Saturday, 19 September 2026

MIDDLE EAST RESET - WEST ASIA EMERGES

September 19, 2026#EndOfEmpireNo comments

The Geopolitical Reset of West Asia:
The Breakdown of Western Hegemony and the Resurfacing of Indigenous Power

Contents

The Collapse of the American Security Architecture
The Non-Vacuum: Why Russia and China Do Not Simply Replace the Hegemon
The Resurfacing of Historic Civilisational and Tribal Power Structures
Regional Realignment and the Crisis of Post-Colonial Constructs
Conclusion

The geopolitical landscape of West Asia - historically referred to in the West as the Middle East - is undergoing an epochal transformation. This realignment is fundamentally driven by the collapse of the post-World War II American security architecture and the squeezing out of Western military hegemony. Crucially, this exit is not creating a political vacuum to be filled by rival external superpowers like Russia or China. Instead, the region is experiencing a profound reversion to its pre-colonial civilisational, historical, and tribal power structures - dismantling the artificial borders and client-state dynamics imposed during the era of Western imperial dominance.

1. The Collapse of the American Security Architecture

For decades, Western strategic dominance in West Asia rested upon an artificial security framework designed to control energy flows, protect key proxy states, and maintain regional hegemony. This framework was explicitly articulated in strategic blueprints such as the 1996 "Clean Break" strategy (crafted by Richard Perle, David Wormser, and Benjamin Netanyahu) and Vice President Dick Cheney’s 2006 regional realignment policy.

These policies sought to re-engineer West Asia by placing the entire weight of American energy dominance and Israeli security onto a narrow pillar: the Al Saud monarchy and the Sunni sheikdoms of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). To secure this arrangement, Western strategy actively sought to neutralise historic regional powerhouses like Syria, Iraq, and Iran through military intervention, sanctions, and the deployment of proxy forces.

That Western-constructed architecture has now entered terminal collapse:

Military Vulnerability and Forced Retreat: High-precision resistance attacks on critical US installations - such as the major strike on the American airbase in Jordan that destroyed vital aviation and logistics infrastructure - have demonstrated that forward US military positions across the Persian Gulf and Levant are unsustainable. American forces are being squeezed out of peripheral bases and forced to consolidate within Israel, where they represent an increasingly concentrated and vulnerable target.
The Failure of American Guarantees: Washington’s inability and refusal to protect its regional partners from devastating strikes on core petroleum infrastructure - such as Saudi Aramco’s Abqaiq processing plant and the East-West pipeline - shattered confidence in the US security umbrella. When Washington repeatedly declined emergency Saudi requests for direct military intervention against Ansar Allah in Yemen, it signalled the end of active American security management in the Persian Gulf.
Depletion of Military and Economic Resources: The US military and its regional allies have largely exhausted their stocks of advanced air defence interceptors. Coupled with the total disruption of maritime shipping through the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandeb Strait, and bombing of the East-Weest pipeline, the petrodollar energy framework that underpinned Western economic hegemony for half a century is rapidly dissolving.

Glossary

Ansar Allah - also widely known as the Houthis, are a Zaydi revivalist and Shia Islamist political and military organization that emerged from Yemen in the 1990s.

2. The Non-Vacuum: Why Russia and China Do Not Simply Replace the Hegemon

Standard Western geopolitical analysis assumes that when a global hegemon retreats, it inevitably leaves a "political vacuum" that rival global superpowers must fill. The evidence from West Asia contradicts this imperial assumption:

Indigenous Security Ententes: Rather than seeking a replacement foreign patron, regional actors are building independent security mechanisms designed to exclude external superpowers. A prime example is the emerging tripartite entente between Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey - an arrangement explicitly formed to replace Western security management with local forces beholden neither to Washington nor to Beijing or Moscow.
Multilateral Rules vs. Imperial Commands: While Russia and China maintain significant diplomatic presence through forums like BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), their engagement differs fundamentally from Western military hegemony. Chinese and Russian diplomatic involvement focuses on promoting consensus-based international law, trade frameworks, and non-aligned de-escalation rather than establishing replacement military blocs or deploying occupying forces.
Rejection of Foreign Alignment: The overarching movement across West Asia and the Maghreb (North Africa) is an anti-colonial national liberation wave. Regional populations and leaderships are asserting sovereign self-determination, explicitly seeking to prevent any foreign power - Western or Eastern - from dictating their internal affairs.

3. The Resurfacing of Historic Civilisational and Tribal Power Structures

With the unravelling of Western-imposed borders and client regimes, West Asia is undergoing a historic reversion to the deep-seated civilisational centres and tribal networks that governed the region for centuries prior to Western colonial intervention.

3.1 The Historic Civilisational Balance (Iran and Iraq)

Historically - prior to twentieth-century Western line-drawing and British-American backing of the Al Saud family - the authentic institutional, intellectual, and civilisational power centres of West Asia were Iran and Iraq (Mesopotamia). The era in which small Gulf sheikdoms exercised outsized geopolitical influence was an artificial anomaly built strictly on temporary petrodollar wealth and Western protection. Power is now shifting back to its historic civilisational roots, as reflected in the massive popular mobilisations across Iraq and the Levant that transcend Western-imposed political boundaries.

3.2 Tribal Sovereignty and Border Dissolution

The revolution led by Ansar Allah in Yemen represents a central catalyst in this regional reset. As the original Arabs of the peninsula, the Yemenis possess deep historical and tribal connections that ignore modern state lines:

Penetration into Saudi Arabia: Yemeni tribal networks extend directly into the northern Saudi provinces of Asir, Jizan, and Najran - territories annexed by Ibn Saud in the early 1930s without local consent.
Resurgence of Disenfranchised Tribes: Regional actors are engaging directly with traditional tribal leaders within Saudi Arabia who remain aggrieved by the historical suppression of their rights and authorities under Al Saud rule. This tribal resurgence directly undermines the centralisation established when St. John Philby and later US Vice President Dick Cheney attempted to anchor Western influence onto one ruling family's victory over its historical rivals.

3.3 Cultural and Esoteric Islamic Rebalancing

Culturally, the rigid, reductionist Wahhabi and Salafi doctrines exported from the Najd desert are losing their dominant grip. They are being supplanted by a resurgence of the region's older, esoteric Islamic traditions - including Zaidi, Ismaili, and traditional Shi'i heritage - that historically anchored West Asian civilization. Furthermore, the Sunni-Shia sectarian divisions previously exploited by Western strategy are diminishing, giving way to pragmatic realpolitik, shared indigenous identity, and regional anti-colonial solidarity.

Glossary

Iran - For more than two and a half millennia, the West called this land Persia while its own people called it Iran. In March 1935, Reza Shah Pahlavi formally asked foreign governments to use 'Iran' in all official correspondence — and a diplomatic note settled a question that had been waiting since Herodotus and “Arabia Felix”.

4. Regional Realignment and the Crisis of Post-Colonial Constructs

The breakdown of Western hegemony is creating severe crises for post-colonial state structures and entities that depended on Western backing:

Saudi Arabia’s Credibility Trap: Riyadh finds itself caught between its inflated narrative as a global Islamic leader and the stark reality of its military and economic exhaustion. Faced with depleted missile interceptor stocks, halted grand Vision 2030 megaprojects (window dressing), lost oil revenues, and the need to sell its gold (selling US Treasuries was made difficult) and seek World Bank loans, Saudi Arabia has been forced to accept defeat and request Iranian mediation to negotiate peace with Ansar Allah.
Israel’s Strategic Isolation: Israel’s long-term strategy of using Gulf monarchies as a shield while maintaining regional military dominance has been demolished by resistance control over vital maritime choke points like the Bab al-Mandeb and Strait of Hormuz. Facing seven multi-front strain that its military leadership acknowledges would require multiple duplicates of the IDF to sustain, Israel is experiencing severe internal political disarray, economic contraction, high-level professional emigration, and growing global isolation, leaving a population that have little connection to the original Ashkenazi colonisers from Europe.
Fragility of Artificial Border States: Western-created buffer states are suffering acute internal strains. Jordan, for example, remains heavily dependent on dwindling financial subsidies and faces deep internal fractures between its Hashemite Bedouin establishment of long date and its Palestinian majority from the time of the Naqba, leaving it highly vulnerable to regional collapse.

5. Conclusion

The geopolitical reset of West Asia marks the end of an era defined by Western line-drawing, military occupation, and client-monarchy management. As American power is squeezed out, the region is not collapsing into an empty void for new global empires to claim. Instead, West Asia is re-establishing its own historical balance - driven by civilisational continuity, tribal sovereignty, and indigenous self-determination.

