Category Archives: United States

Britain, Europe, Government, Politics, Russia, Society, Ukraine, United States

Europe must awaken or face great insecurity in 2026

EUROPE

THE great Victorian jurist, Sir Henry Maine, wrote: “War appears to be as old as mankind… but peace is a modern invention”. Events in the early part of 2026 will doubtless prove his wisdom by showing the awful fragility of that particular invention.

Even if they had never heard of Maine, the most complacent Europeans should have learnt from Vladimir Putin’s relentless onslaught against Ukraine that peace is neither a natural state nor the default setting of advanced countries, but rather a historical aberration that can only be preserved through strength and vigilance.

Yet, in 2025, we discovered how Europe remains divided between nations that grasp this lesson – or never forgot it – and those that cling with obstinance to old delusions. Leading the former category are Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Having broken free of the Kremlin within living memory, these countries know exactly what it means to be invaded by Russia: they will do anything to prevent this from happening again.

And what of Britain? Despite Sir Keir Starmer’s grandiose rhetoric (“a battle-ready armour-clad nation”), Britain remains firmly imprisoned in the camp of the deluded. The PM revealed his priorities in the Budget when he preferred social policies over defence, such as appeasing Labour backbenchers by abolishing the two-child benefit cap. This Government will allocate another £17bn to welfare by 2030, the exact sum that would have allowed Britain to increase defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP. This looks as if Sir Keir has decided to place his own political survival – and the prejudices of his party – before the national security of his country, and for that there is bound to be a reckoning.

The outcome of those decisions is that Britain will enter 2026 at greater risk than was necessary. The perils ahead could scarcely be greater. The first and most immediate danger is that Donald Trump could collaborate with Putin to impose Russia’s peace terms on Ukraine. The guns along the frozen 800-mile front might then fall silent, but any respite would almost certainly be temporary while Russia rearms and regroups. If Putin achieves what he believes to be victory in Ukraine, he would be emboldened to come back for more. We should remember that today’s tragedy in Ukraine is Putin’s third war of attrition and conquest since the assault on Georgia in 2008. Like all aggressors, his appetite remains insatiable.

If there is a flawed peace in 2026, Putin’s next move could be a renewed attack on Ukraine, to achieve his original goal of subjugating the entire country. He might consider still more dangerous options. If he concludes that Mr Trump no longer cares about defending America’s allies, Putin could risk attacking a NATO member and the signs are ominous. If so, Britain would be obliged to stand with our allies and go to war with Russia, the world’s biggest nuclear power. Do we in Britain have any idea of what this would entail, or where such a crisis might lead?

There are still ways of ensuring that we never have to find out. We can rally our European allies to deliver more support to Ukraine, protecting Volodymyr Zelensky from being muscled into a false peace that rewards aggression. And we must do whatever is necessary to secure America’s commitment to NATO. Both imperatives require Britain and the rest of Europe to emulate Poland and its neighbours and spend far more on defence.

The second danger and the threat is rising is that China’s colossal military build-up might culminate in a confrontation with the United States and its allies in the Pacific. In 2025 alone, China commissioned 14 frigates and destroyers into its fleet; the Royal Navy, by contrast, has only 13 of these warships. 2026 has begun with China conducting intensive exercises in the waters around Taiwan, apparently simulating a blockade of that democratic island.

A full-scale invasion of Taiwan remains unlikely, this year, though Xi Jinping is believed to have ordered the People’s Liberation Army to be ready in 2027. But no possibility can be excluded and China’s lightning military expansion will heighten the danger. That threat is likely to reach its peak later in this decade.

Elsewhere, Mr Trump is going to have to decide whether to go to war in Venezuela to overthrow Nicolas Maduro’s autocracy. The biggest deployment of US forces in the Caribbean for nearly 40 years cannot be sustained indefinitely. If the president orders US forces into action, the first new conflict of 2026 would be a regime change operation in Caracas, probably combining air strikes with covert action on the ground.

Another authoritarian anti-Western leader who may be fearing for his regime’s future is Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran. The new year is opening with mass protests in Tehran and other cities.

The Ayatollah’s authority was severely weakened by the successful Israeli-US strike on Iran’s nuclear plants last June. As Khamenei approaches a point of maximum weakness, there must be a chance that 2026 could see the downfall of Iran’s regime, though no-one knows who will take over.

Above all, this has to be the year when Europe finally awakens to the threats and relearns the art of defending itself against aggression. If not, it may be too late to save the modern invention of peace.

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Arts, Books, History, Nuclear Weapons, Russia, Society, United States

Book Review: The Nuclear Age

LITERARY REVIEW

FOLLOWING that day in the summer of 1945 when, on a testing ground in the New Mexico desert – when the first nuclear bomb exploded – many people of that era and generation have lived their entire lives under the threat of universal extermination.

