Category Archives: Politics

Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan

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Summary: A chilling account of what happens when the American presidency ceases to recognise meaningful limits on its own power.

In her 2022 Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, Maggie Haberman provided both an explanation of what makes Donald Trump and a warning about what he might do if given power again.

Regime Change, written with Jonathan Swan, describes what happened when he was.

Drawing on hundreds of interviews and extraordinary access to the second Trump administration, Haberman and Swan document something more profound than the familiar chaos of Trump’s first presidency. This time Trump entered office understanding much better how the machinery of government worked, surrounded by people more willing to execute his wishes, and determined that the presidency should be constrained neither by the institutional conventions that frustrated him during his first term nor, frequently, by conventional understandings of the law itself.

The resulting picture is breathtaking: federal immigration agents and National Guard troops deployed into American cities; presidential power brought directly to bear upon businesses and institutions; and a war against Iran launched without specific congressional or UN authorization and accompanied by rhetoric and military conduct raising profound questions under both national and international law. 

The virtue of Haberman and Swan’s reporting is that they rarely need to editorialise. The accumulation of detail makes the argument for them. What emerges is not simply an unusually aggressive presidency but a different understanding of the office: one in which personal will increasingly substitutes for institutional process and the traditional distinction between the interests of the president and those of the state becomes progressively harder to discern.

Perhaps the only reassuring thing that can be said about Trump is that he is mortal. After reading Regime Change, it is considerably less clear that the American republic as we have known it will outlive him

Judgement at Tokyo, by Gary J. Bass

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Summary: A gripping account of the flawed and politically compromised attempt to bring Japan’s wartime leaders to justice.

The title of Gary Bass’s book echoes that of the Spencer Tracy classic Judgment at Nuremberg. Like the film, the book intercuts biographies of key participants—including the judges and defendants—with appalling accounts of the Japanese atrocities under consideration. These include the stories of an Australian serviceman who survived an attempted beheading and a nurse who survived gang rape and the murder of her friends and colleagues.

But, as Bass explores, the Tokyo trial was in several respects more legally and morally problematic than its Nuremberg counterpart. Opening on 3 May 1946 and concluding on 12 November 1948, it indicted 28 Japanese military and political leaders for crimes against peace, conventional war crimes and crimes against humanity. Twenty-five ultimately received judgments.

For a start, the judges were deeply divided over the legal foundations of the tribunal, particularly its authority to punish individuals for waging aggressive war. The majority secured convictions, but never produced an entirely convincing answer to the charge that they were applying criminal law retrospectively.

Second, General Douglas MacArthur, the effective American ruler of occupied Japan, considered it politically expedient to exclude Emperor Hirohito from prosecution. MacArthur’s officials also sought to prevent evidence implicating the Emperor from entering the proceedings. Whatever conclusion a properly constituted court might have reached about Hirohito’s individual guilt, his exclusion prevented the tribunal from fully examining the responsibility of the person at the apex of Japan’s wartime state.

Third, Shiro Ishii and other members of Unit 731, responsible for biological warfare and forced human experimentation, received immunity from the United States in exchange for their research data. The demands of American military science were thus placed above either justice for their victims or the tribunal’s professed commitment to individual accountability.

Fourth, the United States had itself carried out attacks involving the mass killing of Japanese civilians – not only the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also the incendiary destruction of Tokyo and other cities. Whether or not these attacks were legally equivalent to the crimes prosecuted at Tokyo, their omission exposed the tribunal to the powerful charge that it represented the justice of the victors rather than the impartial application of universal law.

In his discussion of the Second World War in the Pacific, Max Hastings describes “technological determinism” as one factor behind the use of the atomic bomb: once an enormously expensive and powerful weapon existed, the impulse to use it became extremely difficult to resist. Hastings argues that Japan’s eventual defeat was already assured by the naval blockade, the destruction of its industries and cities, and impending Soviet intervention, although he also emphasises the ferocity of continuing Japanese resistance and the pressures facing Truman.

