Hue

[Hue @xChiji]

7yrs from now I'll be a father with two yummy toddlers and a bigbum Queen, subtly saying "well done son!". Oh I'll be sipping wine too.

[Hue @xChiji]

@ChifeDr “Can you guess what it takes to secure a regulatory license in Africa? 3- 4 years of undiluted pain and a boatload of money.”

Amongst other references outlined, the critical question for any progressive will be - what/who exactly do we think enables this?
Emphasis on “enabling”.

[David Hundeyin @DavidHundeyin]

There are some very powerful people pulling the strings behind the scenes on this legal issue over airtime lending in Nigeria, trying to stick their straw into a market worth an estimated N400b annually.  These people are close to the president, and are wielding tremendous power and distorting the entire economy in ways that would have embarrassed a post-Soviet Russian oligarch in 1994.

I’ve been actively aware of this matter for over two years now and the time may have come to tell the full story of how Idris Saliu Alubankudi, and his brother Shamsudeen Saliu 'Shamz' Alubankudi - both very close to Bola Tinubu and his family - have built one of the biggest and most powerful state corruption enterprises
in the entire history of Nigeria.

These men are attempting to capture the systemically important foundations of the entire Nigerian economy - specifically telecoms and ICT - and turn their 3 year-old corruption enterprise into a sort of Nigerian chaebol. You have never seen anything like it before.

You will be hearing the names 'Idris' and 'Shamz' a lot in the coming few days. Also don’t forget their family name 'Saliu Alubankudi.' It's an important part of the story.

[Chetuya Chinagolum @Chetuyachinago]

On Friday, May 15, 2026, highly organized armed bandits launched coordinated, ruthless raids on schools in the Oriire Local Government Area of Oyo State. The attackers arrived in massive convoys of motorcycles, systematically targeted multiple learning centers across the local government, and brutally rounded up innocent students, pupils, and teachers, forcing them deep into the nearby forests at gunpoint.

Oyo State is a territory incredibly endowed with massive, highly lucrative deposits of solid resources and critical minerals. In fact, this year alone, there have been more than thirty high-profile arrests directly related to the illegal extraction of lithium. Those arrested notably include a compromised traditional ruler, Chief Jacob Adefabi Sobaloju, who treasonously handed out illegal mining permits in exchange for raw cash, allowing foreign agents to comfortably strip-mine valuable gold and lithium right inside the sovereign forests of Oyo.

On January 8, 2026, state security forces tracked a massive convoy of heavy-duty trucks carrying tons of lithium ore illegally mined from Oyo State. Security forces intercepted the convoy, impounded seven trucks of raw ore, and arrested six truck drivers. Two Chinese nationals were also arrested and forced to forfeit their assets, as they acted as the untouchable kingpins of the entire operation, working directly with six corrupt Nigerians to illegally mine massive quantities of lithium and mica, process it locally in hidden rural factories, and smuggle it out of the country through the porous, highly compromised ports of Lagos.

This terrifying feature of insecurity, banditry, and terror activities currently exploding in Oyo State is absolutely not a coincidence. We witness the exact same bloody connection in other highly mineral-rich states like Nasarawa, Zamfara with its blood-gold syndicates, Plateau with its columbite and tin deposits, and Taraba with its heavily looted sapphires and uranium.

So, as deeply painful as the situation is, when we watch the horrific videos posted on social media featuring traumatized mothers helplessly pleading for their lives, weeping for their abducted children, and begging the government to pay exorbitant ransoms, we must choose our vocabulary very carefully. We must urgently recognize that this form of systemic insecurity is not just random "kidnapping" or petty theft. It is not a bug in the system. It is a fundamental, heavily financed feature of a neo-colonial machine manufactured to violently clear local populations from their ancestral lands, to extract, refine, and smuggle these critical resources out of the continent, while the blood of innocent Nigerians is simply written off as necessary collateral damage on a corporate balance sheet.

If this undeniable connection between banditry and illegal mining is not enough to convince you that this insecurity is artificially manufactured to loot resources in Nigeria, please permit me to give you further operational details as to why such large-scale, synchronized kidnappings are physically impossible to pull off across different states of the federation without the active, treasonous backing of both local political giants and heavily armed foreign cartels.