DEBT EMPIRE AND THE DEATH OF A FINANCIAL SYSTEM

August 22, 2026#EndOfEmpireNo comments

Debt, Empire and the Death of a Financial System

A summary of Michael Hudson's interview with Glenn Diesen

If every civilisation before ours understood that debt must periodically be cancelled to survive, why did the West alone forget it - and what happens now that the West's debts can no longer be paid?

Fast Track (30-second summary)

Michael Hudson argues that the defining crisis of Western economies today is not new: it is the ancient, recurring tendency of debt to grow faster than the economy's ability to pay it. For three thousand years, Near Eastern rulers managed this by periodically cancelling agrarian debts and freeing bonded labourers. The West never adopted this practice, and Hudson traces the consequence in a straight line from Rome's collapse to the Crusades, which he says gave birth to international banking as a tool of Church and royal warfare, through to today's financialised, deindustrialising US and European economies. China, by keeping credit creation a public function, has avoided the same trap. Hudson concludes that the United States, unable to pay its foreign debts in any real sense, is now trying to extract tribute from allies and adversaries alike - through tariffs, NATO cost-shifting and pressure on Gulf oil producers - a strategy he sees as accelerating the same collapse it is meant to postpone.

1. Introduction

This piece summarises a wide-ranging interview between geopolitical analyst Glenn Diesen and economic historian Michael Hudson, whose fifty-year body of work spans ancient Mesopotamian debt records to the modern history of international finance. The conversation moves from Bronze Age debt jubilees to the Crusades, from the founding of the IMF to Donald Trump's tariff diplomacy, tracing a single thread throughout: the tendency of debt to outgrow the economy's capacity to repay it, and the political consequences that follow when societies fail to correct that imbalance.

Hudson's central claim is that this is not a new crisis but the return of the oldest one in economic history - and that the West is now the last major economic bloc still without a mechanism to resolve it.

Why It Matters

Hudson's framework reframes the current Western debt crisis not as a cyclical downturn but as the terminal stage of a five-thousand-year pattern last avoided by rulers who understood that unpayable debt must periodically be written down. If he is right, the policy tools currently being used - austerity, tariffs, pressure on allies to fund military spending - are not solutions but symptoms of a system approaching the same point every prior Western financial order reached before it broke.

Contents Cover the Following

The ancient pattern: debt jubilees and why the West never adopted them
How Rome's debt dynamics differed from - and destroyed - classical antiquity
The Crusades and the Church's invention of international banking
The rise of the fiscal state and the transfer of power from Church to bankers
Financialisation versus industrial capitalism in the modern West
China's alternative model of state-controlled credit
The present crisis: tariffs, oil, and the declining reserve status of the dollar

2. The Ancient Pattern: Debt Jubilees and the Rulers Who Understood Debt

Hudson opens with the observation that most of his career has been devoted to writing a history of debt and banking, prompted originally by the global South debt crises of the late 1970s. Every economic recovery, he found, took place at a progressively higher level of debt - an unsustainable trajectory he later traced back to the very beginning of recorded economic history.

Leading a Harvard research group for twenty-five years, Hudson studied the economic history of Mesopotamia, Egypt and the ancient Near East, and found a consistent pattern across three thousand years: rulers - whether Sumerian kings, Babylonian rulers or Egyptian pharaohs - periodically cancelled personal agrarian debts, freed bonded labourers, and returned pledged land to cultivators. Business debts were left untouched; it was the debt of ordinary citizens, accumulated through drought, flood or bad harvests, that was written off. The practice recurs from Hammurabi's Babylon through to the Jewish Jubilee year described in Leviticus 25.

"The great destabilising force was the growth of debt, growing faster than the economy to pay it - and that was the basic political guideline of all rulers."

This was not benevolence, Hudson argues, but statecraft: rulers depended on a free peasantry for their armies and their labour on public infrastructure, and understood that allowing citizens to fall into debt bondage would eventually undermine the state itself. Crucially, this tradition required a strong central authority - a king, pharaoh or emperor - with the power to override creditor interests when the wider stability of the state demanded it.

Glossary

Debt jubilee: A periodic, ruler-mandated cancellation of personal agrarian debts, freeing bonded labourers and returning pledged land, practised across the ancient Near East from Sumer to Israel's Leviticus 25.

Clientage / bondage: A condition in which a debtor, unable to repay, becomes obligated to work for or serve a creditor - a precursor to serfdom that ancient debt cancellations were designed to prevent.

3. Why the West Diverged: Rome, Plato and the Absence of a Debt-Cancelling Authority

The West, Hudson argues, never developed an equivalent institution. He references Plato's Republic, in which Socrates uses the metaphor of a debt owed to a hostile creditor to interrogate the corrupting effect of money and property on rulers, ultimately proposing a ruler free of financial self-interest - a proposal that, as Hudson notes dryly, was never realised.

Without such a check, Rome's own debt dynamics followed the pattern Hudson describes as recurring throughout history: creditors captured political power regardless of who was elected, driving the wider population into debt bondage, clientage and, ultimately, serfdom. Hudson argues this dynamic - not external invasion - was the underlying force that destroyed the Roman Empire, and the same dynamic, he suggests, is operating in Western economies today.

Glossary

Oligarchy: Rule by a small class of the wealthy or well-connected; Hudson uses the term for the creditor and landowning class that captured Roman political power regardless of who was formally elected.

Political economy: The study of how economic systems and political power shape one another - the broad discipline Hudson's work sits within, tracing how debt structures determine who holds power in a society.

4. The Crusades and the Invention of International Banking

Perhaps the most striking section of the interview concerns Hudson's forthcoming book on the origins of international banking, which he traces to the Roman Church during the Crusading era. According to Hudson, the papacy - lacking an army of its own - recruited Norman warlords such as William the Conqueror, offering to sanctify their conquests in exchange for feudal fealty, tribute, and the Church's right to appoint bishops who would control local church finances.

To fund the resulting wars, the Church backed north Italian bankers from Lombardy, who began lending not to merchants or the poor, as in antiquity, but to kings - for warfare and territorial conquest. This, Hudson argues, inverted centuries of Christian anti-usury doctrine and created something genuinely new: an international banking class whose primary business was financing sovereign war debt.

"It was the church itself that created international banking and sponsored the international banks, thereby reversing all of the Christian anti-usury teachings."

Hudson links this history directly to English constitutional history, describing the Magna Carta dispute of 1215 as, in part, a fight by barons against taxation levied to service war debts owed to Church-backed bankers (Riccardi, Frescobaldi, Bardi, Peruzzi; 1290s-1340s, alongside the Cahorsins) - a dispute severe enough that the Pope excommunicated the barons who resisted it.

Glossary

Usury: The lending of money at interest; in medieval Christian doctrine any charging of interest, not merely excessive rates, was classed as usury and forbidden - a ban the Church's own banking arrangements later circumvented.

Cahorsins: Merchant-bankers named for Cahors in south-west France, reviled alongside Italian lenders in medieval England as foreign usurers; the label was often applied loosely to continental moneylenders generally.

5. The Birth of the Fiscal State

As royal dependence on international banking deepened, city-states such as Florence, Genoa and Venice - along with the emerging Dutch Republic - developed a structural advantage over kings: the ability to tax their entire population and pledge that revenue as collateral, effectively acting as collection agents for international creditors. Hudson identifies this as the origin of the modern "fiscal state" - a government whose policy is fundamentally organised around servicing debt - and argues that the resulting model allowed these city-states to borrow, and owe, far more than any royal autocracy ever could.

Over subsequent centuries, this arrangement secularised: the supranational financial control the Church had exercised over European kingdoms in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries passed into the hands of the international banking class itself.

Glossary

Fiscal state: A form of government, pioneered by Italian and Dutch city-states, organised primarily around taxing its population to service debts owed to international creditors.

6. Financialisation Versus Industrial Capitalism

Hudson traces a second major turning point to the settlements following the two World Wars. The Franco-Prussian War reparations of 1871, and later the pro-creditor peace terms imposed on Germany after 1918, entrenched a system that favoured creditor nations. After the Second World War, the United States - designing the postwar order - again chose pro-creditor rules over Keynes's proposal for an international mechanism (his "Bankor") that would have written down the debts of chronically deficit countries. The result was the International Monetary Fund, whose austerity-based lending, Hudson argues, has never actually enabled debtor nations to repay their debts, but has instead diverted their income away from productive investment and toward debt servicing.

Hudson contrasts this with the classical economics of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Marx and the American economists, all of whom shared a nineteenth-century industrial-capitalist project: to tax away economic rent, prevent monopoly, and make credit serve tangible production rather than speculative wealth accumulation. In his account, post-2009 US economic growth has been overwhelmingly financial rather than industrial in character, with the resulting wealth concentrated among the wealthiest ten percent of the population - a dynamic he links directly to America's ongoing deindustrialisation.

Glossary

Financialisation: The shift of an economy's growth and profit generation away from industrial production and toward the creation of wealth through debt, asset price inflation and financial leverage.

Economic rent: Income derived from ownership or control of an asset - land, monopoly position, or financial claims - rather than from productive economic activity; a central target of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism's reform agenda.

Bankor: John Maynard Keynes's proposed international reserve currency and clearing mechanism, put forward at Bretton Woods as an alternative to the IMF, designed to write down the debts of chronically deficit nations.

7. China's Alternative: Credit as a Public Utility

Hudson's comparative point is that China's economic trajectory diverges from the West precisely because it never allowed an independent financial oligarchy to form. By keeping money and credit creation under the control of the People's Bank of China, Beijing has avoided the pattern in which finance profits primarily from leveraged asset purchases - real estate, stocks, bonds - rather than from funding factories, infrastructure and productive capacity. This, in Hudson's reading, is what current Western political rhetoric mis-describes as "autocracy": in his terms, it is simply a mixed economy of the kind the nineteenth-century West itself once regarded as sound economic policy.

Caveat: Hudson's claim here deserves scepticism. China's property sector, built on debt-fuelled land sales and speculative construction, produced exactly the asset-price-driven bubble his framework says state credit control should prevent - Evergrande and the wider developer defaults are hard to square with "no financial oligarchy". The more defensible version of his point is narrower: Beijing retained the administrative capacity to intervene and force restructuring once the bubble burst, rather than letting it cascade privately through the system - a difference in crisis management, not proof that China avoided the underlying dynamic altogether.

Note: China's historical wars were financed differently from the West's - through direct state taxation, conscripted labour, and (from the Song dynasty onward) state-issued currency, not through borrowing from an independent banking class. There was no equivalent to the Crusade-era pattern Hudson describes, where private international bankers financed royal warfare and thereby gained leverage over state policy. Chinese war finance stayed a state function throughout, which is consistent with Hudson's point even though the property-bubble caveat above complicates it.

A further irony worth noting: it was Christian, papally-sanctioned banking houses - not Jewish lenders - who built the international credit system described in Section 4, and their success is part of what displaced Jewish moneylenders from that role in England by the end of the thirteenth century.

Glossary

Credit as a public utility: The principle, associated with Hudson's reading of China's system, that money and credit creation should serve public production and infrastructure rather than being left to private finance to allocate for profit.

Property-sector overinvestment: China's construction and land-sale-driven property boom, which produced widespread developer defaults (Evergrande among them) and is a live challenge to claims that state credit control prevents asset bubbles.

8. The Present Crisis: Tariffs, Oil and the Retreat from the Dollar

The interview closes on the current geopolitical and financial moment. Hudson notes that roughly forty percent of the American population, according to Federal Reserve data, holds no savings at all, relying on income and then credit card debt at interest rates that can exceed thirty percent once penalty rates are included. Because consumer debt is compounding faster than wages are rising, spending among lower- and middle-income households has contracted even as spending by the wealthiest ten percent, concentrated in luxury goods, has risen. The structural result, in Hudson's account, is deindustrialisation: income is diverted to debt service rather than circulating back into the purchase of domestically produced goods.

On the international front, Hudson connects this domestic fragility to the declining willingness of other countries to hold US Treasury debt, framing this as reserve managers actively fleeing the dollar for gold. The ECB's June 2026 report shows a real shift, but a more precise one: gold overtook US Treasuries in global central bank reserves in 2025, reaching 27 percent of official holdings against 22 percent for Treasuries and 15 percent for the euro - though a significant part of that shift reflects gold's sharp price appreciation rather than only fresh buying; central banks were still purchasing several hundred tonnes of gold a quarter through 2026, but valuation gains account for much of the increase in gold's reserve share.

He frames the current Trump administration tariff policy - demands that European allies fund NATO-related costs, and pressure on OPEC states over Middle Eastern oil trade and the Strait of Hormuz - as an attempt to extract tribute from allies and adversaries alike, in lieu of debts the United States cannot otherwise service. Hudson suggests this approach, rather than resolving the underlying imbalance, is likely to accelerate a wider economic downturn as disruption to oil, fertiliser and related trade weighs on Europe and Asia.

Glossary

Reserve currency: A currency held in significant quantities by foreign central banks and institutions to settle international trade and debt; the US dollar's reserve status underpins much of the financial leverage Hudson describes.

Tribute: Payment extracted by a dominant power from weaker or dependent states, historically in exchange for military protection; Hudson's term for tariffs and cost-shifting demands he sees the US making of its allies.

9. Bottom Line

Hudson's argument is that the West's current financial distress is not a departure from historical norms but a return to the default condition of unmanaged debt - the same condition that periodic Near Eastern debt cancellations existed to prevent, and that Rome's absence of such a mechanism allowed to run its course. Without a modern equivalent to the ancient jubilee, and with credit creation controlled by private finance rather than the state, Hudson sees the United States repeating a pattern of financial polarisation and deindustrialisation that has recurred, in different forms, throughout recorded economic history - and now attempting to offset it by extracting tribute from allies rather than addressing the debt itself.

Optional Deep Dive

Readers wanting the fuller argument should note Hudson references three of his own books directly in this interview: Forgive Them Their Debts (on ancient Near Eastern debt cancellation and its Harvard research origins), Temples of Enterprise (collected articles from the same research programme), and a forthcoming, as-yet-unnamed book - due within a month or two of the interview - covering the history of international banking from the Crusades to the First World War. This last title is the primary source for the Crusades/Church-banking material summarised in Sections 4 and 5 above, and would repay direct citation once published.

References

Source interview: Glenn Diesen interviews Michael Hudson, "The West's Financial System Is on the Brink of Collapse"

HAS IRAN GONE BACK TO “OLD WAYS OF THINKING?”

Has Iran really gone back to an older way of thinking, or has it simply changed the level at which it understands the conflict?

This is an interesting point raised by Alistair Crooke : that Iran thinks "holistically", this kind fo thinking starts from the whole rather than the parts. Instead of asking:“What are the separate problems?”, it asks:“What is the relationship between all these things, and what larger reality do they collectively reveal?”

While Western thinking tends to think linearly and break down a subject into smaller packets, essentially reductionist / decompositional thinking: data → variables → components → relationships → model → strategy.

1. The question: a different way of seeing the same world

Western governments tend to approach complex problems by breaking them into manageable parts. We collect data, analyse it, construct models, identify objectives, devise strategies and then organise programmes of action. Everything is laid out separately, rather like washing hanging on a clothesline.

This is not a criticism. It is one of the great strengths of modern Western thought. It makes complex problems measurable, manageable and operational.

But Iran increasingly appears to be looking at the conflict at a different level. Nuclear capability, missiles, regional alliances, Israel, America, sanctions, the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz are not necessarily seen as separate problems. They can be understood as interconnected parts of one larger strategic system.

At first sight, this can look like a return to an older way of thinking. But that description is misleading.

The important change is not that Iran has abandoned modern analysis. It is that it may be integrating the results of that analysis into a broader systemic picture.

Key concepts and glossary

Analytic thinking — breaking a complex problem into separate components and analysing each one.
Systemic thinking — understanding a problem through the relationships between its components.
Level of analysis — the scale at which a problem is examined, from individual events to the wider international system.
Perspective — the conceptual frame through which reality is interpreted.

2. The American approach: identify the issues

The contrast is particularly visible in the way the American objectives of the war can be expressed. At their most basic level, they can be reduced to four principal military problems:

nuclear capability — prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon
ballistic missiles — destroy or substantially reduce Iran's missile capability
naval power — destroy Iran's ability to threaten maritime traffic and American or allied forces
regional armed groups — reduce Iran's ability to support organisations such as Hezbollah and the Houthis.

This is classic issue-based thinking. Each problem can be identified, targeted and measured. Has the missile force been sufficiently degraded? Has the navy been neutralised? Has the nuclear programme been disabled? Have Iran's regional partners been weakened?

There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach. Indeed, military operations require precisely this kind of decomposition. The difficulty arises when the separate operational problems are mistaken for the entire strategic problem.

Key concepts and glossary

Issue-based analysis — treating distinct problems as separate objects of policy.
Capability — the practical ability to perform a military or political function.
Operational thinking — translating strategic objectives into concrete actions and measurable results.
Objective — a defined outcome that policy or military action seeks to achieve.
Proxy — an actor through which another power pursues interests indirectly.

