Contact The Editor
Articles By This Author
I emerge briefly from my coma to find that, in a turbulent world, some things never change. In 2022, all the experts were talking about international sanctions bringing Russia to its knees within weeks, and anyway Putin was obviously dying if not dead already. Four-and-a-half years later, the experts are still agreed that sanctions will bring Russia to its knees any day now, and that Putin is deader than ever.
Oh, no, sorry, my bad: now the sanctions are going to bring Russia Iran to its knees within weeks, and their leader is as dead as the Kremlin's not-so-strongman was in 2022. It's like David Merrick's all-black production of Hello, Dolly! - new Persian players for the same old leaden plot. Or one of those Hollywood "reboots" where they make Iron Man gay: reboots on the ground, in Lindsey Graham-speak. Headline from yesterday's New York Post:
Mojtaba Khamenei had to be 'pulled from the rubble' of hospital after US strikes nearly killed him a second time
As highly decorated twenty-seven-star lobbyist General Jack Keane would say: Finish the job! There must be one Tomahawk left down the back of the sofa or whatever.
Fortunately, with a mere forty trillion in federal debt, America is nowhere as near economic collapse as Russia or Iran or wherever's next. And, unlike Vlad and Mojtaba pushing up daisycutters, Washington's indestructible strongman is back on the job:
I'd like to see Putin try to do that!
On the other hand, the Iran war has, apparently effortlessly, brought Britain to economic ruin, which may be why the UK's hitherto all-powerful iron-fisted caudillo has not been seen since late July, even by his favourite Ukrainian rent boys.
Still, the good news is that every day Russia inches closer to that 2022 collapse:
The Novoshakhtinsk refinery in the southern Russian region of Rostov was hit by drones and had to be taken offline, regional governor Yury Slyusar said in a post on Telegram early on Friday.
As a result of the drone attacks, the Novoshakhtinsk refinery, which has the capacity to process 110,000 barrels of crude oil per day, was damaged and halted operations, the official said...
Ukraine continues its campaign to cripple Russian refining capacity, fuel supply, and export revenues. Due to the low refinery production, Russia has been forced to ban diesel exports for months and is likely to extend the ban beyond September 30. The ban was initially introduced in July as Ukraine has continuously taken Russian refineries offline.
That's great news, isn't it?
Whoops, my mistake: in another exciting plot twist, bringing the Russian economy to its knees is now a bad thing. Because the, er, Houthis have done a Lindsey Graham and put their flip-flops on the ground:
The Houthis' capture of Mocha has transformed the war in Yemen — and the geopolitics of the Red Sea
Are you a renowned geopolitical expert? Are you free for a quick Zoom hit on what happens if the Iran-backed Iraqi militias bomb the strategically vital Saudi port of Macchiato? Ha! Gotcha!
Notwithstanding these distractions, what rank-and-file voters want to know is who's two points up in Iowa. After all, we live in a golden age of popular self-government where Abdul el-Sayed is "America's next Obama" and Elif Eralp is "Germany's Zohran Mamdani" and Sadiq Khan is the next Sadiq Khan. Iowa-wise, Republican control of the Senate is all down to Nicki Minaj.
As you'll have gathered from all the foregoing, news is bollocks. And yet, to return to where we came in, the strange persistence of certain recurring themes is itself newsworthy. It is curious, for example, that every western European leader insists on alerting his citizenry that "war with Russia could begin at any moment".
Why? It's fairly obvious that Moscow has determined to conclude the Ukraine war on the battlefield and to hold what it has taken: to the victor the spoils, as President Trump remarked at the UN General Assembly. In the course ofan agreeable week or so in Odessa, it took me a day or two to notice that seventy per cent of the locals speak Russian and that the preferred items I painstakingly learned from the breakfast menu were not in fact in Ukrainian. So I can see why the Kremlin might jib at letting Nato turn it into the Lindsey Graham Memorial Headquarters for the new forward operating bases that used to be in the Gulf. In the weeks since my pre-coma vacation, Putin has destroyed the town's port and reduced Ukraine to a de facto landlocked country.
Tough for the Ukrainians. So the European political class has volunteered you - yes, you, Clive Higginbotham of Rotherham, and you, Jean-Marie Durand of Clichy-sous Bois, and you, Stig Karlsson of Malmö - to go and fight the Russian bear. The Pakistani minicab-driver will take care of your wife and daughters while you're away. When the Donbass is in peril, what fainthearted ninny worries about his own territorial integrity? In London the government's busy giving away Northern Ireland, Gibraltar, the British Indian Ocean Territory and the English South Coast to, respectively, Brussels, Madrid, Port Louis and every sex-fiend in Somalia, so your sovereign territory is hardly at issue, is it, you whiny loser?
Even so, you'd think impending nuclear armageddon would be a wee bit politically controversial. Au contraire, it's impeccably non-partisan. Here, for example, is a discussion about next month's blitzkrieg against Russia between the Rt Hon Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, former Lord President of Her late Majesty's Privy Council and a "conservative", and Mr Paul Richards, former chair of the Fabian Society and a "socialist":
Got that? If you oppose war with Russia, the "conservative" wants to throw you in gaol because Britain suspended habeas corpus during the Napoleonic Wars and the "socialist" wants to throw you in gaol under the 1914 Defence of the Realm Act.
Because that's all the choice anyone needs in a functioning democracy. So good luck findng a Neither Of The Above candidate who'll be permitted to take power. After all, the winning party in this month's German elections is, per the intelligence agencies, a "Russian sleeper cell".
But but but, splutter my correspondents, aren't you worried that Iran is two weeks away from a nuclear weapon? Actually, I assume the deceased ayatollahs have used the seven months since February 28th to acquire nukes. Wouldn't you?
I have argued previously that we are in the last half-decade of being able, even theoretically, to change course via the electoral system. Forty-three per cent of Americans "view socialism favourably", so all the GOP's doing with that billion-dollar ad-buy shrieking the other guy's a commie is driving Dem turnout. The UK's. cosplay conservatives such as Sir Jacob Farq-Hwitt have conserved precisely nothing other than their own wealth and status: beyond that, he and his confrères have cost you your country. Meanwhile, the Pope praises the motto of the French Revolution, and one of his priests calls Islam "an alternative form of Byzantine Christianity". I don't think Mehmet II saw it that way, nor the fellows on the receiving end of his prodigious appetite for sodomising and beheading.
Be that as it may, for the rest of us it is increasingly clear that there is no way back to what was. Therefore, to save the west will require pushing our way through to build something new.
Not the most cheery thought to start the week, but there we are. Brent Crude opened at $109, but relax, they'll talk it down to $104 by the Friday close. And pay no attention to those bond yields unless it's Bond yielding to Pussy Galore.
And, on that note, back to my coma.
Mark's international bestseller America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. If you haven't read the book during its first seventeen years, well, you're missing a treat. It's still in print in hardback and paperback. (Buy it at a 77% discount by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at a 47% discount by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR)
(COMMENT, BELOW)
Mark Steyn is an international bestselling author, a Top 41 recording artist, and a leading Canadian human rights activist. Among his books is "The Undocumented Mark Steyn: Don't Say You Weren't Warned". (Buy it at a 49% discount by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at a 67% discount by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR)