The world crisis stretches from Cuba to Albania

From Donald Trump's speech at a midterm election campaign rally in Fort Myers, Florida:

"We'll take care of Cuba on our way back from Iran. We'll do a little stopover. No, we'll do a little stopover. Actually, what we're going to do with Cuba is we're going to come back from Iran, those beautiful ships will pass Cuba. We'll have one of them stop about 50 yards off the coast. They'll raise up their hands, and then we're going to send Marco Rubio in to finish up the deal."

What Trump says "should be taken seriously but not literally".  I hope he is being a stand-up comedian. His crowd loved it. 

A Romanian politician said to me recently that there's no way the United States will attack Cuba and I hope and think that that's right. I can't be sure. 

As John Mearsheimer says, we can be sure that Fukuyama's "end of history", which was never going to happen, is a long way back in the past. It was predicated on the idea that the final victory of America was the final victory not of American force but of liberal democracy, freedom and free markets. 

All these things are in trouble as France burns, there are riots in Belgium, Portugal, Spain, and Italy and Albania is in turmoil. 

Who guessed that the revolution would begin in Albania? This wave of unrest did, provoked by the behaviour of Jared Kushner. 

Albania is playing the role that Tunisia played in the Arab Spring. 

Are we looking at another 1848? This time a revolt not against absolute monarchy, but against green policies, expensive fuel and in the Albanian case corruption linked to the Trump family including its former member Kimberly Guilfoyle (her again)? 

The comparison with 1848 highlights how fragile European monarchies were then and how powerful the police and the military and security apparatus are in Europe today and how the media plays its role in supporting the established order. 

To repeat an obvious point: the Cold War which was always pointless and unnecessary did not come to an end because of American force but because Gorbachev had the good sense to bring it to an end. 

Communism failed because the people who were administering it ceased to believe in it. 

The great Romanian historian Nicolae Iorga described the Balkans after the Ottoman conquest as "Byzantium after Byzantium". What we have in Romania now is the communist structure of power after communism. The PSD are the children, usually literally, of the communists who executed a lucrative management buyout. 

What we have throughout the West is Cold War thinking after the Cold War. New enemies are found to take the place of communism, except in Cuba where it lingers on. China is the biggest threat but not because she is communist. 

But the new spectres haunting Europe may not be potent enough to keep the population quietly paying for expensive gas. 

I think this is the most interesting moment in European history since 1945 and possibly even for centuries, primarily because of AI but for many reasons. 

Everything has changed. Except the things that haven't changed including the PSD. 

Peccavi

'When a Protestant sins he has no one to whom to confess except his solicitor.' Philip Guedalla

Quotations

"Any city, however small, is in fact divided into one city of the poor, the other of the rich." Plato

"One does odd things. You see, when one's young one doesn't feel part of it yet, the human condition; one does things because they are not 'for good'; one thinks everything is a rehearsal – to be repeated ad lib, to be put right when the curtain goes up in earnest. One day you know that the curtain was up all the time. That was the performance." Sybille Bedford

If it keeps going at this rate, we might, for (I think) the first time in history, be about to witness the first continent-wide youth revolt in Europe - a "European spring" of sorts.

From two podcasts I just heard as I walked to the office

Former US Ambassador Chas Freeman: “In an exchange between Ansarallah [Houthis] and the Saudis, the Saudis lose, because they have so much to lose and the Ansarallah has almost nothing to lose.”

Professor John Mearsheimer on Glenn Diesen's podcast which was released on October 17, 2026: "There was always a very important moral dimension to the Fukuyama argument [about the end of history] because the idea is that liberal democracy is a positive end and liberal democrats or countries that are liberal democracies are the good guys and everybody else is the bad guys. We have moral virtue on our side. That was the basic underpinning logic behind “The End of History.” The good guys won. We are morally superior to the rest. But afterwhat happened in Gaza where the West basically is complicit in a genocide, and this is certainly true of the United States, it's hard to make the argument that the West is morally superior to the rest. Not a serious argument."

News is not really about information but part of the entertainment industry and the intellectually brilliant podcasts with which YouTube abounds are also a form of entertainment. They eat up so much time that I have given them up except occasionally in the bath or walking, but when walking I now rarely listen to them. There's very much to be said for silence and observation, being part of a dying breed a flaneur. 

Brivael Le Pogam: The French owe everyone an apology for the scourge of wokism

This apology by a Frenchman for the harm modern French philosophers have done is extremely worth reading.


'We must understand what they did. Foucault taught that truth does not exist, that there are only power relations disguised as knowledge. That science, reason, justice, the medical institution, the school, the prison, sexuality—everything is merely a staging of domination. Derrida taught that texts have no stable meaning, that every signifier slips away, that every reading is a betrayal, that the author is dead and the reader reigns supreme. Deleuze taught that we should prefer the rhizome to the tree, the nomad to the sedentary, desire to the law, becoming to being, difference to identity.

Rosy-fingered dawn over the Dâmbovița this morning

 

Romania will at last have a government and government contracts will be awarded again

Shortly after Kimberly Gilfoyle had dinner with the leader of the Romanian Social Democratic Party (PSD), but that was purely a coincidence, the PSD brought down Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan who had refused to buy the expensive American gas.

It did so by leaving the governing coalition which President Dan had formed in order to keep the nationalist/pro-peace AUR out of office. That, he thought, was required to defend democracy. 

Today it looks as if a new government of technocrats plus PSD will be formed.

I liked this observation by Sorin Ionita today:

'The Niculescu-Neacşu government will manage the budget with selective prudence and will tell Brussels everything they want to hear, while the public space will be occupied by cultural wars transplanted, to a large extent, from the MAGA repertoire. Some will keep us busy with national values ​​and sovereignty, while others will share contracts and subsidies, including with the former. In this regard, PSD and AUR will complement each other perfectly while they will always deny that they are forming a coalition.'

In fact an alliance formal or informal between PSD and AUR makes perfect sense since in the 1990s the predecessor to PSD was the anti-American party. There's nothing remotely socialist about the PSD, that party of wicked multi-millionaires, except for the fact that they do things for the poorer half of the population in order to get returned to office (which, if you think about it, is all that parties on the left are supposed to do). 

We are so used in Western Europe to parties on the left being liberals and therefore spending their time working against the interests of the working class that we forget this. The one redeeming feature the PSD has is that it has no trace of liberalism.

Energy riots in France

France is the largest purchaser of Russian gas in Europe, and the reason is binding, pre-existing long-term  contracts.

French energy companies are locked into "take-or-pay" agreements signed years ago. If they refuse to lift the gas they must still pay for it. France has chosen to import the fuel until next year. 

Nevertheless expensive American prices are contributing to the cost-of-living crisis, which has had people take to the streets in France.  

The media say nothing about this. 

Green policy also means higher taxes and this contributes to the crisis. I expect to see riots replicated in other European countries - it's surprising they're not happening in England. 

Romania has her own gas fortunately and will have much more shortly, thanks to gas found in the Black Sea. 

Israel Katz says 70-80% of Gaza and Southern Lebanon have been destroyed

Israeli Defence Minister Katz:

“The achievements are dramatic. In Gaza, we have achieved our objectives. 70-80% of Gaza is destroyed. The same is true in southern Lebanon.”

Katz said that Israel is actively applying the "Gaza model" to its military operations in southern Lebanon.

In southern Lebanon, he claimed the operations have already resulted in the destruction of more than 60 villages, 23,000 homes, and a 700-square-kilometer area, displacing roughly 200,000 residents.

"In Gaza, we don't just destroy what's underground, we destroy all the houses."

Note: the word "holocaust" means "a sacrifice burned completely by fire". 

Joe Kent, who resigned this year as director of the US National Counterterrorism Center, and Pelle Taylor

Joe Kent on X:

“The war is not meant to be won." George Orwell 

Defense contractors & their powerful lobby will never be satisfied with simply aiding the U.S. in building a strong military that is prepared for war. 

The nature of the industry’s existence is not patriotism, but endless conflict. War is their business model—a perpetual state of war ensures a perpetual demand for their products. 

