It’ll All Be Over by Christmas (Again)

Everyone likes a quick war. Politicians especially. A brisk little campaign, a few triumphant press conferences, some flags behind the podium, and everyone home in time for Christmas. It is a recurring fantasy of modern politics, rather like the belief that tax cuts always pay for themselves or that the next technological miracle will fix the electricity grid.

Donald Trump declaring he does not need Britain in a war that has already been won sits neatly in that tradition. Apparently the conflict is finished. Victory achieved. No allies required. One imagines someone somewhere is still firing things, but that is presumably just a formality.

History is full of these moments of premature triumph. In 1914 European leaders confidently assured their populations the war would be over by Christmas. They were correct in the sense that there was indeed a Christmas that year. Unfortunately the war carried on through four more of them while Europe industrialised the process of killing young men in muddy fields.

More recently Vladimir Putin appears to have thought Ukraine would be subdued in a matter of weeks. Russian units reportedly carried parade uniforms in their kit for the anticipated victory march in Kyiv. Several years on the war is still grinding away and the parade uniforms remain, one assumes, folded neatly in a warehouse somewhere next to a depressing collection of destroyed armour.

The pattern is familiar because the mistake is familiar. The first phase of a war is usually the easy bit. Armies advance, governments fall, maps get redrawn on television graphics. The hard part begins afterwards when the defeated side declines to accept the script and starts fighting back in awkward and unpredictable ways. Iraq in 2003 was “won” in about three weeks. The unpleasant business that followed lasted years and cost rather more than the original celebration suggested.

Which makes Trump’s remark less a piece of military analysis and more a familiar bit of political theatre. It sounds decisive. It sounds strong. It has the comforting simplicity of a boxing match where someone has already been knocked out.

There is also the small matter of how alliances actually work. If you genuinely want allies in a conflict, there is usually a bit of groundwork involved. Decades of it, in fact. Cooperation, shared intelligence, joint planning, bases, training exercises, and the occasional polite effort not to insult them in public. The United States has historically been extremely good at this. NATO did not appear out of thin air. Neither did the Five Eyes intelligence network or the dense web of military cooperation with countries like Britain.

Trump’s approach has tended to be rather different. Allies are freeloaders. NATO is a protection racket. Trade wars with partners are a useful negotiating tactic. The general tone is that alliances are rather like golf club memberships that should be cancelled if the annual fee looks a bit high.

Which makes the current complaint faintly comic. If you spend years telling your allies they are unnecessary, unreliable, or ripping you off, you should not be terribly shocked if they appear slightly less eager when the shooting starts. Allies are not something you summon like room service. His transactional view of diplomacy has worked against him - spectacularly.

Still, declaring victory early does have its advantages. It saves the awkward business of planning the next phase, the one where the war inconveniently refuses to behave like a press release.

And if events later suggest the war was not quite finished after all, there will always be another press conference explaining that victory had technically already happened and reality simply failed to notice.

The Job That Ate the Dictionary

Portfolio Scope:

"The CIMO leads the organisation’s impact and movement portfolio. This means catalising systems transformation beyond businesses’ adoption of core products - orchestrating movement building and collective action, strategic partnerships and fundraising, brand and communications leadership, policy and advocacy, and programmes that demonstrate systemic change. By combining external influence with internal narrative, the CIMO ensures the organisation shows up in the world as both a credible standards organisation and a catalyst for economic transformation that creates the conditions for an economy that works for people and the planet."

I occasionally read job adverts for entertainment. Not because I am looking for work, you understand. More because every so often you stumble across a masterpiece of modern language, the kind where each sentence appears to mean something until you actually try to translate it into English.

This one begins by announcing responsibility for an “impact and movement portfolio”. I confess that at this point I pictured a sort of leather briefcase containing several carefully organised movements. Perhaps climate in the left pocket, economic transformation in the right, and a spare systemic change tucked under the flap in case the first two misfire.

The successful applicant will apparently “catalise systems transformation”. Now catalysts are very useful things in chemistry, but they normally work because someone has built a reactor, assembled the chemicals and applied some heat. Here the catalytic process appears to involve strategic partnerships, internal narrative and the organisation “showing up in the world”, which sounds less like chemistry and more like a motivational poster in a co working space.