It caused Robert Oppemheiemer, the brilliant scientist heading the US’s Manhattan Project, to proclaim melodramatically (but entirely accurately) an ancient Hindu prophecy: “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Just three weeks later, in early August, the bomb was used for real for the first time against an enemy – in a blinding flash, and a shockwave that destroyed the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

Pavements melted, skin peeled off faces, more than 60,000 perished immediately, and in the following five months another 60,000 died from injuries and radiation.

Three days later, Nagasaki was given the same treatment. The original target had been a different city but heavy cloud cover saved it, diverting the US B29 bomber 125 miles south. Two square miles of the city centre were pulverised. Some 70,000 people died a horrible death.

And amazingly, those were the last fatalities of nuclear explosions. Eighty years on the world has somehow managed to avoid that apocalyptic and life-threatening tripwire of its own making.

So far.

This history is necessary to understand and should be imprinted on all our brains. It’s a miracle we are still here. Because in an unstable world (and increasingly so) we are all one reckless move, one miscalculation, one technical glitch, one individual’s moment of madness, away from Doomsday.

How the lid has been kept on nuclear Armageddon is plotted by acclaimed historian Serhii Plokhy in this chilling and bewildering book.

Bewildering because all we have ever done is make the threat greater, while posturing about the importance of containing it, claiming nonsensically that massive overkill is making the world a safer place.

In 1962, Soviet Union ships carrying nuclear weapons headed for a clash with an American blockade of Fidel Castro’s Cuba in the Cuban Missile Crisis. This was the nuclear confrontation between US President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev that came toe to toe.

If no one blinked, it was inevitable that those red buttons would have been pushed, missiles would’ve been fired, and the world would have been a goner. The end of history itself had beckoned.

Other than being flippant towards the world ending, how else could you deal with the apocalypse being hours, minutes, or just seconds away? Because the very idea is impossible to grasp. Do you hide under a desk as a civilisation built up over millennia is blown apart and a world of abundance is reduced to ashes?

With Cuba, the moment passed. The world survived. Plokhy argues that neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev was ready to push the button. They both pulled back.

And next time? Can we rely on the same calculated response from today’s leaders, from the likes of Putin, Trump, Kim Jong-un, Xi?

Since that’s the threat we live under, and yet we not only get on with our lives and look the other way, but we up the arsenal – increasing the destructive power to the point of absurdity.

Only recently, Putin boasted of a new Russian super-submarine with “unstoppable” weaponry that can fire nuclear drones at Western coastlines from thousands of miles away. In direct response, Trump ordered the US to restart nuclear testing.

Escalation and proliferation like this are the underlying narratives of the nuclear age: the powerful few believing they can keep the weapons to themselves, but finding all they have done is to provide an incentive to other nations to follow suit as quick as possible for fear of being left behind. The cat- and- mouse of the nuclear age; history is littered with such examples. The US threw its scientists into nuclear research for fear of Hitler getting there first and the Nazis snatching a late victory in the Second World War.

Then Stalin had to have his, Britain, too, then France, China, Israel, India. The club just got bigger; containment became harder and much more problematic. World leaders talked non-proliferation, but that’s easier said than done once the genie is firmly out of the bottle.

That genie is now ubiquitous. Officially there are nine fully fledged nuclear-armed states in the world. Yet, the most worrying assertion of all in this deeply disturbing book is that around 40 more states have access to the requisite technology, raw material and capability to produce nuclear weaponry, in some cases at very short notice.

That’s the size and extent of the timebomb each and every global citizen is sitting on.

Those scientists – the Einsteins, Bohrs, and so on – who first developed the principle and then the practicality of releasing unimaginable amounts of energy through nuclear fission and fusion, begged their political and military leaders to concentrate on the massive peaceful benefits of their discoveries.

Presidents and generals agreed; but first, they said, there is the enemy to defeat, this opponent and adversary to match, this military threat to see off.

Eight decades on, that’s where we still are. Plokhy’s account of the nuclear age hardly inspires optimism for the future.

He concludes that fundamentally it is the fear of annihilation that has kept us from the brink – the general agreement that it is in no one’s interest to perish in a global nuclear apocalypse. That held true in the Cuba crisis. He writes: “We must enhance the instinct of self-preservation shared by friends and foes alike to save the world once again.”

And keep our collective fingers crossed.

– The Nuclear Age by Serhii Plokhy is published by Allen Lane, 432pp

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Iran, Israel, Middle East, Politics, United States

Israel’s attack on Iran: A perilous situation

MIDDLE EAST

Intro: The recklessness of the Israeli government and the incoherence of US foreign policy deepens the crisis in the Middle East

American presidents who believed they could easily restrain Benjamin Netanyahu have quickly learned their lesson. Bill Clinton’s expletive fuelled language after his first meeting with the Israeli prime minister warned the world that even America’s might as a superpower was no restraint against Netanyahu’s aims.