The news today - no comment

Israeli settlers in the Israeli occupied West Bank attacked a French mayor and European diplomats, as well as Palestinians. The head of the British Army has told the country to prepare for war. Supporters of Donald Trump are urging him to introduce martial law and even pause the midterm elections according to Axios, a news outlet very close to Donald Trump and the Trump family: one of its leading journalists is a Mossad agent. Starlink is still restricted in Ukraine, hampering the Ukrainian war effort. Anonymous White House sources say the order to do this came from the White House although Trump denies this. Elon Musk pleads not guilty. He says the US army runs Starlink in Ukraine. France is descending into anarchy because of high prices.

Democracy is a system of control

Brian Berletic today:

It was this exact flawed thinking that led millions of Americans and many commentators to enthusiastically anticipate the Trump administration ending multiple US wars, proxy wars and worldwide interference that has only - very predictably - expanded instead.

'Understanding a problem is paramount to solving it. 

'If one thinks US policy is determined by electoral outcomes instead of by unelected corporate interests, focus will be placed on influencing otherwise meaningless elections only ensuring the problem persists.

'This is by design to prevent corporate interests from being the focal point of public attention instead of endless election cycles and an endless supply of disposable politicians. 

'Western-style "democracy" is a system of control, not one of self-determination.

'While electoral cycles are designed to move us emotionally - empirically they are an exercise in manipulating, not empowering us.'

These last sentences are extremely true of Romania and probably of most 'democratic' countries. 

Fights about social liberalism are distractions.

If an election produces a wrong result it's cancelled. When a referendum produces the wrong result, another referendum is held until the electors get it right, then no further referendums. 

Blair and Mandelson, friend of Epstein, tried very hard to do this in England with Brexit but failed. But they came close.

The Epstein class at war

Left-wing dissident American journalist Max Blumenthal thinks that the Ukraine war is being waged to benefit what he terms the "Epstein class", meaning global financial elites and defence companies.  

Zelenskyy acts as a manager on the ground, sustaining a forever war that keeps profits flowing and checks Russia, which is a threat to  the global hegemon.

The more I talk to people in the defence sector and the more I see the money being made in Romania out of defence procurement - it's a feeding frenzy - the more persuasive his view is. 

A conservative like me finds the left-wing critique of American foreign policy very insightful, much more so than the liberal view 

An American defence consultant who knows people like Elon Musk and all the big players in the American defence sector to whom I spoke had a Hobbesian worldview and said that they, unsurprisingly, and the people working at the top of government are simply interested in power and money and absolutely nothing else. 

That's the universal view of Romanian taxi drivers, and taxi drivers usually know everything, unlike mainstream journalists who are paid to do so. Blumenthal calls them stenographers of empire. 

With politicians I think that there is a often a scintilla of genuine ideals but I might be being naive. But it's power, and the enjoyment of playing the political game that motivate them mostly. In Romania it's mostly money. 

In his latest podcast on Judge Andrew Napolitano's always excellent "Judging Freedom" podcast, Mr Blumenthal makes the point that by attacking Russian refineries Zelensky is driving up the price of diesel in order to blackmail Trump into giving him more money. 

An interesting take. But it could have the opposite effect. 

The world would be better off without Trump, Putin or Zelensky in power but the former two are not going anywhere. 

Actually the man who  succeeds Putin (it will be a man) might be worse. 

A friend of mine said that Putin is the best leader Russia could have at the moment but I do not agree. The invasion of Ukraine was a terrible blunder, like the US attack on Iran. 

Xi, despite what he does at home and did in Hong Kong, is the grown-up in the playground. 

He isn't part of the Epstein class. 

Quotations

Barack Obama two days ago in Ireland: “The fact is that the Jewish people, for millennia, were oppressed, discriminated against, killed. Europe was responsible for much of it. They understandably sought a refuge.That is undeniable. What is also undeniable is that they took land off people, and they were excessive. And those people understandably said, This is injustice, and I want my land back.”

