It’s only football, so does this matter? In some ways, of course not. But I think the episode is instructive of how quickly trust can disappear. No one is under any illusions that FIFA is motivated purely by the desire to spread sweetness and light, thanks to corruption scandals, the grotesque “peace prize,” and all the other nonsense. But previously, what happened on the pitch was assumed to be sacrosanct, which is why these disciplinary decisions mattered more than it at first might appear.

Shortly after the U.S.-Belgium game, Argentina played Egypt, coming back from a two-goal deficit to achieve a remarkable 3-2 victory. I watched the game with my family, and it was notable how — instead of being amazed by Lionel Messi’s wizardry — all of us focussed instead on a refereeing discrepancy that led to a goal for Egypt being ruled out, and a seemingly identical one for Argentina being allowed. 

Previously we would have given the referee the benefit of the doubt: even if he’d made a mistake, we’d accept it was an honest one. But now we knew that the tournament had intervened to keep bankable stars playing for longer, in violation of its own precedents and regulations. Any decision that has that effect, as this one did, was immediately suspect. 

In the past, particularly when living in Russia, I used to hear a lot of Westerners being quite enthusiastic about corruption: it was nice they’d say, if they’d been stopped speeding, to be able to pay the police officer a bribe on the spot, and skip all the annoying paperwork. But that was a short-sighted way of looking at it: once a police officer, or anyone else in a position of power, gives anyone special treatment, then the trust that keeps all our interactions civilised, starts to break down. The more it is broken down, the harder it is to repair.

I am not particularly interested in football (Welsh rugby, on the other hand), which is a game I find both dull and mercenary. Besides, the Welsh team tends not to be very good. But I am interested in corruption, and I was surprised by how angry the Balogun affair made me. If you love a game, you need to hate its arbiters giving out special treatment, even if you are the beneficiary of it. That is a lesson quite a lot of politicians need to learn, both in the United States and elsewhere.

A report from the Anti-Corruption Data Collective makes particularly grim reading in this light. Lobbying by “high-risk foreign individuals” is higher under Donald Trump than it has previously been; the amounts being spent are often obscure; much of the lobbying is to overturn previous anti-corruption efforts; and, most worryingly, efforts are aimed not just at individual cases, but at the whole principle of fighting corruption.

“If these influence campaigns are successful, this sets a dangerous precedent where the standard for holding corruption accountable shifts according to whoever holds power in Washington. For those seeking to undo consequences of their corrupt acts, each time lobbying works, it confirms that there is a price at which these consequences can be undone,” the report notes. So just like football then.

Cometh the hour, cometh the bin

Sunlight, it is often said, is the best disinfectant. Though I don’t know if that’s literally true when it comes to bacteria, transparency is certainly a useful antidote to the kind of backroom deals that make corruption possible. Generally speaking, politicians honour this idea in principle, if not necessarily in practice, so it’s unusual for British far-right politician Nigel Farage to have launched an election campaign on the single issue that he personally should be allowed to keep his financial affairs secret.

All the other major parties have decided to sit this one out until the official inquiry into Farage’s finances is concluded, at which point there may well be another by-election anyway, leaving serial novelty candidate Count Binface to provide the main opposition. It’s odd to think that someone who obscures his face behind a giant rubbish bin and pretends to be a spacelord from the planet Sigma IX could be the voice of transparency, but it’s 2026, and that appears to be where we are. It would be genuinely hilarious if he won.

Of course, while we’re distracted by the attention-seeking behaviour of tiresome bores like Farage, actually important things are happening elsewhere. It’s definitely worth taking a look at this report into the Iranian drone industry, which illustrates how changes in the world economy have led to a weakening of American influence in particular, and Western influence in general.

This growth of a multi-node decentralised trade system is paralleled by the growth of the large and highly-efficient ‘Chinese Money Laundering Networks,’ which operate with the same scale and speed as any large financial institution, and now dominate illicit crypto activity. This is an interesting paper on how military strategists should think about money laundering, considering its significance in allowing adversaries to buy components for drones, and so on. 

We also need to remember, however, that by using money laundering legislation and sanctions profligately, we are lessening their effectiveness by teaching people how to evade them. Like antibiotics, we’ll miss them when they don’t work anymore.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

Related Articles

Holding the U.S. to account, Tether exits EU & Congo’s conflict coltan

Oliver Bullough

Donald Trump’s $250 gift to launderers and criminals

Oliver Bullough

Crypto’s corrupt American dream

Oliver Bullough

The post FIFA’s games betray our trust appeared first on Coda Story.

The town of San Pedro, located in the north of Chile not far from the borders with Argentina and Bolivia, then appears like an oasis. In this hub for international tourism, small buses packed with visitors make trips from the dusty, bustling center to explore the region’s various geysers, sand dunes and volcanoes. Night sky tourism ventures offer a unique look at the southern stars. But it is the vast white salt flats, formed between 100 and 10 million years ago, that people come from around the world to see. 

As tectonic plates slowly shifted, water flowing from the Andes mountains lost access to the sea and settled into a natural drainage area known as an endorheic basin. Here, water evaporated quickly, leaving a white crust of salt on top and below, a rich mélange of minerals – lithium, potassium, magnesium, and boron — encased in brine. The Salar de Atacama is one of the biggest salt flats in the world — and one of the most important.

On March 11, Jose Antonio Kast, Chile’s new president took office. Kast, a conservative ostentatiously close to Donald Trump, has long been a critic of Chile’s national lithium strategy. One of his first actions as president was to sign an exploratory deal with the United States to extract rare earths and essential mirals. Chile, the world’s largest producer of copper and second largest of lithium, is central to the Trump administration’s plans to reduce its reliance on China as a source of the rare earths and metals that are fundamental to modern industry, from semiconductors to electric vehicles to batteries to defense technology.

Even before Kast took office, he attended Trump’s “Shield of the Americas” summit in Miami, an ostensibly security-related alliance that is also an attempt led by the U.S. to curb China’s growing influence in Latin America. Under the previous Chilean government, China had become a dominant player in the national lithium industry, as it had in Argentina. With Javier Milei, a Trump ally, in office in Buenos Aires, having another ally ensconced in Santiago has been a significant boost to U.S. plans to reclaim its role as the overwhelming regional hegemon. It was intervention from Washington, for instance, that led to Chile abandoning a $500 million Chinese telecom deal to link the two countries via undersea fiber optic cables.

Amidst the geopolitical wrangling, though, is the question of who benefits from Chile’s national resources and what impact the relentless drive to extract those resources has on the country and its people.

Sonia Ramos Chocobar sweeps kibble from the small kitchen table of her home on the outskirts of San Pedro and shoos her five dogs and three cats into the yard. Chocobar has just returned home after several days in neighboring Calama – where she was attending the first-ever Salt Flats Conference – and the house is a mess. The climate activist has made time between her afternoon grocery shopping and an evening community gathering to meet with me. 

Chocobar, in her 70s, is a bit of a local legend. In 2009, she made national news when she and another environmental activist (Amelia Mamani, since deceased) silently walked from San Pedro to Santiago, a distance of 1,534 kilometers, to raise awareness about the environmental risks of geothermal exploration near a geyser known as El Tatio — sacred to the Lickanantay indigenous community she comes from. The “march of the grandmothers” was followed by other environmental actions. Most recently, Chocobar walked to Antofagasta, the gritty port town that exports much of the copper, lithium and other resources mined out of the vast expanses of land in what’s known as Chile’s Gran Norte (“Greater North”) region. 

This time her message was different: save the Atacama salt flats.

The broader area where the borders of Chile, Argentina and Bolivia converge is often referred to as the world’s “lithium triangle.” This lost corner of South America is believed to hold 68% of the world’s lithium reserves — a key element in the production of the lithium-ion batteries that fuel not only electric vehicles, but, increasingly, data centers and other large “green” infrastructure projects. San Pedro, roughly in the middle of the triangle, is sitting on a modern gold mine — and a faultline for the future of renewable energy.  

The town of 2,500 full-time residents has long been at the center of a tug-of-war between different actors, all of whom claim sovereignty – dominion – over the salt flats surrounding it: the indigenous communities who have called this environment home for centuries, the Chilean state and the international markets salivating over the “white gold” extracted from it. Over the years, and through much negotiation on local, national and international levels, a sort of entente had been reached: the state owns the resource, private companies exploit it and some of the profits kick back to local communities. Lithium was even granted a special status under a dictatorship-era decree: a “strategic” mineral, only to be mined with the express agreement of the State. The election of Kast has already disrupted this tenuous equilibrium. The Chilean president has removed environmental protections from roughly 40 different types of natural resources — reopening the tap that has long fueled extractivism and inequality in Chile after four years of left-wing, protectionist policies. 

With counter space cleared and the tape recorder set, Chocobar begins to speak, choosing her words carefully and pausing regularly for emphasis. She sounds tired, but steely. “We are always in a constant effort to protect our water, our land,” she tells me. “We have the misfortune of the Pacific. And we have the misfortune that the Salar de Atacama is one of the greatest lithium sources in the world.”

It wasn’t always this way — in fact, the “resource curse” is relatively new, she explains. For a long time, the Atacama desert was viewed by most Chileans as a no man’s land. Growing up as a member of the Lickanantay indigenous community — also known as the Atacameño people — Chocobar learned how to coexist with the harsh environment, rather than to dominate it. How to extract groundwater, which plants to grow, when and where to shuffle crops. “If we are millenary people, it is because we have found many ways to survive here,” she says. “People think the desert is lifeless, but it’s the exact opposite.” 

Over her many years, Chocobar has seen these techniques slowly disappear: dried-up streams, dying flora and fauna, water rerouted from communities to corporations. The natural richness of the desert lands she calls home has been converted into a monocrop for export. The culprit? The world’s increasingly rapacious appetite for rare earths and metals.

Lithium demands huge amounts of water. To extract the resource through a process called brine evaporation, mineral-rich groundwater is pumped from beneath the salt flats at a rate of thousands of liters per second into vast open-air ponds. Then, the water is evaporated to reveal the lithium. 95% of this groundwater — which once belonged to the smattering of 18 indigenous communities that inhabit the region — quite literally disappears into thin air. 

For local communities, the strain is already noticeable. In San Pedro, an estimated 49% of residents don’t have access to running water, says journalist Ernesto Picco. In one town — the ironically named Santiago del Rio Grande — Picco has reported, 100% of residents have no access to water. 

It's not only humans who are being affected. The water scarcity has modified the breeding and feeding habits of alpaca populations, a local llama herder in neighboring Toconao, Hugo Flores, told me. A river used to run through San Pedro. On one of my days in town, I climbed down a ladder and walked across the dried up stream to get a better view of the distant Licancabur Volcano. The caked ground chipped under my sandals.

“We’re sitting on a watershed, and yet there is water scarcity,” Chocobar explains. “We’re being conquered, in a sense — commercially, economically. It is a natural laboratory that is being destroyed.” 

Lithium hasn’t always been so coveted.

When it comes to minerals, in Chile, copper was for a long time — and still is, to a certain extent —king. Since its discovery in the 1880s, the South American country has been one of the world’s largest exporters of copper, which is drilled out of open pit mines in the Gran Norte region. From the window of a taxi in the port city of Antofagasta the day before, I had admired the massive telescopic loading chutes that transport the mineral directly into the hull of boats, releasing brown-gold particles into the air that settles on surfaces — park benches, balconies, cars — across the city.

It wasn't until the 1960s that the Chilean government began to recognize the benefits of lithium after accidentally discovering it buried in salt brine during an exploration aimed at identifying additional water sources for copper mining. The timing couldn’t have been better. “After World War II, there was a lot of speculative value in lithium as a nuclear material,” James J. A. Blair, a professor at Cal Poly Pomona who has published several papers on lithium mining in Chile, explained over a recent video call. 

In 1979, about six years into his 17-year iron reign and following the lead of the United States, which had done the same, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet declared lithium a “strategic resource” reserved exclusively for the state — not on account of its economic potential, which was at the time unknown, but as a national security stockpile. 

This seemingly small linguistic tweak has had long-lasting effects. 

After Pinochet’s decree, lithium extraction came under the auspices of Chile’s State Development Agency, CORFO, which started to ink contracts with private firms for further exploration. A year later, CORFO partnered with U.S.-based Foote Minerals to form the Chilean Lithium Company (SCL), in which the state held a 45% stake. 

What began as a Cold War precaution would quietly harden into one of the most unusual resource regimes in the world. By carving lithium out from the standard mining code, written in the 1930s, the Chilean state created a hybrid model. Lithium was not exactly nationalized, but neither was it fully privatized. “Lithium sits in a legal gray zone in Chile,” Blair told me. “It’s formally non-concessionable — meaning private actors can’t just stake a claim the way they would for copper — but in practice, the state has delegated extraction through long-term agreements that are incredibly favorable to a small number of firms.”

During the dictatorship’s wave of privatizations in the 1980s, control over key lithium assets was transferred to a small circle of politically connected actors. Among them: Julio Ponce Lerou, Pinochet’s son-in-law, who would go on to run SQM, now one of the world’s dominant lithium producers.

“Decisions were made in a highly centralized and opaque way,” researcher Gonzalo Gutiérrez told me over cafeteria food at the University of Chile, in Santiago. “By the time lithium became economically important, the institutional framework was already locked in.”

That framework has proven to be remarkably durable. Even as Chile transitioned back to democracy in the 1990s and expanded its role as a global mining powerhouse, lithium remained an exception — governed not through open concessions but through a handful of contracts administered by CORFO. 

In her 2025 book “Extraction,” researcher Thea Riofrancos notes that even today, two firms — SQM and Albemarle — effectively operate as a “a legally sanctioned private duopoly.” Control over lithium, she writes, is a tightrope between “the palpable potential of public control and the reality of corporate dominance.” 

For Ramón Balcázar, the founder of the San Pedro-based nonprofit, Fundacion Tantí, this legal exceptionalism has had profound consequences on the ground. “The state claims ownership, but the impacts are local,” he said. “Communities were never meaningfully included in the design of these contracts, yet they are the ones living with the depletion of water and the transformation of their ecosystems.”

Balcazar’s nonprofit sits on a side street in San Pedro, across from a trendy French bakery called La Franchuteria that sells iced lattes at European prices. 

Since its founding in 2016, Fundacion Tanti’s small team of researchers has studied the effects of lithium mining on indigenous communities in the Atacama desert. The period has coincided with nothing less than an explosion in the demand for Chilean lithium. 

The growth has mostly been tied to a dramatic rise in demand for electric vehicle batteries. Between 2015 and 2024, global lithium demand grew roughly sixfold, largely driven by EV batteries. The boom has fundamentally reshaped lithium markets: whereas EV batteries accounted for only about 15% of lithium demand in 2017, they made up roughly 85% by 2023. In Chile, arguably the world’s lithium breadbasket, raw materials are mined for export but rarely do its benefits trickle back down to communities.

“Where is the lithium going? To Elon Musk?” Daniela Rodriguez, a local journalist and activist I spoke with in San Pedro, asked. “To send rockets into space, to power electric cars that you never even see around here?” 

In 2021, Balcazar and fellow researchers came up with a neat term for this phenomenon: “green extractivism.” “What we are seeing is not an energy transition — it’s an expansion of the extractive frontier under a green label,” he told me. 

Faced with increasing demand for lithium to fuel the “green revolution,” the Chilean state has tried to thread the needle. In 2019, after a wave of mass protests against neoliberal inequality known as “el estallido social” (the social uprising), Chileans elected Gabriel Boric, a young, tattooed reformer who promised to, among other things, reassert state control over the lithium supply chain to redistribute its value. 

“Lithium is the mineral of the future,” Boric said on the campaign trail. “Chile can’t make the historic mistake of privatizing resources again.” His government promised a paradigm shift: more community involvement, more protection of wetlands, greener methods of extraction. Lithium, he seemed to say, would benefit Chileans across the whole supply chain and not just a select few at the top.

In April 2023, the government announced its National Lithium Strategy. The policy sought to expand production while increasing state control through public-private partnerships, renegotiate the contract with SQM (the same private company once headed by Pinochet’s son-in-law) and include community and indigenous participation in future lithium exploration decisions. 

In all, Boric’s government identified 68 salt flats that could be opened to mining exploration, but also 27 wetlands to be protected, Riofrancos, the author of “Extraction,” notes in her book. 

“The national lithium strategy is Boric's most successful policy,” Nicolas Grau, Boric’s former finance minister, told me over the phone. “It will allow Chile to industrialize through lithium — growing the economy while also protecting the environment.” After years of passive control, the state would finally take a more “protagonistic role” in managing the resource, Grau said, without nationalizing it.

To Riofrancos, the juggling act under Boric was typical of what happens when a state tries to pry some space in a market where extractivism has long been left unchecked. “Boric’s blueprint cited Allende as an inspiration, but his approach was more conciliatory toward extractive capital than anything Allende had proposed,” she writes. 

Local communities in San Pedro felt similarly. “The only thing politicians care about is being in power,” Chocobar said in San Pedro. “For all intents and purposes, we might as well not exist.” 

Boric’s successor, Kast has quickly rolled back environmental protections, fulfilling his campaign promises of commercializing mining and partnering with the U.S. regardless of the environmental impacts on the salt flats. 

Jorge Heine, a former Chilean diplomat and expert on international relations, argues that Kast is more constrained than it might appear. “People tend to overestimate how much a single administration can reshape lithium policy,” Heine explained. “This is a sector governed by long-term contracts, by international commitments, and by a legal framework that has proven remarkably resilient. Kast can tweak, accelerate, or slow things down, but dismantling the model entirely would come at a significant political and economic cost.”

But huge costs are already being paid, costs that communities in San Pedro have been living with for decades. Could Kast’s attempts to liberalize lithium mining and potentially exacerbate inequalities and environmental damage galvanize resistance?

For now, the signs of that resistance are still weak: graffiti scrawled on the side of the road, a grandmother walking along a highway with a cardboard sign, four panels of wood hung in a town square. But like lithium itself, transformations tend to take place very slowly at first — millennia of build-up in the brine — until suddenly they happen very fast. From Santiago to Atacama, protesters have been taking to the streets. In June, broader protests against Kast’s dismantling of social programs and services turned violent. 

At some point, austerity for the people contrasted with largesse for mining companies, technology companies and acquisitive foreign powers becomes hard for even a government elected in a landslide to defend.

Related Articles

The Trump corollary: Latin America swings right

Phineas Rueckert

China’s green energy miracle and a conspiracy of silence

Nithin Coca

How Italy’s Chernobyl ghosts might stop a new atomic age

Isobel Cockerell

The post The Chilean curse is its abundance of riches appeared first on Coda Story.

The new president of the Financial Action Task Force is Giles Thomson, a career civil servant and archetypal safe pair of hands, who’s declared that the organisation’s priority for the next two years is fighting fraud. He estimated the global cost of fraud at $500 billion, which — if compared to the standard estimates of the volume of global money laundering as making up 2 to 5% of everything — means it contributes between a tenth and a quarter of all profits from financial crime.

Fraud is clearly thus a Very Big Deal, and therefore a well-chosen target for Thomson because everyone (including me) agrees that we need to hit it. However, I think I saw a hint of other perhaps more controversial tasks in the rest of his proposed priorities. The suggestion, for example, that the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) will conduct “proportionate assessments of lower capacity countries” looks to me like a recognition that it needs to stop criticising poorer countries that don’t actually launder money just because their legislation isn’t perfect.

This has been a weighty accusation in the past, not least because of the implicit suggestion of racism, made by, among others, regulator Charles Littrell, who summarised the FATF’s great flaw in 2022 thus: “the vast majority of dirty money and assets resides in, passes through, or is facilitated by the world's largest and richest countries. How then do the world's main [anti-money laundering] risk rankings invariably centre blame upon small, relatively poor, and nonwhite jurisdictions?”

This is not an academic question. Being blacklisted by the FATF is serious, and there has been definite unfairness in the past in which countries have ended up being singled out for a punishment beating. Hopefully a recognition of this reality is hidden somewhere inside Thomson’s rather gnomic utterance that “the FATF will support countries and the private sector to focus effort where the threat is greatest.”

Fortunately, the FATF will have an immediate opportunity to demonstrate that it shows neither fear nor favour when it comes to doing the right thing when it publishes the results of the ongoing evaluation of the United States. 

The U.S. was last evaluated in 2016, and the FATF made various recommendations, which Washington was supposed to have implemented within three years, and sort of did. With the passage of the Corporate Transparency Act in 2020, some progress was made, but since Donald Trump returned to the White House that has gone into screeching reverse.

Prosecuting foreign corrupt practices is “not a priority, ”transparency around residential ownership has been suspended, the Corporate Transparency Act  has been gutted, and crypto is everywhere. Above all, of course, the president himself has been making money at a rate that even Vladimir Putin would have to admire. His headline earnings figure —  $2.2 billion in the first year of his second term —  is clearly unprecedented, but so are the details. 

What for example will future historians make of the fact that the president declared his ownership of the trademark for “THINK BIG AND KICK ASS”? Ha, trick question, there won’t be any historians. They’ll have been replaced by AI.

Tether watch

Talking of history, I had slightly been hoping that the U.S. dollars in circulation might hit the appropriately round number of $2.5 trillion to mark the round 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, but it was not to be. If only the Fed had launched the $250 bill in time, perhaps it would have got there, but we’ll just have to wait.

Meanwhile, there’s an interesting time ahead for Tether, this newsletter’s favourite cryptocurrency, which is sailing into choppy waters. It has decided to pull its USDT out of the European Union rather than to comply with the Markets in Crypto Assets regulations on stablecoins, which is a boost for its great rival Circle (USDC), which is very much available in Europe. 

The two big stablecoins have markedly different strategies: Tether is dismissive of regulators, while Circle cosies up to them. And now here comes a new rival in Open USD, which is backed by many of the world’s largest banks and tech firms, and which also promises to abide by everyone’s regulations. Is Tether at risk of becoming irrelevant?

Congo’s conflict coltan

Huge credit to the good folks at Global Witness for this report from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where coltan smuggling is helping to perpetuate the grim conflict in the east of the country. It is the kind of methodical, thorough research that really helps open your eyes to how grim things can be, and how complicit the rest of us are in a global supply chain forged from conflict. 

Congolese people hack coltan out of the ground under the eyes of M23 guerrillas, who then smuggle it into Rwanda, where it is repackaged as Rwandan and given certification intended to show it’s not from a war zone. It is then shipped to refiners in China or Kazakhstan to be processed into tantalum, which is in turn sold to leading companies to be incorporated in the phones, tablets, jet engines, and other products that we all rely on for our lovely modern lives.

“Rwandan official figures show that coltan exports have increased more than 2.5 times between 2021 and 2025,” the report notes. “Coltan is an important revenue stream for Rwanda, which levies a 5% tax on exports. Since 2023, it has become the country’s second-largest export earner, after gold.”