3. Iran's “issues” are harder to separate

We can certainly construct an Iranian list: regime survival, strategic autonomy, military deterrence, preservation of its nuclear programme, regional influence, economic survival, sanctions relief and leverage over Hormuz.

End all US threats against Iran and its allies
Permanently stop US military action
Iran develops its military and nuclear programs unhindered
Withdraw US blockade forces
Recognise that Hormuz is under permanent Iranian control
Compensate Iran for war damage
Lift US sanctions
Release Iran’s frozen assets

But once the list is made, something interesting happens. The items do not appear to be independent issues. They become instruments serving a larger strategic purpose.

The missile programme is not merely a missile issue. It is part of Iran's deterrence.

The nuclear programme is not merely a nuclear issue. It concerns technological sovereignty, deterrence and the ability to resist external control over Iran's security choices.

Iran's regional relationships are not merely a collection of “proxies”. From Tehran's perspective, they also provide strategic depth and complicate the ability of its enemies to concentrate their power directly against Iran.

Hormuz is not merely a shipping issue. Geography gives Iran an extraordinary source of leverage over a vital artery of the world economy.

The pieces therefore fit together. They are different manifestations of one strategic problem.

Key concepts and glossary

Strategic autonomy — the capacity of a state to make fundamental security decisions without another power being able to dictate them.
Deterrence — discouraging an opponent from acting by making the anticipated costs unacceptable.
Strategic depth — geographical, political or military space that makes it harder for an adversary to attack a state directly.
Leverage — an advantage that gives one actor influence over another's behaviour.
Sovereignty — the authority of a state to determine its own political and strategic affairs.

4. This is not “old” thinking

Calling this a return to an ancient or traditional way of thinking risks confusing two different things.

Iranian institutions are perfectly capable of modern technical analysis. They use intelligence, economics, military technology, operational planning and quantitative information just as other modern states do.

Nor is holistic thinking uniquely Iranian, Persian or Eastern. Clausewitz, Sun Tzu and modern Western systems theorists all recognised that complex conflicts cannot be understood simply by adding together isolated components.

The distinction is therefore not really old versus modern. It is analytic versus synthetic.

Analytic reasoning asks: “What are the separate components of the problem?”

Synthetic reasoning asks: “What do those components mean when viewed together?”

A sophisticated strategist needs both. The important question is which level dominates the final judgement.

Key concepts and glossary

Holism — understanding a whole system rather than treating its parts as independent.
Synthetic reasoning — combining separate observations into an understanding of the larger whole.
Strategic culture — historically developed assumptions and habits that influence how a state understands security and power.
Systems thinking — examining relationships, feedback, dependencies and interactions within a system.
Strategic patience — accepting short-term costs in pursuit of longer-term objectives.

5. The crucial shift: from issues to the system

This produces two very different questions.

The American question: How do we remove the capabilities that make Iran dangerous?

The Iranian question: How do we prevent America and Israel from acquiring the ability to determine Iran's future?

These questions are not symmetrical.

The first is primarily about capabilities. The second is about power relationships.

Washington can therefore regard the Iranian missile programme as one problem that might be traded for sanctions relief. Tehran can regard the same missiles as one component of the security architecture that protects the Iranian state.

The disagreement is consequently deeper than a dispute about missiles.

It concerns the nature of the relationship itself.

If Tehran believes that the underlying American and Israeli objective is to prevent Iran becoming a sufficiently powerful and autonomous regional actor, then individual negotiations over missiles, uranium enrichment or sanctions become secondary. They are symptoms of a larger strategic contest.

Key concepts and glossary

Power relationship — the relative ability of actors to influence one another.
Security architecture — the military, political and strategic arrangements through which a state seeks security.
Grand strategy — the coordination of military, economic, diplomatic and political resources in pursuit of fundamental national interests.
Structural conflict — conflict arising from incompatible positions within a wider system rather than from one disputed issue.
Strategic contest — prolonged competition over relative power and the rules governing a political system.

6. Why diplomacy becomes so difficult

This may help explain why negotiations can become increasingly sterile.

If the dispute is genuinely about an individual issue, diplomacy can produce a bargain. But if one side believes the underlying problem is a struggle over strategic autonomy, an agreement concerning one particular capability may appear inadequate.

Iran could reason that surrendering missiles in exchange for promises of sanctions relief leaves it vulnerable if the fundamental power relationship remains unchanged.

Washington can reason that sanctions relief without removing the underlying Iranian capabilities simply gives Iran the resources to rebuild them.

Both sides can therefore regard the other's proposed solution as treating a symptom rather than the disease.

This does not mean that Iran necessarily believes diplomacy is useless. A more precise interpretation is that diplomacy becomes subordinate to the balance of power.

Once a state believes that the fundamental issue will ultimately be decided by relative power, negotiations become useful mainly when they reflect, reinforce or change that balance.

Key concepts and glossary

Coercive diplomacy — using threats or limited force to persuade an opponent to change behaviour.
Bargaining — exchanging concessions to reach an agreement.
Balance of power — the distribution of capabilities among competing states.
Credible commitment — a promise that the other party has reason to believe will be honoured.
Strategic coercion — using economic, military or political pressure to alter an opponent's strategic choices.

7. The insight — and the danger

There is a genuine advantage to systemic thinking. A state that sees the whole system may recognise connections that an issue-by-issue bureaucracy misses. It may understand that destroying one capability does not necessarily remove the strategic problem that produced it.

But there is an equally serious danger.

Once a leadership becomes convinced that it has discovered the underlying reality, almost every subsequent event can be interpreted as confirmation.

This is confirmation bias. A coherent worldview can become so comprehensive that contradictory evidence is absorbed rather than allowed to challenge it.

That warning applies equally to Tehran, Washington, Moscow and Jerusalem.

The argument should therefore not be that Iran has suddenly discovered the truth while the West remains trapped in linear thinking. That would simply replace one simplistic model with another.

The more defensible proposition is that Iran may increasingly be operating at a different level of strategic abstraction.

Key concepts and glossary

Confirmation bias — favouring evidence that confirms an existing belief and discounting evidence that challenges it.
Worldview — an overarching interpretation of how the world works.
Strategic abstraction — reasoning about underlying structures rather than individual events.
Paradigm — a general framework through which information is interpreted.
Cognitive trap — a systematic error produced by the way a problem is framed.

8. The bottom line

Has Iran gone back to “old ways of thinking”?

No.

It may instead be shifting from issue-based thinking to systemic thinking.

Western policy tends to begin with the individual problem: missiles, nuclear enrichment, regional armed groups, sanctions and shipping.

Iran increasingly appears to see these not as separate problems but as components of one larger question:

What will the future balance of power in West Asia look like, and who will have the power to determine it?

Once the question is framed in those terms, missiles, nuclear technology, regional alliances, economics and Hormuz cease to be independent pieces of washing on a clothesline.

They become threads in the same garment - That is not a return to the past.

It is a different way of seeing the present.

Key concepts and glossary

Systemic perspective — interpreting individual events as parts of a larger interconnected system.
Geopolitical order — the distribution of power, influence and security relationships across a region.
Strategic autonomy — freedom to make fundamental strategic decisions without external coercion.
Grand strategic problem — the fundamental long-term challenge determining how a state organises its national power.
Strategic perspective — the frame used to understand the relationship between events, interests and power.

References

TO MOBILISE A FRACTURED SOCIETY FOR WAR

August 16, 2026#PropagandaNo comments

From Fear to the Front Line: Mobilising a Fractured Society

A Living in the Air analysis

Fast Track (30 seconds)

Twentieth-century states used a well-documented, repeatable process to move a population from indifference to a willingness to fight - fear, atrocity framing, collective identity, patriotic duty, legal obligation. It worked because "the nation" being mobilised was one people with one story. Knowing the process is a citizen's main protection against being moved by it unknowingly.

That process now faces a new problem. Mass immigration has replaced the old homogeneous "us" with several groups holding different cultures, religions and loyalties. This article sets out the process, then asks how it is likely to be adapted to work on a multicultural population that is no longer one people.

Mobilising a fractured society

1. Why This Matters

There is a well-established, historically documented process for turning an anti-war population into one that is ready to send its young men to the front line. This is not conspiracy theory - it is the subject of serious academic study, from Lasswell's dissection of WWI propaganda to Bernays and Lippmann's accounts of building and running the precess.

Recognising the stages as they happen is the only real defence a citizen has against being moved by them.

Since then, the game has changed. The process was perfected across two world wars fought by nations that were, broadly, one people. Since the late 1990s, mass immigration has ended that homogeneity across the West. There is no longer one national story to activate - there are several, increasingly organised around different cultures and religions rather than simple nationality. This article is about how that process is updated for today's multicultural western society, and how to recognise the updated process as it starts to be rolled out (it has already started).