Then comes the job scope. Brand leadership, communications, fundraising, policy, advocacy, partnerships and programmes demonstrating systemic change. In most places that would describe half the executive team. Here it is rolled together into one heroic figure who will presumably stride through the corridors each morning transforming entire economic systems before coffee.

My favourite line is the bit about “combining external influence with internal narrative”. In ordinary language that means making sure the story the organisation tells about itself matches the story it tells everyone else. Which, when you strip away the incense and chanting, is more or less what every marketing department has done since the invention of the leaflet.

The whole thing has a faintly theatrical feel to it. One imagines a meeting where someone says, “What we really need is someone to run partnerships and communications,” and another person replies, “Yes, but could we frame that as catalising global systems transformation?” After which everyone nods thoughtfully and reaches for the oat milk lattes.

Of course there probably is a real job buried somewhere under all this. Most likely it involves raising money, talking to politicians, managing some NGOs and ensuring the organisation appears in enough conferences and press releases to remain visible. Perfectly respectable work, if described plainly.

But that would never do. You cannot advertise for someone to run partnerships and communications when you could instead recruit a Chief Impact and Movement Officer responsible for redesigning the global economy.

Still, it does make one wonder what the Monday morning briefing looks like.

“Right then. Before lunch we’ll catalise systemic economic transformation. After that we’ll orchestrate a bit of collective action. And if there’s time before tea, we’ll make sure the organisation shows up in the world.”

Blair or Starmer - Choose Your Villain

For years the British right has enjoyed the convenience of having two very reliable villains. Tony Blair is the war criminal who lied Britain into Iraq and should apparently never again be trusted with anything more dangerous than a paperclip. Keir Starmer, meanwhile, is widely described as the most hated Prime Minister in history, presiding over national decline at a speed that suggests the country may sink into the sea before teatime.

Normally this arrangement works perfectly well. Blair represents the reckless interventionism of the past. Starmer represents the allegedly hopeless leadership of the present. The script is simple and everyone knows which lines to deliver.

Unfortunately the current argument about Iran has rather carelessly put the two men on opposite sides of the same question. Blair has emerged to say that Britain should have been more robust in backing Trump’s action and showing solidarity with Washington, a view shared by most on the right of British politics. Starmer has taken a more cautious line, supporting allies but avoiding the sort of enthusiastic war talk that tends to age badly once the shooting starts.

This leaves the right with a small but awkward choice. If they want Britain loudly backing Trump’s war, then they find themselves agreeing with Tony Blair, the man they normally introduce as a war criminal whenever Iraq is mentioned. If they want restraint and caution, then they are suddenly rather close to Keir Starmer, the supposedly disastrous Prime Minister they spend most of their time denouncing.

So they must now decide whether to support Blair or support Starmer. One involves backing the man they still blame for Iraq. The other involves admitting that the most hated Prime Minister in living memory might have the steadier instinct when someone in Washington starts reaching for the missiles.

It is not an easy dilemma if your political worldview depends on both men being wrong about everything at all times. The simplest solution will probably be to ignore the contradiction entirely and continue shouting at both of them anyway. Consistency has never been the strong suit of political commentary.

The Joss Stick Conspiracy

There exists in Britain a quiet conspiracy, conducted not by shadowy men in dark suits, but by cheerful middle-aged women in floaty scarves who say things like “energy” with a straight face. It concerns joss sticks.

Joss sticks, we are assured, come in endless varieties. Sandalwood. Dragon’s Blood. Himalayan Moonflower. Tibetan Cedar. Japanese Plum Blossom Whisper. Each promises a unique sensory journey, an olfactory pilgrimage across continents and centuries. Yet light one, any one, and within seconds the room fills with exactly the same smell. Not similar. Not related. Identical.

It is the smell of a 1978 student bedsit that has not seen fresh air since the Winter of Discontent.

This smell transcends geography, culture, and common sense. You can buy joss sticks in a National Trust gift shop beneath an oil painting of an admiral, or in a dimly lit shop in Glastonbury staffed by someone called Rowan who has opinions about ley lines. It makes no difference. The moment flame meets stick, they all revert to the Universal Joss Stick Smell. It is as if somewhere in the world there is a single enormous factory labelled “Incense”, producing one batch in 1963, and everything since has simply been relabelled with increasing levels of optimism.