Robert McNamara, who served in the statistical machinery supporting the American bombing campaign, later recalled Curtis LeMay’s observation that, had the United States lost the war, they would have been prosecuted as war criminals. McNamara agreed, adding that both LeMay and he had been “behaving as war criminals.” His question – what makes an act immoral if one loses but not if one wins? – goes to the heart of the moral difficulty Bass describes.

Given these contradictions, it is unsurprising that the Tokyo judgments proved considerably more controversial than those at Nuremberg. The most famous dissent came from the Indian judge Radhabinod Pal, who called for the acquittal of all the defendants. His opinion appalled Jawaharlal Nehru but was enthusiastically appropriated by Japanese nationalists, who treated it as vindication of Japan’s war while often ignoring Pal’s own recognition of the atrocities committed by Japanese forces.

Pal’s dissent nevertheless exposed genuine defects in the proceedings: retrospective law, selective prosecution, colonial hypocrisy and the refusal to subject Allied conduct to the same moral principles imposed upon the defeated. Yet those defects did not make Japanese aggression or atrocities imaginary, nor did the Allies’ hypocrisy absolve those responsible for them. That tension – between the necessity of judgment and the partiality of those presuming to judge – is the intellectual centre of Bass’s book.

As in his account of Bangladesh’s war of independence, The Blood Telegram, Bass takes a complex event of major global importance that has become largely neglected in the West and turns it into an enthralling narrative. He explores not only the legal intricacies and geopolitical hypocrisies involved, but also gives voice to their appalling human cost.

Operation Chiffon, by Peter Taylor

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Summary: An indispensable channel, but not the Peace Process

Operation Chiffon is Peter Taylor’s account of the “Back Channel”: the secret line of communication maintained intermittently between the British government and the IRA from the 1970s into the Peace Process. 

Taylor focuses particularly on the MI6 officer Michael Oatley, his MI5 successor, known only as Robert, and their principal intermediary, Brendan Duddy, a Derry businessman.

It is an engaging story, worth telling not least to honour the courage and persistence of those who kept open the possibility of dialogue while the conflict continued. Uncovering its details has been a journalistic project of several decades for Taylor, and he tells the clandestine story extremely well.

Perhaps because he has invested so much in uncovering it, however, Taylor also invests too much historical importance in it. In his telling, the Back Channel becomes not merely one important element of the Peace Process but its decisive mechanism. Indeed, he endorses the contention that without it there would have been no Peace Process.

The wider political architecture receives remarkably little attention. Hume’s three-stranded approach to a settlement, the New Ireland Forum, the Anglo-Irish Agreement, Hume–Adams and the Downing Street Declaration are either treated briefly or relegated to the margins. The constitutional significance of the Anglo-Irish Agreement—giving the Irish government an institutional role in the affairs of a territory claimed as an integral part of the United Kingdom—is scarcely explored. Hume–Adams is also downplayed, on the highly dubious grounds that Martin McGuinness was more central than Gerry Adams to the republican movement’s strategic leadership: McGuinness was the Back Channel’s principal IRA interlocutor.

This mistakes access for authorship. The fact that McGuinness managed a crucial line of communication does not establish that the line itself generated the republican strategy or the political settlement. The Back Channel could communicate intentions, test propositions and build confidence. It could not, by itself, create the political circumstances in which an IRA ceasefire became possible.

Taylor gives particular weight to Robert’s assurance to McGuinness that the eventual outcome of the conflict would be Irish unity. Robert confirms that he expressed this view, apparently going beyond his instructions. Taylor presents the exchange as a decisive moment.

It may certainly have mattered. Coming from someone understood to represent the British government, it could reassure the republican leadership that Britain would not permanently obstruct constitutional change if consent for unity could eventually be secured. But that is different from supposing that Robert’s personal prediction transformed republican strategy. It is more plausible that his words corroborated conclusions already emerging from electoral experience, Hume–Adams, contacts with Dublin and the developing relationship between the British and Irish governments.

Seen within the totality of relationships that produced the Peace Process, corroboration appears to have been the Back Channel’s principal function. The British wanted to establish whether Irish government and SDLP assurances—that an inclusive political process could draw republicans away from violence—were credible. The IRA, in turn, wanted to know whether the political inclusion and constitutional openness promised by Hume and others would actually be delivered once it ended its campaign.