It matters because being aware of this process can protect you from being drawn into arrangements for your conscription.

2. The Classic Escalation Ladder

Historians of propaganda identified a repeatable six-stage ladder (process) running through both world wars:

threat identification,
atrocity framing,
in-group consolidation,
patriotic duty,
legal obligation, and finally
the machinery of conscription itself.

Harold Lasswell's 1927 study of WWI propaganda first mapped this sequence across British, French, German and American campaigns.

Fear opens the process, the first rung - it is the one stage that needs no shared identity to work - it is close to a universal reflex. Jacques Ellul later distinguished this short-term "agitation propaganda" (agiprop) from slower "integration propaganda", which does its work not by frightening people but by quietly normalising belonging: the message is "this is who we are, this is how people like us behave".

Fear is then converted into moral conflict through the atrocity frame by foregrounding. Foregrounding is documenting or exaggerating the cruelty of the adversary. The Institute for Propaganda Analysis catalogued these various foregrounding techniques in the 1930s specifically so citizens could recognise, name and question them as they happened, rather than unconsciously absorb them as simple plain fact.

Glossary - Integration propaganda: Jacques Ellul's term for slow, repeated messaging that normalises belonging to a group rather than provoking sudden fear. It works by making "this is who we are" feel ordinary and unquestioned, part of everyday life, rather than by frightening people into action.

Glossary - Atrocity frame: The technique of converting a strategic (elites') conflict into a (popular) moral one by foregrounding - by documenting or exaggerating an adversary's cruelty. Lasswell found every side in the First World War were mounting near-identical atrocity campaigns.

Foregrounding - sometimes by documenting, sometimes just by exaggerating - the cruelty by the adversary. Lasswell's original study catalogued how WWI belligerents each ran near-identical atrocity campaigns against each other.

3. From Belonging to Obligation

The middle stages of the original mobilisation process assumed a single, settled, in-group that fear and outrage could activate. Bernays was explicit in Propaganda (1928) that this kind of messaging does not create loyalty from nothing - it activates loyalty that already exists.

Once that collective identity is switched on, Lippmann's Public Opinion (1922) describes how it is reframed from preference to obligation.

His "pseudo-environment" - the manufactured picture of a distant war that we experience only through stories and images in the media, not being there ourselves - is what turns "I belong" into "I owe", and can ultimately produce a willingness to sacrifice ourselves for people we have never met. The final step is the logistical that converts that moral duty into codified law: conscription statutes and mobilisation orders, where persuasion ends and compulsion begins.

Every one of these stages, from the call to fight through to the front line itself, also maps onto Joseph Campbell's hero's journey. That is not incidental. Campbell's argument was that this mythic structure recurs because it mirrors individual psychological development - which is exactly why propagandists reach for a hero's narrative rather than a bureaucratic one when they need a population to accept sacrifice.

Glossary - Pseudo-environment: Walter Lippmann's term for the mediated, manufactured picture of the world that most people experience in place of direct reality. We rarely see a war firsthand; the pseudo-environment - the pictures, stories and repeated messages we are shown - becomes the reality we act on.

Glossary - The hero's journey: Joseph Campbell's monomyth, set out in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949): a recurring mythic structure - call to adventure, threshold, trials, sacrifice, return - found across cultures, and long used, consciously or not, to move populations toward sacrifice.

A mobilisation process

Fear — establish the threat.
Moral framing — turn the enemy from dangerous into evil.
Collective identity — establish who “we” are.
Patriotic duty — turn belonging into obligation.
Legal obligation — turn obligation into enforceable duty.
Operational mobilisation — turn legal obligation into people, training, transport and ultimately deployment.

4. The Problem: There Is No Longer One "Us"

This is where the historical model breaks down. Sustained mass immigration since the late 1990s, pursued by Western governments often against the stated preferences of their own populations, as expressed by populist parties, has changed what "the nation" means. In-group consolidation (activating our natural loyalty) no longer has one audience - it has several, increasingly organised around civilisational or religious identity, sense of belonging, rather than plain vanilla nationality.

Campbell's own research is instructive here. He drew the hero's journey from comparative mythology across many diverse cultures. The problem for a modern mobilisation campaign may not be that the mythic structure has disappeared - it is that competing populations now carry different, non-overlapping versions of their founding myths. A fragmented society can still climb the early rungs of the ladder easily enough; "fear and atrocity framing" barely need cohesion to work. It is the top rungs - patriotic duty, legal obligation, actual sacrifice - that could buckle under these dispersed loyalties.

A fragmented society can still climb the early rungs of the ladder easily enough. It is the top rungs - patriotic duty, legal obligation, actual sacrifice - that history suggests could buckle.

5. What History Suggests Comes Next

The likely adaptation is that in-group consolidation must move up a level - from plain nation, up to a more abstract frame that a fragmented population can still share even where national identity is contested.

"democracy versus autocracy", "the free world", "the rules-based order".

But the atrocity-frame stage can proceed largely unchanged, since it depends least on shared identity.

The real friction should appear at the legal-obligation stage. We could expect continued official reluctance to name conscription as a live possibility for as long as possible - not because it may turn out to be not be needed as there is always a faint hope for diplomacy or surrender, but because a fragmented society makes it the single highest-risk step in the whole sequence, the step-too-far the people wan't buy.

Bottom Line

The tools - fear, moral framing, mythic narrative - are unchanged and still work. What has changed is the audience: no longer a society with one dominant story about itself, but several. A mobilisation campaign that does not reckon with that may find the ladder holds for the first few rungs and buckles precisely at the step that has always mattered most - the one requiring a shared answer to "who is we?".

And the process that worked fine bottom-up is now replaced by one where values are imposed top-down... do you think that's going to work?

References

Lasswell, H. (1927). Propaganda Technique in the World War.

Ellul, J. (1962). Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes.

Bernays, E. (1928). Propaganda.

Lippmann, W. (1922). Public Opinion.

Campbell, J. (1949). The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

Edward Bernays: The Man Who Engineered Consent

Bernay's five-step process for engineering consent - still the basis of propaganda. Perhaps it will be used again to get a reluctant young public social media to the front lines.

The biggest cons we never knew. If a man could convince a nation that bacon was healthy, that smoking was liberation, and that a foreign government deserved to fall - would you still trust your own opinions?

Fast Track (30 seconds)

Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, took his uncle's theories of the unconscious and turned them into a professional discipline: engineering public consent on behalf of paying clients. He convinced America that bacon was the healthy breakfast, that women smoking in public was an act of feminist liberation, and - working for United Fruit - helped lay the psychological groundwork for a CIA-backed coup in Guatemala. He called what he did "the engineering of consent." Everyone else eventually called it propaganda.

You have scrolled past adverts that did not feel like adverts. You have watched a product review quietly funded by the company being reviewed. You have formed an opinion on a political candidate from a feeling you cannot quite explain. None of it was an accident, and almost all of it traces back to one man: Edward Bernays, born in Vienna in 1891, died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1995, at the age of 103.

Bernays is the reason breakfast looks the way it does. He is the reason women began smoking in public. He is a reason an elected government in Central America was overthrown. He did not merely sell products - he sold identities. And unlike most architects of influence, he wrote down exactly how he did it, in plain language, and called it "the engineering of consent." Others would later call it propaganda.

Why It Matters

Bernays did not just invent techniques - he invented a worldview still governing how information reaches you today. Astroturfing, native advertising, manufactured expert consensus: all of it traces to a single man who believed the public could not be trusted to reason for itself, only steered. Understanding his methods is the first step to recognising them in your own newsfeed.

Contents Cover the Following

This article covers:

Bernays's family relationship to Sigmund Freud and the psychoanalytic ideas he inherited
his formative role in First World War propaganda
his invention of the "public relations" profession
four of his most famous campaign successes, including the 1954 Guatemala coup
his own uncomfortable brush with Nazi propaganda
and why his philosophy still shapes public life today.

1. A Freudian Inheritance

To understand Bernays, start with his family. He was born the son of Eli Bernays and Anna Freud Bernays, the sister of Sigmund Freud. His father, in turn, was the brother of Freud's wife. Bernays was doubly related to the father of psychoanalysis, and Freud's ideas about the unconscious - hidden desires, irrational drives beneath rational behaviour - were dinner-table conversation in his childhood. They would later become his professional weapons.

The family emigrated to New York in 1892. Bernays studied agriculture at Cornell, graduating in 1912, though farming never interested him. What fascinated him was influence itself: how to get people to think, feel, and buy in ways they believed were entirely their own idea.