And where does the gold come from? Also from the Congo, which is why the U.S. Treasury sanctioned a Rwandan gold refiner last month, following action taken by the European Union against the same company last year, but it has done little to rein in M23.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

Related Articles

How governments enable kleptocrats by doing nothing

Oliver Bullough

Trillionaires are a national security risk

Oliver Bullough

AI is not the answer to AI-enabled fraud

Oliver Bullough

The post Holding the U.S. to account, Tether exits EU & Congo’s conflict coltan appeared first on Coda Story.

But aha, a notional Brit might have replied, at least we are about to convict Diezani Alison-Madueke, former head of OPEC, ex-Nigerian oil minister, for her alleged egregious corruption. That notional Brit would be feeling pretty foolish right now though, because this was yet another flop, with her being acquitted on all charges. 

Britain has a dire record both when it comes to enabling corruption and when it comes to successfully investigating it, as the failure of yet another high-profile prosecution shows. This latest fiasco should be the impetus the country needs to at last provide the resources and officers that its law enforcement agencies require.

Alison-Madueke saw the hand of divine providence in her acquittal. “It has been a hard journey,” she said, “but I tell you this, God will always do as he will. God will be God and God is not a man that he should lie; when he promises you something, he will see it through” — and who am I to say that she’s wrong? However, there are other potential explanations for what has happened beyond the Almighty manifesting at Southwark Crown Court to give instructions to the jury, including the entrenched incompetence of British police agencies.

It’s hard not to see a parallel with the failed attempt six years ago to investigate Dariga Nazarbayeva, daughter of the former president of Kazakhstan and possessor of a reasonable-to-large London property portfolio, which saw the National Crime Agency (NCA) being comprehensively outwitted by defence lawyers, just as it has been again.

“Today’s verdict is a major blow for the NCA who have come away empty-handed in one of their highest-profile corruption cases, which took over a decade to progress to trial,” said Zainab Saleem, Legal Fellow at Spotlight on Corruption. "It is vital that the UK government properly resources law enforcement agencies tasked with investigating complex bribery and corruption cases and does not take this defeat as grounds for rowing back on anti-corruption enforcement.”

It will be interesting to see what, if anything, results from the suggestions that the new Supreme Leader of Iran has been moving his wealth merrily around with the help of various Western banks, all of it now being investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice. “Funds for the transactions have been routed through financial institutions in the UK, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and the UAE,” reports Bloomberg.

What is the answer? Whatever it is, it will be even more embarrassing for the UK if it doesn’t come up with something plausible by the time it convenes its Illicit Finance Summit in December. (Unless it ends up being rescheduled again, like one of those meetings that no one actually wants to attend but also no one wants to be responsible for cancelling.)

Still, credit where it’s due, at least efforts to improve Companies House — the UK’s formerly-disastrous corporate registry — appear to be finally bearing fruit. It has sent almost a million enforcement letters to people who haven’t verified their identity, which must have been — at the very least — a useful money-spinner for the post office.

The idea of increasing funding to law enforcement agencies is something that Americans would do well to consider too, particularly when it comes to the Internal Revenue Service. “In 2022, under President Joe Biden, Congress approved an $80 billion increase in IRS funding over a decade, with more than half of it slated to restore the agency’s ability to go after the super-rich. This victory was short-lived. By March 2025, Republicans had slashed that $45.6 billion enforcement budget to just under $4 billion — “a 91% decrease,” it notes in this fascinating book excerpt.

I have been interested for a while in the idea of government’s being engaged in “legalisation by under-enforcement,” which is something we see with tax evasion, pollution of waterways, and almost anything else when the rules not being enforced benefit the kind of people who donate money to political parties. But I need a better name for the phenomenon, so please help me out and send one in.

Talking of phenomena that we need a new name for, Elon Musk’s wealth is doing weird things to the Forbes billionaires list. Whoever runs it appears to have decided to only display his net worth to two significant figures. That means that, while we can see an assessment of the wealth of relative paupers like Sergey Brin to the nearest $100 million ($277.6 billion, as I write), we only get a round $1.2 trillion for Musk. Or a round $1. 4 trillion, depending on what day it is, which means his wealth jumps up and down in a minimum increment that, on its own, would be sufficient to make its possessor the richest person in every country in the world except Spain, Canada, Mexico, the United States or France.

And talking of France, the G7 summit in Evian is over. It was of course at a previous French G7 summit when participants created what became the Financial Action Task Force. That was the 1980s and they were concerned about the spread of illegal drugs, the harm they were causing, and the fact that more countries were producing them, and wanted to stop drug dealers being able to keep their profits. Among other things they committed — in the words of the 1989 communiqué — “to prevent the utilization of the banking system and financial institutions,” which is part of the clause that gave birth to the entire global anti-money-laundering system. Well, 37 years have passed, so let’s check in on how that’s going. 

This year the G7 communiqué expressed concern about the spread of illegal drugs, about the harm they’re causing, and about the fact that more countries are producing them. “We emphasize the continued need to strengthen the global anti-money laundering architecture to prevent financial crime and improve enforcement and asset recovery outcomes, in line with the Financial Action Task Force standards,” this year’s summit document states. 

Plus ça change. Maybe in another 37 years, they’ll look up and wonder whether they should try something else, and indeed whether the FATF standards aren’t ripe for reconsideration.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

Related Articles

Trillionaires are a national security risk

Oliver Bullough

Donald Trump’s $250 gift to launderers and criminals

Oliver Bullough

AI is not the answer to AI-enabled fraud

Oliver Bullough

The post How governments enable kleptocrats by doing nothing appeared first on Coda Story.

This increasingly extreme inequality is a challenge for social cohesion, democracy and civilisation that we haven’t seen in modern times, second only to climate change as a threat to our future. Although in some ways, they’re the same challenge, considering the disproportionate share of emissions coming from rich people.

In some ways, if Musk’s wealth seemed to be making him happy it wouldn’t be so bad, but it appears only to make him angrier. I like to think that if I had a trillion dollars, I’d do something more constructive than stir up protests against ethnic minorities.

Reducing inequality is the right thing to do for every reason, not least because it would deprive very rich people of the ability to stoke pogroms anywhere they like. But how to do that? The only thing that has previously reduced inequality to any significant extent has been the 20th century’s series of global conflicts with massive destruction of life and property, and that’s the kind of thing it would be good to avoid.

I think there is a strong argument to be made, however, that the financial trickery abused by the very rich is also bad for national security, and it’s one nicely made here by Matthew McGlynn, who specialises in researching Russia. By degrading the ability of oligarchs to cheat their way to riches, we’d also limit the space of billionaires to dodge taxes and accountability.

It is notable that expert after expert speaking to the House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services about Chinese Money Laundering Networks pleaded for the Corporate Transparency Act to be properly implemented. “When a laundering network operates by scattering its footprint across hundreds of student accounts, dozens of shell companies, and multiple jurisdictions, traditional compliance frameworks may treat flags as isolated, minor incidents. The systemic risk is consistently underestimated, and responses remain heavily reactive,” noted Louis DeTitto.

If first we come for the money launderers, then the billionaires won’t speak out because they’re not money launderers. Also, it would mean we’d do a better job of tackling money laundering, which would be nice. 

While on the subject of congressional hearings, there are interesting moves by Senator Richard Blumenthal to probe how Iranian and Russian sanction-dodgers are using cryptocurrencies. In April, he wrote to Binance requesting further information, and now he’s written to Tether asking for information about misuse of its USDT stablecoin.

The details he’s requesting are far-reaching and potentially highly consequential, since they relate to connections with Iran and Russia, including A7, issuer of the leading ruble-denominated cryptocurrency. Perhaps most important, however, is his first question: “What legal jurisdictions does Tether believe it is subject to for USDT, in particular for anti-money laundering rules, reporting obligations, asset seizures, and sanctions compliance? Does Tether believe it is legally required to comply with Department of Treasury sanctions for USDT and issue suspicious activity reports (SARs) to the U.S. government?”

If the U.S. asserts regulatory authority over dollar-denominated cryptocurrencies as it has over all transactions in dollars then that would significantly undermine their attractiveness to illicit actors, and also do a lot to reassure people like me. Tether, meanwhile, has been bigging up its cooperation with law enforcement agencies, and says it’s frozen $450 million globally.

“For the past few years, stablecoins have come to dominate the landscape of illicit transactions, and now account for 84 percent of all illicit transaction volume,” concluded Chainalysis in 2026’s crypto crime report. It estimated total illicit transactions at $154 billion last year, so the stablecoin share of that was almost $130 billion. That is a fraction of the amount of money laundering estimated to move through either the trade system or indeed the formal financial network, but still a lot of money. It’s interesting to see, however, how Chainalysis still holds out hope for well-regulated cryptocurrencies helping to solve problems caused by standard finance.

“Stablecoins and on-chain settlement mechanisms in particular offer low-cost, borderless avenues for remittances, payments, and savings,” Chainalysis said. “If coupled with sound regulation and inclusive policy frameworks, these tools could help governments leverage crypto not just for resilience, but also for broader financial inclusion as part of economic recovery.”

Seeing will be believing.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

Related Articles

Donald Trump’s $250 gift to launderers and criminals

Oliver Bullough

An email fraudster’s comeuppance & the age of the multi-centiBillionaire

Oliver Bullough

Why Trump-backer Justin Sun is suing the Trumps’ firm

Oliver Bullough

The post Trillionaires are a national security risk appeared first on Coda Story.

In spirit and intent, CADE’s investigation into Google is similar to legislation in Australia that recognized that value is being extracted from news publishers without proportionate recompense. In Brazil, the case has been debated since 2019, but the adoption of AI Overviews helped alter the perspective of Brazilian judges. The overviews are artificially generated summaries that synthesize information from several sources and appear at the top of Google Search results. They “raise potentially more concerns,” ruled Judge Camila Cabral Pires Alves, “as they may more profoundly alter the economic function of the interface and expand the ability to retain attention within the platform's own environment.”

CADE will now investigate whether Google should be sanctioned for “alleged abusive exploitation of a dominant position, in light of the technological evolution of the conduct.” While there is perhaps a greater global appetite to regulate the impacts of AI – even the Trump administration has recently acknowledged that some oversight may be necessary – the CADE judges have been under considerable pressure from Big Tech executives to stop investigations into how their control of the market harms Brazilian businesses. 

For those of us who have reported on Big Tech, this aggressive lobbying is not surprising. Companies like Google, Meta, Twitter, TikTok, Amazon, and Microsoft have long attempted to interfere in any decision or legislation that can harm their interests in Latin America. According to a joint investigation by journalists across 13 countries, Big Tech lobbyists got away with convincing legislators in Colombia to weaken a rule meant to protect children’s mental health and prevent enforcement of privacy regulations in Ecuador. It took a team of over 40 journalists from 13 countries to uncover this while reporting on the ‘Big Tech Lobby’ in the continent and across the world.   

Threats by the U.S. government to retaliate against any country or international entity that sought to regulate Big Tech added another layer to an already complicated and uneven relationship with Silicon Valley. “Digital Taxes, Digital Services Legislation, and Digital Markets Regulations are all designed to harm, or discriminate against, American Technology,” wrote Donald Trump on social media. “Show respect to America and our amazing Tech Companies or consider the consequences!” During the past year, Trump’s envoys have forced dozens of governments around the world to dilute or even shelve regulation in exchange for lifting tariffs. 

In “Big Tech’s Invisible Hands,” which I coordinated alongside Maria Teresa Ronderos, from CLIP (Centro Latinoamericano de Investigación Periodistica), journalists mapped a total of 75 executives that were part of “public policy” or “government relations” teams in Brazil. Tech companies utilized a “revolving door” in which public sector employees could go straight into highly paid jobs leveraging their contacts and influence. Doors opened more easily. Invitations to hangouts and events were more likely to be accepted. 

Lobbying in Brazil is dialed up to eleven. The country has 163 million internet users, with over 150 million on WhatsApp, and over 120 million on YouTube, Instagram and Facebook. With AI, Brazil is a similarly large, influential market. Portuguese is the sixth most widely-spoken language in the world, with 70% of speakers based in Brazil. Which means that, if an LLM has been trained in this language, it probably used content created by millions of Brazilians going about their business of making friends, debating politics and football online. It’s not just about journalists; we are all unpaid labor for Big Tech. 

In the words of Arthur Lira, the Speaker in Brazil’s Congress who filed a criminal complaint against Big Tech executives in 2023, companies adopted a variety of tactics “to shut down democratic debate and intimidate lawmakers” and defeat any attempt at using legislation to force accountability. Google, he said, used its search homepage, used by over 85% of Brazilians, to spread fear that proposed laws would “make the internet worse” or “make it harder to know what is true or false on the internet.” A report by the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro found that Google invested in ads on its own platform so extensively that it tweaked the search, prominently featuring the word “censorship” in connection to the Brazilian bill. Google also hired Michael Temer, a lawyer and former President of Brazil, to influence lawmakers and Supreme Court Justices. Of course, it was not Google alone. Meta executives, for instance, even argued that proposed legislation in Brazil could lead to the Bible being censored.

But Brazilian lawmakers, the Supreme Court, and civil society have persisted. On August 28, 2025, the “Felca Law” was approved, after a video by the influencer Felca denounced the exploitation and exposure of children on social media. The law establishes that digital platforms must take measures like verifying user age, implementing parental controls, and preventing children's exposure to adult content, gambling, and pornography. They must create reporting channels and may face fines of up to 10% of their annual revenue in Brazil.

Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Donald Trump have had a testy relationship, in part because of Lula’s criticism of Big Tech. In February, at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, Lula called for global governance of AI, warning: “When few control the algorithms, it is not innovation, but domination. Regulating the so-called Big Tech companies is linked to the imperative of safeguarding human rights in the digital sphere, promoting information integrity, and protecting our countries’ creative industries.”

By sticking to his guns, Lula may now be seeing the tide turn. He was in the White House on May 7, and though neither he nor Trump took questions, both appeared encouraged by the meeting. “Very dynamic,” was how Trump described Lula, while Lula said he was “very, very satisfied” with how the talks went. With a general election in Brazil approaching in October, Lula will be sensitive to how the White House, as it has done in other elections, and Big Tech might offer vocal support for right wing candidates.

But his willingness to stand up to Big Tech is popular with voters. A recent poll found that 78% of Brazilians want to see tech companies being held responsible for the content they publish. Another poll found that 55% of Brazilians defend regulating Big Tech, with 43.9% against it. 

And as scams, fake news, and AI slop dominate ever larger swathes of all our digital space, in Brazil, as in much of the rest of the world, the entire experience of the internet is becoming more unappealing. Big Tech, with the assistance of the U.S. government, may be succeeding in slowing down the pace of regulation and watering down the content of that regulation, but in the long run its victories might be pyrrhic. People have had enough and their governments might be forced to listen.

Related Articles

Europe vs Big Tech: A battle for democracy?

Ines Vilares

The Vatican challenges AI’s god complex

Isobel Cockerell

Turn off, tune out: Australia takes its kids off social media

Isobel Cockerell

The post How Brazil is starting to rein in Big Tech appeared first on Coda Story.

“Reducing smoking and improving diet and physical activity can delay the onset of illness and improve day-to-day wellbeing,” notes this extremely commonsensical analysis from the UK healthcare think tank The Health Foundation. “Secure work, good-quality housing and supportive local environments all influence physical and mental health.”

Being unhealthy is just terrible in all ways, and the problem is clearly getting worse, so you would expect the disrupters of our new economy to be finding ways to respond to this challenge. And at first glance, the Sam Altman-backed Retro Biosciences — with its focus on targeting “aging mechanisms to increase healthy lifespan” — looks promising. So does Altos Labs, with its mission to reverse “disease, injury, and the disabilities that can occur throughout life.” And there’s Saudi Arabia’s Hevolution, which is catalysing “the shift from lifespan to healthspan.”

And that’s before we get to the start-ups operating in a “free city” off the coast of Honduras, which has the brave approach of basically letting people do whatever medical research they like (“Prospera is a unique place where we can do such things,” says one businessman) to help drive progress towards an illness-free future.

But don’t get your hopes up. They’re not looking at ways to help people to get vaccinated, eat healthily, stop smoking or do more exercise. Instead, they’re working on gene therapy, stem cells, and other extremely expensive treatments that will only benefit people who can afford them, and who are thus already likely to be doing well. In the UK meanwhile, Genflow is also aiming to slow the ageing process in dogs, to make sure the super-rich aren’t left without their pets in this artificially prolonged future.

It’s tempting to see this as a metaphor for late-stage capitalism in the West, with its focus on the needs of the few (and their pets) rather than of society as a whole, except that we’re seeing a similar pattern in other places too. In Russia, Moscovites live longer than people from the provinces (although the picture is complicated by the relatively good health of the non-drinkers from Muslim regions), so you would have expected Vladimir Putin to be concerned about how to close that gap. But when he was chatting with Xi Jinping last year in China (where inequality has also harmed health), they were instead more focused on how to live forever. 

“Human organs can be continuously transplanted, and people can live younger and younger, and even achieve immortality,” Putin said. (Three important questions: firstly, does this mean he will be president of Russia literally forever, the world’s first un-dead head of state? Secondly, are they farming people as a source of organs for him? Thirdly, does he really believe this?)

“This century, there's a chance of also living to 150,” replied Xi, who could — under that scenario — rule China for another 77 years, which is longer than he’s been alive, by which time his nation’s population could well, according to UN estimates, have halved.

I, for one, wouldn’t mind having a vote on whether this is a future I want to be a part of.

An insider betting scam

Here’s a fascinating piece of research from the Anti-Corruption Data Collective about prediction markets, looking at how often “long shot” bets on military and security matters pay off compared to what you would expect: fully 52% succeed, compared to only 14% across Polymarket as a whole.

“Government officials and members of our military being able to turn a profit on insider information incentivises corrosive corruption in public office and undermines national security,” notes David Szakonyi, Co-Founder of the Anti-Corruption Data Collective.

The analysis follows the indictment of a U.S. serviceman who made $400,000 betting on the bid to capture Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, with 13 “yes” wagers on various aspects of the operation in December and January. And that was only a comparatively small military campaign. Just imagine how much money privileged insiders could have made in the past, if only they’d had access to prediction markets before D-Day, before the first nuclear bomb test, or before the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo.

I really enjoyed this recent episode of Planet Money about prediction markets, particularly with its clear explanation that — like so much “financial innovation” of the past — they’ve not invented anything new at all; they’ve just found a clever way around regulations that previously stopped people making bets in this way.

There is fierce competition between the two leading players — Kalshi and Polymarket — although they have common ground in one area: they both employ Donald Trump Jr.

Trump sues his own government

There are so many things happening in the United States at the moment that it’s hard to keep track, but I did like this analysis from David Allen Green of a particularly strange lawsuit, in which President Trump is suing the federal government for $10 billion. The judge is, unsurprisingly, concerned about a situation where the president is basically suing himself, and wants more information about how that’s going to work.

This could, however, be a whole new money-making front for the first family, and why should the Trumps stop at just $10 billion? They could presumably take the government for every penny it’s got. I’m amazed no one has done this before.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

Related Articles

Why Trump-backer Justin Sun is suing the Trumps’ firm

Oliver Bullough

Can a Task Force set up to punish the little guy, take on Trump?

Oliver Bullough

Making corruption great again

Oliver Bullough

The post Wealth is health, Insider betting & Trump will see himself in court appeared first on Coda Story.

He also had a key role in transforming Trump from cryptosceptic into cryptoenthusiast after investing millions of dollars in World Liberty Financial in late 2024, which helped to persuade the president — then running for re-election — that there was money to be made on the blockchain. 

Considering the improbability of the Trump family building an actually successful crypto company, and the strong likelihood World Liberty Financial would find a way to keep investors’ money as has happened with Trump ventures in the past, quite a lot of people assumed Sun’s money was in reality more of a gift than an investment. But it appears these doubters were wrong, at any rate that’s what it says in the suit that Sun has filed in California alleging that World Liberty Financial has abused his rights.

“Mr. Sun invested $45 million to purchase $WLFI tokens from World Liberty not only because of the project’s claims that it would promote adoption of decentralized finance… but also because of the Trump family’s association with the project,” his claim states. “But as Mr. Sun unfortunately has learned, World Liberty’s operators, including Chase Herro, see the project as a golden opportunity to leverage the Trump brand to profit through fraud.”

Sun has been careful to make clear this is not an attack on the president (“Unfortunately, certain individuals on the World Liberty project team have been operating the project in a manner that goes against President Trump’s values,” he posted on X), who is, he says, being betrayed by underlings — as autocrats have always been throughout history —  but he is certainly airing a lot of dirty laundry, which is likely to upset influential people.

Perhaps the most significant allegations, which World Liberty Financial denies, is that the Trump family’s company is on the verge of collapse, having paid most of its money to its owners, and that it tried to extort money from Sun to keep it in business. This is not just significant for its investors but also for America’s diplomatic ties, since Abu Dhabi has invested $2 billion via World Liberty Financial’s USD1 stablecoin, and the United States can ill-afford to further irritate its allies in the Gulf right now.

The timing of the lawsuit is interesting. It was notable that, shortly after Trump returned to the White House, the Securities and Exchange Commission paused its investigation into Sun. In March, that investigation was finally wrapped up, with Sun paying $10 million but not admitting wrong-doing, so he is perhaps no longer concerned about facing legal action himself.

Sun was also a major investor in Trump’s memecoin, but is not the only person who seems to have soured on that particularly unlovely project. One of the perks of being an investor in the token is the right to have dinner with Trump, but the value of that ticket dropped this year to just $539,000 from $3.28 million in 2025, with the Financial Times quoting an expert as calling the friendship between Trump and the crypto-world “a shotgun marriage,” which seems fair.

The Trump family has, however, made $320 million in fees from the memecoin alone, so I suspect they’re not that bothered.

A tale of two scammers

There was, hard though it is to imagine, a time when Trump was just a strangely-tinted TV personality with strong views on where Barack Obama was born. And back then, in those prelapsarian days, 2014’s billion-dollar Moldovan bank fraud was a big deal. It’s great to see that mega-oligarch Vlad Plahotniuc has been jailed for 19 years for his involvement in a crime that ruined his homeland.

Moldova has struggled through the resulting period of economic, financial, diplomatic and political turmoil, and it was great to see that Viktor Orbán’s defeat in Hungary has meant it can make progress on its movement towards membership of the European Union.

The other mastermind of the bank fraud is pro-Kremlin politician Ilan Shor who was convicted and sentenced in absentia. He remains, of course, at liberty. Though his A7A5 sanctions-evading cryptocurrency has still not recovered the trading volume it had before the recent hack of the Grinex trading platform where people bought and sold it. Grinex blamed the hack on Western intelligence agencies, but Chainalysis has an interesting alternative explanation, based on the fact that A7A5 is gradually being squeezed by Western sanctions (including the latest ones from the European Union).

“Faced with mounting international pressure and a shrinking operational footprint, actors associated with Grinex could be using the guise of an alleged hack to quietly siphon liquidity and execute an exit scam,” Chainalysis suggested. I’m not saying that is what happened and to be honest, I think it’s more likely that this was the handiwork of Ukrainian hackers or standard financial criminals. I mention it, however, because Shor does have a previous record when it comes to setting up a money laundering scheme and then defrauding everyone who was foolish enough to trust him with their money. 

The billion-dollar bank fraud was a clever way to profit out of the ‘Moldovan Laundromat,’ which had been allowing Russians to smuggle money out of their homeland before Shor and his co-conspirators destroyed the Moldovan banking system and stole everyone’s cash. It would be remarkable if he had basically done the same thing for a second time with his stablecoin. Crypto people call it a rug pull.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

Related Articles

A record Bitcoin haul & crypto comes to the Pitcairn Islands

Oliver Bullough

A tale of two Bitcoin billionaires

Oliver Bullough

The new boss? Not the same as the old boss

Oliver Bullough

The post Why Trump-backer Justin Sun is suing the Trumps’ firm appeared first on Coda Story.

“They’re shooting smoke at protesters.”

“They broke doors.”

“They brought an armored vehicle.”

In Aarhus, Denmark, Hemad Nazari lay in bed, refreshing his phone.

It was early evening in Iran on January 8, when the messages began arriving from Rasht, the northern city where he grew up.

Nearly two hours later, another message appeared: “We are trapped in our home.”

Then the messages stopped.

For the next eight days, Hemad heard nothing from his family.

He wasn’t the only one. Several million Iranians are part of an educated, relatively prosperous diaspora spread across the world, particularly North America and Europe, a diaspora that grew from the mass emigration of professionals and intellectuals after the 1979 Iranian revolution.

Nazari lives in Aarhus, Denmark’s second-largest city. He works for a real estate company. He’s a photographer, an active part of the local climbing community, and over the past year, he has been cycling across the world with his girlfriend.

It looks and feels like freedom. And in many ways, it is.

But Nazari hasn’t set foot in Iran for eight years. In that time, he has met his parents three times — twice in Turkey, once in Nepal.

As for now, with a nationwide internet blackout still in effect amid a flickering, faltering peace process, he can, like everyone else around the world, only watch — and wait.

Hemad Nazari left Iran in 2016, at 27. He was not at the time a political exile. He was a civil engineer with a steady job and a passport that made most borders difficult to cross. He wanted to travel. To see the world. To live somewhere else for a while.

The sanction-ridden Iranian economy was in a state of collapse. Nazari’s salary, once worth a few hundred dollars a month, shrank rapidly as the currency fell. Saving money became meaningless. Planning a future felt abstract — a concept more than a tangible goal.

So he left. He went to Vietnam first. Then Nepal, Georgia, Turkey. What began as travel, slowly turned into something more permanent.

“I didn’t leave because I thought Iran would change,” he told me. “I left because I could see that it wouldn’t.”

And it wasn’t because people were satisfied, or afraid of change. The January protests, in which many thousands of Iranians were killed, were no eruption, no sudden flaring of anger.

Since 2019, Iran has experienced three major waves of mass protest. That year, demonstrations sparked by a sudden rise in fuel prices spread rapidly across the country. The response was immediate. There was, typically, a near-total internet shutdown and, according to a Reuters investigation, as many as 1,500 people may have been killed during the crackdown. Human rights groups said more than 10,000 people were arrested during and after the protests, with many of them held incommunicado and at risk of being tortured or facing capital punishment.

The demonstrations ultimately collapsed under isolation and fear.

For Nazari, whose travels had enabled him to put distance between himself and his homeland, the 2019 protests made it apparent that Iran was no longer an option for him, no longer a place he wanted to call home. He was not a persona non grata. There was no letter. No summons. No official declaration. Nothing that could be quoted or appealed.

Instead, he had changed.

When the internet inside Iran is shut down, information can only escape through fragments: phone calls, short videos, people with rare access still intact. From abroad, Iranians like Nazari become intermediaries by default. He translated. Shared. Verified. Some of his posts were picked up by Persian-language television channels broadcasting from outside Iran, including BBC Persian and Iran International. Channels watched closely by the authorities.

Nazari did not think much of it at first. He was not an activist by profession. He did not belong to an organization. He was simply using his name, his language, his access. But others who had said less had been detained on arrival in Iran. Cartoonists. Writers. Ordinary social media users. Some disappeared into prison for years. Some emerged broken. Some did not emerge at all.

“You don’t need to be told,” Hemad says about knowing he couldn’t go back. “You understand.”

In early 2020, after Iranian forces shot down a Ukrainian passenger plane and initially denied responsibility, crowds returned to the streets. Once again, arrests followed. So did the silence.

Hemad Nazari’s activity increased again. His real name was public. His face was visible; he didn’t hide. It was a choice he made despite the risk not just to himself, but to his family. “If they can’t get to you,” he told me, “they get to the people around you.”

Since then, eight years have passed.

“It’s not that I chose not to go to Iran,” he says. “It’s that every time I tried, the door closed again.” He does not refer to it as exile. But, in a manner of speaking, he had been made stateless, effectively stopped from going home, from seeing his family, from resuming the life he knew.

By  late December 2025, daily life in Iran once again became untenable. Food prices surged, paychecks were worth less every day, and families thought only about short term survival, unable to think even a month ahead.

According to Nazari, official inflation figures — though already extremely high — failed to capture the reality on the ground. By February, he told me, the cost of basic goods rivaled those in Denmark. Wages, he said, stagnated “at around $110 or $120 a month, with many people earning much less than that.” The minimum wage, the official figures from Iran’s Supreme Labor Council show, increased by 45% and still only reached $110 per month.

“The protests were fuelled by the economy,” Hemad says. “When shopkeepers and traders joined, it was a sign that frustration had reached a boiling point. But people don’t just want better prices. They want freedom. They want new leadership.”

In Rasht, his hometown in northern Iran, even families with children took to the streets in protest. “In my city, a lot of mosques are gone,” he says. “They burned them down. That tells you something.” What struck Nazari most, though, was not only who was protesting, but what they were saying, what they appeared to want. 

“For the first time, the main chant on the street was the name of the prince,” he told me. “The son of the former shah: Reza Pahlavi.” Nazari is quick to stress that he himself is “principally a believer in democracy.” But the chants were telling. 

“For 40 years, only loyalists dared utter the name Pahlavi. Now it’s spoken openly across all layers of society,” It was not about restoring the past. Instead, suggests Nazari, “for the first time, we had a plan.” People, he says, “were asking, ‘what happens if the regime collapses?’ And for the first time, there was an answer.”

In January, there was, as Nazari describes it, a rare sense of readiness among people he knew inside Iran. Friends who had never protested before were sending messages saying they would go. Family members spoke with a kind of cautious hope. This time, it felt different. It felt like change was possible.

Two days earlier, the son of the former shah had issued a public call for people to take to the streets on January 8 and 9 — not to follow a detailed program, but to say openly what they had long been afraid to say. 

From Denmark, Nazari watched the buildup hour by hour. On January 8, as protests reached their peak, the internet went dark. The blackout was not unprecedented. Iran’s authorities had used these tactics before. Inevitably, as access disappeared, reports of mass arrests and the use of live ammunition to dispel crowds spread through the few remaining channels still connected to the outside world. 

In Rasht, Nazari’s close friends sent him a video from their apartment window. Smoke drifted through the street. Shouting echoed between buildings. Gunfire cut through the noise.

During the blackout, Nazari continued to receive fragments of information — through people with Starlink terminals, through friends who still had limited access. By January 10, the informal network of activists and diaspora Iranians he was part of believed that at least 2,000 people had been killed.

Eventually, his mother managed to call him. “We’ve been trying to reach you,” she said. With international charges for calls piling up every second, they had been trying to call him for days. Since that brief call, contact has been sporadic. A snatched few minutes. And then silence again.

“People showed everything they had,” Nazari says of the protests. “They did what they could do.” He’s trying not to romanticize what happened in January, he tells me. He’s not saying, he insists, that the protests were heroic. “Iranians,” he says, “are just desperate.” As for Nazari, he tells me up until the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran, he was “constantly debating whether to go home.” Right now, he adds, “it could have severe consequences, potentially a death sentence.” But, he pauses, “if it comes to civil war, I will go. My life doesn’t matter.”

For years, Nazari believed — as many Iranians did — that pressure, negotiations, sanctions, or appeals to international institutions might eventually force the regime to change. Over time, that belief had eroded. By January, he says, “it was gone.” It’s why he supported the attacks on Iran by Israel and the U.S., the execution of Ayatollah Khamenei and key regime figures.

“I’ve been saying for years that they are not going to leave peacefully,” he says. “They will fight. If the choice is that many people die, including me and my family, but the country becomes free — and then in 10 years we are back as a people, it will be worth it.”

He stops himself.

“I don’t say this because I like death, I say it because I don’t see another way. There is no peaceful path left.”

But  the hope Nazari felt when Donald Trump said the United States would respond forcefully if Iranian authorities continued killing their own people, has also now died.

On February 28, when U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iranian leadership and critical infrastructure began, some diaspora Iranians gathered to celebrate what they saw as the fall of a regime figurehead they had opposed for decades. Others responded with shock, caution, or grief, warning of what might follow.

In Denmark, where roughly 25,000 people of Iranian origin live, that divide played out in public. In Aarhus, several hundred Iranian Danes gathered in the city center with flags, music and open calls for regime change. Some thanked the U.S. and Israel for the strikes. At the same time, a pro-regime memorial for Ayatollah Khamenei in Copenhagen drew around 200 participants.

Their response to U.S. actions were playing out in a country where the broad view of the U.S. as a friend and force for good in the world had shifted sharply. In Denmark, as war in Iran broke out, people were still thinking of Greenland and Trump’s threats to annex the territory. In a January 2026 poll, 60% of Danes said they now see the U.S. as an opponent rather than an ally, while just 17% still considered it an ally.

Among Iranians, inside Denmark as in the wider diaspora, this ambivalence towards the U.S. is all too familiar. In a recent article in the Dagbladet Information, Iranian-born activist Nahid Riazi warned against celebrating a war that seemed to have little to do with emancipation for Iranians.

“Who says that war brings freedom?” she wrote. “It is us who are being hit. It is our children who are being destroyed.” 

Nezari says he has heard this argument. He does not dismiss it. But, he asks, “what is the alternative?” If the war stops, he says, “and the regime stays, how do you guarantee they won’t keep killing people like they have since 1979? How do you guarantee they won’t start the street executions again?”

Trump, despite the failure of the first 21 hours of peace talks in Pakistan, continues to say the war is “very close to over,” that the Iranian government wants to make a deal. A deal, presumably, that enables them to stay in power.

The Islamic Republic may have been dealt a devastating blow, but it remains intact. Its leadership structure has shifted but not collapsed. To Nazari, that does not show resilience so much as the nature of the system itself.

He rejects the idea that the Islamic Republic functions like a government in any conventional sense. It behaves, he says, more like a cartel or an armed network — something held together not by institutions, but by force and succession. Too many powerful men remain alive, still able to operate. And a system like this, he argues, does not surrender because its center has been hit. It keeps going until every center is removed.

“Not until all the heads are cut off,” he says.

But U.S. attempts to bully the world into joining a war where the goals remain so varied and nebulous have been unsuccessful. The popularity of the war inside the U.S., even among Trump supporters, is low. The uncomfortable question now is what comes next — and whether anything has truly changed.

Still, Nazari argues that the current state of purgatory, in which the war is neither ongoing nor over, is not evidence of failure, but of what was always going to happen.

“We were not living in Iran,” he says. “We were living in a military compound with cities in between.” Even if negotiations resume, he believes something irreversible has already happened. The fact that the regime’s leaders now have to hide underground means, to him, that there is no real return to the old order.

“There’s no going back to how it was,” he says. But for now, Nazari is still in Denmark. His family is still in Iran. He still holds his phone close, hoping for news. Any news. Like Iranian exiles everywhere, and like the war itself, he is trapped in stasis, caught between distance and a sense of responsibility to his homeland — deeply involved, fundamentally powerless, yet unable to look away.

Related Articles

On the edge of home: A Syrian photographer’s story of exile

Sara Kontar

and

Nadia Beard

The strike, the illusion of regime change, and what comes next

Jim Muir

Always on the outside: Exile isn’t about the country you leave

Garry Pierre-Pierre

The post An endless purgatory: How an exiled Iranian waits and watches appeared first on Coda Story.

Before the elections on April 12, a scandal engulfed the Hungarian government. On leaked recordings, foreign minister Péter Szijjártó can be heard deferentially acquiescing to his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov and passing on information from EU meetings. Szijjártó appeared willing to help the Kremlin’s cause in Brussels, to remove oligarchs and their relatives from the EU blacklist, and to block efforts to aid Ukraine. Hungary’s advocacy for the Kremlin’s agenda culminated in its recent veto of fresh sanctions on Russia and over $100 billion in loans to Ukraine. On X, Polish prime minister Donald Tusk wrote that while “Hungary is and will be in the European Union, Victor Orbán and his foreign minister left Europe long ago.” And the Irish taoiseach Micheál Martin described Szijjárto’s calls with Lavrov as both “sinister” and “alarming.”

Szijjárto alleged that “foreign intelligence services, with the active involvement of Hungarian journalists, have been intercepting my phone calls.” It is a plot, the Hungarian government claims, to influence the upcoming polls. Orbán directly blames Ukraine for seeking to unseat his government. The opposition, led by Peter Magyar, has a healthy lead in the polls and describes the Hungarian government’s closeness to the Kremlin as “treason.” According to European intelligence reports, Moscow sent a three-person team to Hungary, overseen by Putin confidant Sergei Kiriyenko who ran an operation to interfere in the Moldovan election back in September. His tactics encompassed “vote-buying networks, troll farms, and on-the-ground influence campaigns.” A Kremlin-linked media consultancy, facing EU sanctions, was hired to dismiss Magyar as a Brussels stooge and portray Orbán as the only candidate strong enough to to be treated as an equal by world leaders, as evidenced by the strength of his relationship with Trump. 

Despite a war with Iran that doesn’t appear to be going entirely to plan, the U.S. president took time out to back Orbán with enthusiasm and at considerable length on Truth Social. Trump said Orbán was “a true friend, fighter, and WINNER.” JD Vance, the vice president, is scheduled to visit Hungary on April 7, just five days before the election. And secretary of state Marco Rubio went to Hungary in February. It is now part of the U.S. National Security Strategy to work towards “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.” To that end, notes the U.S. government, “the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism.” Orbán speaks MAGA’s language on immigration, traditional values and the Christian essence of Western societies. He is, like Putin and Trump, in MAGA’s view, an implacable opponent of secular, progressive, globalist politics as symbolised by Brussels.

Orbán, the longest serving current head of government in the EU, has become a figurehead for populist, nationalist movements across the world. The recent CPAC Hungary summit was attended by several of these leaders including France’s Marine Le Pen, Italian deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini, and the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders,who called Orbán “a lion on a continent led by sheep.” Latin American leaders close to Trump , including Javier Milei of Argentina and Jose Antonio Kast of Chile, also attended. Milei, who gave the longest speech at the summit, said Orbán was “a beacon for all… who refuse to accept that the West's destiny is one of managed decline.” This international network, with the United States and Russia included, has a vested ideological interest in seeing Orban continue to remain a thorn in the EU's side. 

But what can Brussels do? The answer, it appears, is not much. The EU is consensus driven; it needs all its parts to act in concert, giving holdouts like Orbán considerable power to hold the whole bloc hostage. But given Orbán’s prominence as an ideologue, when Hungary blocks sanctions or delays support for Ukraine, it is more than a single nation going rogue. Alice Weidler, co-chair of the far-right AfD, the largest opposition party in the German Bundestag, was among those who spoke at the CPAC Hungary conference last month. Robert Fico, prime minister of Slovakia, is an Orbán ally. On April 19, Bulgaria will have its eighth general election in just five years. Former president Rumen Radev’s new Progressive Party leads the polls and shares Orbán’s pro-Kremlin, anti-EU inclinations.

So polarized is the Hungarian election, that right wing groups are deploying their own observers from Argentina, Austria, the Czech Republic, Kenya, Poland, Germany, Italy, Spain, Serbia, Tanzania and the United States to monitor proceedings. EU observers have said the Hungarian government controls the national media and a recent documentary alleges that a desperate government is resorting to vote-buying, gerrymandering and intimidation tactics. It’s hard to see how either Orbán or Magyar will accept the election result without protest, unless the margin is crushing. But, given Trump’s disdain for NATO allies and the EU, an Orbán election defeat would be a much-needed victory for European unity. 

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

Related Articles

The Orbán precedent

John Shattuck

The Trump corollary: Latin America swings right

Phineas Rueckert

In Hungary, it’s Central Asia to the rescue

Katia Patin

The post How much longer will Orbán be Putin and Trump’s man in Brussels? appeared first on Coda Story.

So huge kudos to Earth League International for producing a detailed, specific and thoughtful report on how corruption facilitates wildlife crime globally, which is packed full of lessons for the study of corruption in general as well. Corruption is a system, everything is connected. It’s the water in which criminals swim, and it will drown the rest of us if we let it.

Earth League International embeds investigators in corrupt networks all over the world, and reveals how it is so much more than just the “abuse of entrusted power for private gain” and their report quotes multiple specific examples. The choice for an official standing in the way of a Transnational Criminal Organisation (TCO) is not between taking a bribe and being honest, it’s between taking a bribe and having a family member killed. 

“Corruption tilts the playing field of justice by turning some officials or even agencies into additional arms of criminal networks, akin to painting a group of white chess pieces red and then commencing a match, giving the criminal side a decided advantage”, notes the report. And, it adds, “Transnational Criminal Organisations are savvy about which officials they approach, assessing weaknesses such as debt or family ties that may make them more vulnerable to financial offers or threats.”

It estimates the value of global wildlife-related crime at over $1 trillion annually, which is an astonishing amount of money, but an important point to take is that this is not a separate form of corruption. The same border officials that wave through illegal shipments of timber or shark fins also help with other forms of smuggling. The money that criminals funnel into politics undermines democracy in all ways. “Corruption is not the sole purview of less wealthy nations. It is everywhere. During investigations into illegal wildlife trafficking for (traditional Chinese medicine) in Europe, for example, Earth League International found enablers in San Marino, Italy, Belgium, and Poland,” notes the report.

There is something grimly ironic that so much of the despoliation that is making things worse for everyone is driven by the trade in “medicine” and thus a desire to make the world better. In reality, of course, pangolin scales and totoaba swim bladders are no more medicinal than my toenail clippings. Perhaps the ultimate expression of this is the demand for hallucinogenic toad venom, as detailed in this excellent article from a few years ago, which supposedly helps us all access the inner divine, but which is meanwhile wiping out the unfortunate toads that secrete it. “Most harvesters don’t have a consciousness about the sacredness of the species”, said a toad practitioner. “It’s just a hustle business.”

On a more geopolitical and less psychedelic level, this report on how Russia is repurposing its influence networks in Europe so as to maintain its fossil fuel exports show that other forms of corruption have huge environmental impact of their own. “The time for polite half-measures is over. Stronger enforcement, embargoes and tariffs on Russian fossil fuels to cripple exports, personal sanctions, and transparency rules are the only way to dismantle Russia’s covert influence architecture,” it concludes.

I’d add to that: we all need to build renewable energy sources like there’s a war on, because there is, and democracies urgently need to gain the freedom to act independently of autocracies’ control of fossil fuel supplies. You can’t act freely if someone’s hands are around your neck.

So, what’s the answer? As so often with financial crime, it’s possible to be overawed by the scale of the challenge. But the important thing is just to start. Here’s a manifesto from a coalition of British environmental groups, which gives some ideas. I particularly approve of this one: “government should introduce comprehensive protections and safeguards for whistleblowers, followed by financial incentives, to enable whistleblowers to disclose evidence of corruption and money laundering”.

Of course, corrupt officials are not just standing still while we agonise about how to stop them. I am particularly alarmed by the potential appeal of modern prediction markets for allowing politicians, military officers or anyone to profit from their privileged access to advance knowledge of government actions. Here’s a remarkable story about how people betting on the specific details of the Iran War sent death threats to a Times of Israel journalist whose reporting threatened to lose them a wager.

U.S. lawmakers have introduced a bill, the BETS OFF Act, for which acronym they deserve credit — to crack down on the markets that encourage this kind of behaviour, which was also observed in the hours leading up to the U.S. attack on Venezuela. “There’s no getting around the fact that any prediction market where somebody knows or controls the outcome of a bet is ripe for corruption,” said Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut. “When events that involve good and evil, life and death become just another financial product, morality no longer matters and the soul of America is fundamentally corrupted.” 

On that note, I see that someone is trying to juice the price of the $TRUMP memecoin by inviting its biggest holders to dinner at Mar-a-Lago, apparently with a speech by President Donald Trump (or whoever that is in the decidedly weird picture accompanying the announcement — Nigel Farage in a blond wig?), and an exclusive audience for the 29 biggest holders. The president, should he attend, will not, however, be accepting gifts, which is a weight off my mind. I had been worrying that this whole event was a bit dodgy.

The announcement of the event did boost the price of the $TRUMP tokens, as presumably did the announcement that Tether head Paolo Ardoino would be the headlining speaker, a remarkable turnaround for someone whose company was, just 18 months ago, having to vehemently deny it was the subject of a Department of Justice probe. Whether corruption will continue to be seriously investigated and punished, in a newly transactional world order, remains to be seen. The signs, though, are not promising.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

Related Articles

Iran’s cryptocurrency enablers

Oliver Bullough

Can a Task Force set up to punish the little guy, take on Trump?

Oliver Bullough

Making corruption great again

Oliver Bullough

The post Our corrupt world, run by oligarchs for oligarchs appeared first on Coda Story.

But to get the real headliner, we need to drop down to number 17 where we find Changpeng Zhao ($110 billion, since you ask), founder of cryptocurrency exchange Binance and business partner of the Trump family’s own crypto firm. Centibillionaires are old hat now but CZ is, as far as I can tell, the first centibillionaire on the Forbes list to have been pardoned by the U.S. president for egregious financial criminality. That feels like quite a big deal so congratulations to him.

CZ’s pardon last October was, according to the White House, because his 2023 plea deal and $4.3 billion fine for enabling money laundering on an industrial scale were the result of “an overly prosecuted case by the Biden administration” and part of a war on cryptocurrency.