To coordinate these massive attacks, these syndicates need a vast, highly paid human intelligence network on the ground to monitor the schools or religious centers that are always their primary targets, to meticulously map out complex escape routes, to identify which communities have weak vigilante presence, and to pay off local informants. The main combat operations involve highly trained, ruthless thugs wielding high-grade machine guns, anti-aircraft weaponry, and rocket-propelled grenades that cost tens of thousands of dollars on the black market. Their escape routes are pre-arranged to either completely bypass military installations, or to ensure that their marked vehicles are cleared by corrupt, highly paid police officers stationed ahead to avoid any friction during the operation.

Furthermore, to sustain such a prolonged, high-stakes military operation deep in the forest, you need highly secure communication channels to bypass signal triangulation from federal law enforcement agencies. This is why Starlink satellite terminals, encrypted satellite phones, dark web communication networks, and untraceable digital infrastructure are the preferred systems actively used by these terrorists. You also need thermal surveillance drones and real-time satellite feeds to monitor the square perimeter of the forest camps, to watch out for local vigilante groups or military convoys approaching, allowing the bandits to instantly regroup and evade capture.

Now you must understand that this is not a small, ragtag operation of hungry thieves. It is a highly sophisticated paramilitary campaign, and it would be absolutely impossible to sustain without both local comprador elites and foreign corporate cartels working shoulder to shoulder.

This knowledge is incredibly important, because from the naive uproars online and in real life, it is painfully clear that the vast majority of Nigerians do not draw this vital connection. Nigerians who have been thoroughly lobotomized by the democratic illusion truly believe that this deeply entrenched insecurity is just a political bug that can be magically corrected by simply voting the "right" candidate with their permanent voters card. Let me be brutally clear: it does not matter who you vote into the presidency, the insecurity will continue uninterrupted because the underlying economic incentives of the global resource cartels remain completely untouched.

Our brothers in the Sahel regions have even executed direct military coups in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, systematically throwing out the French imperialists, yet the same banditry and terrorism continues to bleed their borders. This again proves that the driving financial force behind this insecurity ravaging Africa and parts of the Global South is a structural, international resource war, and it is absolutely not something that a mere symbolic, democratic change in local leadership can easily correct.

What truly allows terrorism, illegal mining, and banditry to thrive is the absolute vacuum of the state. Yes, the foreign cartels provide the sophisticated weapons, the untraceable cash, and the satellite feeds to serve as the logistical backbone for the attacks, but this does not work in isolation. They need desperate agents on the ground to carry out these bloody attacks and to physically clear communities for illegal mining. These violent agents are obviously not recruited from the shopping malls, the air-conditioned bank offices, the university campuses, or the corporate boardrooms in the cities. They are recruited directly from the remote, impoverished rural communities that are completely detached from any state apparatus, economic oversight, or human dignity.

You see, because our government institutions are incredibly weak and aggressively corrupt, government budgets and fiscal spending are almost exclusively concentrated in the capital cities. This means the vast majority of these rural communities have absolutely no functional healthcare, their electricity supplies are non-existent, and in most villages, there are no power poles or wires. The people have to desperately depend on expensive solar panels or petrol generators just to sustain their petty businesses. There are practically no paved road networks, except for the major federal highways that lead straight to their towns solely for the government to deliver ballot boxes every four years or to host manipulative political campaigns.

All of this systemic neglect creates a massive, gaping government vacuum in rural communities across Nigeria, and this rolls out the red carpet for foreign nations to deploy intelligence-backed NGOs and establish heavily funded religious schools. These radical schools are where the vast majority of our twenty million out-of-school children get their basic education. Many times, these foreign-funded schools also offer daily feeding, free basic healthcare, community protection, and a twisted sense of belonging that the Nigerian state completely denies them. So, essentially, these radical institutions always operate as a highly effective, heavily armed state embedded directly within a failing state.

Most of these vulnerable students are heavily indoctrinated and later awarded exclusive scholarships to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and other Middle Eastern nations to complete their militant Islamic studies, exactly the same path taken by Mohammed Yusuf, the very man who founded the Boko Haram terror network in Nigeria.

