The Social World

Tag: United States

  • The science of marriage

    “Those whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.” With this stern admonition, the Church has long been a fervent defender of marriage. But as religion has faded as a social force, so too has marriage. 

    Does it much matter if people choose to shack up together instead of tying the knot? What is lost if some men want to be incels or some women decide a husband is a bothersome surplus to their needs? The problem is that all lifestyles alternative to marriage serve to undermine it. And like other major social institutions, marriage is not some arbitrary cultural construct like a federal holiday. Rather, it rests on genetically shaped behaviors that evolution has written into the human genome because of their survival value. Suppress or subvert these behaviors and you risk consequences.

    Evolution’s imperatives are deeply laid. Step back just a few beats in evolutionary time, to when early humans were exploring the African savannahs, using their wits to evade stronger predators. The human skull needed to expand, but the mother’s pelvis was a limitation. To pass through it, babies had to be born with their heads still small, which meant prematurely. These helpless infants were more likely to survive if two parents were around, unlike with the other great apes where the mother alone raises the offspring. Evolution supported the human family unit with two clever biological innovations, also unknown among other apes. Female chimpanzees sport visible swellings when they are ready to conceive but ovulation in humans became largely concealed, so a man wanting to ensure his paternity had to stick around until the first signs of pregnancy. And to encourage further association, evolution arranged for women to be sexually receptive all the time, not just at estrus.

    The pair bond between man and woman induces both partners to share in the arduous task of raising children. It’s this set of genetically shaped behaviors that is formalized in the cultural institution of marriage. The nature of the pair bond was somewhat modified with the advent of polygamy in tribal and successor societies, where powerful men were able to accrue many wives. Genghis Khan, the world champion in this pursuit, labored prodigiously in the large harems he assembled throughout the lands he conquered – and some 16 million men today carry his Y chromosome. But polygamy is destabilizing. For some men to have many wives means that many men have none. Large numbers of wifeless young men, with no stake in society, create problems. The usual solution was to march them off to war with neighboring states. But warfare doesn’t always turn out as expected.

    Monogamy first came to prominence in ancient Greece and Rome, and was spread by the Church throughout the Roman empire. So successful was the one man/one woman principle to the formation of stable polities that it eventually became the custom across most of the world. Marriage and monogamy are both stabilizing measures developed by culture in support of the behaviors prescribed by evolution. The human family is the best social structure that evolution could contrive for raising children. What happens when we mess with this structure and the institution of marriage that supports it?

    The answer, not to be overdramatic, is extinction – or at least a road that leads directly there. In almost all countries outside of Africa, fertility is in rapid decline. The total fertility rate in both the US and UK has dropped more than 20 percent since 2010 and last year reached all-time lows of 1.60 children per woman’s lifetime (US) and 1.41 for British women. For a population to sustain itself at constant size, a fertility rate of 2.1 is required.

    Bad things happen to declining populations. A dwindling workforce has to support an ever-heavier burden of retirees. Tax rates rise, hope for the future falls. Defense is imperiled if the army cannot meet its recruitment goals. Once a population slips below a fertility rate of about 1.4 for 20 years or so, it reaches a point of no return: retirees consume the resources young families would need to raise more children. Marriage is the context in which people have children. Some 80 percent of children born in the US and UK are born to married parents. People who cohabit have far fewer children. Children fare best when both a mother and father share in their upbringing. The declining rate of marriage is one of a nexus of factors that have depressed fertility. People are starting families later, or stopping at one child. One reason is the expense of raising children. Another is that women are now better educated than men and can easily find jobs, often choosing careers over childcare.

    In World War One, women handed out white feathers on the street to men presumed too cowardly to risk their lives on the front line. Should men now be distributing white feathers to women who decline to bear children, a social duty just as crucial for society’s survival as is military service? Well, no. Women cannot ethically be dragooned into bearing more children than they want. But the obvious incentives just don’t seem to work. South Korea has put in place every pro-natalist policy you can think of, from direct cash payments to housing subsidies and government-funded matchmaking. Its fertility rate hit 0.72 in 2023 and is projected to fall as low as 0.65 this year. Last year, 150 schools in South Korea reported that they had no new first-year children. Unless childbearing is somehow made a more welcome choice for women, and marriage comes back into popularity, each future generation will be smaller than its predecessor.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

  • The world needs more copper, but there’s a catch

    The world needs more copper, but there’s a catch

    Copper has a nickname in the commodities market. It’s known as “Doctor Copper” because it’s so deeply integrated into the physical fabric of our lives and all the technology we depend on that its price reflects the health of the economy. “Gold is money, everything else is credit,” said J.P. Morgan more than a century ago. But copper is more than money. It’s modern human life. It is used in every corner of our technology, from houses to windfarms to warehouses. Which is why I think, while everyone’s still obsessing about gold, it’s worth taking a look at copper.

