on from Gaza to annex the West Bank (something that Trump himself has vowed he will not allow to occur).

    The pressure is now on for Israel and Hamas to reach a lasting agreement. Hamas stated that it supports the release of “all Israeli prisoners, both living and dead, according to the exchange formula contained in President Trump’s proposal, provided the field conditions for the exchange are met. In this context, the movement affirms its readiness to immediately enter into negotiations through the mediators to discuss the details of this.” The key questions are how far Israel will withdraw from the Gaza strip and what role, if any, Hamas would play in a future government.

    Then there is the issue of who gets to run Gaza in the interim. Trump has tapped former British prime minister Tony Blair, who has his own injudicious record in the region, to serve as the head of a board of peace. Not surprisingly, Hamas is balking at the prospect of an interim governing body, but it is more than likely to have to surrender on this point.

    Might Blair work to transform the Gaza strip into a new Trump Riviera? Rumors of a manufacturing zone named after Elon Musk are percolating in Washington. This past February, Trump released an AI-generated video of him and Musk cavorting on a beach called “TRUMP GAZA.” Perhaps the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change will prove more influential than anyone had hitherto contemplated.

  • Can Trump turn Gaza into the ‘Riviera of the Middle East?’

    There are plenty of legitimate questions to be asked about the Trump-Blair peace plan for ending the conflict with Israel. Will Hamas ever agree to it? Will any peace deal hold? Will the wider Middle East get behind it? But there is also another question that we must ask. If this peace does hold, can Trump and Tony Blair turn Gaza into a cross between Dubai and Singapore – or is that completely deluded?

    All the immediate attention will, of course, be on whether this new deal actually ends the fighting. We will find out over the next few weeks. But assuming it does, the President and the former British prime minister have ambitious plans for the strip of land that has been fought over so fiercely.

    There will reportedly be a “Trump economic development plan to rebuild and energize Gaza” crafted by a “panel of experts who have helped birth some of the thriving modern miracle cities in the Middle East.” It will be a “special economic zone… with preferred tariff and access rates to be negotiated with participating countries.”

    It is not hard to work out what President Trump has in mind. Back in February, he declared he wanted to transform Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East” and put out an AI video of a new Gaza complete with a Trump tower, golf courses, luxury hotels, and gleaming, air-conditioned offices and apartment complexes. Meanwhile, earlier this year there were reports that staff from the Tony Blair Institute had worked on plans for a “Trump Riviera” in the region.

    It is not hard to work out what President Trump has in mind

    Could that possibly work? On the surface, of course, it sounds completely crackers. It is hard to imagine that anyone is going to want to play a leisurely round of golf over land best known for its tunnels, hostages and booby traps. Or indeed that the Palestinians want their country to be turned into a strip of casinos and condos, or a tax haven for jet-hopping expats. And, in fairness, it certainly faces plenty of obstacles. 

    And yet, this plan not entirely crazy. After all, the booming statelets of the Gulf have clearly shown that entirely new financial and business centers can be built out of a desert in a remarkably short space of time. From 2000 to 2022, the GDP of the United Arab Emirates, which includes Dubai and Qatar, grew from $157 billion to $550 billion. Work has already started on the Ras El Hekma Project, a $35 billion joint venture between Egypt and the UAE to build a new city on its Mediterranean coast, while Saudi Arabia is building new cities and business centers as well. 

    With its prime Mediterranean location and closer flying times to Europe, Gaza might well be able to do at least as well. Of course, it will take complete peace and security to have a chance of success, plenty of American and Israeli money, and tariff-free access to the US market. But low tax, entrepreneurial statelets are one of the boom industries of the 21st century. There is no necessary reason why the Trump-Blair vision of Gaza should not join them – as far-fetched as it might sound right now.

  • Grow a pair, Euro cry-bullies

    Grow a pair, Euro cry-bullies

    After a weekend of bloodlust at Bethpage, the European team pulled off a stunning victory to take home the Ryder Cup. So why are they so sore about it?

    Golf is known as a gentleman’s game, with countless unwritten rules of etiquette. The Ryder Cup is a rare exception, where the 12 best golfers from Europe and America duke it out not for money, but for glory, and rowdy fans bring their national pride to bear.

    The American fury picked up as the Europeans sprinted ahead on Saturday, leading to an overall air of chaos. Forget the “golf clap” – heckling, shouting and four-letter cursing became the standard behavior as European players walked past the grandstands or lined up their shots.

    Conduct became so bad that Irishman Rory McIlroy, typically a fan favorite in America, went viral for telling a fan to “shut the fuck up” on the 15th hole. He then refused to play until course officials could calm down the crowd. Then someone even lobbed a beer can at his wife as the gallery turned into a mosh pit.

    Sure, it’s probably not the best look for the master of ceremonies, American comedian Heather McMahan, to start a “fuck you, Rory” chant into a live mic. And manners matter, no matter which side of the pond you’re on. But if this were any other sport, no one would bat an eye. And the European whining here seems to massively overstate a bit of rowdy banter.

    Is McIlroy really such a baby that he can’t play through a little heckling? He’s from Northern Ireland, one would think he’s made of tougher stuff.

    Does a comedian really deserve to lose her job for getting into the atmosphere and firing off a poor taste quip? Maybe, probably. But she apologized and stepped down from her MC role – we don’t need the whole media struggle session to boot.

    Yet that’s exactly what the media ran with over the weekend, quoting endless Europeans tut-tuting American sportsmanship. The story wasn’t the Cup itself, despite a better-than-usual tournament – but how tacky and awful the Americans are.

    “What I consider crossing the line is personal insults,” Luke Donald, the European captain, said at a news conference Saturday night.

    “Nothing was going to happen, there wasn’t going to be a physical altercation, but there was a lot of language that was unacceptable and abusive,” McIlroy said.

    “They kept talking about [McIlroy’s] wife, and I thought that was disrespectful. That’s apparently what New York does,” one self-righteous Irishman told CNN Sports.

    What New York (and America) most certainly doesn’t do is jail sports fans for “unacceptable language” that hurts no one. These Euro cry-bullies should take note for their own, much rowdier, soccer hooligans rotting in jail.

    Yet a certain kind of American liberal, particularly those in the media, still loves to scoff at the spectacle. “Look at our unsophisticated countrymen,” they sneer, seeking the European seal of approval that every would-be cosmopolitan craves.

    But they should remember that brutality is the norm when Western powers clash, and goes far beyond a few naughty words. Sport – no longer war – is the civilized man’s version of barbarity, a place for him to take out his violent proclivities within some clearly delineated boundaries. You can’t blame him for stepping ever so slightly out of line once his blood is hot.

    And a little excess rowdiness is a good thing. In America, we’ve all become a little too accustomed to therapy-speak. We lean on euphemisms and platitudes, not only in sport, but in politics and business and every place where candor is key. So we swallow outrages with approved terms like “feelings” and “harm” and “impact,” all too concerned with sensitives and perceptions, and then wonder why the temperature keeps rising.

    If you want to make a difference – and let out a little steam – some unbridled hostility goes a long way. The American Founders, after all, were more than happy to throw a few punches in the midst of otherwise polite society.

    What matters is that we can all shake hands at the end of the day, putting sportsmanship back to their rightful place without ever holding a grudge. And here, it’s the Europeans – not the Americans – who are failing to mind their manners.