What fascinates me is the language. No other consumer product enjoys such creative freedom with the truth. Imagine if other industries behaved like this. You buy a bottle of wine labelled “Tuscan Reserve”, and it tastes exactly like Tesco cooking sherry. You purchase an Aston Martin, and under the bonnet is a lawnmower engine. Yet with joss sticks, the fiction persists unchallenged. People light “Sacred Himalayan Pine”, inhale deeply, and nod thoughtfully, as if detecting notes of altitude and yak.

They are detecting notes of burning dust.

I once conducted an experiment, entirely in the interests of science. I purchased three different varieties. One was “Ancient Temple Sandalwood”, one was “Mystic Forest Rain”, and the third was “Celestial Amber”. I lit them in separate rooms, left them for ten minutes, and returned blind. I could not distinguish between them. The only measurable variable was the rate at which they made the house smell like a charity shop in 1985.

Even the marketing imagery betrays the truth. The packaging shows waterfalls, monks, misty mountains, and abstract swirls of enlightenment. None shows what actually happens, which is a thin column of smoke drifting lazily toward the nearest smoke alarm while the cat eyes it with suspicion. There is never an image of a man standing in his kitchen waving a tea towel at the ceiling sensor while muttering that he was promised “tranquillity”.

The appeal, I suspect, lies not in the smell itself, but in the idea of the smell. Lighting a joss stick suggests intention. One is not merely sitting in a chair. One is centring oneself. One is cultivating atmosphere. One is, briefly, the sort of person who might own linen trousers. The fact that the smell is indistinguishable from every other joss stick ever made is beside the point. It is the ritual that matters. Humans are endlessly vulnerable to ritual. We will pay extra for anything that implies we are improving ourselves, even when all evidence suggests we are just making the curtains smell faintly of smoke.

There is also a strange persistence to the aroma. It does not leave politely. It lingers. It seeps into upholstery, books, and clothing, merging eventually with the permanent background scent of the house. Weeks later, you will pick up a jumper and detect a faint ghost of “Mystic Forest Rain”, which still smells exactly like “Ancient Temple Sandalwood”, which itself smelled exactly like “Celestial Amber”.

In the end, I suspect the manufacturers know perfectly well that the variations are imaginary. The names are there to reassure the buyer that they are making a meaningful choice, when in fact they are simply selecting which label will accompany the same small stick of scented inevitability.

I still have the remaining sticks, untouched in their decorative boxes, waiting for some future moment of optimism when I again believe that “Sacred Moon Lotus” might smell different. It will not. It will smell like every other joss stick, and I will stand there, holding the match, wondering why I ever thought otherwise, while opening the window to let the enlightenment out.

Young Men of Fighting Age

Every now and then a political argument collapses under the weight of its own arithmetic. Nigel Farage’s outrage about Labour supposedly paying asylum seekers “£40,000 to go home” is one of those cases where the numbers themselves quietly undermine the story being told.

The figure being waved around is not £40,000 per person. It never was. The proposal being discussed allows up to £10,000 per individual, with a maximum of £40,000 per family unit. The larger number only appears if several people in the same household qualify for the payment. Partners, children, dependants. In other words, the only way the headline figure appears is when you are dealing with families rather than individuals.

Which creates a small but rather awkward difficulty for a line Farage and others have been repeating for years about the small boats being filled with “young men of fighting age”. If that description were broadly accurate then the arithmetic is very straightforward. One person arrives, one payment is offered if their claim fails, and the maximum amount involved is £10,000. That is the number that would normally appear in the discussion.

You only reach the dramatic £40,000 figure if you are talking about several people in a household. The larger headline therefore quietly assumes the presence of partners and children. Yet the rhetorical frame that usually accompanies these debates insists the crossings consist largely of solitary young men. The two claims sit rather uneasily together. Either we are mostly dealing with individuals, in which case the relevant figure is £10,000, or we are dealing with families, in which case the familiar trope about lone men begins to look rather overstated.