    Since the global financial crisis in 2008, stock markets may have reached new highs but the physical world of construction, infrastructure and manufacturing has never quite regained its old growth rate. Western consumers borrowed, policymakers stimulated, AI and tech shares soared, but factories, grids and cities grew slowly. And copper demand over the past 15 years (at 1.9 percent) was below the average of 3 percent annual growth seen since 1950.

    At the same time, a wave of new mine supply hit the market. Pre-crash, the West raised money for mines thanks to the low cost of capital. Post-crash, China has led the way with new mines in Ecuador, Peru and the Democratic Republic of Congo. This has resulted in a period where supply consistently ran ahead of demand. As a consequence, copper priced in real money (expressed in units of gold) has been on a long downward trend. Despite all the chatter about battery metals and nominally rising prices, copper has been in a bear market and is 60 percent lower in real terms than it was 25 years ago.

    The most obvious driver for the coming bull market in copper is our insatiable appetite for electricity and all things electrical. The world’s largest mining company, BHP, estimates that as recently as 2021, about 92 percent of copper demand still came from traditional sectors such as construction, old-fashioned power systems and industrial machinery. Only about 7 percent was explicitly tied to energy transition uses (EVs, renewables, grid upgrades), and 1 percent to digital tech and data. This is changing fast – just look around you.

    The world is electrifying at a breakneck pace. In March, the International Energy Agency (IEA) published its “global energy review of 2024” and noted that, although global energy demand grew by 2.2 percent in 2024 (faster than the average rate over the past decade), electricity demand surged by 4.3 percent. And with electricity demand, you can assume copper demand, too.

    EV sales continue to rise globally, and of course each electric vehicle requires three to four times more copper than an internal combustion car: 80-90 kg vs. 23-24 kg. Wind turbines are still popping up. Every single wind turbine uses two to three tons of copper per megawatt of capacity in the turbine itself – but you can double that to include connecting cables for on-shore windfarms, and more again for off-shore installations. Diffuse energy collection systems such as solar panels also require vast amounts of copper cabling. Don’t forget copper use in grid-scale batteries and in high-speed charging infrastructure. And then look at aging grids from the US to Europe to Asia, which need massive upgrades. And then look at your own personal habits and what you have bought recently. Smart devices, automation, the internet of things. The battery in every chargeable device you use is 10 to 15 percent copper by weight. Copper, copper, everywhere.

    As if that isn’t enough, throw in the big one: AI and data centers. The AI boom isn’t just virtual, it’s physical too. Every data center needs transformers, cooling, power-switching equipment and miles of copper cable. The growth has barely started and our future world is being built on electricity – and on copper.

    The IEA now forecasts explosive growth in copper demand from electrification through the 2020s and 2030s. Goldman Sachs, BHP, Wood Mackenzie, UBS and others independently say the same thing: we are entering a structural shortage. The “old copper” market is forecast to shrink to 60 percent of the demand pull, with new sectors likely to comprise 40 percent of the market within 15 years. And remember that “old copper” demand is still growing at 2 percent annually, which in a 24-million-ton annual market is 480,000 tons of new copper demand every year.

    And herein lies the problem. Copper mining is an incredibly large and mature industry. Most of the easy deposits have already been mined and the global mined average grade is now around 0.5 percent Cu. Future deposits are likely to be lower grade, harder to access, deeper and more complex. Water is a major issue. Either there is too much, with mines flooded this year in Indonesia and the DRC; or there is too little, with large deposits above 4,000 meters looking for a water solution in the Andean deserts of Argentina and Chile.

    Now consider much tighter environmental regulation and granting of permits and it is no surprise that the average development timeline for a copper project to advance from discovery to production is 18 years. This is not an industry that can be turned on quickly – unlike an immature or small-tonnage commodity such as lithium. A large copper deposit in the discovery phase today is unlikely to be in production until 2043.

    Furthermore, local opposition is rising. Social license to operate and indigenous rights are increasingly restrictive factors in Australia, Canada, Ecuador and Peru. And apart from a few established mining hot-spots, Europe is essentially off-limits to any meaningful mining venture due to high power costs and a fundamentally anti-mining, eco-socialist mindset. Even the US, with Trump’s tariffs and exhortations to redomicile copper production, is challenged. To produce large quantities of refined copper you need abundant smelting capacity, and America is currently exporting copper minerals for processing abroad.