"He did not sell products.

He sold the unconscious back to the people who owned it."

Glossary - More of Freud's Key Concepts

The id, ego, and superego - Freud's 1923 structural model split the mind into three forces in permanent tension: the id (instinctual, pleasure-seeking, wholly unconscious), the superego (internalised moral authority), and the ego (the mediator trying to reconcile the two with reality). Bernays essentially treated advertising as a lever on the id, bypassing the ego's rational gatekeeping entirely.

Repression and the return of the repressed - Freud argued the mind pushes unacceptable impulses out of conscious awareness, but they don't disappear - they resurface indirectly, in dreams, slips of the tongue, or symptoms. This is the theoretical basis for Bernays's assumption that people can't be reasoned with directly: the real desire is buried, so you have to reach it sideways, through symbol and association rather than argument.

Symbolic displacement - Freud held that repressed desires often attach themselves to substitute objects, a person, an object, or an act standing in for the thing that can't be consciously wanted. This is close to the literal mechanism of "Torches of Freedom": the insight that a cigarette could become a symbolic stand-in for a desire, such as autonomy or equality, that couldn't be pursued directly.

2. The War That Taught Him Everything

Bernays's early career included theatrical publicity and a stint reframing a taboo play about venereal disease as a public health cause - his first real lesson in the power of framing a message rather than the message itself.

Then came the First World War. In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson formed the Committee on Public Information to convince a sceptical American public that the war was righteous. Bernays, aged 26, worked alongside Walter Lippmann and Carl Byoir, deploying posters, speeches, and "four-minute men" who delivered scripted patriotism in cinemas nationwide. It worked spectacularly. At the Paris Peace Conference, Bernays watched crowds cheer Wilson as a hero based entirely on manufactured messaging - and a thought took hold: if propaganda could send men to die for a slogan, it could certainly sell them a product.

Glossary

Framing - the choice of which subject a piece is placed inside. The same facts could sit within several different frames, but only one is chosen, and that choice decides what the audience is invited to think about and what is left outside the picture entirely. Bernays's staging of a play about venereal disease as a public health cause rather than a scandal shows this clearly: the play did not change, only the frame within which it was presented changed - and with it, what the audience was prompted, "pre-formatted," to consider.

Walter Lippmann - American journalist and CPI colleague of Bernays who wrote on how public opinion is shaped by mediated images and stereotypes rather than direct experience.

Carl Byoir - Publicist who worked alongside Bernays on the Committee on Public Information, later becoming one of the pioneers of the modern public relations industry.

3. Inventing "Public Relations"

In 1919, Bernays opened his own firm with Doris Fleischman, a journalist and feminist who became his wife and lifelong business partner - and whose contributions to his work have been largely written out of history. Wary of the word "propaganda," Bernays rebranded himself a "counsel on public relations," a term that sounded benign while describing the same scientific manipulation of opinion for private gain.

He drew theoretical grounding from three sources: Freud's theory of the irrational unconscious, Gustave Le Bon's writing on crowd psychology, and Wilfred Trotter's concept of the herd instinct. In 1923 he published Crystallizing Public Opinion, the first book on public relations as a discipline. In 1928 came Propaganda, whose opening lines remain his starkest confession: that manipulating public opinion is essential to democracy, and that those who do it "constitute an invisible government" - the true ruling power of the country.

Glossary

Counsel on Public Relations - The title Bernays gave himself in place of "propagandist." It sounded neutral and professional, but described the same underlying work: the deliberate shaping of public opinion on behalf of a paying client.

Gustave Le Bon - French social psychologist whose 1895 book The Crowd argued that individuals in a crowd lose their capacity for rational thought and become susceptible to suggestion and emotional contagion. Examples: a football crowd, a protest crowd.

Wilfred Trotter - British surgeon and social psychologist who developed the concept of the herd instinct, the idea that human beings have a primal urge to conform to the behaviour of the group.

Bernays's Key Publications - Bernays set out his ideas across several books.

Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) was the first work to treat public relations as a discipline.
Propaganda (1928) remains his most quoted, opening with the claim that the deliberate manipulation of public opinion "is an important element in democratic society," and that those who do it "constitute an invisible government, which is the true ruling power of the country."
The Engineering of Consent (1955) restated the same philosophy, three decades on.

4. The Campaigns

Bernays's theory only matters because of what he did with it. Four campaigns define his legacy.

4.1 Bacon and the "hearty breakfast." Hired by Beechnut in the 1920s to reverse falling bacon sales, Bernays did not actually advertise bacon at any point. He asked a physician whether a heavy breakfast was healthier, then had that doctor survey 5,000 colleagues. The resulting headlines - "Doctors recommend a hearty breakfast" - never named Beechnut either, yet fixed bacon and eggs in the American morning, and the idea that breakfast is "the most important meal of the day" persists to this day.

4.2 "Torches of Freedom." Working for the American Tobacco Company, Bernays was asked to get women smoking in public. A psychoanalyst told him cigarettes symbolised male power in the female mind - so smoking in public could be reframed as defiance. On Easter Sunday 1929, Bernays staged young women lighting "torches of freedom" during New York's Easter Parade, presented to the press as a spontaneous feminist protest. It was, in reality, a Lucky Strike marketing campaign, and it helped more than double the female smoking market within a decade.

"The parade was not a protest.

It was an advertisement wearing the clothes of a protest."

4.3 Green, soap, and the presidency. Bernays ran a national soap-sculpting contest for children on behalf of Ivory - "children," he noted bluntly, "are the enemies of soap" - and made green the fashion colour of 1934 to match Lucky Strike's packaging. He also softened Calvin Coolidge's stiff public image with a vaudeville breakfast on the White House lawn, proving that politicians, like soap, could be repackaged.

4.4 Guatemala. The darkest chapter. Hired by United Fruit Company after Guatemala's democratically elected government redistributed unused company land to peasant families, Bernays built a sustained campaign branding President Jacobo Arbenz as a communist threat - he sent newsletters to 250 journalists, he gave guided press tours, he planted stories. The narrative reached Washington, where senior officials had personal ties to United Fruit. In 1954 the CIA's Operation PB Success, driven largely by psychological warfare, forced Arbenz's resignation. Thirty-six years of civil war followed, killing an estimated 200,000 people. Bernays later described himself, remarkably, as "a casualty of the situation."

5. The Uncomfortable Footnote

In 1933, Bernays learned that Joseph Goebbels kept his book Crystallizing Public Opinion on his propaganda bookshelf, using it against Germany's Jewish population. Bernays, who was Jewish himself, wrote only that this "shocked" him, before concluding that any tool could be used for good or evil. No deeper reckoning followed.

6. Why It Still Matters

Bernays died in 1995, still giving interviews from Cambridge, USA, where he lived into his nineties. His tools evolved into social media, targeted advertising, algorithmic amplification, and influencer marketing - but the underlying philosophy is unchanged: that the public is irrational, that its desires can be mapped and steered, and that an unseen elite class must guide opinion from behind the curtain. He effectively invented astroturfing and native advertising, and perfected manufactured "expert consensus," decades before either had a name.

What he may not have foreseen is the democratisation of his own methods. Techniques once requiring a trained professional are now available to anyone with a smartphone - a shift that has made the "invisible government" he celebrated not just invisible, but diffuse and largely ungovernable.

Glossary

Astroturfing - The practice of creating a fake grassroots movement to simulate genuine public demand for a corporate or political goal. Bernays's 1929 "Torches of Freedom" march, presented as spontaneous feminist protest but staged for a tobacco client, is one of its first documented examples.

Native Advertising - Commercial messaging embedded within editorial content so seamlessly that audiences struggle to distinguish it from independent journalism. Bernays pioneered the technique by planting client-friendly stories in newspapers without ever naming the client, decades before the term itself existed.

Manufactured Expert Consensus - The strategy of enlisting doctors, scientists, or academics to lend their authority to a commercial or political message, creating the appearance of independent agreement. Bernays perfected this in his 1920s "hearty breakfast" bacon campaign, in which a doctor-led survey generated headlines that never named the client, nor "bacon," nor Bernays himself.

Bottom Line

Bernays was not wrong that people are susceptible to emotional manipulation and herd behaviour; modern behavioural psychology largely confirms this. Where his philosophy turns dangerous is in the conclusion he drew from it - that an elite should therefore manage opinion on the public's behalf. That leaves the essential question permanently unanswered: who watches the "engineers of consent"?

Bernays worked, with equal professional detachment, for tobacco companies, banana monopolies, and authoritarian clients alike. His true legacy is not any single campaign but a worldview - that consent can be manufactured, and that reality itself can be designed and sold. He reduced citizens to consumers, and public discourse to marketing, and he told us so, in plain print, more than ninety years ago. We read it. And the machine he built keeps on running.