It increasingly looks as if Donald Trump, too, has succumbed to Israeli wishes. The US State Department quickly declared that the devastating Israeli attacks on Iran – which killed key military commanders and nuclear scientists, as well as striking its missile capacity and a nuclear enrichment site – was unilateral. President Trump had urged Mr Netanyahu to hold off, pending imminent US talks with Iran over its nuclear programme. The suspicion is that Israel feared that a deal might be reached and wanted to strike first. Israeli officials, however, have briefed that they had a secret green light from the US, with Mr Trump the only one to oppose it.

Iran, raging with anger from the attack but afraid of looking too weak to retaliate, is unlikely to believe that the US did not acquiesce to the offensive. It might suit it better to pretend otherwise – in the short-term, it is not clear what ability it has to hit back at Israel, never mind taking on the US. Mr Trump has made that harder still by threatening “even more brutal attacks” ahead, urging Iran to “make a deal, before there’s nothing left” and claiming that “we knew everything”. Whether Israel had convinced Mr Trump that this was the way to cut a deal, or he is offering a post-hoc justification after being outflanked by Mr Netanyahu, may no longer matter.

Israel has become dangerously confident of its ability to reshape the Middle East without pushing it over the brink. It believes that its recent pummelling of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran’s air defences have created an opportunity to destroy the existential threat posed by the Iranian nuclear programme before it is too late. Russia is not about to ride to Tehran’s rescue, and while Gulf States don’t want instability, they are not distraught to see an old adversary weakened.

But not least in the reckoning is surely that Mr Netanyahu, who survives politically through military action, has only just narrowly survived a parliamentary vote in the Knesset. The Israeli government also faces mounting international condemnation over its war crimes in Gaza – though the US and others have allowed those crimes to continue. It is destroying the nation’s international reputation, yet may bolster domestic support through this campaign.

The obvious question now is the future of a key Iranian enrichment site deep underground at Fordo, which many believe Israel could not destroy without US “bunker busters”. If Israel believes that taking out key personnel and some infrastructure is sufficient to preclude Iran’s nuclear threat, that is a huge and perilous gamble. This attack may well trigger a rush to a full nuclear-armed status by Iran – and ultimately others – and risks spurring more desperate measures in the meantime. The implicit and more likely danger is that Israel will hope to draw in Washington, by persuading it that Iran is a paper tiger or baiting Tehran into attacking US targets.

At his inaugural speech before becoming president, Mr Trump claimed: “My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier.” Yet, reportedly, he now seems unconcerned about a regional war breaking out due to Israel’s strikes. Few around the world will feel so sanguine. The current incoherence and incomprehensibility of US foreign policy fuels instability and risks drawing others towards fateful miscalculations.

ISRAEL has been warning the United Nations for more than a decade that Iran’s hardline Islamic regime was on the brink of developing a nuclear warhead.

The doom-laden rhetoric of the country’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has become almost part of the global background noise. Like the attention-seeking shepherd-boy in Aesop’s fairytale, he has cried, “Wolf!” so many times that the reaction of most world leaders has been to ignore his false alarms.

The ancient fable, though, ends with a dark twist, when a real wolf attacks the sheep. And within the last few days the UN’s nuclear watchdog has finally sat up and taken notice, approving a resolution that accuses Iran of breaking its pledges not to develop nuclear weapons.

The country’s Islamic fundamentalist government has always claimed that its nuclear programme is simply about “clean energy”. But that is an obvious lie. Iran could always have simply purchased nuclear reactors from Russia and generated ample electricity – but without the plutonium fuel vital to the production of nuclear weapons being under Tehran’s control.

Not only would that have been a far cheaper option, but it could also have led to the lifting of Western sanctions. This would, of course, have been a big win for most of the country, but not its supreme leader, 86-year-old Ayatollah Khamenei.

He has proved more than willing to sacrifice the wellbeing of his subjects, the people who suffer most from the deprivation resulting from sanctions, by choosing instead to pour billions into nuclear laboratories buried a mile or more underground.

And if the mullahs do succeed in developing nuclear weapons, they will unleash devastation on a neighbour they have long wanted to bomb back to the Stone Age.

Nothing less than a complete abandonment of uranium enrichment in Iran is acceptable to Washington and that is what the US will continue to seek to achieve of the Iranian regime.