    Does anyone want to take a wild guess where the newest, most efficient, lowest-cost smelters have been built? Smelters so efficient and with so much capacity that they render most other new smelter proposals unviable. Of course it is China, with its 60 percent coal-fired, low-cost power grid. Fierce competition among smelters and refineries in China has translated into record low margins for smelters and refineries around the world. Two state-run smelters have closed in Chile since 2023, and in Australia, Glencore’s Mount Isa smelter, which has operated in the town for almost 100 years, is being prepared for closure. As Glencore says, “The future of our Mount Isa copper smelter and Townsville refinery is currently under review, as global market shifts and reduced copper volumes challenge the sustainability of these assets.”

    At one point in September, Chinese smelters were actually paying suppliers of copper mineral (concentrate) to deliver material to them, when normally miners pay for the privilege. Essentially the emergence of the Chinese processing capacity is yet another indication of China’s dominance in primary materials and manufacturing.  (When will liberal democracy governments actually notice that economic and industrial activity depends on low-cost energy, which in turn relies on a high proportion of reliable, low-cost spinning generation such as coal, gas, or nuclear?)

    One of the real challenges for the copper industry is that even expanding production from existing mines is proving to be extremely difficult. Mining companies are having to spend large sums of capital on existing mines just to stand still, let alone grow production. Look at Chile, the world’s largest copper producer. The Chilean Copper Commission, Cochilco, estimates that investment of $83 billion will be spent on mining in-country to 2033, mostly in the copper sector and that production will only incrementally rise from 5.3 million tons last year to 5.5 million tons in 2033.

    Separately, BHP runs the world’s largest copper mine, Escondida, in Chile. And in its August presentation, BHP estimated that an investment of about $5 billion in Escondida would take production out to 2031 with only a drop of about 20 percent to one million tons annually. The world needs a new Escondida every other year, and even this huge mine is struggling to keep up. Overall, BHP forecasts no growth in production from its Chilean operations from 2031 to 2040.

    Staying in Chile, one of the most cautionary tales of recent times is Teck’s expansion of the Quebrada Blanca mine in a project called QB2. Originally estimated to cost$4.7 billion (in 2016) the project was updated in 2023 to a forecast of $8.8 billion, and now all bets are off. Ten billion, anyone? Even worse, during Teck’s acquisition by Anglo American, Teck lowered production guidance from the mine. Problems with downtime, throughput limitations and higher unit costs mean that production forecasts of 230,000 to 310,000 tons of copper annually for the next few years have been reduced to 170,000 to 255,000 tons. Do you see the trend? Cost estimates are up, production estimates are down. Copper mines are major infrastructure projects that are increasingly difficult to deliver in a modern world.

    To make matters worse, the fragility of mine supply is currently center stage as several large operations have come unstuck. Flooding in the DRC and Indonesia, seismic activity in Chile, political shutdowns in Panama and social unrest in Peru have removed roughly 800,000 tons of annual supply from the market. And although much of it should come back on stream during 2026 and 2027, it is too little, too late.

    Governments are waking up, but what can they do? The US and EU have added copper to their “critical minerals” lists, which seems more a statement of the obvious than a policy plan. Within five years, the world may need an additional six or seven million tons of copper annually that simply does not exist in any mine plan or construction schedule today.

    The slow-motion capital blow-out of the QB2 mine expansion is causing the large mining companies to baulk at committing to a new mine build. While it may be easier for companies to buy production through mergers and acquisition, copper prices will have to be much, much higher to stimulate the construction decisions on the new big mines that are needed to fill the supply gap.

    In short, the fundamentals of supply and demand dictate that the copper price has to re-rate. The copper industry is so large and so mature, with such long development timelines, that it is relatively price insensitive. Copper supply is capital and time constrained. The nature of copper demand has fundamentally changed: AI and electrification is turbo-charging copper use.

    The copper crunch is coming, prices are going to rise far and fast, maybe two or three times higher than today’s prices. It is going to take a long time to get a meaningful supply response. Hold on tight: copper’s going for a ride.

    Merlin Marr-Johnson is president and chief executive of Fitzroy Minerals.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

  • It feels as if Michael McFaul’s audience has long since left

    Since the end of the Cold War, politicians and commentators have been searching for a new paradigm through which to understand international relations. Notwithstanding Francis Fukuyama’s oft-misunderstood The End of History, we have tried various patterns to classify the world order, of which George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil,” first used in 2002, was among the more enduring.