Awkwardly for all concerned, Binance is now suing the Wall Street Journal after it reported that $1 billion had moved through the company to Iran-backed terror groups. And the Wall Street Journal has not only declined to spike the story, it has doubled down by reporting that the Justice Department is now investigating the firm’s actions. “The Wall Street Journal couldn’t determine whether the Justice Department is investigating Binance itself for potential misconduct, or solely the customers on its platform,” the WSJ said. But either way, considering the White House has committed to wiping out Iran’s support of terror groups and upended the global energy markets in its quest to do so, the news reports alleging that CZ’s company enabled those same groups would surely be embarrassing for all concerned, were any of them the kind of people capable of embarrassment.

After all, the fact that Iran is using crypto on a huge scale to evade the sanctions placed on its activities, and to support foreign proxies like Hezbollah, with the active connivance of some of the biggest companies in the crypto world, could only be a surprise to the most witlessly incurious of numbskulls. Or perhaps, I suppose, they are all making so much money from crypto that they don’t care who else might be.

While we’re on the subject of Trump, he’s at No. 640 on the list of billionaires as I write this, nearly tripling his wealth in just the last two years. Forbes has this very apropos explanation: “Donald Trump has presided over the most lucrative presidency in American history, adding billions to his net worth, largely by cashing in on crypto.” 

But, I hear you ask, what about non-billionaires? How are the few billion of us whose net worth isn’t counted in the billions doing? Well, not great. And I’m beginning to feel a bit concerned about what this all means for democracy. “The widening gap between the rich and the rest is at the same time creating a political deficit that is highly dangerous and unsustainable,” said Oxfam International Executive Director Amitabh Behar back in January, and the situation has gotten worse since then.

The Bank of England’s animal stories 

I spend a lot of time at the moment talking in public about money laundering because of my new book. Top of my list for policy suggestions for tackling financial crime, if anyone were to ask, is that governments should stop printing large denomination bills: $100 bills, €200 notes or — worst of all — Switzerland’s colossal 1,000-france banknote are little used by ordinary people, but extremely helpful for criminals looking to transport large amounts of wealth in a small space.

So, in one way it was great that Britain was temporarily convulsed by controversy around banknotes last week. It’s high time we talked more about them. Could this spell the end of the UK’s own big bill: the £50, of which the Bank of England issued almost an extra 30 million last year, even though pretty much the only people that ever use them are criminals and tax dodgers? Would Britain finally get serious about ending the epidemic of financial crime?

No, of course not, the controversy was entirely about the Bank of England’s decision to replace the pictures of people on its next series of banknotes with pictures of animals. For some reason, badgers were mentioned. Also otters. “It says all you need to know about the lack of seriousness of the Bank,” said former business secretary Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, without any apparent irony, considering his own spectacular lack of seriousness in agreeing to comment on this absurdly unserious confection.

A sledgehammer that cracks nuts

While researching the anti-money laundering system that has grown over the last few decades, I have come to find it strange that there isn’t more public disquiet over the powers that governments have awarded themselves to check ordinary people’s transactions. When there is concern, it tends to come from crypto/libertarian bores (the kind of people who talk about ‘Operation Choke Point 2.0’), so perhaps no one else wants to be associated with it. But I think the situation would be a bit healthier if more of us engaged with what is being done to us in ways that we can get.

I obviously think that tackling money laundering is of huge importance, but I am coming round to the view that more public pushback over exactly how that is being done would be good. It would force policymakers to justify what they’re doing, and therefore come up with some techniques that actually work, instead of the ineffective but intrusive mess we have at the moment.

To cut a long story short, I found this contribution from the Dutch non-profit organisation ‘Privacy First’ to be interesting. “Instead of managing risk, banks seek to eliminate it by withdrawing altogether from customers or sectors perceived as problematic. The burden of compliance and over-enforcement often falls not on criminals, but on already marginalised communities with limited access to remedies,” it says.

I agree with that, and I agree also with its argument that beneficial ownership transparency should not be absolute. Were there to be opt-outs from ownership registries for vulnerable people, there would be less scope for rich crooks to argue that shell company transparency is a violation of their human rights. 

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

Related Articles

Why Kleptocrats go to war without a care in the world

Oliver Bullough

Can a Task Force set up to punish the little guy, take on Trump?

Oliver Bullough

Why the law lets financial criminals off the hook

Oliver Bullough

The post Iran’s cryptocurrency enablers appeared first on Coda Story.

She was speaking at an International Atomic Agency summit hosted by France. Just days before the summit, French president Emanuel Macron spoke — a nuclear submarine looming behind him — of the need to increase the country’s stockpile of nuclear warheads for the first time in several decades. “In this dangerous and uncertain world,” Macron said, “you have to be feared if you want to be free.” 

In February, the ‘New START treaty’, a mutual agreement between Russia and the U.S. to reduce and limit their nuclear arsenal, officially expired. The U.S. said China had conducted secret tests and that Beijing had to be part of any future non-proliferation agreement. For its part, the Chinese accused the U.S. government of seeking to mask its own expansionist ambitions. In the wake of the Iran war, started apparently because the Iranian regime was just days away from securing a bomb, other countries have spoken openly of their nuclear ambitions. After the start of the Iran war, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un spoke pointedly about preparing a nuclear-ready navy while inspecting a new destroyer and observing the testing of nuclear-capable cruise missiles. Even Polish prime minister Donald Tusk said Poland “will not want to be passive when it comes to nuclear security in a military context.”

On X, Tusk posted that Poland is in talks with France about joining its nuclear deterrence program. “We are arming together with our friends,” he wrote, “so that our enemies will never dare to attack us.” France is the only nuclear-capable European country, its systems (unlike the UK’s) completely independent of the U.S. and its new deterrence framework will include collaborations with Germany, Poland, Greece, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium. Macron is calling France’s new strategy “advance deterrence,” a willingness to spread French nuclear armaments across the continent. A senior Pentagon official said the U.S. would “obviously at a minimum strenuously oppose” European countries seeking to acquire nuclear weapons. The U.S., as part of a NATO agreement, already deploys over 100 nuclear weapons in Europe — in Germany, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey. 

Europe’s anti-nuclear tradition grew out of grassroots movements in the 1970s. In West Germany, protests against a planned nuclear plant in the small wine-growing town of Wyhl began when local farmers feared pollution would destroy their land and crops. By the 1980s, millions of Europeans were protesting nuclear weapons and the deployment of NATO missiles across the continent, bringing nuclear security debates into the public arena and pushing governments toward disarmament efforts. The political impact of those protests were long-lasting. Across Europe, nuclear energy programs were curtailed or abandoned entirely. Denmark banned nuclear power plants in 1985, Germany shut down its last nuclear reactors in 2023, and several countries imposed strict limits on nuclear development. Nuclear technology, whether for energy or weapons, remained politically toxic in much of Europe. But, as Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen said European deterrence “is necessary because the military threat from Russia is expected to increase,” and its reliance on U.S. military support can arguably no longer be taken for granted.

At the Paris summit, China, Brazil, Belgium and Italy all signed up to a pledge to triple global nuclear capacity by 2050. South Africa signed the pledge earlier this month. The war in Iran has once again made clear that the world must wean itself off fossil fuels. The U.S. — which imposed additional tariffs on India for buying Russian oil and thus helping to finance the continuation of the war in Ukraine — has, since the start of the attack on Iran, told India it can continue to buy Russian oil. Delhi promptly bought 30 million barrels of Russian crude oil. But this month India also signed a deal with Canada to receive uranium to expand its nuclear energy program. But in 1974, Canada provided India with nuclear technology for peaceful uses that were promptly put towards the building of nuclear weapons. Nuclear collaborations between the two countries were suspended for decades. It’s not a coincidence that those ties are once again being revived in the current geopolitical context. A growing clamor for nuclear energy has clear proliferation risks.

While France has been talking about greater nuclear deterrence, most European states are speaking about a revival of nuclear energy as an alternative to fossil fuels and as a means to achieve climate goals. The vast energy requirements of AI and data centres is also prompting nations to adopt an “atoms for algorithms” strategy, to be, as Macron said, “at the ​heart ​of ⁠the artificial intelligence challenge.” But to talk about energy alone is to ignore the appeal nuclear deterrence has for nation states trying to navigate dangerous geopolitical straits. Iran was attacked ostensibly because it was on the verge of having a bomb. Favored nations such as Saudi Arabia are able to sign nuclear pacts that remove non-proliferation guardrails, but the actions of the U.S. and Israel in Iran will make the bomb attractive to many more as a national security strategy.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

Related Articles

The strike, the illusion of regime change, and what comes next

Jim Muir

The AI-powered ‘forever wars’ start now

Simon Allison

An execution stayed: Why the Islamic Republic might cling to power in Iran

Jim Muir

The post As Iran burns, a new age of nuclear proliferation begins appeared first on Coda Story.

It's fair to say Trump probably didn't give a damn about Misley Mandarin’s opinion. But the self-styled “interim first minister” of Chagos, who recently upped sticks from Britain in a “super, super secret” mission to take up residence on the long-deserted Peros Banhos atoll, gave Washington his official “blessing” anyway.

I spoke via WhatsApp to the 47-year-old Chagossian in his base camp: basically a few tents, with a solar generator and a Starlink satellite connection enabling him to beam reels to his 10,000 Facebook followers. He quit his job as a bus driver in London to come here, determined to halt Britain’s plan to hand over what he considers to be his land to Mauritius after a long-running decolonization battle.

“We’re British citizens here. We’re not moving,” he said.

Mandarin wants the land of his forebears to remain under the rule of Britain, the former colonial ruler that booted out about 1,500 native Chagossians, including his own father, to make room for the U.S. military base in the late 1960s. The removal consigned Chagossians to a miserable fate in newly independent Mauritius.

Now on home turf, Mandarin, his 72-year-old dad, and two other Chagossians have dodged immediate deportation: they’ve obtained an injunction from a British court allowing them to stay until a hearing on March 13. Since their arrival, two more Chagossians have joined them. “We can do self-determination right now. We don't want to cut any links with Britain. We're not looking for independence,” Mandarin says.

“The next generation will decide on independence.”

Marriage of convenience

Life on Île du Coin, the largest island on Peros Banhos, is simple. The daily routine revolves around catching fish and finding a supply of fresh water. The new residents collect overnight rainfall in tarpaulin sheets to drink. Bathing involves a dip in the sea to wash off dirt, followed by a splash of precious rainwater to rinse. 

Mandarin appears to be relishing the experience. Soon after his arrival, the former army cook, who has bags of swagger, posted a video of himself cooking up “naan fromaaz”, or cheese naan, in a skillet on a makeshift stove. “Pa bizin madam isi mwa!” he jokes. I don't need a wife here!

The Chagossians arrived on the island on 16 February, accompanied by former army officer Adam Holloway, a former Conservative MP who recently defected to the radical right Reform UK party.

Reform, which is surging in the polls, is leading opposition to a bilateral treaty that would see Britain cede sovereignty of Chagos to Mauritius, while paying an average of £101-million ($135-million) per year to maintain a lease on Diego Garcia over the coming century. Negotiations began after the International Court of Justice ruled in 2019 that Britain should transfer sovereignty of Chagos to Mauritius “as rapidly as possible.”

The sleek yacht that brought the group on the five-day journey from Sri Lanka and travels back and forth with supplies was paid for by British-Thai businessman Christopher Harborne, a mega-donor to Reform. Its name is No Excuse – as in, “no excuse for us not to stay on Chagos,” says Mandarin.

Reform UK and the Chagossians make for curious bedfellows. On the one hand, there's a political party that has floated plans to create a Trump-inspired, ICE-style agency to carry out mass deportations in Britain. 

On the other, there’s Mandarin’s dad, finally back home after being brutally evicted from his atoll at the age of 14. “I will not go back to England. I want to die here,” said Michel Mandarin, as he set foot on his cherished Chagossian soil.

The unlikely pairing has had cause for joint celebration. Two days after they arrived, Trump withdrew his approval for the UK-Mauritius transfer treaty, which was supposed to provide legal certainty for the base in a hypothetical world governed by the rules-based international order. 

It turned out the president was annoyed at British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s refusal to sanction the use of Diego Garcia for the Iran offensive. “DO NOT GIVE AWAY DIEGO GARCIA!” he told the British prime minister. The treaty was paused. Then war broke out and a beleaguered Starmer agreed to “defensive” strikes from Diego Garcia.

On Île du Coin, war seems like a distant prospect, even if it is potentially less than 200km (about 125 miles) away in Diego Garcia. As Tuesday drew to a close, there had so far been neither sight nor sound of the US’s deadly B-52, B-1, and B-2 bombers in the slightly overcast skies.

Kicking the can

Mandarin left Mauritius at age 22. He joined the British army in a bid to improve his lot and later became a bus driver in south London. He says he always felt like a second-class citizen in Mauritius, with “no opportunity to progress”.

Rights groups have charted how evictees from Chagos struggled to cope in Mauritius, many of them ending up trapped in an urban nightmare of poverty, mental illness, and addiction — with little sympathy from their hosts. Many Chagossians left for Britain after securing citizenship rights.

Now the fate of their homeland is being decided by a treaty negotiated over their heads. Last year, a UN committee on racial discrimination warned that the treaty could perpetuate “long-standing violations” of Chagossian rights.

The treaty says Mauritius is “free” to resettle islanders on any of the Chagos islands — except Diego Garcia. But there is no binding obligation for it to do so and the exclusion of Diego Garcia rankles. The deal also includes a £40-million trust fund to be managed by Mauritius, which has been criticised as a ruse by Britain to avoid paying proper compensation. 

“People talk about decolonisation, but if Britain did the wrongs, Britain should have to repair the wrongs — not kick the can to Mauritius,” says Mandarin. “Or they will get away with it.”

One of the reels he has filmed on Île du Coin features an industrial oven that was used by colonial officials to burn the islanders’ dogs before they were evicted. Officials threatened the islanders with the same fate if they refused to leave. Britain must pay compensation, he says.

'Belongers'

Mandarin’s joint odyssey with Reform UK has provoked mixed feelings among the Chagossian diaspora in Britain, Seychelles, and Mauritius. 

“He’s put us back in the centre of the story, but will we be overshadowed by Reform’s agenda?” asked one Chagossian in the English town of Crawley – home to a 3,500-strong Chagossian community — who is also opposed to the deal.

As the treaty was being negotiated, Chagossians’ concerns were largely swept under the carpet as a complicating factor in a pragmatic decolonization drive.

The hard right has capitalized on the deal’s major flaw, positioning itself as the main champion of Chagossians, just as their ancestral land finds itself embroiled in a conflict that could upend the global order.

One video recently posted by Reform leader Nigel Farage saw him express outrage after being “denied access” to Île du Coin for the delivery of “humanitarian” supplies to Mandarin and his men, racking up a cool 4.7 million views on X. 

Asked whether he is being used by Reform and its supporters, Mandarin is sanguine. He says he also contacted the left-wing Green Party for support, but it never replied. “Only Reform responded. At the end of the day, it’s politics. You have to make your own judgements for the sake of your people,” he says. 

He views the upcoming hearing as a potential “turning point in our fight”. The injunction barring their removal was granted on the basis that their location was too far from the base to pose a security threat. “If the court says they can’t remove us, then maybe more people will come,” he says. “This is our people. This is our time. We’re not visitors — we’re belongers.”

Related Articles

The Identitarians are back: How a discredited worldview dominates the global agenda

Josephine Lulamae

In Hungary, it’s Central Asia to the rescue

Katia Patin

When globalization was king and home was elsewhere

Shougat Dasgupta

The post The Belongers: What the Chagos Islands tells us about the new world order appeared first on Coda Story.

For even the largest militaries, it is an almost impossible task to identify, select and then precisely locate such a high volume of targets. But the U.S. military had some help. Claude, the “next generation AI assistant” built by Anthropic, was used in the planning of ‘Operation Epic Fury’. This, even though the Department of War recently labeled Anthropic a “supply chain risk”.

Anthropic is one of the world’s leading AI companies. Together with Palantir, another Big Tech company, it has been working since 2024 with the Pentagon to embed its systems in military decision-making – creating what is arguably the operating platform of present-day U.S. warfare and intelligence. Even though secretary of defense Pete Hegseth said the company “delivered a master class in arrogance and betrayal” and that the government would “cease all use of Anthropic's technology,” the company is too integrated into modern U.S. warfare for it not to be essential to the U.S. attack on Iran. The question might be not whether companies like Anthropic can ringfence their tech but whether the Pentagon might just commandeer it. 

Craig Jones, an academic who studies automated kill chains at the University of Newcastle, has told reporters that “the AI machine is making recommendations for what to target, which is actually much quicker in some ways than the speed of thought.” Similar AI systems have been used by Israel to coordinate its bombing campaign in Gaza, which is among the most destructive in human history. 

Among the first hits in the United States and Israel’s aerial bombardment of Iran was the Shajarah Tayyebeh primary school for girls, in the southern town of Minab. It was a Saturday morning, and school was in session. According to Iranian state media, at least 165 people were killed, mostly young girls between the ages of seven and 12. Another 96 were severely injured. Eyewitness and open source intelligence reports corroborate the claims of mass civilian casualties. Both Iran and Israel have denied responsibility. The United States has said it is “looking into” allegations that the school was destroyed by one of its missiles. Maybe, given the volume of the bombardment, they’ve lost track. 

It is too soon to know why the school was targeted – or whether it was an error. Either way, the U.S. military’s reliance on AI raises difficult questions.

AIs get things wrong all the time. Maybe it’s an extra finger in an AI-generated image, or a ‘hallucinated’ reference in a research report. Or, maybe, an algorithm sends a missile to the wrong address. That’s why Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said that weapons “that take humans out of the loop entirely and automate selecting and engaging targets” are simply not reliable enough. That position — along with Anthropic’s refusal to allow Claude to be used for mass domestic surveillance (although they are just fine with foreign surveillance) — led to the Pentagon cancelling a $200-million contract with the company on Friday, the day before the attacks on Iran began. The Department of War immediately signed a new deal, minus any ethical guardrails, with OpenAI.

Anthropic’s confrontation with the Pentagon has burnished its reputation as an “ethical” AI company. But it may have found its ethical backbone too late. Critics argue that even within Anthropic’s “red lines”, there is enormous potential for abuse, while a “human in the loop” does not necessarily prevent mistakes — raising questions about who, exactly, is responsible when these mistakes result in fatalities. Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur for Palestine, accused Amazon, Google and Microsoft in a 2025 of being “complicit in genocide” for providing cloud storage systems to the Israeli military. Anthropic’s integration into the U.S. military has been much deeper.

While Israel and the U.S. are waging an AI-powered war, Iran is responding with a technological revolution of its own. The Islamic Republic has pioneered the production of low-cost one-way attack drones, most notably the Shahed-136, which costs just $34,000 to produce and as much as $4 million to shoot down. These are battle-tested: Russia has launched an estimated 57,000 Shahed-type drones in its war against Ukraine. Despite U.S. reliance on its own high-tech AI-powered systems, an American version of the Shahed also made its debut, alongside Claude, in the attack on Iran. 

In response, Iran has aimed more than 1000 drones at neighboring Gulf states since the war broke out on Saturday. Hundreds have been shot down, but even the most sophisticated air defences struggle with this sheer volume, and dozens have struck their targets, threatening to prolong this war and cause more damage to U.S. allies than anticipated. It is significant that these targets included at least three Amazon data centers in Dubai and Bahrain. Just last month, Amazon announced that it was making Anthropic’s Claude available to its Middle Eastern customers. Claude experienced two global outages this week — it is not clear if these were related to the data center attacks. 

Tech evangelists promise that artificial intelligence will, one day, cure cancer, end poverty and greatly increase our quality of life. But the new technology’s most obvious impact has been on warfare. For those with access to them, AI systems like Claude make it dramatically easier to bomb hundreds of targets at the same time — and much harder to figure out who is accountable when something goes wrong. On Truth Social, Donald Trump — who has promised to stop wars, not start them — posted approvingly that technology and munitions now mean Wars “can be fought ‘forever,’ and very successfully.” 

As the bombing of Iran continues, we are not far from a time when AI not only parses data to select targets, it actually chooses when to pull the trigger. And advanced AI models have far fewer qualms, for instance, about deploying nuclear weapons than humans faced with similar scenarios. One day, when — if — war crimes investigators are able to pin down exactly who is responsible for killing dozens of young girls in Minab, tech bosses may find themselves implicated alongside military and political leaders. “The AI did it” can’t be their defense.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

Related Articles

The strike, the illusion of regime change, and what comes next

Jim Muir

The future according to Silicon Valley’s prophets

Isobel Cockerell

AI, the UN and the performance of virtue

Abeba Birhane

The post The AI-powered ‘forever wars’ start now appeared first on Coda Story.

Throughout my nearly five years in Tehran at the turn of this century, speculation about his health and longevity was a near-constant background hum. He was reported, or rumoured, to be mortally stricken by prostate cancer, his constitution already weakened by an assassination attempt in 1981 that left his right arm largely useless. Who would succeed him was far from clear, and the object of further speculation. 

As he lived on into more recent times, reaching the same age of 86 attained by his predecessor – the Islamic Republic's founding father Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini – the prospect of his demise became a more immediate issue, though the question of succession remained equally shrouded in uncertainty. As Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei was the commanding voice behind the ruthless crackdown that took the lives of tens of thousands of citizens early this year in the latest and greatest of many escalating protests, at which the slogan "Marg Bar Diktator!" — Death to the Dictator! — became an increasingly prominent slogan. 

Their wish was confirmed to be true at 5 a.m. local time on Sunday morning by Iranian broadcasters. The previous morning, Khamenei’s compound in Tehran was demolished as the Israeli-American onslaught got under way while the Ayatollah was heading a meeting of the Defence Council. That ensured that top military figures were also killed, including the commander of the Revolutionary Guards, Mohammad Pakpour, the Army Chief of Staff Abdolrahim Musavi, and Khamenei's top military adviser, Ali Shamkhani, who had been wounded but survived the attack in June last year. 

The Iranian leadership appears to have been caught by surprise, as it was last year when the opening Israeli strike, which culled many top military leaders as well as nuclear scientists, was launched between two rounds of indirect negotiations between Iran and the U.S. Oman, which was mediating the talks, was furious then, denouncing Israel as the real destabilising factor in the region. 

Perhaps the Iranian leaders — and the Omani mediators — thought that such a dirty trick could only be pulled once. But it has happened again, with no evidence that the talks in Geneva had broken down. The chief Omani negotiator, Badr Albusaidi, was livid. Only hours before the strike, he was in Washington for meetings “to explain that a peace agreement between the U.S. and Iran is now within reach. No nuclear weapons. Not ever. Zero stockpiling. Comprehensive verification. Peacefully and permanently. Let’s support the negotiators in closing the deal.”

After learning of the attack, he expressed his outrage in another tweet: “I am dismayed. Active and serious negotiations have yet again been undermined. Neither the interests of the United States nor the cause of global peace are well served by this. And I pray for the innocents who will suffer. I urge the United States not to get sucked in further. This is not your war.”