Republican caution was understandable. The movement had emerged from the 1975 ceasefire convinced that it had been induced to suspend its campaign, weakened in the process and offered no corresponding political advance. Whether or not that had been the British government’s deliberate intention, it became a powerful lesson within republican strategy: a ceasefire without reliable political guarantees could become a trap.

As a mechanism of mutual assurance, therefore, the Back Channel was extremely important. It allowed each side to test the seriousness of the other without public commitment and gave messages an authority that informal political contacts might have lacked. 

But a channel is not the same thing as the process whose messages it carries. Without the political framework developed through the work of Hume and many others, there would have been little for Oatley, Robert or Duddy to communicate. Taylor has written a compelling account of one indispensable strand of the Peace Process. His mistake is to treat that strand as the fabric itself.

Here Where We Live Is Our Country, by Molly Crabapple

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Summary: Recovering a forgotten Jewish history, vital for our times

At the end of the nineteenth century, Zionism emerged both as a response to European antisemitism and, in a fundamental way, as an acceptance of one of antisemitism’s central claims: that Jews could never truly belong in Europe. Its answer was a Jewish “homeland,” ultimately to be established in Palestine, with catastrophic consequences for the people already living there. After the briefly entertained East Africa scheme, the Balfour Declaration gave imperial force to this idea, helping to condemn Palestinians to dispossession in the name of Jewish refuge.

Among the earliest and most strenuous opponents of this idea were European Jews themselves. For example, Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India in Lloyd George’s British government, while perhaps not an opponent of colonialism per se, was a fierce opponent of Zionism, viewing it as an antisemitic concept that would jeopardize the status of Jews in Britain. 

In Here Where We Live Is Our Country, Molly Crabapple focuses on a different group of Jewish anti-Zionists: the Bund – the name translates from German or Yiddish as “union” – a Jewish social democratic movement that grew in Eastern Europe, particularly in the old Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire. The Bund, as Crabapple shows, was fiercely opposed to colonialism and rejected Zionism’s plain implication that Jews should answer European exclusion by displacing others. Instead they insisted that their culture, including the Yiddish language and literature, should be nourished and respected in the countries in which they lived. For decades they organized to achieve this. 

There is an echo of Mark Kurlansky’s Basque History of the World in Crabapple’s gripping work. Both books show how a people often treated as peripheral profoundly shaped wider political history.. In the case of the Bund, Crabapple traces their influence from the Russian Revolution, where they allied with the Mensheviks, to resistance against the Nazis alongside the Polish Socialist Party, and finally to the radical Jewish politics of New York City that formed part of the coalition behind Zohran Mamdani’s mayoralty..

Like Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton, it is also a book that made me rethink large portions of history that I had previously thought myself relatively familiar with. For example, no other history of Eastern Europe that I have read – even Timothy Snyder’s superb Bloodlands – has quite so forensically itemized the scale of antisemitic atrocity that plagued Eastern Europe from the end of the First World War to the destruction of Warsaw. 

But, in describing all of this, Crabapple’s purpose is not special pleading to show antisemitic atrocity as something unique. Rather she strives to show, as Seamus Heaney reflected, that all “Human beings suffer,/ They torture one another./ They get hurt and get hard.” And so, Zionism was born as a result of European violence and, as the Jews suffered in Europe, so the Palestinians now continue to suffer at the hands of the state and settlement project that Zionism produced. Palestinian armed groups have also committed atrocities, sometimes with comparable levels of cruelty, though without comparable power. This will inevitably continue until the cycle of violence can be broken. 

The Bund sought to break this cycle through solidarity. That they lost, in the face of the monstrousness of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany does not negate their message. As Crabapple writes, “solidarity is fragile and frequently betrayed, but it is all we have. It is the only thing that can save us. There is no other earth after all. We are trapped together on this one. It belongs to us all as an inheritance and prison.” The alternative is the morality of the bully with the strong doing what they wish, while the weak endure what they must. 