    In Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder, Michael McFaul acknowledges the widespread if nebulous consensus that the challenge presented by Russia and China is a kind of second Cold War – historian Niall Ferguson has labeled America’s relations with China “Cold War II.” But McFaul rejects the easy creation of a model which is reminiscent of past conflicts, arguing that it fails “accurately [to] describe the complex, unique dynamics of our current era of great power competition.”

    While McFaul’s analysis draws on his experience as a social scientist and a historian, he also dons his “policymaker hat” to provide a solution as well as commentary. Whether one agrees with his prescriptions or not – of which more anon – for that, at least, we should be grateful. It is easy enough to lament, to use Seán O’Casey’s phrase, that “th’ whole worl’s in a terrible state o’ chassis,” but considerably more demanding to say what can and should be done about it.

    There is a touch of the straw man around the edges of McFaul’s arguments. When he explains that “China is not an existential threat to the United States or the free world,” for example, he is suggesting a position which few serious foreign policy observers hold. Indeed, it is hard to say what a truly existential threat to the US would look like – at least a foreign one. As a young Abraham Lincoln told his audience in Springfield, Illinois, in 1838: “All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge… if destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

    One current difficulty lies in characterizing the foreign policies of the Trump administration. McFaul notes, correctly, that the President, on returning to the White House, “immediately withdrew the United States from the Paris Climate Accords, the World Health Organization and the UN Human Rights Council.” It is hard to think of a multilateral institution that Donald Trump likes or trusts, from the UN to NATO to the World Trade Organization. McFaul sums this up as “an even stronger commitment to an isolationist agenda.”

    But that will not quite do. President Trump authorized major air strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities in June; he is escalating military action against drug cartels in the Caribbean Sea, declaring that the US is at war with the drug cartels and creating a Joint Task Force within US Southern Command to coordinate strikes; he has interposed himself as a “peacemaker” between India and Pakistan, Armenia and Azerbaijan and, most recently, in the Middle East. This is hardly shutting out the rest of the world and focusing on domestic concerns.

    What, then, would the former ambassador and director of Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies advise the nation’s chief executive to do? McFaul advocates selective but not complete economic decoupling from China, lifting most of the tariff barriers Trump has imposed and encouraging American investment abroad, attracting Russian and Chinese scientific, technological and entrepreneurial talent to the US. He also argues that “defense is only part of a successful strategy. America needs more offense,” though it is hard to see him and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth agreeing on the implementation of that statement.

    Fundamentally, McFaul believes in international cooperation and in multilateralism, not only for America’s prosperity and security but also as a way of prying apart the ad hoc and transactional alliance which currently holds sway between Moscow and Beijing. I freely confess to being an enthusiast for informed debate and vigorous but respectful exchange of ideas, and someone with McFaul’s background should be listened to as America decides how to approach international relations.

    However, Autocrats vs. Democrats founders on two obstacles. The first is the highly personal and utterly unpredictable nature of Trump’s foreign policy. The President has few guiding principles save his own instincts and his attitudes can turn on a dime, making it very difficult to formulate any coherent kind of framework which can direct American policy. As we have seen with his wildly varying views on Ukraine and Russia, it sometimes feels as if he himself does not know what he will think tomorrow – making it a sheer impossibility for anyone else.

    More broadly, there is a feeling that American politics is not currently amenable to debate, discussion and exchanges of information. While the extent to which the electorate is polarized may be exaggerated, politicians certainly seem to have retreated to entrenched positions and debate can seem like a concession to a sworn enemy. In that respect, there is something slightly old-fashioned about McFaul’s book. He may have prepared an intellectual case and a list of detailed propositions, but it feels as if his audience has long since left, taken up arms and rushed to the ideological barricades.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

  • The stubborn resilience of Mexico

    The stubborn resilience of Mexico

    When they looked back, indigenous historians remembered how the fall of the Aztec empire to Hernán Cortés had been prefigured by terrifying omens and portents. The central valley had been plagued by comets, eclipses and supernatural storms. The previous emperor, Ahuitzótl, died after hitting his head on a lintel. A strange woman stalked the streets of Tenochtitlán, the capital, at night, crying “O my sons! We are about to perish.”

    But there were other signs that might have been heeded, too. The empire itself was only a few decades old when Cortés arrived in 1519. It was a patchwork of rebellious territories and city states, surrounded by yet more hostile peoples. Tenochtitlán fell after a three-month siege in 1521. It was the Aztecs’ many local enemies that sealed the empire’s fate; Cortés proved better at negotiating competing political realities than many of his successors. At the beginning of that year, he had fewer than 600 of his own men under his command. Thanks to indigenous support, however, he had at his disposal more than 100,000 troops.