But Donald Trump and the U.S. were already thoroughly sucked in, and it was indeed their war, or at least his. According to the Israelis, the date had been decided jointly weeks before, after months of planning. Which meant that the Geneva negotiations, focused on the nuclear issue, were simply deceptive camouflage designed to give time for the U.S. to complete the marshalling of its biggest naval and air buildup in the region since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. 

Trump and the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu soon made it clear that the campaign now had little to do with the niceties of Iran's nuclear programme: the agenda was regime change in Tehran, and a surprise attack to decapitate the regime was an essential element. 

With Iran's air defences largely taken out in last year's 12 days of war, it was like shooting fish in a barrel. Hundreds of air, missile and drone strikes were carried out on missile launchers, military bases and other targets around the country, with inevitable "collateral damage", including a girl's primary school in the southern town of Minab where scores of children were reported killed.

The Iranians did their best to live up to their dire warnings of deadly reprisals against Israel, and against American bases and allies on the Arab side of the Gulf and elsewhere. Missiles hailed down on airports and other installations in Kuwait, Bahrain, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and even Oman, despite its active mediation. While some U.S. bases may have been hit, so too were many civilian sites such as Dubai's iconic Burj al Arab hotel. Explosions too are being heard in Beirut, after Hezbollah fired rockets and drones at northern Israel to "avenge" Khamenei's death and the Israel Defense Forces struck back.

Air traffic was halted throughout a region rich in international hubs, sowing chaos worldwide. Iran's declaration that the strategic Strait of Hormuz was closed to shipping forced cargo shippers to suspend the voyages that transport some 20% of the world's oil and a lot of liquid gas, causing tremors through international markets. Once again, a decision taken by a tiny circle of men in Washington, Jerusalem and Tehran instantly rewired daily life, reminding us who actually gets to pull the global emergency brake.

What all this would do to Iran's relations with the Arab side of the Gulf was one of many open questions. While Oman was actively mediating, the other Arab oil states had been pressing the Americans not to allow a campaign that would predictably destabilise the region, and declaring their airspace not available for any hostilities. But any sympathy for Tehran quickly evaporated when the missiles started flying in: the Gulf Arab states closed ranks.

Trump and the Israelis made it clear that this was not one quick spectacular strike, but an ongoing campaign that would last days, perhaps even weeks. Presumably at the end, Iran would find its missile capabilities "obliterated," in Trump's favourite term, along with any nuclear activities. 

Once the bombs stop falling, Trump and Netanyahu urged, the Iranians should come out of their basements and take over a government that would be theirs for the taking. A historic opportunity that would likely not recur for generations, Iranians were told. 

But it is hard to imagine such regime change being wrought remotely from the skies. The regime lost little time in filling the leadership vacuum, setting up a three-man ruling council in line with the constitution, composed of the President, Masood Pezeshkian, the head of the Judiciary, Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei, and Ayatollah Alireza Arafi from the Council of Guardians. All regime loyalists, and the latter two noted hard-liners. So business as usual as far as they are concerned. But the fact is that the assassination of the Supreme Leader and the attendant bludgeoning of the regime's capabilities will inevitably usher in a new and unpredictable phase in Iran's turbulent history.

On the streets, reactions were fractured: jubilation in areas that had long chanted “Death to the dictator”, state-promote mourning in others, but also fear and a grim resignation, an understanding that power vacuums are often filled with fresh repression or civil war.

A smooth transition to a peaceful democracy is about the least likely scenario among the many possibilities. So too is an imminent return of the monarchy, with a comeback by Israeli-backed Reza Pahlavi, son of the Shah ousted by the 1979 revolution. So far there has been no sign visible to the outside world of a split in the ranks of the defenses built up by the Islamic Republic, which still has regular military forces numbering around 400,000, Revolutionary Guards of up to 190,000, and its auxiliary militia enforcers, the Basij, who may be able to mobilise around a million at street level. 

There must be much anger among regime loyalists, which may fall on the heads of any opposition protestors who imagine they can move in and take over the reins of government from the bombed-out wreckage of the Islamic Republic. The U.S. military is not likely to be able to remain engaged in the detail of defanging the regime once the main thrust of the campaign is done. But Israel likely will. Its equivalent of the CIA, the Mossad, has spent years building up formidable intelligence at street level, and will be doing its utmost to continue hamstringing the regime from within and fomenting opposition.Among the many unanswerable questions is whether all this will lead simply to chaos and fragmentation, which is probably Israel's preferred outcome, or to a more compliant regime willing to compromise with the U.S. in order to get crippling economic sanctions lifted. As Trump concedes the war might last weeks, who knows what Iran will eventually emerge from the smoke and the rubble?

Related Articles

The phoney war: Will the U.S. strike a decisive blow against Iran?

Jim Muir

An execution stayed: Why the Islamic Republic might cling to power in Iran

Jim Muir

The end of the Tehran-Damascus axis

Jim Muir

The post The strike, the illusion of regime change, and what comes next appeared first on Coda Story.

If anybody hoped that the man on whose word it all hangs, President Donald Trump, might clarify his intentions in his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, they were disappointed. 

Speaking 36 hours before a third round of indirect and ultimately inconclusive talks with the Iranians in Geneva on Thursday, he said, "My preference is to stop this problem through diplomacy but one thing is for certain, I will never allow the world's number one sponsor of terror, which they are by far, to have a nuclear weapon...they want to make a deal, but we haven't heard those secret (sic) words, 'We will never have a nuclear weapon.’”

In the run-up to the Geneva talks, led on the U.S. side by real estate moguls Steve Witkoff and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, Iranian officials voiced optimism that a deal could be struck and insisted they would be flexible on the nuclear issue. Various formulas were being bandied around, such as Iran sending abroad half of its estimated 300kg of highly enriched uranium and diluting the rest under supervision, participating in a regional consortium for peaceful enrichment and so on. 

In theory, for Iran to say "We will never have a nuclear weapon" should not be an issue — it has said all along that it is not pursuing that goal, which is banned by a fatwa. Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi posted on X this week that Tehran “will under no circumstances ever develop a nuclear weapon.” Which begs the question as to why it has enriched uranium to 60% — short of weapons grade but well beyond the levels needed for peaceful civilian purposes.  

Witkoff and Kushner will be vigilant for signs of Iranian duplicity and foot-dragging. But with another set of talks ending with no deal apart from promises of more talks, both sides might simply be playing for time, Iran to delay the feared blow, and the U.S. to finish assembling the assault force, its biggest mobilization of naval and air power in the region since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

There is strong apprehension in the region that the huge and costly U.S. buildup must mean business. American bombs and missiles would hit Iran. The Iranians would make good on their threat to make it a regional war, not a symbolic retaliation as happened in the 12-day war in June last year after American bunker-buster bombs hit Iran's nuclear facilities in Isfahan, Natanz and Fordow. This time Iranian missiles would target U.S. military assets, bases on the Arab side of the Gulf and elsewhere, and perhaps oil installations. And Israel. The Israelis would hit back hard. Hezbollah in Lebanon would do its best to join in, prompting a further massive Israeli response. 

There were ominous straws in the wind. The U.S. withdrew non-essential personnel from bases in the Gulf, and from its embassy in Beirut. The Israelis reportedly warned Lebanon that if Hezbollah joined in, they would hit back at government targets, including Beirut airport, which were unscathed throughout the earlier hostilities. They stepped up their daily attacks on suspected Hezbollah targets, including a big missile attack on February  20 on the eastern Beqaa valley which left 12 dead, including eight Hezbollahis. Since the November 2024 ceasefire, Hezbollah has not fired so much as a peashooter at Israel while well over 400 of their people have been killed in Israeli attacks on Lebanon.

Does all this mean the doomsday scenario is inexorable? Are the Americans set on a clear game plan, with identified objectives and the means to attain them?

Apparently not. Trump is reportedly receiving divided counsel from his advisers, military and political, some more hawkish and others more cautious than others. Above all, he has an eye on the looming mid-term elections in November. He was elected on a platform of ending the "forever" wars in the Middle East, yet could be on the brink of starting another one, which would not go down well with part of his MAGA base or the public in general. 

The signs are that he was hoping the swashbuckling display of power would intimidate the Iranians into buckling. Witkoff admitted Trump was puzzled that Iran had not capitulated. “Why, under this pressure, with the amount of sea power and naval power over there, why haven’t they come to us and said, ‘We profess we don’t want a weapon, so here’s what we’re prepared to do?’ And, yet, it’s sort of hard to get them to that place,” he told Fox News. Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi explained: "It's because we're Iranian."

Trump's adrenalin was clearly set pumping by the adventure in Venezuela, where a similar military buildup culminated in the operation to abduct President Nicolas Maduro. But Iran is not Venezuela. It is a highly militarized regime which has spent 47 years preparing its internal and external defences, and which has different power bases that make it hard simply to decapitate. There is no magic bullet that might not set the region on fire. 

Taking out the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamene'i (who is also a religious leader, and this is Ramadan) would not be likely to bring about a change in regime behavior as in Venezuela. Bringing the regime down altogether would require a prolonged and detailed campaign that the U.S. military machine might not be able to sustain. 

That's where Israel comes in. Some White House advisers reportedly believe it would play better politically for Israel to strike first rather than the U.S., and thus force Iran to retaliate. Like Trump, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a man with an eye on impending elections (October at the latest) is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who makes no secret of his ambition to see the Iranian regime brought down. Netanyahu — backed by almost the entire Israeli political spectrum — is clearly champing at the bit, but aware of the danger of being seen to drag the U.S. into a potentially messy embroilment. One reason perhaps for the unusually discreet nature of Netanyahu's sixth visit to the White House on  February 11 — in through the back door, no lovefest press appearances. 

Which may also actually have been a sign that the two allies might not be on the same strategic page. Plunging Iran into fragmentation and chaos would absolutely fit Israel's playbook, but not necessarily America's. The two are working at cross-purposes in Syria, where the Israelis are pushing against a strong central government which the U.S. is supporting, even against its erstwhile Kurdish allies in the north-east. 

If there are two constants in the current equation, they are that the Iranian people’s disillusionment and rage against the regime will not go away, and neither will Israel's desire to overthrow it. But if Trump does not share that goal, he will have to find a face-saving way to wriggle off the hook he has created with his ostentatious military buildup. 

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter.Sign up here.

Related Articles

An execution stayed: Why the Islamic Republic might cling to power in Iran

Jim Muir

What we miss when we talk about the “Middle East”

Natalia Antelava

The end of the Tehran-Damascus axis

Jim Muir

The post The phoney war: Will the U.S. strike a decisive blow against Iran? appeared first on Coda Story.

Almost simultaneously, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission launched an investigation into Grok, X’s generative AI chatbot, for producing sexualized deepfakes which might have included personal data of Europeans, including children. Even British prime minister Keir Starmer, who has signed a sweeping “Technology Prosperity Deal” with the U.S. has, spoken about the need to “protect children’s wellbeing” from Grok. And earlier this month, French police searched the Paris offices of X as part of a process that X described as a “politicized criminal investigation.” 

With Australia having set a precedent for “age-gating” the Internet through legislation, France’s under-15 ban is now due to come into force in September. The UK already requires age verification for certain content via the Online Safety Act, and Spain, Slovenia, Denmark, Germany, and Greece are among those considering similar measures. ​​The social and political consensus is striking. A 30-country Ipsos survey found strong majorities in every country supporting bans for under-14s.

Elon Musk responded to the Spanish prime minister’s comments about social media being essentially a failed state, rife with criminality and a disregard for law, by calling him “a tyrant and traitor to the people of Spain.” The U.S. government has only been marginally more restrained. The House Judiciary Committee’s report accused Europe of mounting a decade-long campaign to “censor the global internet.” 

The involvement of the U.S. government, and its consistent defence of U.S. tech companies, means the battle is increasingly less about European regulators and Silicon Valley and more about what appears to be a profound ideological mismatch. “Though often framed as combating so-called ‘hate speech’ or ‘disinformation’,” said the Republican legislators’ report, the EU was working to “censor true information and political speech about some of the most important policy debates in recent history — including the Covid-19 pandemic, mass migration, and transgender issues.” Meanwhile, a recently published report in Europe shows how Silicon Valley companies spent 151 million euros lobbying far right European parliamentarians in 2025 to water down regulations. 

Big Tech forging links to the European far right dovetails with a Trump administration in which senior figures, including Donald Trump himself, endorse certain candidates in elections and routinely repeat far right talking points as part of an “unapologetic defense of Western civilization.” And now the U.S. State Department has openly touted the building of a “freedom.gov” portal that enables people to access restricted content, even if it contravenes local laws in sovereign countries.

But European regulations are not the only challenge to the impunity with which social media platforms seem to be able to act. As momentum builds to hold social media platforms to account in Europe, in the U.S. Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg has been defending Instagram in a Los Angeles courtroom. He was testifying in a lawsuit, one of several hundred filed in U.S. civil courts, alleging that social media platforms are addictive, harm the mental health of children and that platforms are aware of these effects but do little to safeguard teenage users from harm. 

The lawsuits have the effect of making the Australian, European, and perhaps global attempt to ban teens from setting up social media accounts appear necessary. But Paige Collings, a digital policy expert at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and board member at European Digital Rights, said that bans are politically attractive precisely because they are simple. “Complex problems require complex solutions,” she said. “It’s more expensive. It’s longer-term. It can’t just be implemented overnight. But blocking under-16s from social media — that is something you can implement overnight.” 

Collings is among a growing chorus of experts that are cautious about embracing bans as a comprehensive solution. For instance, she explains, to ban children, platforms first need to know who is a child. This relies on national digital ID systems, facial recognition, and third-party age verification. In all scenarios, Collings said, “we are trusting that these services and platforms are not storing this information, not selling the information,” often without meaningful guardrails to ensure that is the case. 

When the UK introduced age restrictions last summer, searches for VPNs surged as users of all ages tried to avoid giving away personal information. Now the government has floated expanding restrictions to VPN usage to plug enforcement gaps. The purpose of a VPN itself is to preserve the privacy of its user, however imperfectly. VPNs are essential tools for businesses to secure communications, for journalists to protect sources, and for citizens in restrictive environments to access independent information. Forcing identification to use them fundamentally undermines their purpose. And when the argument for banning them is framed around the protection of children, it reinstates the urgency of an entire infrastructure required to keep children off the internet and risks normalizing identity checks as conditions for access to online spaces. In a digital economy where personal data is highly valuable, such measures raise the question of who ultimately benefits.Beyond privacy concerns, Collings points out that age-gating can become “a fantastic tool for censorship with no accountability or remedy.” It does, in fact, do in part what the U.S. government and Silicon Valley companies say it does, which is restrict speech. At an AI summit in Delhi, French president Emmanuel Macron dismissed Silicon Valley’s invocation of censorship as a defense against European regulation. “Free speech,” he said, “is pure bullshit if nobody knows how you are guided through this… having no clue about how the algorithm is made, how it is tested and where it will guide you — the democratic biases of this could be huge.” But, forcing accountability and improving safety would perhaps be better than a blanket ban where the cutoff is 14 or 16, leaving everyone else to take cover as best they can in a “digital Wild West,” to borrow the Spanish prime minister’s phrase.

Related Articles

Turn off, tune out: Australia takes its kids off social media

Isobel Cockerell

The global battle to age-gate the internet

Lydia Morrish

Lying about your age? This AI will see right through it

Chris Stokel-Walker

The post Europe vs Big Tech: A battle for democracy? appeared first on Coda Story.

TRIPP is more than a photo-op or a vanity project. The South Caucasus, particularly since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, has become an area of critical strategic value as a corridor between East and West and a new arena of superpower competition. “Vance is not well known for flying around the world just for fun,” said Svante Cornell, Research Director of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute in Stockholm. “The U.S. is serious about the TRIPP Corridor and they want everybody in the region to know that.” 

Armenia and Azerbaijan have fought two wars over disputed Nagorno-Karabakh since the late-1980s, as the Soviet Union collapsed. It has been a brutal, society-shaping conflict, followed in 2023 by Azerbaijan’s rapid takeover of Nagorno-Karabakh and the flight of nearly the entire ethnic Armenian population.

Russia, though formally cast as a mediator, spent years manipulating the conflict: arming both sides, managing ceasefires and preventing resolution in a familiar imperial tactic later perfected in Ukraine: manufacturing and freezing instability until it could be turned into full-scale war on Moscow’s terms. But Trump changed the narrative by brokering a peace that has continued to hold. In December, officials from both countries discussed “lasting peace” and a “joint future” at a summit in the Qatari capital Doha. Armenia and Azerbaijan are also deep in discussion about integrating their energy systems. And Washington is now trying to lock that peace into concrete: rails, roads, and fiber that physically re-route the region away from Russian and Iranian gatekeeping.

This, wrote Trump on Truth Social recently, “was a nasty War… but now we have peace and prosperity.” For once, the self-congratulation isn’t entirely empty. Trump – who has confused Armenia for Albania and talked about settling its war with “Aber-baijan” in Davos just weeks ago – can legitimately take credit for making geopolitical gains in what Russia considered its backyard. 

The US president has repeatedly quoted Vladimir Putin as telling him: “‘I cannot believe you got this war settled’... cause it’s his territory.” That line matters because the South Caucasus is to Russia what the Caribbean Basin and the Panama “backyard” once was to the United States: a strategic near-abroad where outside powers aren’t supposed to build permanent leverage. 

Hemispheric defense, the Trump administration has made clear when it comes to Latin America, is at the heart of its defense strategy and that it expects other superpowers to be similarly focused on their spheres of influence. Thus, Russia’s inability to be a reliable ally to Armenia will be seen as weakness to be preyed upon by rival powers. Armenia is now even talking to Turkey, a historical adversary, about opening their shared border and establishing diplomatic relations.

Still, Armenia remains a member of the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union and has its railway networks handled by Russia’s RZhD national rail operator — a factor Russia tried to use in an attempt to get involved with TRIPP. “Regarding the 'Trump Road' project, as it's being called, we confirm our readiness to explore possible options for our involvement,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova said in January. Armenia’s Parliament Speaker shot down the possibility as “absurd.”

As for Azerbaijan, Trump said on Truth Social that part of Vance’s visit to Baku would be dedicated to “the sale of Made in the U.S.A. Defense Equipment,” a prospect that won’t please Moscow.

Georgia, once considered Washington's closest partner in the South Caucasus, is notably absent from JD Vance’s itinerary and being left behind is as consequential as being included.

For two decades, Georgia’s power and growing prosperity came from being the corridor: the place where pipelines, highways, and rail lines had to pass if Europe wanted Caspian energy without Russian control. The Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline was the signature project of that era, an “East–West energy corridor” literally running through Georgia. TRIPP threatens to redraw that map. A corridor through southern Armenia that becomes the new headline route doesn’t just “leave Georgia behind” — it means Georgia loses its most significant geopolitical bargaining chip because transit was the card it could play with Washington, Brussels, Ankara and Baku.

Now, as Washington invests in a new flagship corridor, countries like Georgia that fall outside it are forced to hedge. Over the past decade, Georgia has deepened ties with China through trade deals, cultural exchanges, and visa-free travel, while simultaneously sliding back toward Russia despite Moscow’s 2008 invasion of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Under the Georgian Dream government, repressive legislation and violent crackdowns on protest have widened the gap with the EU and the U.S. Georgian prime minister Irakli Kobakhidze has appealed directly to Trump for a reset, but TRIPP makes clear where Washington’s priorities now lie. With Azerbaijan and Armenia at the heart of a new U.S.-backed route, influence in the South Caucasus is reorganizing around infrastructure — and power is flowing along it.

TRIPP, even if it exists just on paper for now, indirectly challenges the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, a network of railways, ports, pipelines, and trade corridors aimed at boosting international trade under Beijing’s leadership. It enables the moving of goods while bypassing Russia and, where possible, Iran — an approach that became more urgent after 2022. And it undermines China, which has been busy paving routes to Iran. Both countries have been in intense contact with Central Asian countries and last summer inaugurated a railway route that connects China and Iran through Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. 

The South Caucasus is just a small piece in a puzzle that fits together over 140 Belt and Road countries — and Cornell is skeptical about the scale of China’s ambition versus its actual investment. “Belt and Road maps include a lot of infrastructure in this part of the world that has nothing to do with China,” he told me. “Most everything that's been built in the region has been built as a result of the funding from the countries in the region, not by Chinese funds.“  In keeping with this strategy, a fully operational TRIPP might be seen by China as a benefit, a way to trade while avoiding unreliable maritime routes. But researchers in China say that the problem will be if TRIPP “becomes securitized or if Washington leverages its control for geopolitical influence.” And with U.S. foreign policy increasingly waged as a battle with China for resources and global influence, TRIPP could become a threat to Chinese influence in the region. 

Vice President Vance’s visit is a sign of sustained U.S. engagement in the region and a sign that Trump’s attention has not waned after a ceremonial peace agreement in Washington.

The simplest way to read TRIPP is as a 27-mile project with an outsized consequence: it reorders who controls the “land bridge” between Europe and Central Asia and it tells every capital nearby who Washington thinks matters. 

And China will have to prepare for an economic standoff in terrain it once assumed was ripe for Chinese dominance. Russia, meanwhile, finds itself on slippery ground, no longer the indispensable broker it once was in its immediate neighborhood. TRIPP also adds an unexpected edge to the Ukraine-shaped narrative of a Trump administration willing to accommodate Moscow at every turn, suggesting instead a relationship that is less uniform and more selectively disruptive than it first appears.

Related Articles

The Trump corollary: Latin America swings right

Phineas Rueckert

Georgian nightmare: did a government knowingly poison its people?

Masho Lomashvili

Resisting the Authoritarian Playbook in the South Caucasus

Masho Lomashvili

The post A Trump corridor through the Caucasus appeared first on Coda Story.

Albertans queuing to sign a petition, even one to secede from Canada, could never compete for attention with the tragic, disorienting developments that filled the first long month of 2026: the ICE shooting in Minneapolis, Donald Trump's bombastic threats to annex Greenland, and Canadian prime minister Mark Carney's tense warnings from Davos about middle powers ending up "on the menu." 

But for those who've tracked how sovereignty collapses, these winter queues had an eerie resonance.

Almost as soon as he took office for his second term, Trump began calling Canada "the 51st state," declaring that the country "only works" if it becomes part of the United States. He'd refuse to use proper titles, referring to Canadian prime ministers as "Governor Trudeau" and later "Governor Carney." He posted altered maps showing Canada as U.S. territory. It played as crude humor, vintage Trump bluster designed to dominate the news cycle and unsettle an ally he viewed as weak. But by January 2026, as Trump’s threats to annex Greenland dominated headlines, his drip-drip taunting of Canada had calcified into something concrete on the ground in Alberta, had given shape and momentum to a once low-key secessionist sentiment.