So, this bloody insecurity in Nigeria and the rest of the Sahel regions will never stop until this massive government vacuum is violently accounted for and permanently filled with genuine, socialist state infrastructure. This vacuum is exactly what paralyzes government intelligence agencies, such as the recent catastrophic case in Mali, where over 12,000 highly armed fighters completely overwhelmed the Malian and Russian military in Kidal in a massive surprise attack. For a hostile force of 12,000 troops to successfully coordinate and execute a fearless, synchronized attack on a state capital, it proves without a shadow of a doubt that the state is totally lacking in human intelligence. That critical human intelligence is missing because the local population is loyal to the parallel state that feeds them, rather than the central government that abandoned them.

[Hue @xChiji]

@Arsenal COYG!!!!!!!

[Arsenal @Arsenal]

This belongs to all of us.

[Adedayo Agarau @adedayoagarau]

I’ve spent the past couple of weeks building Looters: a public archive of Nigerian political corruption since the 1990s.

Governors, ministers, shell companies, Swiss accounts, the Jersey trusts, — one searchable graph.

You too can connect the dots: https://t.co/faIfzWfAIp

[David Hundeyin @DavidHundeyin]

Pro-sovereign media like The Spearhead can only do so much in raising the mental level of our people.

The real magic bullet is the primary and secondary education syllabus. If I ever hold state power, there will be a once-in-a-century earthquake at the Ministry of Education. The new syllabus will not be an updated version of the current one. It will be a completely different one that nobody is familiar with. A syllabus designed to prepare children to understand their developing country and grow up to take control of its destiny, not one designed to prepare them to pass anstract exams so that they can be plucked and harvested by oyibo people.

When I get my way, by the time a Nigerian kid writes their junior WAEC, they will know exactly who they are, where they come from, their place in the world, and where they are going. That's the only way to sweep out the decrepit millennial and Gen X generations who are already beyond redemption, and replace them with younger Gen Z's, Alphas and Betas who understand how the world works and know how to be useful to themselves within it.

[Hue @xChiji]

@Afrophyte Davidpetersen.arc on Instagram

[Kennedy Wandera @KennedyWandera_]

A fiery speech by South Africa's🇿🇦 EFF leader Julius Malema, over xenophobic attacks targeting foreign nationals.

“You say Zimbabweans take your jobs. Nigerians take your jobs.

You march, close shops and beat up people. Tell us after doing that how many jobs have you created, by beating up these Nigerians, Zimbabweans and Ghanaians?

You beat people because they took your jobs.

You close a shop that hires people. How many have you created after beating and chasing them?

Unskilled men, with no skills, none whatsoever, say somebody took away their jobs. I don't want your votes if you behave like that. Take them away.

Pushing out of school an African child that looks like you, I will never do that. You can take your votes. Make me die with my conscience very clearly.

I will never refuse a pregnant woman of African descent to give birth in the clinics of South Africa. Never!”

[Chetuya Chinagolum @Chetuyachinago]

I am not an activist; I consider myself an irredeemable revolutionary thinker.

This is the fundamental reason why I refuse to waste my breath discussing the symptoms of a terminal disease, things like fuel subsidy removal, electoral reform, police brutality and probes, or the theatrical debates over the minimum wage happening across Nigeria and the rest of the African continent.

No matter what happens in life, I, Chetuya Chinagolum, will never advocate for a better 'Nigerian President,' a smarter 'Central Bank Governor,' or a more pragmatic and nationalistic 'Chief of Army Staff.'

I believe the current system and political institutions in Nigeria are beyond repair because the system itself is the problem.
I do not want to reform the house or fix a leak in the roof; I want to tear it down to its foundational level and build something entirely new.

To me, a revolution is not enough, it is important to defend that revolution.

The brilliant African revolutionary, Thomas Sankara, believed a revolution was complete only when every citizen has two meals a day and clean water, when the people no longer fear their leaders, and when the nation no longer depends on foreign aid.

Sankara was a genius, heavily influenced by Lenin, the architect of the world’s first socialist state.

However, Sankara’s tragedy was that he focused on decolonizing society and building civilian infrastructure while leaving the colonial military architecture intact.

Eventually, that military served as a Fifth Column.
A faction led by his second-in-command and supposed best friend, Blaise Compaoré, gunned him down and delivered his corpse to the interests of the colonial masters.

Consider Patrice Lumumba. He believed he could "Reform" the brutal military machine established by the Belgians in the Congo.
Instead, the white officers who held the highest ranks mutinied.