Molly Crabapple’s book is an outstanding work of narrative history, elegantly written, compelling and deeply moving – it made me cry more than once. It is a fierce assertion that another world is possible in which we all try to take care of each other instead of honouring the worst instincts of the cruel and the greedy.  

The Shortest History of Ireland, by James Hawes

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Summary: “… in this great future we can’t forget our past, so dry your tears I say…”

Perhaps not quite as arresting as his Shortest History of Germany, but James Hawes Shortest History of Ireland is an exquisite thing. 

Rather than allow himself to lose narrative momentum, Hawes does, perhaps, skip over a few historical controversies – notably the impact of the Invincibles’ atrocity on the Kilmainham “Treaty”, and Collins role in the assassination of Henry Wilson. But the overall coherence of that narrative, his rigorous attention to evidence, the entertainment of his storytelling and the elegance of the prose are exceptional.

It is refreshing to see proper attention given to the role of Hume in the peace process. This has become something of a rarity in recent accounts which tend to emphasise the parallel squalid spooky shenanigans that some English writers (yes I do mean Peter Taylor!) like to dubiously  assert were central. 

This is immediately the best concise history of Ireland available anywhere. So, it is nice that it concludes on a hopeful note albeit one that must be underpinned by caution: Irish reunification is now inevitable. 

To grasp the full potential of this demands careful planning, perhaps aiming for a new federal constitution based on the four provinces. The current Dublin-centric model of government hordes power in the very way the English did during their colonial exploitation of the island to the continuing detriment of those living “beyond the Pale.”

So, if this book has a moral it’s that if today’s Irish politicians don’t rapidly reconvene the New Ireland Forum to gather evidence and plan for the future, then they will deserve every iota of historical ignominy that will inevitably be heaped upon them. 

21st Century Candidates for Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary

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Summary: an evolving list

Ambrose Bierce defined politics in his Devil’s Dictionary as “The conduct of public affairs for private advantage”.

As Trump, Netanyahu and Putin continue to use this as their platonic ideal, here are a few more commonly used terms to better understand this brand of politics in the 21st Century.

Accountability — A principle once thought central to democracy, now regarded as the bad manners of social inferiors.

Betrayal — The dispatch of Caesar by his own signature methods.

Consolation — The knowledge that nits become lice.

Context — The reason a “tragic mistake” was all the enemy’s fault.

Decency — An elusive quality discovered in Caesar only after the knives have safely done their work.

Empathy — An existential threat arising from the dastardly impulses of fellow feeling and compassion.

Gullibility — A touching belief in the stories told by plutocrats.

Hypocrisy — The art of applying opposite principles with identical conviction.

Human moment — A politician’s self-pity.

Human rights — Rights universally acknowledged until someone inconvenient claims them.

Investigation — A process for discovering that a “tragic mistake” was unavoidable.

Realpolitik — A posh name for complicity in atrocities

Responsibility — An elusive quality, once thought central to professionalism, now applied only to those without sufficient privilege.

Rule of Law — An antiquated idea, dating back to Aristotle and Sophocles’ play about that loser Oedipus, that even important people should be accountable.

Self-defence — Violence committed by ourselves.

Special relationship — How vassals describe their vassalage.

Terrorism — Violence committed by the enemy.

Tragic mistake — Violence committed by ourselves against civilians after we got caught.

Wealth — The safest substitute for wisdom and expertise in policy discussions.

Wisdom — The consolation losers derive from losing. Of obsolete utility because of wealth.

    Mikaeil Mirdoraghi on his way to be killed

    Public Art

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    Summary: an evolving collection of images of pieces about movements -in the broadest sense of the word – that have, by and large, stirred the conscience of the world, if only a little

    Massachusetts 54th, Boston
    Kindred Spirits (the Choctaw memorial), Middleton, Co.Cork
    Broken Chair (landmines memorial), Geneva
    Velvet Revolution, Prague
    Gormley in Folkestone
    Free Derry Corner
    Mr John in Prague
    Banksy, London

    Sudan Stories II: Not Exactly a Getaway Car

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    Summary: second in a series of guest blogs from “Elphaba” on the ongoing war in Sudan

    There was some great excitement in Singa this week as it was announced that many vehicles had been found and owners could bring proof of ownership and reclaim theirs. Ours was a battered, old, much-loved and very unreliable crate. She appeared to have some kind of sentience: working on a whim for some and not others. Opening and closing the windows was an act of will power (no winders that worked). But she had given great service carrying sheep, produce, people and everything in between for several years before she was taken at gun point last summer

    A family member, Ax, went to see if she was there. He said the site was depressing. It was full of lines of metal shells, most with no wheels, broken windows and some with little or no innards. 