None of this, incidentally, proves that Labour’s policy is sensible. One can perfectly reasonably question whether paying failed applicants to leave will actually increase voluntary returns, whether it creates a precedent that could be exploited, or whether the real solution lies in speeding up the asylum process and removals. European voluntary return schemes have had mixed results. Governments try them because deportations are expensive and legally complicated, not because the optics are attractive.

But that is not the argument Farage is making. The argument being made is essentially theatrical. Take the largest possible theoretical number, repeat it loudly, and allow the audience to assume that is the typical payment. Once the arithmetic is unpacked, however, the drama fades rather quickly. The scheme does not offer £40,000 to a migrant. It offers up to £10,000 to an individual, with a cap for families.

The curious part is that maintaining the outrage requires two mutually uncomfortable pictures of migration to exist at the same time. The migrants must be solitary “men of fighting age” when discussing border control, but they must also become multi-member households when a larger number is required for a headline. The story shifts shape depending on which version produces the most alarming figure that day.

Political messaging can stretch reality a fair distance. Arithmetic, unfortunately for the message, tends to be less flexible. Farage attacks a £10k voluntary return payment while simultaneously proposing £2,500 payments plus a deportation machine costing about twice as much per migrant. That contrast is quite potent when laid out numerically.

Who Took the Lid Off the Iran Crisis?

It is interesting how the story of the Iranian-linked arrests in Britain is being told. The headlines jump straight to the last page of the book. Iranian suspects. Surveillance of Jewish targets. Counter-terrorism raids in London suburbs. The impression created is that the Middle East has somehow followed us home, as though the quarrel simply drifted across continents of its own accord.

What tends to be skipped is the earlier part of the story, which explains how we arrived here in the first place. Without that context the events look almost spontaneous, as if geopolitical tensions simply materialise out of thin air. In reality the chain of events has been developing for years and the turning points are not particularly difficult to identify.

Back in 2015 there was a nuclear agreement with Iran. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was not perfect and no serious person pretended that it was. But it did something extremely important. It placed Iran’s nuclear programme inside a diplomatic framework.

Enrichment was capped, stockpiles were reduced and international inspectors were given unusually broad access to Iranian facilities. The arrangement did not make Iran a friendly liberal democracy, but it imposed real constraints and bought time. Most importantly, it moved the nuclear dispute away from military confrontation and into negotiation.

Then in 2018 Donald Trump removed the lid. The United States withdrew from the agreement and reinstated sanctions even though the inspectors responsible for monitoring the deal had repeatedly confirmed that Iran was complying with its obligations at the time. The remaining signatories attempted to keep the arrangement alive, but the central bargain had been broken. Once the United States restored sanctions, the economic benefits promised to Iran largely disappeared, and with them the incentive for Tehran to continue observing the limits.

Iran stayed within the restrictions for a while anyway. For roughly a year Tehran continued complying in the hope that the agreement might somehow survive. When that hope faded Iran began gradually stepping outside the limits from 2019 onwards. Enrichment levels rose, stockpiles grew and the estimated breakout time shortened. The crisis path that the agreement had temporarily slowed resumed and the nuclear issue moved steadily back toward confrontation.

Which rather clarifies where responsibility actually lies. The diplomatic framework did not collapse because of fate, historical inevitability or some mysterious drift of events. It was dismantled by a deliberate political decision in Washington, and once that structure had gone the strategic logic of escalation returned almost immediately.

Enter Benjamin Netanyahu, who has spent years warning that Iran’s nuclear ambitions represent an existential threat to Israel. Israeli governments before him voiced similar concerns, so the anxiety about Iran’s programme is not uniquely his. Even so, the language used today stretches the meaning of existential rather further than it should.

An Iranian bomb, or even an Iranian near-bomb capability, would certainly alter the regional balance. It would strengthen the regime internally, increase Tehran’s confidence and make Israel and the Gulf states more wary. But Israel already possesses nuclear weapons of its own and retains overwhelming conventional military superiority over any immediate neighbour.

Those weapons were themselves developed clandestinely in the 1960s. Israel is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and its nuclear facilities are not subject to international inspection regimes. The result is a long-standing asymmetry in the region: Israel holds a nuclear deterrent while remaining outside the formal frameworks designed to regulate such weapons.