A young journalist-turned-soldier named Joseph Mobutu was promoted by Lumumba to calm the troops, but Mobutu had already been groomed by Belgian and US intelligence.
He used that very colonial military structure to arrest Lumumba, hand him over to his executioners, and rule as a Western-backed puppet-dictator for 32 years.

Even Kwame Nkrumah, A staunch Pan African socialist who was on a mission to transform into an Industrial powerhouse.

But the Ghanaian military was a relic of Sandhurst(the elite British academy).
His officers were trained to be 'professionals' in the British sense, meaning they were ideologically aligned with London, not with Nkrumah’s Pan-African vision.

While Nkrumah was on a peace mission in Vietnam, these Sandhurst-trained officers launched a CIA-backed coup.
They preferred the 'prestige' of the British system over the 'disruption' of a socialist revolution.

The graveyard of African revolutionary thinkers is deep, and the reason for this repeated disaster is simple: African thinkers are trying to change the situation from within, instead of pursuing the total annihilation of the system.

When Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, they didn't 'reform' the Tsar's army,they dismantled it.

When Mao Zedong took power in China, he completely shattered the old military. Those who represented the old order faced execution or re-education. They understood that you cannot pour new wine into old, poisoned wineskins.

The current Nigerian democratic system is a parasitic construct. It cannot be fixed. It must be dismantled, scattered into a thousand pieces, and blown into the void of space.

Every institution in Nigeria today is a tool for colonial extraction and plunder.

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), established in 1958 by British advisors from the Bank of England, was designed to keep us tethered.
Its policies historically favored banks that funded the export of raw materials to Europe, while strangling local Nigerians who dared to build factories that might compete with British manufactured goods.

The Judiciary was set up to protect 'Property Rights', specifically the property of British corporations and the Crown, while punishing 'Sedition' (any resistance against the government).

This is why Nigerian judges still wear ridiculous English wigs and gowns, and why the language of the law is a foreign tongue designed to intimidate the common man. It was built to reinforce the authority of the 'State' over the 'People.'

As for Education, Lord Lugard was explicit: the goal was to produce clerks, interpreters, and low-level administrators to grease the wheels of the colonial machine. It was never designed to produce engineers, independent thinkers, or revolutionaries.

This is why our schools still focus on rote memorization and the empty chase for 'certificates' rather than solving the problems of our soil.

Even our land is not ours.

During the colonial era, the British declared all 'unoccupied' land belonged to the Crown so they could seize it for mining companies.

The 1978 Land Use Act in Nigeria is the direct descendant of this theft, giving a Governor the power to seize any land 'in the public interest,' mimicking the behavior of the colonial masters.

The list is endless: the Civil Service, the Police, the entire administrative carcass.
This is why I do not support your political parties.

This is why I refuse to discuss local politicians, their petty graft, or their fraudulent elections. This is also why I insist that the AES (Alliance of Sahel States) must radically change their military doctrines and purge the colonial institutions they inherited.

It is not enough to have a revolution; the revolution must be total. The colonial institutions must be burned to the ground so that power can finally be returned to the people.

This is why I write. This is why I am here. And I promise you, this revolutionary movement will inevitably move beyond this platform.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

Let me tell you what Lee Kuan Yew actually believed.

He believed in an authoritarian developmental state

He believed in long-term industrial planning.

He believed in controlled media.

He believed in strict limits on political opposition.

He believed the Western liberal democratic model was not appropriate for Asian societies.

He explicitly and repeatedly said these things.

He also believed in meritocracy, in building institutions of genuine quality, in zero tolerance for the kind of corruption that allows elites to loot rather than invest.

Not one of these beliefs is what the IMF prescribes.

So when you ask "how come it worked in Singapore," the honest answer is simple:

Because Singapore did not do what the IMF tells African and Latin American countries to do.

If your argument is "poor countries should copy Singapore," then your argument is: strong state, industrial policy, sovereign wealth fund, long-term planning, rejection of Western liberal democratization pressures, state ownership of strategic assets.

Say that argument out loud.

See if it sounds like what you were trying to defend.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

Here is what Singapore did that you are not mentioning:

It nationalized land.

The government owns the land.

Private property rights in land, the foundational institution of Western liberal economics, do not function in Singapore the way the textbook says they should.

It built public housing that is genuinely public.

Not vouchers. Not market-rate subsidies.

The state designed, built, and allocated housing to 80% of the population.