    At the back of his mind in going to look for the vehicle, apart from the fact that it is “something to do” when daily routines are still restricted, was a potential to get her back “in case we need to run”. But then you are an easier target in car than on foot. Behind this is the reality that although our family are for the most part fine, there is a thin ice feeling.

    On the 4th October a friend in El Obeid rang and we were delighted to hear all was well. The next day he rang to say that they had been bombarded with drones. Omderman has also been hit. Nothing is resolved. And South Sudan is still unravelling.

    One of the fall-outs of the war coupled with climate change (I think) has been a steep increase in Dengue fever. We also hear disputed reports of cholera outbreaks. Now at the tail-end of the rains is the malaria season 

    In the end we could not locate our vehicle. We laughed that she was never exactly a get away car, except in the sense that we seemed to get away with paying very little road tax over the years. In this seemingly endless war, the citizens who have lost most of what we think of as essentials are expected to pay significant amounts to reclaim their cars at a time that inflation in the costs of everyday needs, and the continuing devaluation of currency, bites. 

    Arbitrary Power and the Rule of Law: The UK’s Criminalisation of Protest

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    Summary: The UK government’s shenanigans around Palestine Action undermines fundamental principles of rule of law

    In 2010, Tom Bingham — former Master of the Rolls, Lord Chief Justice, and Law Lord — demonstrated in his book The Rule of Law that the concept is fundamental to any tolerably functioning democracy. He set out eight principles, including that:
    • legal rights and liabilities must be determined by law, not the arbitrary discretion of, for example, ministers;
    • the law must provide effective protection for fundamental human rights; and
    • the rule of law requires states to comply with their obligations under international law as seriously as domestic ones.

    The British government appears to violate all three of these particular principles in its decision to ban Palestine Action and criminalise anti-genocide demonstrators.

    To begin at the beginning: there is no agreed definition of terrorism in international law and little academic consensus. The terrorism scholar Alex Schmid once suggested that terrorism might be considered “peacetime equivalents of war crimes.” That deliberately omits atrocities such as Hiroshima, Dresden or Gaza, but it is easy to see why governments responsible for mass civilian killings might resist such a definition that makes them seem at least terrorism adjacent.

    In the absence of international agreement, terrorism becomes whatever individual governments decide it is. In the UK, the government has defined it broadly as violence against people and damage to property in pursuit of a political cause. Yet even by that standard, its application is arbitrary. The killing of close to 100,000 civilians by a UK ally is treated as legally too complex for ministers to judge, but the throwing of paint on a weapons system is not. To brand the latter vandalism as “terrorism” is to reduce the definition to a tool of political convenience — a textbook example of arbitrary discretion, and thus a breach of the rule of law.

    This arbitrariness also undermines basic human rights protections, most clearly in the assault on the right to peaceful protest. On 6 September 2025, Steve Masters, a British military veteran, was arrested while sitting in his wheelchair in Parliament Square holding a poster. He was one of 890 people detained that day. Their “crime” was not violence, but conscience: holding placards in solidarity with Palestine Action. Farcically, many will be charged with terrorism offences.

    What their protest reveals is the UK’s deeper breach: the failure to honour its obligations under international law, including its duty to prevent genocide under the Genocide Convention. Training officers of a military engaged in mass civilian killings, and rolling out the red carpet for those officers’ political masters, cannot plausibly be described as discouragement of genocide.

    Protesters hold up a mirror to the British government, and the government recoils from its reflection. Yet it is only the protesters who offer any hope that the UK might one day be able to face itself with any self-respect, once the atrocities with which it has been complicit have passed.