    As Paul Gillingham makes clear in his magnificent new history of post-conquest Mexico, this fractious relationship between the margins and the center, the governed and the governing, would prove a surprisingly consistent feature of Mexican politics over the centuries. Something of this tension is reflected in the book’s structure: a strong narrative is interspersed with chapters approaching it from different thematic perspectives that reflect some of the country’s many contradictions.

    New Spain, as the territory was called, would be a viceroyalty – a semi-autonomous kingdom – not a colony. Its autonomy was amplified by imperial indifference: “I have had no reply [to my letters],” Luis de Velasco, the second viceroy, wrote to Charles V in 1553. “It is two-and-a-half years since I wrote the first of them.” The indifference was often mutual. There was a diplomatic, if paradoxical, formula for evading unpalatable edicts: obedezco pero no cumplo (“I obey, but I won’t do it”).

    Stubbornness, the persistence of difference, is another recurrent theme; Gillingham stresses continuity as much as change. Old boundaries and family-based political structures remained largely in place. The elites that most indigenous people dealt with were their own from the pre-conquest world. The Montezuma family held power in Mexico City into the 1620s; a century later, one of them, the count of Montezuma, would be the last Habsburg viceroy.

    Nevertheless, the Spanish did bring profound disruption. New diseases – smallpox, typhoid, malaria, yellow fever and more – caused devastation. “They died in heaps, like bedbugs,” the Franciscan friar Motolinía reported of the arrival of smallpox in 1520. Two 16th-century outbreaks of enteric fever, a kind of typhoid, reduced the population of Texcoco from 15,000 to 600. The bishop of Oaxaca reported that in 20 years it killed 90 percent of his flock. Quarantine was one of the few available means of halting disease. The Spanish policy of congregación was its opposite: villagers were driven into towns where Christianity was easier to impose and people were easier to tax and control.

    Control wasn’t easy. Riots were common: Gillingham records 140 of them in central Mexico and Oaxaca alone between 1680 and 1811. The greatest, in Mexico City, in June 1692, began with the death of a pregnant woman in a hungry crowd outside the city’s grain exchange. Government buildings went up in flames, including the viceroy’s palace and the mint. There were moments of humor – “Shoot! Shoot!” one protester shouted. “And if you have no musket ball, hurl tomatoes!” – but 12 rioters were either hanged or beheaded. This was the exception, however. Reprisals were rare. Bargains were usually struck and order restored. Riots, Gillingham suggests, were typically “counterintuitive solutions to conflict.”

    Gillingham’s is first and foremost a political and economic history, and he is keen to show Mexico’s place on the world stage. First discovered in 1546, Mexican silver revolutionized the global economy, he argues. It flooded Europe. At least a third of it ended up in Asia, paying for silk and spices, tea and cotton. It also fueled urban growth in Mexico, making it “the world’s first wholly multicultural place.” To New Spain’s 160 ethnic groups were added some 150,000 people of African descent by the mid-17th century, together with traders and migrants from across Europe and Asia.

    The Spanish fought a long, futile taxonomic battle to demarcate the population along racial lines. An entire genre of painting – the pinturas de castas, showing 16 different Mexican racial types – was invented. But the enslavement of Indians was illegal from 1542. Those who sued their owners usually won. In 1549, two slaves named Pedro and Luisa sued the conquistador Nuño de Guzmán – notorious for torture, enslavement and slaughter – and secured both freedom and substantial compensation. Indians proved enthusiastic litigants: one judge complained of endless opportunistic lawsuits, “Indians against Indians… subjects against lords… towns against towns.”

    In 1810, two years after Napoleon placed his own brother on the Spanish throne, a parish priest in an obscure northern town launched a rebellion, ringing his church bell and shouting, “Death to the Spaniards! Long live the Virgin of Guadalupe!” It turned into a war. Independence came in August 1821. But it was only the beginning of Mexico’s troubles: the government changed hands 48 times in the next 34 years.