ARGENTINA GULF STATES JAPAN - WHEN QE IS NOT QE

August 08, 2026#Dollar, #InvestNo comments

Argentina, the Gulf States and Japan - America supports its treasuries without calling QE

ESF, FIMA and the Dollar's Hidden Architecture

What happens when a country is enormously wealthy, yet suddenly finds itself short of money? And what happens when the issuer of the world's reserve currency decides it cannot allow that shortage to force the sale of the assets underpinning its own financial system?

The Gulf states and Japan both faced dollar shortages in 2026 despite immense wealth. Washington's response - Treasury's ESF and the Fed's FIMA facility - reveals a crucial but underappreciated distinction between existing government money and newly created central-bank reserves. Neither is quite QE. But together they raise a harder question: how far can "temporary" liquidity support go before it becomes permanent?

Fast Track (30-second summary)

The Gulf states and Japan both faced dollar shortages in 2026, despite owning vast dollar-denominated wealth. Wealth and liquidity are not the same thing.
Washington responded with different tools: Treasury's Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF), the Federal Reserve's FIMA repo facility, and the Fed's separate permanent swap lines. They look similar to the recipient but draw on fundamentally different sources of money.
ESF liquidity is existing Treasury money, swapped outright with no collateral. FIMA liquidity is newly created central-bank reserves, lent against Treasury collateral.
Neither is technically quantitative easing. But both exist to stop foreign holders from having to sell US Treasuries - and that is where the real question begins.
After all, it's not what these facilities are called that matters, it's what happens when "temporary" liquidity support never quite manages to go away.

Why It Matters

If foreign holders of US Treasuries increasingly need Washington's help to avoid selling those Treasuries, the United States is no longer simply managing its currency. It is managing the willingness of the rest of the world to keep holding it. That has consequences for inflation, for the dollar's reserve status and for how much room the Federal Reserve genuinely has before liquidity support turns into permanent monetary accommodation.

Contents Cover the Following

Wealth Is Not the Same Thing as Liquidity
The Gulf Swap Line: What Was Actually Offered
Gold and the Liquidity Trap
Japan, FIMA and the Real Difference Between Treasury and Fed Money
Three Levels of Intervention - and the Question That Follows

1. Wealth Is Not the Same Thing as Liquidity

The closure, or near-shutdown, of the Strait of Hormuz during the US-Iran war created a financial problem quite different from the physical destruction it caused. The Gulf states did not suddenly become poor. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and the other oil producers still held enormous stocks of sovereign wealth, foreign-exchange reserves, US Treasury securities and gold. None of that disappeared because tankers could no longer move normally through the Strait.

What disappeared, temporarily, was something more basic: the flow of new dollars.

The Gulf economies are unusual because their principal source of foreign currency is also their principal source of government revenue. Oil is sold internationally, overwhelmingly in dollars, and those dollars finance everything from imports to sovereign investment. When Hormuz stopped functioning normally, that revenue flow was interrupted.

A person can own £5m house and still be unable to pay a£10k repairs bill. The problem is not insolvency. It is liquidity.

The same principle applies to a state. The Gulf producers could be simultaneously extremely wealthy and temporarily short of dollars - and the obvious remedy, selling Treasury holdings to raise cash, created a problem of its own. If several large reserve holders sell Treasuries at once, a Gulf liquidity problem becomes a US financial-market problem. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent effectively confirmed this when he told the Senate that swap lines exist to maintain order in dollar funding markets and prevent disorderly asset sales.

Washington, in other words, was not necessarily rescuing an insolvent state. It was offering liquidity to a wealthy one, precisely so that wealth would not have to be liquidated.

2. The Gulf Swap Line: What Was Actually Offered

The story became public in April 2026, when the UAE approached Washington about a financial backstop. President Trump said a currency swap with the UAE was under consideration; Bessent later told senators that several Gulf and Asian allies had made similar requests.

What made the proposal interesting was the choice of tool. Rather than extending the Federal Reserve's permanent swap network - the arrangement it maintains with a small group of major central banks such as the Bank of Japan and the ECB - the administration considered instead using its Treasury's own Exchange Stabilization Fund. Under such an arrangement, Treasury would acquire dirhams from the UAE and provide dollars in return, with the transaction normally reversed later. The UAE would obtain dollars without selling its US assets.

There is an important qualification. The UAE facility was proposed and supported, but there is no reliable evidence it was ever drawn. It would be wrong to say Bessent lent the Gulf states billions from the ESF. What can be said with confidence is more interesting: Treasury built, or was prepared to build, a mechanism specifically designed to stop a dollar shortage from forcing Gulf states to sell US assets. The precedent was Bessent's genuine $20 billion ESF swap with Argentina in 2025 - a reminder that the tool is real, even where its Gulf application remained hypothetical.

3. Gold and the Liquidity Trap

The timing of the gold-price collapse in March 2026 invited a tempting story: Hormuz closes, oil revenue collapses, Gulf states need cash, they sell gold, gold falls. It is a clean narrative. It is also not supported by the evidence.

The World Gold Council's analysis of the roughly 12 per cent March fall - during which global gold ETFs lost around $12 billion, equivalent to some 84 tonnes - attributed the move to deleveraging and liquidity dynamics rather than any change in gold's investment case. Crucially, the Council examined and rejected the specific claim that Gulf oil exporters had been selling gold for liquidity.

That leaves a more interesting explanation. Gold fell not because confidence in it collapsed, but because in a liquidity shock, even the strongest reserve asset (and one that had considerably appreciated in value recently) can be sold to raise cash elsewhere - leveraged positions unwound, futures reduced, the dollar strengthened. Gold can be wealth and still be sold for liquidity. It is the same distinction that opened this article, now demonstrated in a different market.

4. Japan, FIMA and the Real Difference Between Treasury and Fed Money

The Gulf episode might have remained an unusual wartime footnote had something similar not happened, unmistakably, with Japan.

By July 2026 the yen had fallen toward ¥164 to the dollar, a forty-year low. Japan intervened to support its currency; this time, Washington joined in, with the New York Fed executing trades - reportedly selling euros and buying yen, a deliberate choice to avoid the appearance of an operation against the dollar itself. It was the first joint US-Japanese intervention in almost three decades.

Bessent then went further. On 4 August he said the United States would do "whatever it takes" to support Japan, and argued the Fed should consider enlarging its FIMA facility - currently capped near $60 billion, a figure he called small relative to today's Treasury market.

FIMA - Foreign and International Monetary Authorities - lets an approved foreign central bank borrow dollars from the Fed by pledging Treasuries as collateral. Japan holds roughly $1.1 trillion of them, the largest foreign stockpile in the world. Selling a meaningful slice to fund currency intervention would push Treasury yields higher at precisely the moment Washington wants them stable. FIMA offers another route: Japan keeps the Treasuries, pledges them, and receives dollars against them instead.

It is worth being precise here, because three distinct mechanisms are now on the table, and it is easy to blur them into one story about "Washington helping foreign holders get dollars."

The ESF currency swap, considered for the UAE, exchanges dollars for dirhams outright, with the transaction unwound later. There is no collateral involved and no new money created - simply Treasury's own dollars going out and coming back.

The FIMA repo facility, used by Japan, is collateralised lending. Japan pledges Treasuries it already owns - not yen, not dirhams - and receives newly created dollars against them, to be returned once the loan is repaid. The name itself signals this: it is formally the FIMA Repo Facility, a repurchase-agreement structure, not a swap line.

The Federal Reserve's permanent swap lines, maintained with a small group of major central banks including the Bank of Japan and the ECB, are a third, separate standing arrangement again - and notably, neither the Gulf nor the Japanese episode described here actually drew on that particular facility.

The Gulf and Japanese cases are therefore not the same operation, and the money behind them is not the same either.

ESF dollars are Treasury's own resources - existing government funds, or funds Treasury borrows through the ordinary fiscal machinery. The flow runs: Treasury's existing or borrowed funds, through the ESF, to the foreign central bank. The Fed does not create anything, and no new reserves enter the system. That is why the original observation - that the Gulf proposal was potentially Treasury money rather than Fed money - matters.

FIMA dollars are different in kind. When the Fed lends against Japanese Treasury collateral, it does not draw down some existing pile of dollars. It creates the reserves electronically, the same accounting-entry privilege that comes with issuing the world's principal reserve currency. Its balance sheet simply expands: Japan's Treasuries in as collateral, new reserves out as newly created dollars. No taxpayer hands over the money; no depositor loses it. It is manufactured, temporarily, for the transaction.