The Alberta Prosperity Project needs 177,732 signatures by May to trigger a referendum on secession from Canada. Their representatives claim they've made "repeated visits" to Washington to meet with senior Trump administration officials, meetings they say took place inside the kind of secure facility reserved for discussing classified intelligence. 

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent publicly declared that Alberta should "come down into the U.S." as a "natural partner." Republican Congressman Andy Ogles told the BBC that Albertans "would prefer not to be part of Canada and be part of the United States because we are winning day in and day out." According to the separatists' own materials, their vision includes a "common market" with the U.S., zero tariffs, adoption of the U.S. dollar and construction of two oil pipelines through American territory. Spokesperson Jeffrey Rath has claimed the U.S. would potentially provide a $500 billion line of credit to the newly independent Alberta.

Widening the Overton window

A referendum on Albertan secession, should it happen, appears almost certain to fail. Polls show only 24% of Albertans support joining the U.S., with 65% strongly opposed. Most media outside Canada has treated this as a fringe story. But the language being used by the Trump administration in support of secession is becoming a textbook example of how the Overton window shifts: say the outrageous thing, let it be dismissed as mischievous troublemaking, and then watch as domestic actors race to occupy the newly opened political space. Repeat until the "absurd" becomes debatable, and the debatable becomes negotiable. When a U.S. Treasury Secretary publicly advocates for a Canadian province to secede and join America, he's not predicting the future — he's manufacturing a present in which such conversations become possible. There’s no master plan; the chaos itself creates opportunity.

The timing matters. Mark Carney has emerged as the strongest voice pushing back against Trump's increasingly aggressive rhetoric, most notably in his Davos speech warning that middle powers risk ending up "on the menu." Daniel Béland, a political scientist at McGill University who studies Canadian federalism, sees Alberta separatism as potentially serving a strategic purpose for the Trump administration: "Mark Carney is standing up to Trump. We saw what happened in Davos, right? So maybe they see that what's happening in Alberta is weakening both Canada and Carney."

The reason this story matters has less to do with the petition itself than with the narrative infrastructure being built around it. Recently, the exiled Russian news agency Meduza obtained a manual that the Kremlin had distributed to state-owned and pro-government media outlets instructing them how to cover Trump's Greenland standoff. The directives were explicit: emphasize that territorial expansion is what "strong countries" do, that Trump is "aiming for Vladimir Putin's success," that conflicts with European countries "will be forgotten, but the territories will remain." Journalists were told to frame NATO as "collapsing" and Putin as "forcing America to engage in equal dialogue" while European leaders "halfheartedly protest on social media."

For Russian and Chinese state outlets, coverage of Albertan separatism is in keeping with the broad narrative that Western alliances are fracturing and sovereignty is negotiable for resource-rich regions. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, meanwhile, has spent the past year articulating what he calls a doctrine of "hemispheric defense," framing Canada not as an ally but as territory that needs to be controlled. A "rapidly changing" Canada, he has said, in which 25% of the population is "foreign-born" means "these people are hostile to the United States of America." Canada, Bannon claims, “is the next Ukraine."

While Bannon has spoken extensively about hemispheric defence and Canada’s strategic value as a U.S. protectorate, there's been no official movement towards such a goal — no Pentagon study, no Congressional authorization hearings, no legal pathway to annexation. Trump can troll, Bannon can theorize, Bessent can advocate, but no one appears to be seriously suggesting executing a plan. The damage isn't in the doing, it’s in the destabilization, it’s in normalizing the conversation.

A parallel playbook doesn't mean identical outcomes. There will be no little green men, no masked special forces in Calgary. But in 2014, when Russia entered Crimea, it wasn't military occupation alone, it began with the systematic deployment of narratives that made annexation appear inevitable, even locally driven, before troops ever arrived. And now the Kremlin argues hypocrisy when the United Nations Secretary General says the principle of the “self-determination of peoples has a number of requisites.” 

Déjà vu

My view is shaped by what I've witnessed: Russian-backed separatists taking over my grandparents' house in Abkhazia in the 1990s, years of reporting from South Ossetia before Russia seized it in 2008, and standing outside a Ukrainian military base in Perevalnoe in 2014, watching Russian soldiers in unmarked uniforms take control while Moscow denied they were even there.

The annexation of Crimea showed how the ground for seizing sovereignty is laid through manufactured political theater. A politician whose party won 4% of the vote in 2010 was installed at gunpoint and held a referendum under occupation that reported 96.7% of people supported joining Russia. He's still in charge.

Provinces and regions challenge sovereignty regularly. In Scotland's 2014 referendum on whether it should be independent of the United Kingdom, nearly 45% voted ‘yes.’ Catalonia's 2017 referendum saw 48% back independence from Spain before Madrid blocked it through force, both physical and legal. Quebec came within 1% of secession in 1995, a margin so narrow it prompted federal legislation defining how provinces could leave.

What distinguishes Alberta isn't the referendum mechanism, it's the involvement of a foreign power. In every previous case, challenges to sovereignty remained internal disputes. Spain's government opposed Catalonia, but secessionists didn’t visit France to seek €500 billion in credit from the French government. Canada addressed Quebec's grievances, but the U.S. Treasury Secretary at the time didn't suggest that Quebec should "come down into the U.S."

The overt encouragement of Albertan secession is without precedent among Western democracies. Canada faces provocation by a superpower neighbor whose cabinet officials actively encourage provincial secession, whose political figures meet separatist leaders in secure intelligence facilities, and whose state apparatus treats a G7 ally's territorial integrity as negotiable. "This is something that, at least to my knowledge, is unprecedented," says Béland, referring to US State Department meetings with Alberta separatists. 

The architecture of erosion

The conditions in Alberta and Crimea are, of course, fundamentally different: no troops, no armed separatists, and Alberta is a democracy in which roughly 76% oppose joining the U.S., if not necessarily Albertan independence. What's comparable though is the vocabulary being used in the U.S.: the systematic framing of sovereignty as conditional, resources as rightfully belonging to a more powerful neighbor, and local grievances as requiring external "solutions." 

The rhetorical architecture that made Crimea possible is now being constructed around Alberta. That architecture requires foundation stones, and Alberta has them. When the province joined Canada in 1905, Ottawa retained control of Alberta’s natural resources though Ontario and Quebec got to keep theirs. This inequity was corrected in 1930, but the resentment lingered. In 1980, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau imposed a 25% federal tax on Alberta's oil and seized control of pricing. The backlash was fierce: unemployment soared, projects collapsed, and "let the eastern bastards freeze in the dark" became a rallying cry. Separatist movements have flared and faded for decades, always returning to the same core grievance: Alberta produces 90% of Canada's oil, Canada sells 95% of it to the United States, yet Alberta feels like a resource colony for Eastern Canada's benefit.

Russia exploited similar dynamics in Crimea: real economic marginalization, language politics, the feeling of being a colony for Kyiv's benefit. External powers don't create these grievances, but they weaponize them. And just as in Crimea, it's indigenous populations raising the alarm first. The Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation filed a lawsuit arguing that Alberta cannot hold a referendum without indigenous consent, and explicitly warning that a referendum "will enable foreign interference from the most powerful neighbor to the south." In Crimea, the indigenous Tatar population boycotted the 2014 referendum and suffered systematic repression afterward.

Alberta's premier, Danielle Smith, has walked a careful line, speaking about her desire to stay a part of Canada while defending the need to hold a referendum. She met Trump at Mar-a-Lago days before his inauguration last year, speaking of the "need to preserve our independence while we grow this critical partnership." But when the referendum petition was approved, she framed it as a democratic duty: "You need to have a pressure-release valve on issues that people care about." According to the Globe and Mail, Canadian defense officials have recently modeled a U.S. invasion scenario for the first time in over a century: a theoretical planning exercise, not an operational war plan. The modeling assumed American forces would overcome Canadian positions in as little as 2 days, prompting examination of asymmetric responses: sabotage, drones, dispersed resistance. Officials stressed an invasion remains highly unlikely. But allies don't conduct theoretical exercises in fratricide unless something fundamental has shifted.

The shifting burden

Stories matter. The current collapse of Europe's post-Cold War security arrangement began with narratives that made that collapse imaginable.

From the mid-2000s, Russian state television started hosting marginal voices questioning Ukraine's right to exist. In 2008, the Russian daily Kommersant reported that in a private meeting, Putin told George W. Bush that Ukraine was "not even a state" and that the Kremlin would be encouraging secession in both Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Six years of this rhetoric made Ukrainian sovereignty negotiable before a single soldier crossed the border.

Trump has spent over a year declaring Canada "only works" as part of the United States while his Treasury Secretary publicly advocates for Alberta's secession and Bannon, whose finger is frequently firmly on MAGA’s pulse, calls the country "hostile" and "the next Ukraine." Béland warns that the damage from this process extends beyond the referendum's outcome: "Even if the ‘no’ wins, the remain side wins, and even if it's an easy victory... having a referendum campaign is highly divisive in and of itself, and it opens the door to potential U.S. interference."

Sovereignty doesn't collapse with a single referendum. It erodes in the accumulation of moments when defending it appears unreasonable, when maintaining it requires constant justification, when the burden of proof shifts from those who would divide to those who would preserve.

With additional reporting from Masho Lomashvili

Related Articles

Russia lost Venezuela. Putin won everything else

Natalia Antelava

Meet the Kremlin’s keyboard warrior in Crimea

Andreas Rossbach

Donald Trump’s imperial dreams

Natalia Antelava

The post Imagining the unimaginable annexation of Alberta appeared first on Coda Story.

But does it mean the regime is at its last gasp? Or will these events be added to a long list of inconclusive revolts that started well before the "Green Revolution" that followed the 2009 election, through to the "Woman, Life, Freedom" movement in 2022?

The latest signs are that the protests may be waning. But there are at least three new elements that make this latest uprising different and which may rise again later even if the regime survives. 

The protests were kicked off by the Bazaar in Tehran, the conservative mercantile class, normally the last to want to rock the boat. Like a bushfire, it spread with lightning speed to towns and cities across the country, fuelled by grievances that had surfaced in previous protests. So, the initial impulse came from the country's disastrous economic situation. With the national currency, the Rial, losing 84% of its value over the past year alone, inflation had brought crushing hardship to many despite the regime's efforts to apply bandaids to the gaping wounds. The involvement of the Bazaar gave the protests a new depth. The second novel element was the sudden emergence, around ten days into the uprising, of Reza Pahlavi, son of the ousted Shah, as a figurehead for the protests. "Javid Shah, Long live the Shah!" became one of the main battle cries of the protesters. The dissident movement lacked unity, leadership and a shared platform. The hope was that Reza Pahlavi could act as a unifying figure who might oversee a transition to a democratic future. 

Adopting him may have been a sign of desperation, but it was also a red rag to the regime, a provocation impossible to ignore. A third new feature was the unprecedented level of outside interference, whose direction and intentions were far from clear at the outset. Fresh from abducting Nicolás Maduro and vowing to "run" Venezuela, Donald Trump seemed in the mood for further adventures, urging Iranian "patriots" to keep protesting, and telling them that help was on the way. Much would clearly depend on what form that "help" would take. But by tying it so clearly to Iran's internal situation rather than the nuclear or missile issues that underlay the 12-day Israeli-U.S. war on Iran in June last year, Trump's intervention was giving the uprising a dimension it lacked before.

All this amounted to what the regime clearly saw as a potentially mortal threat, and it reacted with unprecedented ferocity. Though the full picture has yet to emerge because of the communications blackout, there are horror stories of overflowing morgues, many gunshot wounds to eyes and genitals, machine guns mowing down crowds, and many other brutalities that seemed to succeed in tamping down the flames. Opposition human rights groups believe the death toll is closer to 12,000 than the 2,000 initially announced by the regime, which was already a good deal higher than for previous uprisings.

Left in a purely Iranian context without the U.S. wild card, the regime, although rattled, seems to have survived another round of challenge, though with consequences that may surface later. As Israeli military analysts had pointed out, the Iranian authorities had many repressive tools they had not yet deployed. There was no sign of a crack in the loyalty of the security forces or of serious splits within the government. Bear in mind that the Revolutionary Guards (the IRGC), in addition to their powerful military machine and auxiliaries (the Basij), also wield huge economic clout on which hundreds of thousands of families depend.

If this round has been crushed internally, there will surely be another round later unless there is a radical change. The decision by activists to adopt Reza Pahlavi did not reflect a widespread longing for the monarchy; it was rather a signal that the opposition had given up hope of changing the regime from within, and that overthrow was the only way forward, with Pahlavi as the only visible symbol of defiance to rally around. But even Donald Trump cast doubt on the level of support inside Iran for the aspiring "Crown Prince."

The regime's only hope of treating the dire economic crisis swiftly and undercutting protest would be to bring about a lifting of ever-tightening sanctions, which means coming to terms with the Americans. And that raises the question of U.S. (or Trump's) intentions. In the 12-day war last June, Israel clearly wanted to continue a campaign of detailed bombing that could have led to regime collapse, while Trump was content with one spectacular strike. His instinct is not to get embroiled in lengthy open-ended hostilities. 

Regime change in Iran would very likely produce chaos, and perhaps fragmentation of the country as a unitary state. It is very hard to imagine a smooth transition to democracy, and very easy to see Kurdish, Arab, Azeri Turkish, Sunni Baluchi, and other minorities splintering away as vying factions struggle for power in Tehran. That may suit Israel's playbook for regional disintegration, but the transactional Trump likes to do deals with unified states; witness Syria, where Israel favours a weak, decentralized state, but the U.S. wants a unified, cooperative one under al-Sharaa; and Venezuela, where Trump has left the regime in place and spurned the opposition despite removing Maduro. 

If it remains committed to some form of action against Iran, the U.S, would have to calibrate its moves with great care. Striking nuclear or missile facilities again would likely have little effect on the regime, but would provoke a reaction against U.S. bases in the Gulf that might not be as cosmetic and choreographed as it was last June. American strikes against political, military or security targets would have to be sustained and detailed or would end up being ineffective or counter-productive, and if effective, could produce collapse and chaos. Might Trump dream of doing a Maduro on the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamene'i, leaving the IRGC and others to do a deal? Anything is possible. But in Iran, nothing is simple. 

While Israel was standing by watchfully and hoping for a tough U.S. response, there were countervailing pressures from America's Gulf Arab allies, deeply unsettled by the crisis. They don't want to be hit by an angry Iranian neighbor, while the possibility of regime collapse and fragmentation opens up all kinds of prospects of regional instability and danger. The signs are that these representations have hit home with Trump.

But Iran remains a mess with no easy resolution. And it's not going to go away.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

Related Articles

The end of the Tehran-Damascus axis

Jim Muir

Russia lost Venezuela. Putin won everything else

Natalia Antelava

What we miss when we talk about the “Middle East”

Natalia Antelava

The post An execution stayed: Why the Islamic Republic might cling to power in Iran appeared first on Coda Story.

Sections:

Over the past week, the world has been fixated on Venezuela. On the spectacle, the shock, the fallout. We have been watching something else too: Southeast Asia.

The Philippines chairs ASEAN this year. For months, Manila has anchored its South China Sea strategy in international law — the same law a UN tribunal used to rule in the Philippines’ favor against Beijing’s territorial claims. It is the foundation of everything: diplomacy, deterrence, legitimacy.

Then last week, the Philippines’ closest ally carried out a military operation in Venezuela, captured a sitting head of state, bombed the capital, and announced it would “run the country” to secure access to oil reserves. International law scholars are already calling it one of the most serious violations of the UN Charter in decades.

In Manila, opposition politicians and foreign policy commentators are warning that this leaves the Philippines strategically exposed. Not because they sympathize with Nicolás Maduro, but because you cannot invoke international law against China on Monday when your ally demolishes it on Friday.

This is exactly the vulnerability the Kremlin has spent years trying to manufacture: a world in which Western appeals to law sound selective, self-serving, and hollow.

For decades, Vladimir Putin has worked to exploit the gap between what the West says and what it does. Between the values it preaches and the compromises it makes. Between the “rules-based order” it defends and the shortcuts it takes when those rules become inconvenient.

In 2019, Fiona Hill — then Donald Trump’s Russia advisor — testified that Moscow had floated the idea of a Venezuela–Ukraine “swap.” If Washington wanted Russia out of its backyard, perhaps it should reconsider its position on Ukraine. At the time, many Western analysts dismissed this as bluster or fantasy.

What was missed is that this idea was not confined to back channels.

Around the same time, Russian state media  was openly socializing the same logic — discussing Venezuela and Ukraine as interchangeable pieces on a geopolitical chessboard, normalizing the language of trade-offs and swaps. Not as scandal. Not as provocation. As realism.

Russia’s message was clear: this is how grown-up power works.

The swap was never really about Venezuela and Ukraine. It was about training audiences — at home and abroad — to accept that smaller countries are negotiable. That sovereignty is transactional. That influence is something you barter.

Putin was playing a long game.

Nearly seven years later, Donald Trump invoked the Monroe Doctrine and sent Delta Force into Caracas. Russia may have lost a client state. But it gained something more valuable: validation of its operating thesis that this is, in fact, how the world works.

Hours before the raid, Nicolás Maduro was hosting a senior Chinese envoy, discussing energy deals. Among his last public words before capture: “It’s the year of the horse and we gallop onward in perfect union.” Now China’s UN ambassador is denouncing “serious violations” at the Security Council. Meanwhile, in London, Keir Starmer — a former human rights lawyer who calls international law his “lodestar” — is biting his tongue to keep Trump onside. In Southeast Asia, diplomats are privately calling Venezuela a “dangerous precedent.”

Many pundits argue that Venezuela humiliates Putin by showing he is an unreliable ally. I think this misses the point.

Putin’s goal was never to be reliable. It was to prove that reliability, like sovereignty, is conditional. That the “rules-based order” was always just American hegemony with better marketing. That when push comes to shove, power trumps principle — and everyone knows it.

The logic is brutally simple: You cannot defend Kyiv’s sovereignty while “occupying” Caracas.
You cannot invoke international law against Russia while kidnapping heads of state yourself.
You cannot lecture Beijing about rules while rewriting them in real time.

The piece we are sharing with you today was written a year ago, on the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It traces how Putin dismantled Western moral authority step by step. What looked like isolated episodes — Georgia, Crimea, Syria, election interference — were in fact components of a single strategy: to expose and widen the gap between Western democratic ideals and how they are practiced.

That gap was not created by the Kremlin. But it has been effectively weaponized.

Democracy, individual rights, and the rule of law remain powerful ideas. They still mobilize people. They still inspire resistance. But from Manila to Caracas to Kyiv, we are now living in a world where the West’s failure to defend its own values has turned a Russian autocrat’s worldview into a global reality.

If this feels sudden, it isn’t. The piece below shows how carefully this moment was prepared.

Essay by Natalia Antelava

Three years ago this week, as Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, an extraordinary wave of global solidarity swept across the world. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets in cities from London to Sydney. Tech giants blocked Russian state media. Even Switzerland abandoned its neutrality to freeze Russian assets. Only five countries voted against a United Nations resolution calling for Russia to withdraw its troops from Ukrainian territory, compared to the 141 who voted in favor of it.

Today, that solidarity has been replaced by something no one could have imagined in February, 2022: the United States has refused to back an annual resolution presented to the UN General Assembly that condemns Russian aggression and demands the removal of troops. Instead, the leader of the world's most powerful democracy now repeats the Kremlin's false narrative that Ukraine started the war.

This stunning reversal of the U.S. position represents Vladimir Putin's greatest victory - not in the battlefields of Ukraine but in a war that most of us thought ended over 30 years ago: the Cold War. 

Putin's win is no accident. For decades, he has been explicit about his ultimate goal: to return to the world of 1945, when the leaders of the U.S.S.R., U.S. and Britain sat around a table in Yalta to divide the world between them. The invasion of Ukraine three years ago was never about Ukraine - it was about reclaiming lost power and forcing the West back to the negotiating table. Putin’s success stems from the collective failure of the Western establishment, convinced of its own invincibility, to recognize his systematic dismantling of the order they claimed to defend.

It would be too simple to blame Donald Trump or any single political leader for finally giving Putin his seat at the table. This failure belongs to the entire Western establishment - including media organizations, think tanks, universities, corporations, and civil society institutions.

The values the West claimed for itself - defense of individual rights, rule of law, democratic values - were worth fighting for. But having “won” the Cold War, Western establishments grew complacent. They assumed the moral high ground was unassailable, dismissing those who warned it could be lost.

When Putin called the Soviet collapse "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century," Western analysts dismissed it as rhetoric. When he told George W. Bush that Ukraine was "not a country," they treated it as diplomatic bluster. When he used his 2007 Munich speech to declare ideological war on the Western-led world order, they saw a tantrum.

Each subsequent action - from the invasion of Georgia in 2008, to the annexation of Crimea in 2014, from the downing of MH17, also in 2014, to the killing of opponents throughout Putin’s reign - was treated as an isolated incident rather than part of a carefully orchestrated strategy. When Georgian leaders warned that Ukraine would be next, the Obama administration ignored them, dispatching Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Geneva to meet her Russian counterpart and present him with the infamous "reset" button. When Baltic and Polish leaders pleaded for increased NATO deployments and warned about the Nord Stream pipeline's security implications, they were dismissed as paranoid.

"The Western Europeans pooh-poohed and patronized us for these last 30 years," former Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski told Politico in 2022. "For years they were patronizing us about our attitude: 'Oh, you know, you over-nervous, over-sensitive Central Europeans are prejudiced against Russia.'"

The lost victory

Meanwhile, inside Russia, Putin was perfecting the playbook that would eventually transform the West itself. His ideologues, like Alexander Dugin, weren't just discussing Russia's future - they were designing a blueprint for dismantling liberal democracy from within. Dugin, and the influential Izborsky Club think tank, understood that the key to defeating Western values wasn't to challenge them head-on, but to turn their contradictions against themselves.

It wasn't that Dugin had anything particularly compelling to offer. His vision of a post-liberal world order where traditional values trump individual rights was hardly original. But when he sat down with Tucker Carlson in April last year to present Putin as the defender of traditional values against the decadent West, his message resonated with conservatives because too many Westerners felt that liberal values had become hollow promises. 

Many studies, like this from the Pew Research Center, showed that Americans were rapidly losing faith in their institutions. Rather than addressing these grievances, the Western establishment preferred to blame disinformation and foreign interference, dismissing citizens’ concerns and creating resentments that Putin proved masterful at exploiting.

Putin was also methodically building a global coalition that extended far beyond the West. While Western media focused on Russia's influence operations in Europe and America, Moscow was crafting a different narrative for the Global South. In Africa, Russian embassies bombarded newsrooms with op-eds positioning Russia as the successor to the Soviet Union's anti-colonial legacy. The message was simple but effective: Russia was fighting Western imperialism, not waging colonial war.

Engineering the West's downfall

While Western governments spent billions setting up fact-checking initiatives and disinformation monitoring centers - always reacting, always one step behind - Putin was methodically building loose, agile networks that tapped into genuine popular anger about Western hypocrisy and double standards.