    The country’s elites became addicted to a distinctively Mexican form of low-fat coup called a pronunciamiento – Gillingham calls them “choreographed rituals” of revolt. Like the riots, they were more bargaining mechanism than revolutionary moment. General Santa Anna, intermittently the country’s president, specialized in them. He launched one in 1822 to reopen Congress and another in 1835 to close it. “He was very good at getting power,” Gillingham notes, “and very bad at exercising it.” The century also saw the beginning of Mexico’s difficulties with its increasingly powerful neighbor. “So far from God, so close to the United States,” the cliché ran. Texas seceded. The US invaded and took California, Utah and much else besides. The French put another Habsburg on the throne; Emperor Maximilian lasted three years before he was executed by Benito Juárez in 1867. His death was a watershed: between them, Júarez and a successor, Porfirio Díaz, would rule the country for more than 50 years.

    Mexico modernized fast, helped by foreign money: half of all US overseas investment went into Mexico. The country’s GDP trebled, but economic links to the US proved a double-edged sword. When the US went into recession in 1907, Mexico followed. Díaz, nearing 80, promised to allow free elections in 1910. Then he changed his mind.

    Guerrilla warfare erupted in the always-fractious north. The revolution lasted a decade. It cost close to one-and-a-half million lives – Gillingham calls it “the greatest mass dying in Latin America since the conquest” – and became a self-perpetuating cycle of violence. “La Revolución es la Revolución,” the saying went; a rhetorical shrug of the shoulders. Gillingham places the death toll in a contemporary global context. It is dwarfed by the collective dead of Ypres, the Somme and other such battles.

    A further civil war erupted in the 1920s between the government and the Catholic Cristeros; civil war, a contemporary wrote bitterly, was “Mexico’s national sport.” Another was assassination.

    Serious land reform arrived in the 1930s when the government redistributed nearly half of Mexico’s cultivable land – some 46 million acres. Lázaro Cárdenas, the president, hoped to “Mexicanize the indio,” the old dream at the heart of Mexican history. But there were always too many Mexicos, each as proud and independent as any other.

    From 1938 until 2000, the country was a one-party state – sometimes a dictablanda, a soft dictatorship with elements of both democracy and autocracy, but latterly unambiguously dictatorial.

    The October 1968 massacre of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of protesting students in Mexico City’s Tlatelolco district was a particular low. The government was in the early years of a guerra sucia, a “dirty war,” against some 40 different guerrilla groups nationwide. Suspects were disposed of in canvas sacks dropped from low-flying planes over the Pacific. How many isn’t known, but “the regime clearly killed thousands.” As ever, there are contradictions: this all coincided with 1,000 percent increases in health and welfare budgets; a million new homes were built for the country’s poor.

    Gillingham’s account of Mexico’s history since its return to democracy in 2000 is dominated by the war against the drug cartels, which has many of the hallmarks of a full-blown civil war. It’s another facet of the country’s complex relationship with America. Mexico’s drug use is low by global standards; the cartels exist to feed US demand. By 2020, 200,000 Mexicans had been killed and a similar number had become refugees. Migration is another constant. The country’s first female president, Claudia Sheinbaum, elected last year, has troubles to confront.

    But what a history her country has, and Gillingham’s account of it is a tour de force. If it’s easy for critics to focus on Mexico’s long struggle with internal violence, we might also think more about its enduring resilience and endless capacity for negotiating peace and stability – however contested – from apparent chaos. There is always cause for hope, however dark the omens. There are indeed many Mexicos; but there is also only one.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

  • Inside the gruesome world of the ‘human safari’

    Inside the gruesome world of the ‘human safari’

    “People don’t actually do that, right?” my publisher asked nervously. “No one actually goes on a human safari, do they?”

    Eight years ago, I didn’t know for sure. There had certainly been rumors for years that wealthy foreigners were traveling to conflict zones to kill civilians at random. Gradually I had concluded that some people were indeed heading off to complete their bucket list of horrors.

    In my novel To The Lions, I placed the “human safari” in a fictional refugee camp in southern Libya. Concrete proof, however, was almost impossible to find.

    Several times during my years as an investigative journalist, I heard stories about nightmarish things going on in places where law and order had collapsed. As part of my job, I visited refugee camps close to the Syrian border and in southern Bangladesh, where hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees have fled over years of conflict.

    Anyone who has spent time in refugee camps knows that human trafficking is almost routine. If someone isn’t worried about trafficking a preteen girl into a brothel, it’s not an enormous leap to assume that they might be open to enabling other forms of abuse. Slowly, depressingly, I started to realize that if you really wanted to – and, importantly, you had the cash – human safaris were indeed possible.