It created a mandatory savings scheme that forces Singaporeans to save 37% of wages into a state-managed fund used for housing, healthcare, and retirement.

It runs sovereign wealth funds that invest state capital globally.

It used the state to deliberately attract and direct foreign investment into specific industries it chose to develop.

Every single one of these policies contradicts what structural adjustment programs tell poor countries to do.

So yes. Singapore worked.

It worked because it ignored your argument.

[Farida Bemba Nabourema @Farida_N]

Xenophobia is a direct indicator of social decay. In every African country where you see populations turning violently against foreign nationals, what you are actually seeing is a population that is drowning financially, struggling to find work, struggling to eat, watching their living conditions deteriorate with no credible explanation from the people responsible for governing them.

The foreigner becomes the easy explanation and excuse for a failing state.
What makes it particularly revealing is who they target. They never target the foreign corporations extracting resources at below-market prices. Not the foreign financial institutions whose conditionalities have gutted public spending for decades, not the foreign governments whose diplomatic protection keeps predatory local elites in power election after election. Those actors are too distant and too legally armoured, living behind gates in neighbourhoods that the angry and the desperate cannot reach. So they go after the ones they can reach: the street vendor from a neighbouring country, the migrant worker who is every bit as broke and as desperate and as abandoned by power as they are.

The poor man’s oldest and most reliable mistake is to see his enemy in his fellow poor person. It requires a macroscopic reading of how power actually operates to understand that the Malawian vendor and the South African unemployed youth are not each other’s problem. They are both products of the same system of extraction, the same manufactured scarcity, the same political class that needs them fighting each other precisely so they never turn around and face the right direction.

Xenophobia is never a spontaneous eruption of hatred. It is what manufactured poverty looks like when it finally needs somewhere to go.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

Every discipline taught in the African university, law, political science, sociology, psychology, history, philosophy, arrives pre-structured by the civilization that created the current world order.

Law arrives as English common law or French civil law, not as a tradition rooted in the actual governance practices of the societies it is supposed to serve.

History arrives with the periodization of European history, ancient, medieval, modern, grafted onto societies for which none of these categories make sense and all of which imply that African history only becomes legible when it intersects with European history.

Psychology arrives as a set of theories developed by studying largely white, educated, Western populations and declared universal.

Philosophy arrives as a tradition that begins in Greece, passes through Rome, arrives in the European Enlightenment, and occasionally, generously, includes a footnote about African philosophy.

The student who completes this education is not educated about their own world.

They are educated into someone else's world.

They graduate literate in the assumptions of their dispossession.

And then they are asked to develop their country using these tools.

The tools were built to explain a different house.

They do not fit the door.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

The critique of China in Western and Western-influenced media is the current test case for everything described here.

Observe the framework.

When China builds infrastructure in Africa, it is "debt trap diplomacy."

When the West did the same thing for decades, it was "development assistance."

When China establishes military relationships abroad, it is "expansionism."

The country with 800 overseas military bases describes this as alarming.

When China's economy grows and its people's living standards improve at a pace without precedent in human history, lifting more people out of poverty faster than any other project in history, the coverage focuses on what is wrong, what is missing, what is repressed, what is concerning.

Now observe who reproduces this framework most fluently.

Not just American journalists.

Indian op-ed writers.

South Korean think tank analysts.

Japanese policy researchers.

Singaporean academics.

The Western frame on China has been globalized.

In countries that have every historical and strategic reason to form their own independent assessment of China, countries that share borders, history, cultural ties, economic relationships, the debate is conducted substantially within a framework produced in Washington.

This is the measurement.

This is the test of how thoroughly the information architecture has been installed.

When countries that are not America assess China's rise using American categories, the empire has achieved something armies cannot.

It has made its perception of the world everyone's default perception.

That is total information dominance.

And most of the people inside it cannot feel the walls.

[Hue @xChiji]

@LarryMadowo So shallow

[Hue @xChiji]

@nnamdiobiii

[Nnamdi Obi @nnamdiobiii]

Every time the West calls an African country "unstable" they mean the resources stopped flowing.