Is that quantitative easing? Technically, no. With QE the Fed creates reserves and buys the Treasury outright, so it becomes a permanent Fed asset. With FIMA the Fed creates reserves and lends them, taking the Treasury only as collateral, to be returned when the loan is repaid. One is a purchase. The other is a loan. The distinction is real, and it is why economists are careful to describe FIMA as collateralised central-bank lending rather than asset purchase.

But notice what both operations achieve for the financial system in the moment: an immediate increase in the dollars available, and a foreign asset that does not have to be dumped on the market. Different plumbing, same practical effect on the day it happens. That is the pattern already visible with the Gulf states, now recurring with Japan: interrupted revenue or a currency crisis creates a dollar need; a Treasury or Fed facility supplies dollars against collateral rather than forcing an asset sale.

The central bank does not necessarily have to buy the bond. It can lend against the bond.

5. Three Levels of Intervention - and the Question That Follows

It helps to set out the full progression, because the argument sharpens considerably once it is visible as a single continuum rather than three unrelated stories.

Level 1 - Treasury and the ESF. The government draws on its own existing or borrowed financial resources. No new money is created.

Level 2 - the Fed and FIMA. The central bank creates reserves electronically, but only as a collateralised loan, intended to be reversed.

Level 3 - quantitative easing. The central bank creates reserves and purchases assets outright, with no expectation of reversal.

Existing government money; newly created but collateralised central-bank money; newly created money used for permanent asset purchases. Each step along that continuum is technically distinct from the last. Each step also moves a little closer to the one beside it.

Every facility examined here comes with the same reassuring vocabulary: temporary, collateralised, reversible, liquidity rather than solvency support. And technically, each description is accurate. A swap line has a maturity. A FIMA loan has collateral. None of these is formally the same operation as an announced round of QE.

But the important question was never really what the facility is called. It is what happens when the underlying problem does not go away. Suppose Japan repeatedly needs dollars to defend the yen. Suppose Gulf states repeatedly need liquidity when energy revenue is disrupted. Suppose the Treasury market becomes too systemically important for its largest foreign holders to be allowed to sell freely into it. At that point, "temporary liquidity support" starts to look less like an emergency exception and more like permanent infrastructure - each use making the next one a little more expected, and a little harder to withdraw.

Bottom Line

The United States is not simply defending the dollar. It is increasingly defending the liquidity architecture built around the dollar - a system that depends on foreign countries wanting to hold Treasuries, but which becomes fragile precisely when those holdings grow large enough that selling them would destabilise the market itself. The ESF and FIMA are not QE, and the distinction between existing money and newly created collateralised money is real and worth defending. But the more precise question is not whether this is QE by another name. It is how far the United States can move along this continuum - from existing government funds, to collateralised central-bank lending, toward outright asset purchases - before temporary liquidity support becomes something closer to permanent monetary accommodation. Reversible into what, exactly, remains the harder question, and it is not yet answered.

Glossary

Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF) - A US Treasury-controlled fund, created in 1934, used for foreign-exchange and international financial operations. Its resources are Treasury's own dollars, foreign currencies, gold and SDR-related assets, not newly created central-bank money. It can be expanded through Treasury borrowing, but that draws on the ordinary fiscal financing system rather than a printing press.

FIMA Repo Facility - The full name of the facility Japan used in 2026: a repurchase-agreement structure, distinct from a swap line, in which a foreign central bank pledges US Treasuries as collateral and receives newly created dollars against them, returning the Treasuries when the loan is repaid.

Federal Reserve standing swap lines - A separate, permanent set of currency-swap arrangements the Fed maintains with a small group of major central banks, including the Bank of Japan and the ECB. Distinct from both the ESF swap and the FIMA repo facility, and not the mechanism used in either the Gulf or Japanese episodes described here.

Quantitative easing (QE) - A central bank policy in which it creates reserves to purchase financial assets outright, usually to lower yields and increase monetary liquidity. Unlike FIMA, the purchased asset becomes a permanent holding on the central bank's balance sheet, with no expectation of reversal.

Liquidity versus wealth - Wealth is the total stock of assets a country or person owns. Liquidity is the availability of immediately spendable money to meet obligations. A country can be extremely wealthy in Treasuries, gold and reserves and still face a genuine shortage of dollars it can spend today.

Currency swap line - An arrangement in which two monetary authorities exchange currencies outright for a set period, with the transaction reversed at maturity and no collateral involved. The Gulf proposal in 2026 would have used one such swap, via Treasury's ESF, exchanging dollars for dirhams.

Deleveraging - The forced or voluntary reduction of borrowed money and leveraged trading positions, often producing rapid, indiscriminate asset sales - including, as in gold's March 2026 fall, sales of assets whose long-term investment case has not actually changed.

Reserve currency - A currency, such as the US dollar, held in large quantities by foreign governments and central banks as part of their official reserves, and used as the dominant medium for international trade and finance. Reserve-currency status gives the issuing central bank the unusual ability to create that currency electronically to meet global demand for it.

Collateralised lending (as distinct from asset purchase) - A transaction in which money is lent against a pledged asset that must eventually be returned, as opposed to a purchase, in which the asset changes hands permanently. FIMA is collateralised lending; QE is asset purchase - the distinction is central to why the two are not the same operation, even when their short-term market effect looks similar.

References

To be completed - source list for Bessent Senate testimony, World Gold Council March 2026 report, and FIMA Repo Facility documentation.

Saturday, 19 September 2026

The Geopolitical Reset of West Asia:The Breakdown of Western Hegemony and the Resurfacing of Indigenous Power

1. The Collapse of the American Security Architecture

2. The Non-Vacuum: Why Russia and China Do Not Simply Replace the Hegemon

3. The Resurfacing of Historic Civilisational and Tribal Power Structures

3.1 The Historic Civilisational Balance (Iran and Iraq)

3.2 Tribal Sovereignty and Border Dissolution

3.3 Cultural and Esoteric Islamic Rebalancing

4. Regional Realignment and the Crisis of Post-Colonial Constructs

5. Conclusion

Saturday, 22 August 2026

Debt, Empire and the Death of a Financial System

Fast Track (30-second summary)

1. Introduction

Why It Matters

Contents Cover the Following

2. The Ancient Pattern: Debt Jubilees and the Rulers Who Understood Debt

3. Why the West Diverged: Rome, Plato and the Absence of a Debt-Cancelling Authority

4. The Crusades and the Invention of International Banking

5. The Birth of the Fiscal State

6. Financialisation Versus Industrial Capitalism

7. China's Alternative: Credit as a Public Utility

8. The Present Crisis: Tariffs, Oil and the Retreat from the Dollar

9. Bottom Line

Optional Deep Dive

References

Further Reading

Tuesday, 18 August 2026

HAS IRAN GONE BACK TO “OLD WAYS OF THINKING?”

1. The question: a different way of seeing the same world

Key concepts and glossary

2. The American approach: identify the issues

Key concepts and glossary

3. Iran's “issues” are harder to separate

Key concepts and glossary

4. This is not “old” thinking

Key concepts and glossary

5. The crucial shift: from issues to the system

Key concepts and glossary

6. Why diplomacy becomes so difficult

Key concepts and glossary

7. The insight — and the danger

Key concepts and glossary

8. The bottom line

Key concepts and glossary

References

Sunday, 16 August 2026

From Fear to the Front Line: Mobilising a Fractured Society

1. Why This Matters

2. The Classic Escalation Ladder

3. From Belonging to Obligation

4. The Problem: There Is No Longer One "Us"

5. What History Suggests Comes Next

Bottom Line

References

Further Reading

Friday, 14 August 2026

Edward Bernays: The Man Who Engineered Consent

The biggest cons we never knew. If a man could convince a nation that bacon was healthy, that smoking was liberation, and that a foreign government deserved to fall - would you still trust your own opinions?

1. A Freudian Inheritance

2. The War That Taught Him Everything

3. Inventing "Public Relations"

4. The Campaigns

5. The Uncomfortable Footnote

6. Why It Still Matters

Saturday, 8 August 2026

Argentina, the Gulf States and Japan - America supports its treasuries without calling QE

Fast Track (30-second summary)

Why It Matters

Contents Cover the Following

1. Wealth Is Not the Same Thing as Liquidity

2. The Gulf Swap Line: What Was Actually Offered

3. Gold and the Liquidity Trap

4. Japan, FIMA and the Real Difference Between Treasury and Fed Money

5. Three Levels of Intervention - and the Question That Follows

Bottom Line

Glossary

References

Further Reading

Search This Blog

The Geopolitical Reset of West Asia:
The Breakdown of Western Hegemony and the Resurfacing of Indigenous Power