    And now evidence is finally starting to emerge. Prosecutors in Milan have just opened an investigation into Italians who allegedly visited Sarajevo during the Bosnian war in the 1990s to shoot at people trapped in the besieged city. Early on in that war, the main street running into Sarajevo became known as “Sniper Alley.” Thousands of people were killed there over a four-year period. Now prosecutors believe some of these deaths occurred because rich foreigners allegedly paid members of the Bosnian Serb army to escort them to the hills above Sarajevo to shoot and kill citizens.

    The prosecution in Milan doesn’t surprise me. When societies collapse, some people will go out and do exactly what they want. While I was reporting in Libya shortly before Muammar Gaddafi was killed in 2011, I watched excitable young men drive very expensive cars extremely fast along the seafront. They’d always wanted to do it, they said cheerfully, and now they could. A few days later they all ran out of gasoline and that was that.

    But what would you do if there was no risk of being caught? Some people want to kill. And in our globalized world, I believe that some of those people jump on a plane and head off to those collapsed societies in order to embark on the worst sort of tourism.

    The rumors were almost impossible to prove. The people who went on human safaris weren’t going to talk. Those in their sights – some of the most vulnerable people in the world – had no way of knowing what was going on until it was too late. Even if they had their suspicions, they had no one to tell. The rumors continued to emerge in odd places. While I was chasing Somali pirates around the Indian Ocean with the British Navy, the Royal Marines took several captives. It hadn’t been the most equal battle – a US Navy ship on one side of the tiny pirate ship, a British ship on the other and a Lynx helicopter firing rows of bullets straight over the pirate ship’s bow – but the pirates themselves were heavily armed with guns and rocket-propelled grenades.

    In the aftermath of the arrests, I went out to the tiny pirate ship with the Marines and spoke to the captives. Most of them were uncommunicative. One pirate – who memorably had six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot – was rather more chatty. He soon realized I was a journalist and attempted to spark up conversation with me first in fluent Italian and then in fluent German. He couldn’t speak English, but we eventually established that we could both speak French.

    After we had discussed the pirate’s cousin (who lived in Manchester), and he had suggested that we get married – a proposal I had to turn down – we moved on to stories he had heard about Russians prowling around the Red Sea attacking Somali pirates. These people, he insisted, were not Russian armed forces. They weren’t mercenaries hired by shipping magnates, either. These were people on expensive, glamorous yachts who wanted to kill someone – anyone. They were there for fun, the pirate said, and it was clear that no expense had been spared.

    As my would-be fiancé pointed out, absolutely no one was going to care if a Somali pirate was killed. Out on the high seas, no one would ever even know. And if anyone did find out, they might conclude that the pirate had got what he deserved.

    It is this gray area – where people manage to convince themselves that they’re meting out “justice” – that I suspect drives some “human safaris.” It is easy to find videos on social media of vigilantes claiming to have gunned down illegal immigrants who are attempting to cross the US/Mexico border. Heavily armed groups of civilians routinely patrol the border areas.

    “We were going out huntin’,” Bryan C. Perry, of Clarksville, Tennessee, announced on TikTok as he set out his plans to head down to the border in 2022. And he was going to “shoot to kill.” If you’re off to kill someone and you’re clearly going to enjoy it, where exactly is the line? Perry is now serving several life sentences.

    The late critic A.A. Gill faced a storm of complaints after he admitted that he had shot a baboon to “get a sense of what it might be like to kill someone, a stranger.” He was open in his curiosity, at least. Some people are fascinated by the idea of killing. They want to know how it feels to kill a man, a woman or a child. And in some parts of the world, they can satisfy that urge – and absolutely no one will stop them.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

  • Fact check: are the NYT’s experts right about UK immigration?

    Fact check: are the NYT’s experts right about UK immigration?

    Yesterday’s release of immigration figures by Britain’s Office of National Statistics didn’t make for particularly pleasant reading. While net migration had fallen to around 200,000 in the 12 months to June, much of this was down to an unusually high exodus of people, with 693,000 leaving the country over the same period. Many of those leaving were under the age of 30.

    That news, however, seemed to prompt something approaching gloating over at the New York Times, which published a piece yesterday headlined: “The British Public Thinks Immigration Is Up. It’s Actually Down, Sharply.” To labor the point, the piece was accompanied by a picture of anti-migration protestors in Scotland. The not-so-subtle subtext being: what a bunch of gammon thickos the anti-migration lot are in the UK.

    The piece went on to chastise Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, saying her “fiery rhetoric does not entirely match the reality” of migration, as well as Nigel Farage, Kemi Badenoch and the British public at large:

    Britain’s political elites are focusing the public’s attention on migration in ways that are not always accurate, especially when it comes to describing the scale of the flow of people into the country, experts say. That is helping to create a gap between how people perceive immigration in Britain and the facts.