Putin's triumph lies not in offering better ideas or values - democracy, individual rights, and rule of law remain powerful ideals. His genius was in exploiting the growing gap between these principles and people's lived experiences"

The West's reactive stance allowed Putin to continuously set the agenda. The vast "counter-disinformation" industry - now effectively destroyed by Trump’s aid cuts-  focused on debunking individual claims but consistently missed the bigger picture. From RT Arabic's dominant position in Lebanon to coordinated social media campaigns across Africa, Putin crafted narratives that positioned Russia as the champion of all those who felt betrayed and marginalized by the Western-led order.

"Russia's message lands well and softly," one editor from Johannesburg told me during a gathering of African editors in Nairobi in 2022. "The challenge for our team is to objectively navigate overwhelmingly pro-Russian public sentiment." 

The success of this strategy is now undeniable. And yet, Putin offers little in return for his repudiation of the West. Democracy, individual rights, and rule of law remain powerful ideals. His genius was in exploiting the growing gap between these principles and people's lived experiences, a gap that Western establishments proved unwilling or unable to address.

This blind spot - coupled with the West’s inability to imagine losing - became the so-called free world’s greatest vulnerability. While liberal establishments were congratulating themselves on the "end of history," Putin was methodically working to rewrite its ending. While they dismissed the appeal of traditionalist values as backwards and parochial, he was building a global alliance of like-minded leaders and movements. 

Putin's victory was never inevitable. At each step, Western institutions had opportunities to recognize and counter his strategy. Instead, their conviction in their own righteousness led them to consistently underestimate both the threat and the extent of their own failures.

Today, as Russian state media hosts celebrate their triumph and Trump prepares to negotiate Ukraine's surrender, the scale of Putin's achievement is breathtaking. He has succeeded where generations of Soviet leaders failed: not just in resisting Western influence but in fundamentally transforming the West itself. 

The Cold War’s new ending is exactly as Putin scripted it. Not with the triumph of Western liberal democracy, but with its possibly fatal weakening. The Kremlin's guiding framework—where power is truth, principles are weakness, and cronyism is the only real ideology—now defines the White House as well.The question isn't how we got here - Putin told us exactly where he was taking us. The question is whether we can finally abandon our arrogant certainties long enough to understand what happened - and what comes next.

Read More

The Club That Wants Russia to Take Over the World: Our 2018 investigation revealed how the Izborsky Club, a self-described "intellectual circle" of philosophers, journalists and Orthodox priests, was working to dismantle Western liberal democracy. Read how they laid the groundwork for today's reality.

Related Articles

Russian trolls and mercenaries win allies and good will in Africa

Shola Lawal

Is this Putin’s utopia?

Joshua Kucera

On the frontiers of the “Russian World”

Natalia Antelava

The post Russia lost Venezuela. Putin won everything else appeared first on Coda Story.

Argentina’s president Javier Milei greeted news of Kast’s victory with a map of South America, divided neatly into red (left wing) and blue (right wing) halves. Lined up on the blue side were Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador, with Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela prominent in red. “The left recedes,” posted Milei, “freedom advances.” Not surprisingly, president-elect Kast’s first trip after the election was to Buenos Aires this week where he embraced Milei and posed with a chainsaw, a reference to their shared promise to slash budgets and the size of their governments. Kast also found time in Buenos Aires to support Trump’s desire to force regime change in Venezuela. “It solves,” Kast said, “a gigantic problem for us.” 

This year has been terrible for incumbent left wing governments in South and Central America. In Ecuador and Bolivia, right-wing candidates were recently elected to office. Last month, Hondurans voted between three candidates; left-wing candidate Rixi Moncada trailed a center-right and a Trump-backed far-right candidate locked in a virtual tie as the country sent soldiers into the streets to calm tensions. Next year, both Colombia and Brazil will head to the polls in highly-anticipated elections. Kast, who lost in two previous attempts to become president, is arguably the most right wing politician to be elected president in Chile since the end of Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship in 1990. Kast’s brother was a central banker during Pinochet’s rule and his father was a member of the Nazi party. “In a way,” Chilean academic Victor Muñoz Tamayo told me, “this is an election of our political moment.”

On Wednesday, Donald Trump posted that “Venezuela is completely surrounded” and will be “until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.” Alongside oil, the U.S. government prizes access to critical minerals. In the vast desert region known as Norte Grande lies an expanse of salt flats on the borderlands between Chile, Bolivia and Argentina. It is known as the “lithium triangle.” Here, roughly one-third of the world’s supply of lithium sits beneath the surface of the earth. Extracting this rare element, a key component of electric vehicle batteries, requires large quantities of water: roughly 500,000 gallons per ton of lithium carbonate. While the incumbent Chilean government sought to regulate the extraction of lithium and nationalize its production, Kast has said he favors a market approach. “They don't believe in climate change. They don't believe in protecting the rights of nature. They don't recognize ancestral communities,” says Daniela Rodriguez, a local “journalist and activist” in the town of San Pedro de Atacama. 

The choice of location – the upscale Santiago neighborhood of Las Condes – for Kast’s victory speech was no accident. In front of a crowd of thousands in this area of sleek high rises and banks nestled just below the nearby mountains, Kast said “Chile won. And the hope of living without fear won.” 

In the first round of voting in November, Jeannette Jara, who ran on a coalition platform that spanned from Communists to Christian Democrats, came out on top – garnering around 27 percent of votes. She beat out Kast, populist Franco Parisi, far-right libertarian Johannes Kaiser and center-right Evelyn Matthei. Originally from Conchalí, a poor commuter suburb of Santiago, Jara highlighted her working-class roots and accomplishments as labor minister under president Gabriel Boric. In this role, Jara passed laws to raise the minimum wage, gradually reduce the work week and partially reform the country’s private pension system – a legacy of the 17-year Pinochet dictatorship. In Chile, Boric was elected on a wave of popular discontent that coalesced in the nationwide 2019 social movement known as the estallido social (social outburst), but once in office, he struggled to impose his transformative vision, including a rewrite of the 1980 constitution. Jara’s party affiliation and her connection to Boric (whose approval rating sits around 30 percent) hampered  her candidacy. 

In campaign spots, Kast frequently red-baited Jara, playing on long-held fears of the Communist party that still persist in Chile. “Vote 5 [Kast’s ballot number], without communism, without communism,” went the lyrics of one popular campaign jingle. Kast has also minimized his previous support for Pinochet, whose regime arrested, tortured and disappeared thousands of opposition members and leftists. As a candidate in 2017, Kast said he would have voted for the dictator and has said Pinochet “saved” the country from communism. Though he was once known for his extreme policy positions, Kast successfully moderated his tone when campaigning. “In the past,” Muñoz Tamayo explained, “he talked about things like eliminating the Ministry of Women. Now, he focuses on public order, crime, and uncontrolled migration. They’re right-wing, radical issues, but also very popular.” There are an estimated 336,000 undocumented refugees in Chile, many of them from Venezuela. 

It’s an issue that has made some voters ignore Kast’s praise for Pinochet. I traveled to Los Vilos, a couple of hours north of Santiago by bus, where I met former student activist Joaquín Vidal at the seaside bed-and-breakfast he runs. Vidal showed me tokens he kept in a box from his eight-month spell in prison for participating in a protest against Pinochet’s rule. He went into exile in 1982. One of the items he’d kept in the box was a leather belt signed by his fellow inmates. “Normally, I’d give these items to the Museum of Memory and Human Rights,” he told me. “But I’m worried the far-right might shut it down.” 

In parliamentary elections on November 15, right-wing parties gained a majority in the Chamber of Deputies, giving Kast an unprecedented mandate. While campaigning, Kast was able to reassure a country paralyzed by fear that he was focused on the issues that mattered to them. But executing on his promises, which include forcibly removing hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants and implementing austerity measures will be difficult. Over seafood in a Santiago restaurant, Jorge Heine, Chile's former ambassador to China, South Africa and India, told me that Kast “does not have a proper team of experienced public policy specialists and professionals to run the country.” This, he added, “does not bode well.” 

Despite the tenor of the election, Heine told me, “the truth is Kast will be handed a country that is in pretty good shape and by no means ‘in crisis,’ as he likes to say.” The question is, “will he act like [Italian prime minister Giorgia] Meloni or Trump?” Chile’s election of a Trump-supporting right wing president comes at a time that the White House has revealed its extensive plans for the region. 

“American sweat, ingenuity and toil created the oil industry in Venezuela,” posted Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff. “Its tyrannical expropriation was the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property.” It's an attitude that informs current White House policy in Latin America, even though the United Nations enshrined the principle of “permanent sovereignty over natural wealth and resources” in 1962. Miller is effectively saying that countries like Venezuela should not be sovereign, but instead vassal-states. The ‘Trump Corollary,’ the U.S. government’s updating of the 19th century Monroe Doctrine, claims “as a condition of our security and prosperity” the right to “assert ourselves confidently where and when we need to in the region.” Its actions in Venezuela are a demonstration of this intent. 

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter.Sign up here.

Related Articles

Musk and Milei’s chainsaw bromance

Ana Prieto

From Bolsonaro to Mamdani: the global delegitimization playbook becomes New York reality

Natalia Antelava

and

Erica Hellerstein

Who is the real Javier Milei?

Danielle Lee Tomson

The post The Trump corollary: Latin America swings right appeared first on Coda Story.

The suit has been brought on behalf of 306 American victims of the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks in Israel, and alleges that Binance accounts transferred $300 million to Hamas and other terrorist organisations, and received $700 million from them, figures that dwarf the sums detailed in the criminal prosecution of Binance that led to its $4.3 billion fine two years ago.

“This was not a compliance lapse, it was a business model,” said Jonathan Missner, managing partner of Stein Mitchell Beato & Missner LLP, the law firm behind the case. “Our investigation shows that Binance built systems designed to evade oversight, using its off-chain network and weak controls to move enormous sums for sanctioned groups. This platform became a conduit for financing murder, kidnappings, and rocket attacks. The families deserve justice—and the public deserves transparency.”

In a previous case brought under the same legislation, Jordan’s Arab Bank was sued and – despite procedural wrangling that went on for years -- ended up settling with the victims for an undisclosed but significant sum of money. 

Anything that forces Binance to start taking its responsibilities to victims of crime as seriously as it takes its willingness to accept money from perpetrators of crime is a good thing. And if you want to see how widespread those crimes can be, read this excellent investigation from the ICIJ which finds crypto platforms to be “awash with dirty money.” But there are always particular challenges around terrorism funding, which can have perverse outcomes.

In contrast to drug cartels, for instance, terrorists move relatively small amounts of money, which means financial institutions have to monitor a far larger array of transactions if they want to protect themselves from a lawsuit. Because terrorists use banks in the same way as anyone else does, what this tends to mean is that very large numbers of ordinary people lose their accounts just so compliance departments can be sure to sweep out the terrorists.

The result is the under-discussed phenomenon of debanking, which overwhelmingly affects Muslims and charities targeted towards Muslim beneficiaries. 

“Humanitarian charities are facing banking barriers because banks are adverse to giving large transactions to countries they deem a risk, like Syria,” said Abdulsami Arjumand, a senior executive at the U.K.’s Muslim Charities' Forum. “Banks determined to avoid any heavy fines from the US treasury or the FCA act with very strict risk appetite… There is a balance to strike between securing aid and fighting financial crime. At the moment, we are far from that equilibrium.”

People excluded from traditional finance by this kind of inherent unfairness have turned to cryptocurrencies, and it would be a shame if the Binance case were to lead to the same injustices being imported into the crypto world as well.

A sidenote to the Binance case is the fact that the company’s founder – Changpeng “CZ” Zhao – was recently pardoned by Donald Trump who claimed that Zhao was the victim of an anti-crypto witch hunt by Joe Biden. 

In reality, he was jailed (and his company fined $4.3 billion) because of Binance’s complete failure to maintain any kind of anti-money laundering programme. At the time, one Binance compliance staffer wrote: “We need a banner ‘is washing drug money too hard these days - come to binance we got cake for you’.” And though Zhao stepped down and Binance pledged to change its ways, it appears to have done little to stem the tide of dirty money flowing through its systems. 

Zhao’s hard-to-explain pardon once again draws attention to the peculiar folkway of the U.S. pardon process. The presidential ability to pardon people derives from the States’ origins as British colonies. It is something that kings could do back in the 1770s. Technically, King Charles III can still pardon anyone he likes, though he almost never does, which is something else he doesn’t have in common with Donald Trump.

Of course there have been controversial pardons in the past, but often they come at the very end of a presidential term. Trump seems to be unusual in his willingness to hand them out this early. It must have been particularly demoralising for the prosecutors who worked hard to secure a conviction against David Gentile, only to see him released after serving just two weeks of a seven-year sentence for defrauding more than 10,000 people.

Binance denies any wrongdoing related to the Hamas case. Still, it does raise the interesting prospect of Trump having to defend his decision to pardon a man subsequently ruled to have helped Hamas move its money. But then, CZ was already convicted of helping Iranians, Syrians, North Koreans and the Russian occupiers of Ukraine move money in defiance of sanctions, and Trump hasn’t faced any backlash for pardoning him for all of that, so perhaps not.

A plague on both their houses

In unrelated but entertaining crypto news, there’s a spat brewing between the hip young dudes at Tether, and the boring old squares at Standard and Poor’s, after the rating agency cut its rating for the stablecoin issuer to its lowest possible level, which I thought was fair comment but which Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino got rather irate about. “Tether is living proof that the traditional financial system is so broken that it's becoming feared by the emperors with no clothes,” he wrote in one of a number of posts on X in which he demonstrated how little he cared about S&P’s opinion by talking a lot about it. He later posted a clip from the movie ‘The Big Short’, in which a rating agency employee defends the absurdly high ratings given to mortgage bonds before the 2007-8 financial crisis. That too, it must be said, is fair comment. It would be nice – rather like a rugby match between South Africa and England – if we could find a way for both Tether and S&P to lose.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

Related Articles

Tether, Trump and the twisty road to transparency

Oliver Bullough

‘Iceberg, right ahead’ & the rise of Chinese laundries

Oliver Bullough

A record Bitcoin haul & crypto comes to the Pitcairn Islands

Oliver Bullough

The post Terrorism’s crypto financiers & Trump’s clemency habit appeared first on Coda Story.

It’s good that they’ve managed to trace the network further, linking it to Russian-Moldovan-Israeli tycoon Ilan Shor and a bank in Kyrgyzstan, but also worrying that the organisation appears still be to be functioning. Two cash couriers were busted carrying around £2 million each, which also does not suggest the organisers are too stressed: you don’t carry that much money in one go if you’re concerned about being caught.

The core of the scheme is that the money launderers collect cash from criminals all over Europe, and swap it for the cryptocurrency USDT (I published this about the issue earlier this year), and so it remains. “Tether, from what we can see, at least, appears to still be the majority token used by these networks,” a law enforcement source said.

Perhaps the most interesting difference between the boring old banks and the exciting new crypto industry is that, if a boring old bank had been so deeply involved in moving so much criminal wealth, it would have been fined a nine-figure sum and forced to radically change its ways. But Tether suffers no such indignities. Thanks to the inflation of the Trump crypto bubble, Tether made profits of $10 billion in the first three quarters of 2025, and is still coining it, despite the publicity around this operation and many other allegations of money laundering.

It now owns 116 tonnes of gold, which is more than Greece, South Korea or the UAE.  Last week Tether spent a billion dollars on Bitcoin, though that didn’t do much to arrest the slide in the Bitcoin price, which as I write this has dropped by a third since its peak in early October, and erased all of its gains since Trump’s 2024 election win. Tether also claims to own $135 billion of US government debt. So, to cut a long story short, it’s basically as potent as a reasonably-sized central bank, and doesn’t have to care what a law enforcement agency thinks of it.

“Look, you can point to various different parts of the global crypto infrastructure where you would say, ‘wouldn't it be great if you could rain fire upon them?’ And me, as a law enforcement professional, would say, ‘yeah, it'd be brilliant, right?’ But obviously, I don't have that capability at my fingertips,” the same law enforcement source said, which was pretty funny but also depressing.

Obviously, there’s not much anyone can do to limit crypto while Trump controls all branches of the U.S. government and his family members continue to do so well out of it, but it would be interesting to see what might happen if the Democrats won a majority in one or both of the houses of Congress, considering some of the questions they’re already asking. 

“Every time a governance token is sold, three-quarters of that money goes directly to President Trump and his family, even for sales to entities linked to North Korea and Russia,” said Senators Elizabeth Warren and Jack Reed in a letter to the Department of Justice. That’s the kind of allegation that could lead to some spicy committee hearings.

A small step towards transparency

Dr David Richard Hull gained a small footnote in the history books last week when he became the first person to verify his identity on Companies House, the UK’s corporate registry, which is trying hard to move from being part of the problem to part of the solution (at least The Dark Money Files’ Graham Barrow said he was, and Graham Barrow does tend to know).

For a long time, it was generally reckoned that the easier and cheaper it was to create a company, the more vibrant and dynamic your economy would be, and in few places was this principle applied more enthusiastically than in the UK. This unleashed a tsunami of shell-company-powered money laundering, with criminals buying British corporations for less than the price of a round of drinks, and using them to hide their identities.

Eventually, officials realised that rampant financial crime was actually bad for the economy, rather than beneficial, so brought in new checks on the identities of those creating companies. There is a lot of mess to sweep away before the corporate registry is truly cleaned up, but this is a good start, though it would be even better if some of the more far-flung bits of British territory could be persuaded to embrace transparency as enthusiastically.

There are similar registration rules in most European Union countries, although their registries are not necessarily open to everyone, as this survey from Transparency International shows. Of course, the United States has given up on its efforts to open up corporate registries, despite convincing arguments that shell companies from lax states like Nevada are a clear threat to national security. 

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

Related Articles

‘Iceberg, right ahead’ & the rise of Chinese laundries

Oliver Bullough

The Tehran-Washington crypto connection

Oliver Bullough

Dinosaur bones, lottery tickets & upside-down skyscrapers

Oliver Bullough

The post Tether, Trump and the twisty road to transparency appeared first on Coda Story.

Tuggar’s mention of Sudan was a reminder of what religious war and genocide looks like and how little the international community has done to stop it. He cited Nigeria’s “constitutional commitment to religious freedom” and its status as Africa’s largest democracy as reasons why it was “impossible” that the government would look away from the kind of violence Trump described. Trump did not cite any statistics when he told reporters on Air Force One that “record numbers of Christians” are being killed in Nigeria. A multifaith country, Nigeria has the sixth largest Christian population in the world. Numbers from the Pew Center show that about 93 million Christians live in Nigeria, compared to 120 million Muslims. 

The U.S. president seems to be taking his lead from Texas senator Ted Cruz. The latter posted on X last month that “officials in Nigeria are ignoring and even facilitating the mass murder of Christians by Islamist jihadists.” In his ‘Nigeria Religious Freedom Accountability Act,’ Cruz said 52,000 Christians have been killed in the country since 2009 and over 20,000 churches and religious institutions have been destroyed. These numbers have been described by the Nigerian government as “absolutely absurd” and “not supported by any facts whatsoever.” Cruz called for sanctions on Nigerians officials. In his bill Cruz also called for Nigeria to be designated a “Country of Particular Concern,” a designation reserved for states that tolerate “egregious religious freedom violations.” And on Monday the Trump administration did exactly that, arguing that the designation was necessary because Nigerians were being prevented from freely expressing their beliefs. 

But speak to people in Nigeria and you will get a different analysis depending on whom you ask. The violence, perpetrated by Islamist groups like Boko Haram, Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), and others is indiscriminate, claiming the lives of both Christians and Muslims. Tens of thousands of people have died and millions have been displaced as a result of the security situation in Nigeria. Many of these are residents in northern Nigeria, especially in the northeast and northwest, where the population is primarily Muslim.

In north-central Nigeria however, it is true that Christian communities have been targeted. Their demands for government action to stop the killings have fallen on deaf ears. I live for some of the year in Kwara State, a state in north-central Nigeria. In October, a distant relative was kidnapped with his entire family. My friends, family members and I have had to move house on short notice due to vicious attacks and kidnappings near where we live. But it’s hard to argue that Christians are being singled out when so many Nigerians of every background are dying. 

“The irony is rich enough to choke on,” writes Elnathan John, a Nigerian novelist. “Trump’s America, where school boards ban books and churches preach ethnic purity, has appointed itself the saviour of our pluralism… One imagines a global exchange programme: our clerics and their preachers meeting to compare notes on how to weaponise God most efficiently.” Nigerians, broadly, acknowledge the insecurity in the country, and frequently debate the role of religion in the widespread violence. But everyone agrees that Trump’s motives are suspect. Before this recent outburst, Trump’s reputation in Nigeria, while mixed, consisted of support from a strong Christian base. The threat of military action over an internal issue has sparked widespread indignation and accusations of neocolonial overreach.

Trump’s Africa strategy is a decisive pivot away from traditional development aid and democratic institution-building toward hard-nosed commercial diplomacy, centered on U.S. access to critical minerals and African compliance on accepting deportees in exchange for financial incentives or favorable trade terms. Nigeria, notably, is one of the countries that has refused to take in deportees and was recently hit with 15% “reciprocal” tariffs. Ghana, which was also hit with 15% tariffs, just accepted 14 West African deportees. 

Trump’s other approach to Africa has been to interfere in highly charged internal politics based on narratives that appeal to his base. This summer, Trump accused the South African government of enabling a “genocide” of white farmers, a highly politicized and disputed claim rooted in white nationalist rhetoric. While Trump said he would give special dispensation for white Afrikaner refugees from South Africa (tellingly, very few have actually taken advantage of his offer), he did not threaten violence on a sovereign country for its internal troubles as he has against Nigeria. 

While Vladimir Putin has stayed quiet over the issue, Andrey Maslov, head of the Center for African Studies at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics said Trump is deliberately leading the U.S.  down a path of isolation and focusing on the country’s internal problems. “He works for his core electorate and the future electorate of [Vice President] J.D. Vance, specifically its religious segment,” Maslov told Russia’s state-controlled media RT.

Does Trump’s foreign policy continue to help China position itself as the more reliable global partner? Expressing support for the Nigerian government, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said Beijing “opposes any country using religion or human rights as a pretext to interfere in other countries' internal affairs.” China has invested billions in Nigerian infrastructure and minerals in recent years, and the value of its trade with Nigeria now outstrips that of the U.S. Has the global pattern been set – China now offers the carrot, while the U.S. wields the stick?

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

Related Articles

A tragedy in Nigeria shows the risks of cheap drone warfare

Olatunji Olaigbe

Trump, Museveni and the anti-LGBT agenda

Lyla Renwick-Archibold

Sudan’s forgotten war

Olatunji Olaigbe

The post Do Nigeria’s Christians need a savior? appeared first on Coda Story.