The likely strategic outcome of Iran acquiring a deterrent would therefore not be the disappearance of Israel. It would be mutual deterrence, an uncomfortable and dangerous equilibrium but one that exists in several other parts of the world. The real concern for Israel is less apocalyptic and rather more practical. For decades it has enjoyed being the only nuclear power in the region, and an Iranian deterrent would end that monopoly and impose new limits on Israel’s freedom of action.

Once that distinction is recognised the case for open war becomes much less straightforward. Negotiations were still being attempted, yet the stated objectives of the conflict remain fluid. Depending on who is speaking, the goal is stopping the nuclear programme, weakening Iran’s military capability, curbing the Revolutionary Guard, deterring proxy militias or perhaps encouraging regime change. When the purpose of a war shifts depending on the microphone, the strategy begins to look rather blurred.

Meanwhile Netanyahu happens to be standing trial on corruption charges in Israel’s courts. That fact does not prove that conflict was launched to save his political skin, but it would be naive to ignore the incentives. Leaders under legal pressure rarely complain when national emergencies dominate the headlines, and prolonged security crises tend to rearrange domestic political priorities very effectively.

Trump, for his part, has history here. He was the man who dismantled the diplomatic framework in the first place. When he now aligns himself with Netanyahu’s approach he is not repairing the situation. He is returning to inspect the hole he kicked in the wall and remarking that the draught is rather concerning.

All of which brings us back to Britain. We now have Iranian-linked arrests here apparently connected to surveillance of Jewish targets. If that is borne out it is deeply serious, and Jewish communities in Britain should not be left carrying the risks of conflicts directed by men thousands of miles away. Yet this is precisely how distant conflicts spread. Diaspora communities become symbolic targets, intelligence operations surface in European suburbs and police protection increases. A strategic rivalry that began thousands of miles away slowly seeps into countries that were never meant to be part of it.

Once you follow the sequence, the outcome is hardly surprising. The trigger came in 2018 when Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear agreement and dismantled the diplomatic framework that had been containing the dispute. Once that framework was removed Iran resumed climbing the nuclear ladder, Israel escalated in response and the confrontation began spreading outward. What now appears as counter-terrorism arrests in Britain is simply one of the downstream consequences of that decision.

When someone removes the lid from a boiling pot it should not be surprising that the contents eventually spill across the kitchen floor.

A Manifesto for the Wrong Parliament

I had a look at Reform’s manifesto for the Welsh elections - so you do not have to. 

It is an interesting document, though not always in the way intended. Quite a lot of it reads as if it has been written for a parliament that does not actually exist.

The first thing that strikes you is how many of the big themes sit firmly outside the powers of the Senedd. Immigration is a good example. Asylum policy is not devolved. Border control is not devolved. Visa policy is not devolved. These are matters decided in Westminster. The Welsh Parliament can debate them, complain about them, pass motions about them, but it cannot actually change them.

Unless, of course, the plan is to put a booth on the Severn Bridge and start checking English passports before they are allowed in to buy holiday homes. That would at least solve two Reform complaints at once.

Yet immigration sits right in the middle of the manifesto. One rather gets the impression that the document is aimed less at governing Wales and more at provoking nods of agreement in the pub. Which is perfectly fine as campaigning goes, but it does raise the small question of what exactly you would do with the levers of power if voters handed them to you.

There is a second difficulty, and this one is structural. Welsh politics is not organised in quite the same way as English politics. A large slice of the electorate places real weight on language and cultural identity. Support for the Welsh language, in one form or another, runs through Labour, Plaid and even parts of the Conservative vote. It is one of the few things that crosses party lines.

So proposing to dismantle large parts of the language policy framework is not quite the clever insurgent move it might appear from the outside. In significant parts of north and west Wales it simply puts a hard ceiling on how far you can go. Plaid’s vote in those areas is not just political. It is cultural. Outsiders tend to underestimate how sticky that kind of loyalty can be.

Which is slightly ironic for a party that spends much of its time talking about culture and identity. Welsh language policy is exactly that. It just happens to be Welsh culture rather than English culture, which appears to cause a certain conceptual difficulty.