    Hmmm, what are the facts though? And do they actually match the NYT’s version of reality?

    When you strip away the net migration figures – which are influenced by people leaving the country – and look at immigration alone, you perhaps get a clearer picture of the situation.

    The NYT rightfully mention that immigration was down last year from 1.3 million to around 898,000. But it rather neglects to mention the fact that this is still stupendously high in the history of the British Isles. It only looks like a sharp fall if you compare it to the peaks of 1.4 million in 2023.

    In fact, if you don’t count the Boriswave surge in immigration post-2020, last year would have been the highest recorded immigration since records began.

    In other words, it looks like the British public are far more in tune with the realities of immigration than the so-called experts advising the US paper of record.

    It looks like it’s gammons 1 – NYT 0.

  • Activist silence over Sudan speaks volumes

    Activist silence over Sudan speaks volumes

    The city of El Fasher, long a symbolic and strategic stronghold in Darfur, has in recent days become the site of atrocities so grave that the United Nations has openly warned of the risk of genocide. Videos reviewed by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights show scores of unarmed men executed in cold blood, some lying dead at the feet of Rapid Support Forces fighters, others dragged off and detained. Journalists and aid workers have disappeared. The last remaining functional hospital was shelled, killing patients and staff. The Saudi Maternity Hospital, once a rare lifeline, is now a mass grave.

    Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, has confirmed that his office is receiving “multiple, alarming reports” of summary executions and ethnically motivated killings. He has also warned of sexual violence, the targeting of civilians, and the use of starvation as a weapon.

    In January 2025, the United States government officially recognized the situation in Darfur as a genocide. That designation was based on documented patterns of targeted violence against the Masalit and other ethnic groups, carried out by the RSF with deliberate and systematic brutality. What is happening in El Fasher now appears to be a continuation of that same pattern, on a new and terrifying scale.

    Yet despite this, global attention has been almost non-existent. There are no viral campaigns, no slogans echoing across protest marches, no campus occupations. The cultural and political forces that mobilized with speed and intensity over Gaza have, in the case of Sudan, fallen almost entirely silent. The contrast is stark.

    The numbers speak with grim clarity. The Sudanese conflict has killed at least 150,000 people, displaced over ten million, and according to some reports starved thousands of children. Entire cities have been razed. Bodies lie buried in shallow graves along roadsides. And still, the attention from media, advocacy groups, and international institutions pales into insignificance when compared with the hysteria over Gaza.

    This dissonance raises uncomfortable questions. Why does a genocide carried out by paramilitaries with a documented record of mass atrocities provoke so little public response? Why has the legacy of the Janjaweed, now rebranded as the RSF, not inspired the same moral mobilization as other contemporary crises? It cannot be for lack of evidence. Nor can it be due to the complexity of the conflict, for the situation in Gaza is hardly less contested or politicized. The absence of Sudan from the activist conscience is hard to explain.

    Perhaps it’s a case of ideological selectivity. The Gaza conflict fits into a broader matrix of anti-colonial, racial and political narratives that have been adopted by global protest movements. Sudan, by contrast, does not map easily onto these frameworks. There are no obvious Western powers to blame, no clean dichotomy of occupier and occupied. And so, the killing of Sudanese civilians, even on genocidal terms, fails to galvanize.

    This is not an argument about proportionality. Every innocent civilian death is a tragedy, whether in Gaza, Sudan, or anywhere else. But the silence around Sudan is not merely an oversight. It is a revealing index of what captures the moral imagination of the world, and what does not. It suggests that certain atrocities only gain traction when they resonate with a pre-established political script, however transparently manipulated.

    Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the World Health Organization, has called the El Fasher hospital attack “horrific” and reiterated that “health care is not a target.” The Sudanese Journalists’ Syndicate has demanded the release of Muammar Ibrahim and warned that communications blackouts are placing civilians and reporters at grave risk. Such pleas relating to hospitals and journalists may sound familiar from a war where one side openly and deliberately abused medical facilities and the guise of journalists to carry out brutal terrorism and killing: that in Gaza. And still, in this case, the world barely blinks.

    Sudan does not lack for suffering. What it lacks is a globalised network of advocacy targeting our media, schools, universities, pop concerts, fashion designs, and cultural institutions. The very experts and campaigners who demand accountability elsewhere must now be asked: why have they gone quiet here? If the war in Gaza is paused why has none of their energy to write open letters and organise marches been directed toward the dying in El Fasher?

    I know the answer. Do you?