The Americans have started calling the Ayatollah’s bluff by suggesting that they could facilitate the enrichment of uranium to the level required for electricity production, but not to a weapons-grade level, outside Iran under strict US control through the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

The IAEA, however, believes Iran could already have enough enriched uranium for as many as ten warheads, an estimate based on the copious traces of radioactive heavy metal detected at unofficial bomb-making facilities, deep underground in remote regions. The Ayatollah has made a pretence of condemning nuclear weapons research for more than 20 years. In 2003 he issued a fatwa (religious edict), declaring that Islam forbids the development, production, stockpiling, or use of such bombs. But the fatwa means nothing – because Shia Muslim law also permits believers to lie in self-defence, especially when they feel they are facing persecution.

And the real truth is revealed in a joint statement by Iran’s foreign ministry and its own Atomic Energy Organisation, announcing it will replace its current centrifuges, crucial for enriching uranium, with state-of-the-art equipment at Fordow, one of its main nuclear sites.

The IAEA’s resolution marks the first time in more than 20 years that it has accused Iran of breaching its promises. This time, they too believe the wolf is preparing to attack. The obvious target is Israel, which Tehran has repeatedly threatened to destroy. In 2005, the then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared “the occupying Zionist regime must be wiped off the map” – an explicit call repeated by many others over the years in Iran’s theocratic regime.

Ten warheads of a similar destructive power to the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945 would be far more than the number required to obliterate Israel. Just three might be enough to wipe it off the map – one on Tel Aviv, one on Haifa, and one on West Jerusalem.

Those three cities contain about 10 per cent of the nation’s total population. But Israel is a tiny country, and radiation fall-out from three bombs could make the entire country uninhabitable.

Israel’s famous Iron Dome missile shield, as well as its David’s Sling, Arrow and Thaad air defence systems, are not impenetrable. Last month, Houthi rebels in Yemen hit Ben Gurion airport between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv with what they described as a “hypersonic” missile – manufactured and supplied by Iran.

Until just recently, many observers thought Iran’s uranium facilities were less of a real threat than they seemed, because warheads and missiles are useless without a third component: the detonator.

Now, it appears scientists at the Parchin facility south of Tehran have successfully manufactured a trigger powerful enough to set off a nuclear explosion.

All the pieces are in place. For those praying for a negotiated solution to the crisis, and not a military one, is that Iran’s launching pads are out in the open. That will at least give Western politicians some hope.

Unlike China and Russia, which can covertly prepare their nuclear missiles for launch inside concrete bunkers, the Iranians have to position and fuel their weapons on the surface – a process that can take 40 minutes. In theory, that gives the West an opportunity to launch a retaliatory strike first, using conventional or nuclear weapons. The Israelis’ strikeback missiles are kept on permanent readiness, capable of launch within three minutes.

To wait until Iran is less than an hour away from hitting Israel is high-risk policy. Until now, the West has always baulked at the alternative – to approve a knock-out strike against Fordow and Iran’s other subterranean facility, Natanz, both in inaccessible mountainous regions.

Some protagonists in Israel believe a unilateral atomic strike is justified: using a nuke to stop the nukes. But this approach is likely to fail for two reasons. Firstly, most of the energy in a nuclear blast is confined to the surface. Whole cities can be vapourised but bunkers deep underground might well survive undamaged. Secondly, a worldwide escalation in hostilities sparked by such an attack would probably be unstoppable. Russia could feel emboldened to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine, for example.

More likely, and more effective, would be a series of bunker-busting bombs – blasting an ever-deeper crater until the enrichment facilities are destroyed, even if they are protected by concrete a mile thick.

Tactically, could this work? There are two problems. One is logistical: how does Israel get the bombs to the target? Iran’s air defences have scarcely been tested and might easily be capable of picking missiles or warplanes out of the sky. To launch a mega-attack and fail to damage the nuclear facilities would risk conflagration and all-out war.

The other difficulty is a moral one. Crucial segments of the Iranian programme are based in or near Tehran. The entire ten million population of the capital city is being used as a human shield. Could Britain and the US stomach civilian casualties, especially if it provoked a wave of terrorist reprisals?

Without US help, Israel would not be able to obtain the bunker-busters nor the heavy bomber aircraft required to strike Iran’s nuclear boltholes. These bombers could fly from British bases in Cyprus or the Chagos Islands. This raises the danger of terrorist blowback to “very high”, but backing off means giving in to terrorism and nuclear blackmail.

Israel may well have a brilliant undercover attack planned. Ukraine’s great success smuggling drones under Operation Spider’s Web for mass attacks, deep inside Russia, might be a model. Pinpoint bombing of the entrances and ventilation shafts at Fordow or Natanz, for example, could put a uranium facility out of action for months, trapping the scientists inside to suffocate or starve.

The nature of a nuclear war is horrible and grim. Every possible outcome is terrifying as the threat of full-scale war increases.

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