Then there is geography. Reform’s support, where it exists, is likely to be spread thinly across the country. The new Senedd electoral system is proportional, which helps smaller parties, but it still rewards parties whose votes are concentrated in particular regions. Plaid benefits from that. Reform probably does not.

And finally there is the rather awkward matter of credibility. It is one thing to run as a protest movement. It is another to look like a party that has seriously thought about how devolved government actually works. When large chunks of your programme involve policies the Senedd cannot deliver, opponents do not have to deploy devastating rhetoric. They merely have to hand you a copy of the devolution settlement and a highlighter pen.

None of this means Reform will fail. They may well pick up a share of the protest vote, particularly at the expense of the Conservatives, who are having a fairly miserable time in Wales. Under the new voting system that could translate into a respectable number of seats.

But there is a difference between being a disruptive presence and being a party capable of governing. At the moment the manifesto feels much more like the former. It reads as though someone has mistaken the Senedd for Westminster and written a campaign accordingly.

Which is an unusual approach to running Wales, though it may save time when it comes to writing the next manifesto.

The Red Line You Forgot to Draw

There is something faintly irritating about watching governments discover their strategy halfway through a crisis. It gives the impression of a driver who insists he knows exactly where he is going while repeatedly stopping to ask for directions.

With the benefit of hindsight, and I freely admit that, the problem with the government’s messaging over the use of British bases was not the underlying policy. The problem was that the conditions were never stated clearly at the start. On day one the message seemed fairly clear: Britain was not allowing its bases to be used for the operation. Then British assets were attacked and the position shifted rather quickly.

At that point the government found itself explaining that supporting defensive action was entirely different from participating in offensive operations. Which is technically true in legal terms, but rather less convincing in practical terms. Missiles launched from a base do not pause at the runway to check whether their paperwork describes them as offensive or defensive.

What should have been said from the outset was something far more straightforward. Britain will not permit its bases to be used for offensive action in this conflict. However, if British forces, territory or assets are attacked, that changes the situation and we will support defensive operations. That is not escalation. That is deterrence.

The clever part of that wording is that it quietly builds in the legal justification from day one. Under international law, the right of self defence only arises once an attack has occurred. So if the condition is clearly stated in advance, any later response sits neatly within that framework. The legal argument, the deterrent signal and the political narrative are all aligned before events begin to move.

States do this all the time. Alliances are built on exactly this sort of conditional commitment. An attack on one member triggers a response from others. The purpose of stating the condition in advance is not merely to justify retaliation afterwards. It is to make the red line visible so that everyone understands the consequences before they stumble over it.

By not spelling out the condition early, the government ended up looking as if it was making things up as it went along. First a refusal. Then an attack. Then a revised position. Even if the underlying policy never actually changed, the public narrative quickly settled on hesitation followed by a reluctant reversal.

This is really the difference between strategic communication and tactical messaging. Tactical messaging reacts to events as they happen. Strategic communication sets out the logic of the response before events force your hand, so that when something does happen everyone already knows what follows. One looks deliberate. The other looks weak, and almost invites criticism because it appears that the government is being pushed into its own decisions.

None of this is especially mysterious. If someone attacks your forces, you respond. That is the oldest rule in statecraft. The clever part is making sure everyone understands that rule in advance so that the attack never happens in the first place.

Instead we were treated to the diplomatic equivalent of announcing the rules of the game after the first foul has already been committed. It works, eventually. But it rarely looks particularly convincing.

Starmer was right, but at the wrong time.

Nuclear Bombs Don’t Stop Revolutions

People talk about Iran getting nuclear weapons as if the ayatollahs would immediately start flinging them about like fireworks on Bonfire Night. The picture tends to involve apocalyptic theology, a red button and Tel Aviv glowing in the dark before breakfast. It makes for good television, but it is not actually how nuclear weapons behave in the real world.

The awkward truth is that nuclear weapons are mostly political insurance policies. Their purpose is not to be used but to make sure nobody tries to overthrow you from the outside. Once a regime has them, any invasion carries the small but rather terminal risk that the defender might decide to take the attacker with them. That tends to concentrate minds wonderfully.