I made a glossary of 100 diplomatic words they use and what they actually mean.

https://t.co/hivzYl1N0Z

Bookmark this before your next history book. 🧵

[Reza Nasri @RezaNasri1]

Few points:

1- Western governments continue to insist, with ritualistic certainty, that the Strait of Hormuz is an “international waterway” that must be reopened "unconditionally". This absolutist posture reveals a profound failure to absorb the central lesson of the recent US–Israeli war on Iran: when a so-called international waterway is weaponized to launch an existential armed attack against the coastal state whose territory it crosses, the very concept of “unconditional” access becomes legally and morally indefensible.

2- The war has irrevocably altered legal interpretations and the strategic landscape. For the first time in modern history, a major international strait was used not merely for commerce or neutral navigation, but as the primary maritime corridor for a coordinated campaign of aggression - including strikes, logistics, blockades, and overflights aimed at destroying a coastal state’s sovereignty, infrastructure, and leadership. American and Israeli forces treated the Strait as a de facto launchpad and supply line for operations that, under any reading of the UN Charter, constituted an unlawful use of force.

In that context, Iran’s decision to regulate and, where necessary, restrict passage to belligerent-linked vessels was not an arbitrary closure. It was a proportionate exercise of the inherent right of self-defence under Article 51, fully consistent with the coastal state’s sovereign authority over its territorial waters.

3- A decisive factor that further strips the Strait of Hormuz of the very characteristics and rights otherwise attributed to international waterways is the dense network of US military bases stationed in the littoral Arab states encircling the Persian Gulf.

These installations—in Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait—serve no commercial or neutral purpose. They exist explicitly to project power against Iran, to threaten its vital interests, and to enable the very existential military operations witnessed in the recent war. Forward-deployed US aircraft, warships, missile systems, and logistics hubs turn the entire Gulf region—including the Strait itself—into an armed forward-operating zone directed at a single coastal state.

Under international law, an international strait derives its special transit-passage status from its role as a neutral corridor connecting two bodies of high seas or EEZ, used for peaceful international navigation. When one side of that corridor is transformed into a permanent military platform aimed at the destruction of the opposite coastal state, the waterway ceases to function as a “normal” international strait. It becomes instead an extension of a hostile military perimeter.

The presence of these bases fundamentally alters the legal character of the Strait. Unless and until these US military bases are completely removed from the littoral states of the Persian Gulf - and eventually replaced by a local collective security regime that ensures Iran and other every litoral states' security - the Strait of Hormuz cannot be treated as a standard international waterway entitled to unconditional transit passage.

The Western response has been to double down on the fiction of unconditional transit passage. But the recent conflict has exposed the fatal weakness in this outdated and inapplicable doctrine they so aggressively promote.

4- The war therefore demands a fundamental shift in how Western states and the international community conceptualize “international waterways.” Unconditional reopening is no longer credible. Conditions must now be devised and codified to prevent the future misuse of such straits as conduits for existential threats. Such safeguards would not “close” international straits but would preserve the legitimate right of peaceful navigation while closing the loophole that allows aggressors to exploit them.

[Glenn Diesen @Glenn_Diesen]

We are told that security in the Middle East requires defeating Iran, security in East Asia requires defeating China, and security in Europe requires defeating Russia. We never discuss security in terms of how to learn to live together by harmonising interests and managing competition. This is by design. This is hegemonic peace, in which security depends on defeating rivals rather than managing a balance of power.

Subsequently, security relies solely on deterrence rather than reassurance; diplomacy is dismissed as appeasement; peace agreements are temporary and deceptive; and war is peace. Our rivals do not have legitimate security concerns, as their policies are allegedly always motivated by aggressive, irrational, or expansionist behaviour.

We have convinced ourselves that our liberal hegemony is a force for good, and that our opponents oppose our dominance because they reject our benign values of freedom. Discussing the security concerns of adversaries is believed to “legitimise” their policies, which is treasonous. The world is divided into good guys (liberal democracies) and bad guys (autocracies). We should not ask how defeating Russia, as the world's largest nuclear power, is a rational security strategy, or why our governments refuse to even speak with Moscow to discuss the European security architecture and end the war. Our governments have relabelled nuclear deterrence as nuclear blackmail to signal that there can be no more constraints.

All empires can become irrational during decline. Leaders take greater risks to avoid decline, legitimacy crises at home must be distracted with enemies abroad, outdated strategies from a bygone era of strength are still embraced, and there is a tendency to double down on narratives of being indispensable, representing universal values, and dismissing all opposition as illegitimate and dangerous. Are we the fanatics?