I was at a park near where Florida A&M University and Florida State University campuses overlapped in Tallahassee some forty years ago, enjoying the warm air and easy company of friends, when I overheard a white student waxing nostalgic about the Civil War.

“The South should have won,” he said wistfully, as though mourning a missed opportunity rather than a moral catastrophe.

My friends and I exchanged glances. As the outspoken one in the group, I called back, “We beat you last time, and we’ll do it again.”

At the time, I was a sophomore at FAMU, an Historically Black College and University, immersed in African and U.S. history, surrounded by a vibrant, intellectual, Pan-African community that shaped my view of the world.

It was an oasis—an environment where I could think deeply and freely about the past and its implications for the present.

That encounter seemed trivial then, but in hindsight, it revealed something festering beneath the surface of American life: a refusal, especially among some white Americans, to reckon with the legacy of the Civil War.

A family that defied the script

Years later, I would revisit that moment when I went to pick up my daughter at school. She bears the richness of two heritages—mine rooted in Haiti’s resistance, her mother’s Midwestern sensibilities.

Upon seeing me in the courtyard, one of her friends called out that her nanny was here to pick her up. Irritated, she shouted, “That’s my daddy, not my nanny.”

I smiled at her spunkiness. But I also knew that moment crystallized what I had always sensed: our very existence as a family disrupted someone’s idea of what America should look like.

In 1996, I wrote about our marriage for Essence Magazine. The stares. The quiet bewilderment. The feeling that our presence broke an unspoken rule. “Our very existence,” I wrote then, “disrupted someone’s idea of what America should look like.”

It still does.

A fire long smoldering

Four decades after that afternoon in Tallahassee, I’ve come to believe we’re in the midst of the Civil War’s final battle—not a clash of soldiers on a field, but a sociopolitical and cultural war threatening to tear the nation apart.

A fire is roaring through America’s foundations. It didn’t start yesterday. It wasn’t sparked by Black Lives Matter or the 2020 election or any single migrant crossing a border. No—this fire has been smoldering for generations, lit by the unfinished business of the Civil War.

“This is not a war between North and South or red and blue. It’s a war within whiteness itself.”

It’s a reckoning between two factions of white America:
– One trying to build a country where power is shared and history confronted.
– The other desperate to preserve a fantasy where they remain the sole heirs to the republic.

People of color are the excuse, not the cause. The rest of us are just trying not to get burned.

The arsonists and the alarm sounders

January 6 wasn’t just a riot—it was a flare from a deeper blaze.

When white Americans stormed the Capitol waving Confederate flags, Jesus banners, and Trump signs, they weren’t attacking a building. They were rejecting a future that no longer centers them.

They were not fringe. They were family—teachers, cops, veterans, neighbors—willing to overturn democracy to preserve supremacy.

On the other side are white Americans lighting different kinds of fires: truth-telling ones. They’re teaching real history, confronting privilege, tearing down monuments to lies.

But they’re outgunned by grievance—weaponized, monetized, and televised grievance. And nothing in America spreads faster than white grievance wrapped in the flag.

A fire fueled by fear

What drives this isn’t just racism—it’s fear.
Fear of losing centrality.
Fear of becoming “just another demographic.”
Fear that the stories they were told about greatness might be myths.

Equality feels like oppression when you’ve never experienced either.

This fear is tangled with economic despair and a longing for a past that never truly existed. As the promise of American prosperity falters, anger searches for a scapegoat. Immigrants. Black people. Queer youth. Anyone but the systems that failed them.

The refrain becomes familiar: “America is changing too fast.” But the truth is, America is finally starting to look like itself.

Witness from the margins

I write this not only as a journalist who has covered American democracy for decades, but as a Haitian immigrant who has lived its contradictions.

I arrived as a Black boy with a French accent, navigating the strange hierarchies of race in America. Later, I married a white woman from the Midwest. We raised biracial children in Brooklyn—a borough that celebrates difference in a country that often doesn’t.

For those of us not born here, the message is double-edged: assimilate into a crumbling house, or help rebuild it from the foundation up.

The Currency of Whiteness

For generations, whiteness has been an invisible currency—buying safety, authority, dominance. Now, that currency is losing value. The country is changing its exchange rate.

Some white Americans are hoarding what they can while they can. But people of color aren’t seeking revenge; we’re seeking balance. We don’t want to become what whiteness once was—we want to build something better.

But we can’t rebuild while one faction is holding a flamethrower.

The front lines

Go to any school board meeting, and you’ll see it. Parents shouting about “indoctrination,” demanding books be banned, LGBTQ kids erased.
Go to any legislature, and you’ll see laws crafted to silence, restrict, and erase.
Go online, and you’ll find young white men radicalized by digital preachers of hate.

This fire is not spontaneous—it is fed, stoked, and monetized.

Redefining whiteness

“What does it mean to be white in America without being supreme?”

That’s the question white Americans must face.
Without supremacy, whiteness becomes a blank page. Some see emptiness. Others see possibility.

The hope lies with those writing a new script: one rooted in solidarity, not superiority. But this new identity won’t be born in classrooms—it’ll be forged in discomfort, in truth-telling, in choosing democracy over delusion.

America’s burning house

America today is a house on fire. The flames were set long ago—some rooms built on slavery, others on exclusion, others on stolen land.

Some white Americans are the arsonists, some the alarm sounders, and the rest of us are tenants wondering whether the fire will reach our floor before the builders arrive.

This is the metaphor of our time: a burning house still under construction. We can let it collapse—or rebuild it stronger and fairer.

The Final Battle

The final battle of the Civil War is here.
Not with bayonets but ballots.
Not with cavalry but algorithms.
Not in Gettysburg but in Georgia, Michigan, Texas—and in living rooms across the country.

And now, with the reins of power once again in his hands, Donald Trump is no longer shouting from the sidelines.
He’s using the full weight of his office to bend democracy to his will—purging dissenters, weaponizing institutions, rewarding loyalty over law.

He has become less a president than an arsonist-in-chief, pouring accelerant on the nation’s divisions and daring America to burn.
Each provocation—each threat, each insult, each abuse of power—is another match flicked at the dry timber of grievance that’s been piling up for generations.

The question now: Will America finally douse the flames—or stand mesmerized as the house collapses around us?

The memory returns

Sometimes, I think back to that afternoon in Tallahassee, when a college kid wistfully claimed the South should’ve won.
I wonder where he is now—did he grow out of that fantasy or dig deeper into it?
Is he among those cheering today as Trump fans the flames from inside the house?

I’ll never know. But I do know this: the war he romanticized never ended—it just changed its weapons and its uniforms.
And now, as the smoke thickens and the fire climbs higher, we are all living in the house they built.

Whether it stands or burns will depend on who chooses to rebuild—and who keeps feeding the fire

A version of this article was first published on Garry's Substack and Coda's Sunday Read newsletter. Sign up here.

Related Articles

Erasing August: How Russia Rewrites Georgia’s Story

Masho Lomashvili

How to find your voice when you are being silenced

Luba Kassova

To control the future, rewrite the past

Natalia Antelava

The post The Fire This Time: Can America douse the flames? appeared first on Coda Story.

It doesn’t appear to matter how many more civilians die in the meantime. “Israel values the work of journalists, medical staff, and all civilians,” Benjamin Netanyahu posted on social media on August 25 responding to global condemnation following the deaths of five journalists in an attack on Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip. Since the war in Gaza began in October, 2023, at least 197 journalists have been killed according to the Committee to Protect Journalists which has described Israel’s actions as “the deadliest and most deliberate effort to kill and silence journalists that CPJ has ever documented.” Al Jazeera, the Qatari-based news network, puts the number at over 270. 

Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, speaking at a Catholic festival in Rimini, said the killings were “an unacceptable attack on press freedom and on all those who risk their lives to report the tragedy of war.” British prime minister Keir Starmer called the bombing in Khan Yunis “completely indefensible.” On X, the German foreign ministry said it had “repeatedly called on the Israeli government to allow immediate independent foreign media access and afford protection for journalists operating in Gaza.” Spain described it as “a flagrant and unacceptable violation of international humanitarian law.” 

Given the near universal condemnation, will anything be done to hold Israel to account? “More governments are showing a willingness in recent months to call out Israel for its failure to protect journalists and to call for transparent investigations into their killings,” said Jodie Ginsberg, the chief executive of the Committee to Protect Journalists. “But,” she told Coda, “they still stop short on taking any concrete measures - such as sanctions, or conditions on trade agreements or weapons sales - that could force Israel to uphold its obligations under international law.”

Earlier this month, on August 10, Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif, was killed in Gaza City alongside several of his colleagues. Israel admitted to targeting al-Sharif, describing him as “masquerading” as a journalist. “A terrorist is a terrorist,” Israeli diplomats said, “even if Al Jazeera gave him a press badge.” 

According to intelligence sources who spoke to Israeli publication +972 Magazine, the IDF established a special “Legitimization Cell” after October 7, tasked not with security operations but with gathering intelligence to bolster Israel's media image. The unit specifically sought to identify Gaza-based journalists it could portray as Hamas operatives, driven by anger that Palestinian reporters were “smearing Israel's name in front of the world.” Whenever global criticism intensified over the killing of journalists, the cell was instructed to find intelligence that could publicly counter the narrative. "If the global media is talking about Israel killing innocent journalists, then immediately there's a push to find one journalist who might not be so innocent—as if that somehow makes killing the other 20 acceptable," one intelligence source told +972 Magazine. Intelligence gathered was passed directly to American officials through special channels, with officers told that their work was vital to allowing Israel to continue the war without international pressure.

In its initial inquiry into Monday’s bombing of Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, Israel claimed a camera at the hospital was “being used to observe the activity of IDF troops, in order to direct terrorist activities against them.” International journalists have no independent access to Gaza. It would be, Ginsberg said, “one way to help force a change in the narrative being pushed by Israel that all Gazan journalists are terrorist operatives and therefore none can be trusted.” Ginsberg told Coda that of the cases of journalists and media workers killed by Israel, CPJ has so far “deemed 26 to be deliberate targeting… these are the cases where we are clear that Israel would have known the individuals killed were journalists and nevertheless targeted them.”

Journalists, as civilians, are protected under international law. Targeting them is a war crime. Yet, Ginsberg notes, since “international journalists and human rights investigators do not have access to Gaza,” it has “hampered documentation.” And “more disturbingly,” she added, “the dehumanization of Gazan journalists and Gazans more generally means there has not been the collective outrage that should accompany any killing let alone killings of this magnitude.”

Israel has already said that the deaths of journalists in the attack on Nasser Hospital were a "tragic mishap" that resulted from legitimate security operations. The recent UN Security Council vote on an immediate ceasefire (14 out of 15 members supporting, only the U.S. withholding) signals Israel’s growing isolation. But American support is all Israel needs to continue its war. As the killings of journalists continue to be explained away, without evidence, as the killing of terrorists, the window for independent reporting in Gaza has likely closed. The systematic targeting of Gazan journalists isn't collateral damage, it's strategic silencing ahead of what may be the war's final phase.

A version of this story was published in our Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

Related Articles

China’s crackdown on Uyghurs reaches the Arctic

Natalia Antelava

China ordered a Uyghur journalist extradited to Xinjiang. His wife has taken to the Istanbul streets to stop it

Alishan Jafri

Threatened, harassed, punished: The Uyghur translators defying China to tell Xinjiang’s story

Emma Lacey-Bordeaux

The post The systematic silencing of Gaza appeared first on Coda Story.

Ordinary people are using cash money less and less in everyday life, so logically the amount of banknotes in circulation should be falling. Particularly at a time of high inflation, when a non-interest-bearing form of money is losing value all the time. This is what is happening in the eurozone, where the value of cash in circulation hit its all-time high in June 2022 of €1,602.6 billion, which was €16.2 billion more than the total today.

In the United States, on the other hand, the total number of dollars in circulation hits a new high every month, and in July reached $2,399.538 billion. That is an increase of $121.6 billion since June 2022, or just over five percent. The only people willing to hold paper currency when inflation is high are people who have a compelling reason not to care, and I think the only significant group of people that meet that requirement are criminals who seek anonymity. 

So while financial markets may find an alternative to the mighty dollar, at least the United States can count on the continued custom of the world’s criminals. Interestingly, the pound is behaving more like the dollar than the euro, with the total in circulation having increased by 5.9 percent since June 2022 to £93.6 billion. And the same is true of the Canadian dollar (up three percent). So I suppose an alternative explanation is that criminals just like speaking English?

BANKS CAN’T CLOSE CRYPTO BACKDOOR 

Of course one of the drivers of the dollar’s supposed decline is America’s geopolitical rivals creating new payment mechanisms outside of the Western system. Iran, under severe sanctions, has sought to create new routes for money to flow and the United States – including as recently as last week – has tried to stop that from happening.

“As a result of President Trump’s maximum pressure campaign and increasing isolation from the global financial system, the Iranian regime is running out of places to hide,” said Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent. “Treasury will continue to disrupt Iran’s schemes aimed at evading our sanctions, block its access to revenue, and starve its weapons programs of capital in order to protect the American people.”

Meanwhile, Trump has signed an executive order stopping the previous practice of encouraging banks from being highly sceptical of crypto clients, much to the delight of said clients. “It used to be that corresponding banks in the US block transactions involving crypto (fiat for buying crypto). This opens banking for crypto internationally,” tweeted Changpeng Zhao, founder of the giant Binance exchange.

But what does this mean for Iran? Iranians were already using crypto to evade sanctions, despite efforts by some of the better-connected companies to keep a lid on them.

“Iran’s government maintains extensive control over the country’s financial system, including cryptocurrency infrastructure,” concluded Chainalysis in an analysis published earlier this year. “Cryptocurrency represents an alternative financial system, and the increasing use of Iranian crypto exchanges suggests that more individuals and institutions are resorting to crypto to safeguard wealth and circumvent financial restrictions.”

I’m struggling to think of an analogy for what the U.S. government is doing here in its policy towards Iran’s illicit financial flows. By sanctioning the Cross-Border Interbank Messaging System used by Iranians, it’s shutting the door, but by banning U.S. banks from doing due diligence on crypto companies, it’s demolishing the wall. 

AN ATTACK OF CONSCIENCE

British real estate has been the investment of choice for kleptocrats for years, thanks to the country’s toothless regulators, conscience-free lawyers, and biddable politicians. But the war in Ukraine created much soul-searching in Britain about what exactly its approach had enabled, and a long-overdue re-examination of the system finally began, with – apparently – actual real-world consequences.

“British lawyer Rory Fordyce has been ordered to pay £32,500 for failing to adequately vet funds linked to the family of Azerbaijan’s former security chief,” reports the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). “In addition to the fine, Fordyce was barred from holding any legal management or compliance roles for five years and was ordered to pay £50,000 in legal costs.” And as if that wasn’t enough for the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal, a specialised court that brings cases against certain kinds of lawyers, it has also decided to prosecute another lawyer for making threats against people criticising the huge Ponzi scheme OneCoin, after detailed allegations were made by the Tax Policy Associates.

“Solicitors aren’t Daleks. We have ethical and professional obligations. We’re not permitted to act for an obvious fraud and threaten people who call out the fraud,” said TPA founder Dan Neidle.

The lawyer in question – Claire Gill of Carter-Ruck – denies any wrongdoing, and Carter-Ruck has promised to mount a vigorous defence. Still, hopefully this will encourage lawyers to be more diligent in checking the bona fides of their clients.

THIEVING OLIGARCHS

I’m sure many of the readers of this newsletter have read Richard Wilkinson’s and Kate Pickett’s ‘The Spirit Level’, published in 2009, with its thorough and convincing analysis of why inequality is bad for individuals and societies. I remember reading it at the time and thinking it could change the world but sadly that does not seem to have happened. 

Now Pickett is back with a series of blogs for the London School of Economics, starting with powerful posts on the environment, and health. There’s so much to think about in the global debate around oligarchy, and it’s easy to forget that it’s all about ordinary people’s lives, and how they are stunted when others cheat them of what should be theirs. 

“The picture is as tragic as it is clear regarding the gap between rich and poor and how this connects with myriad physical and mental health conditions,” she writes. “Countries with higher levels of income inequality are associated with higher rates of adult obesity and child overweightness, diabetes, mental illness, asthma, drug use and infant mortality.”

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

The post Criminal dollars, Trump’s crypto trapdoor, and Dalek solicitors appeared first on Coda Story.

The Iranian defense minister’s trip to Qingdao - his first foreign visit since the ceasefire with Israel - was meant to signal solidarity within the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a block that includes Russia, India, and Pakistan. But the SCO, despite its ambitions, could only muster a joint statement of “serious concern” over Middle East tensions when Iran was being bombed by Israel - a statement India refused to sign. This exposed the stark limits of alternative alliances and the growing difficulty of presenting a united front against the West. In Qingdao, Andrei Belousov, the Russian defense minister, warned of “worsening geopolitical tensions” and “signs of further deterioration,” a statement that’s hard to argue with.  

Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, Trump relished his role as global peacemaker, claiming credit for an uneasy Israel-Iran truce - a truce that Russia welcomed while being careful to credit Qatar for its diplomatic efforts. Russia itself reportedly played a supporting role alongside Oman and Egypt. But the real diplomatic heavy lifting was done by others - and Russia’s own leverage  was exposed as limited. 

Once the region’s indispensable power broker, Moscow found itself on the sidelines. Its influence with Tehran diminished, and its air defense systems in Iran—meant to deter Israeli and later American strikes—were exposed as ineffective. With Bashar al-Assad’s rule in Syria collapsed, the Kremlin is acutely aware it cannot afford to lose another major ally in the region. As long as the Iranian government stands, Russia can still claim to have a role to play, but its ability to project power in the Middle East is now more symbolic than real. The 12-day war put Russia in an awkward position. Iran, a key supplier of drones for Russia’s war in Ukraine, was unimpressed by Moscow’s lack of support during the crisis. Even after signing a 20-year pact in January, Russia offered little more than “grave concern” when the bombs started falling. Similarly to the SCO, BRICS, supposedly the alternative to Western alliances, could only issue a joint statement, revealing just how thin multipolarity is in practice.

Enter the new narrative spin

For years, Vladimir Putin has argued that the West’s “rules-based order” is little more than a tool for maintaining Western dominance and justifying double standards. His vision of multipolarity is not just anti-American rhetoric—it’s a deliberate strategy to appeal to countries disillusioned by Western interventions, broken promises, and the arrogance of those who claimed victory in the Cold War. Russia has worked to turn Western failures—from Iraq to Afghanistan, from Libya to the global financial crisis—into recruitment tools for its own vision of “civilizational diversity.” Multipolarity, in the Kremlin’s telling, is about giving every culture, every nation, a seat at the table, while quietly reserving the right to redraw the map and rewrite the rules when it suits Moscow’s interests.

For a time, this approach was paying off. Russia’s anti-colonial and multipolar rhetoric resonated well beyond its borders, particularly in the Global South and among those frustrated by Western hypocrisy. 

But across the periphery of Russia’s historical empire, from Central Asia to the Baltics, from the Caucasus to Ukraine and Georgia, Russia’s multipolar message is seen not as liberation but as yet another chapter in a centuries-long cycle of conquest, repression and forced assimilation - a reality that continues to define the struggle for self-determination across Russia’s former empire.  Here, Russia’s message of “sameness” has long served as a colonial tool, erasing languages, cultures, and identities in the name of imperial unity. 

The recent conflict in the Middle East has forced Moscow to adapt its “multipolarity” messaging yet again. As its limitations as a regional power became impossible to ignore, Russian state media and officials began to reframe the conversation—no longer just championing multipolarity, but openly embracing the language of empire. In this new narrative, ‘empire’ is recast not as a relic of oppression, but as a stabilizing force uniquely capable of imposing order on an unruly world. The pivot is as much about masking diminished leverage as it is about projecting confidence: if Moscow can no longer dictate outcomes, it can still claim the mantle of indispensable power by rewriting the very terms of global legitimacy.

As we peered into the abyss of World War III, Russian state media pivoted: suddenly, ‘empire’—long a slur—was rebranded as a stabilizing force in a chaotic world.

This rhetorical shift has been swift and striking. Where once the Kremlin denounced imperialism as a Western vice, Russian commentators now argue that empires are not only inevitable but necessary for stability. “Empires could return to world politics not only as dark shadows of the past. Empire may soon become a buzzword for discussing the direction in which the world’s political organization is heading,” wrote one Russian analyst. The message is clear: in an age of chaos and fractured alliances, only a strong imperial center—preferably Moscow—can guarantee order. But beneath the surface, this embrace of empire reveals as much uncertainty as ambition, exposing deep anxieties about Russia’s place in a world it can no longer control as it once did.

Inside Russia, this new imperial rhetoric is both a rallying cry and a reflection of unease. In recent weeks, influential analysts have argued that Iran’s restraint—its so-called “peacefulness”—only invited aggression, a warning that resonates with those who fear Russia could be next. Enter Alexander Dugin, the far-right philosopher often described as “Putin’s brain,” whose apocalyptic worldview has shaped much of the Kremlin’s confrontational posture. Dugin warns that if the U.S. and Israel can strike Tehran with impunity, nothing would stop them from finding a pretext to strike Moscow. This siege mentality, echoed by senior officials, is now being used to justify a strategy of escalation and deterrence at any cost.

Dugin’s views were echoed by Konstantin Kosachev, chair of the Russian parliamentary foreign affairs committee: “If you don’t want to be bombed by the West, arm yourself. Build deterrence. Go all the way—even to the point of developing weapons of mass destruction.”

But for all the talk of “victory,” by all sides post the 12-day war,  the outcomes remain ambiguous. Iran insists its nuclear ambitions are undimmed. While Israel and Trump’s team says Iran is further from a bomb than ever before – still, the facts are murky and the region is no closer to peace. As one Russian analyst remarked, the normalization of “phoney war” logic means that everyone is arming up, alliances are transactional, and the rules are made up as we go along.

If the only lesson of the 12-day war is that everyone must arm themselves to the teeth, we’re not just reliving the Cold War—we’re entering a new era of empire-building, where deterrence is everything and the lines between friend and foe are as blurred as ever.

In a world where old alliances crumble and new narratives emerge, the true battle, it seems, is not just over territory or military might, but over the stories that define power itself. Russia’s pivot to an imperial narrative reveals both its ambitions and its anxieties, highlighting a global order in flux where legitimacy is contested and the rules are rewritten in real time. Understanding this evolving empire game is essential to grasping the future of international relations and the fragile balance that holds the world together.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

Research and additional reporting by Masho Lomashvili.

Related Articles

From Russia with hate

Natalia Antelava

The scramble to reconstruct Gaza

Jim Muir

The end of consensus

Shougat Dasgupta

The post The empire game 2.0: Through Moscow’s eyes appeared first on Coda Story.