You can see the logic by looking at the countries that do have nuclear weapons. The United States has them. Russia has them. China has them. India, Pakistan and North Korea have them. None of those governments are in serious danger of being invaded and removed by foreign armies. Meanwhile Iraq and Libya, which abandoned or never finished nuclear programmes, were both dismantled by external intervention. One does not need to be a conspiracy theorist to notice the lesson other governments might draw.

But nuclear weapons only solve one problem. They protect regimes from external destruction. They do nothing to protect them from their own people.

The Soviet Union collapsed while sitting on the largest nuclear arsenal on Earth. Thousands of warheads, fleets of missile submarines, entire cities dedicated to building the things. None of it stopped the state dissolving in 1991 because nuclear weapons are rather poor at managing economic stagnation, corruption or political legitimacy. Even the Kremlin could hardly threaten to vaporise Moscow in order to win a domestic argument.

The same logic applies to Iran. If Tehran acquired a small nuclear arsenal it would not suddenly become suicidal. It would become harder to invade. Israel and the United States would have to think much more carefully about military action, which is rather the point of the weapons. But they would not prevent regime change from inside. A government cannot nuke its own territory to deal with protests, factional struggles or a collapsing economy. Those things are settled the old fashioned way, with politics, power and occasionally a great deal of shouting in the streets.

Which leaves the uncomfortable conclusion. Nuclear weapons can make a regime safer from foreigners, but they do very little to save it from itself. History suggests that when governments finally fall, they usually manage it perfectly well without the help of an invading army.

3.000-, 4.000-, 5.000-Kilogramm-Bomben!

I watched Pete Hegseth’s speech about the Iranian ship yesterday and found myself becoming distracted by something rather odd. Not the submarine bit. Submarines sinking ships is, after all, what submarines are designed to do. Sailors have known this for about a century and the whole thing tends to be handled with a certain professional understatement. What caught my attention instead was the way he began talking about bomb weights.

Quite a lot of bomb weights, in fact. Two thousand pounds of this. Several thousand pounds of that. Delivered with a sort of energetic enthusiasm that reminded me faintly of a man explaining the horsepower of his new ride on mower. And as this catalogue of explosive poundage went on, a small historical memory started stirring somewhere in the back of my head.

Because there is a rather well known precedent for this rhetorical device. Adolf Hitler had a habit during the early war years of doing exactly the same thing. He would stand at a podium and start listing the weights of German bombs destined for British cities. One thousand kilos. Two thousand kilos. Delivered with the same dramatic cadence of someone unveiling an impressive new industrial appliance. The point was not military explanation. It was theatre. The audience was meant to feel the scale of destructive power through the numbers.

Now before anyone gets too excited, I am not suggesting Pete Hegseth is Adolf Hitler. That would be absurd. For one thing, Hitler usually built up to his bomb statistics rather than launching into them halfway through a press briefing. The resemblance is purely rhetorical. When politicians start reciting the specifications of explosives with visible relish, it produces a tone that sits oddly with the subject matter.

The slightly funny thing is that the genuinely interesting part of the episode is the submarine. Submarines are frightening not because of the size of the bang but because they are quiet and patient. They do not make speeches about bomb weights. They sit somewhere cold and grey under the ocean, do their calculations, fire a torpedo, and then disappear again while everyone else tries to work out what just happened.

Which is why naval announcements normally sound calm to the point of boredom. Professionals talk about objectives, threats, and outcomes. They rarely sound like someone reading the specification sheet of a particularly exciting firework. Somewhere out there there will be a submarine captain who carried out the operation with total composure and then went back to the routine of the control room, someone probably putting the kettle on while another officer checks the charts.

Meanwhile in Washington the speech had drifted into something that sounded suspiciously like a monster truck rally for explosives. Bomb weights, enthusiastic cadence, the faint sense that the speaker was enjoying the description a little too much.

Naval warfare, historically speaking, has generally benefited from the opposite tone. If your briefing about a torpedo attack begins to sound like a wartime propaganda speech about the size of the bombs, it may be a sign that the presentation needs a small adjustment.

The submarine, after all, already did the impressive part. The rest of us could probably manage with a slightly quieter explanation. In fact I suspect the submarine crew themselves would have preferred it that way. They probably heard the speech afterwards while making tea and quietly wondered why anyone felt the need to start announcing the poundage of the explosives.