Sir Roger Scruton: “If you start thinking about politics in an intellectual way, you are likely to be on the left, because that provides a systematic solution, an answer to the questions, puts it all in a system, and also gives you a rather dignified and self-congratulatory place in the system. But if you think a bit harder and longer about it, you’ll move back to what you would have been if you had never thought at all. That’s my view of what an intellectual conservative is: it’s someone who articulates the real reasons for not having reasons.”

Bunny Sheffield: "Feminism is Marxism in drag." 

Chas Freeman on Glenn Diesen's podcast yesterday says nobody can tell you any more what the Ukrainian war is about

The podcast is here 

"As I indicated, the idea in the beginning was to use Ukraine to take down Russia. Lloyd Austin and the Biden administration said the purpose of the war was to weaken and isolate Russia. It was a bit out of line to admit that, but that was the actual purpose that led to the outset of the war.

"We don't know what the war is about now. Is it about arms sales to Europeans so they can pass them on to Ukraine? Is it about supporting an ideological crusade against some mythical Russian ideological menace? Does anybody really imagine the Russians—who have bogged down in Donbas—could actually invade Western Europe? They could devastate it, yes, but they could not occupy and control it against any serious opposition, and there would be opposition.

"What is this about? Nobody can really tell you at this point. They say it's about democracy, but Ukraine is not a democracy. They say it's about Ukrainian nationalism, but Ukrainian nationalism will not accommodate the nationalism of others or the linguistic and cultural autonomy of others. They say it's about punishing the Russians for a war of aggression, but the Russians started that war because they were denied the opportunity to negotiate.

Arnaud Bertrand: why did China just save the world economy?

[On X just now.] 

This is one of the biggest geopolitical mysteries of the year: why did China just save the world economy?

Because, make no mistake, it absolutely did. Analysts are pretty much unanimous on this: had China not dramatically - and I mean dramatically - reduced its oil imports this year, the price of crude oil would have gone through the roof and dragged the global economy down with it.

As we all guessed, CIA knew about and approved of the destruction of Nord Stream

The CIA knew of plans to sabotage the Nord Stream gas pipelines before the September 2022 explosions in the Baltic Sea, and American intelligence officers initially raised no objections to the operation, according to German investigative journalist Oliver Schröm.

In an interview with German news outlet ntv, Schröm discussed findings from his investigation with fellow journalist Ulrich Thiele for their book Die Sprengung. Schröm claims that CIA personnel in Ukraine were informed about the plans by individuals with whom American intelligence had maintained long-standing contacts. According to him, the American officers initially showed no fundamental opposition to the operation and even indicated that financial support might be available.

Thanks to the late Beverley Little

 

Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lord Dacre was a Whig and a Protestant atheist. I never met him but I heard him lecture on Carlyle, whom he considered a fascist

Hugh Trevor-Roper (1914-2003), The Wartime Journals (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), pp. 165-166 (June 1943):
'And books', I asked myself as I stood in Blackwell’s shop in Oxford one day, surrounded by fat volumes on Soviet Russia and the Virgin Birth, and thin volumes on Education and Democracy, earnest pamphlets, flimsy novels, yellow manuals, reprints, Americana and all. There seemed no end of them. And what is in them all? Learned sawdust — vapour trash. And there were historical works too, lives of saints, and lives of kings, and lives of conquerors and politicians and administrators, and chronicles of wars and politics and movements and revolutions, — all the accumulated mundungus of all the centuries of man, stirred this way, stirred that, and smelling now thus, now thus, as the stirrer stirred. Must I add to these? I asked myself; spend perhaps a whole lifetime to increase this great Sargasso Sea by one wisp of seaweed? Vanitas Vanitatum! And over & around me, in the hidden background, in the Bodleian, in the New Bodleian, in the Radcliffe, I was aware of the unseen, oppressive, brooding presence of myriads of musty tomes, hundreds of tons of them weighing me down with their stifling, persecuting bulk. A feeling of hot spiritual claustrophobia overcame me, as in childhood, when I was besieged by a great herd of panting cows; and I turned and left the shop in disgust.

Thanks to https://laudatortemporisacti.blogspot.com

Dacre was a Whig and a Protestant atheist.

Belloc on P. G. Wodehouse

I CAN'T remember if I ever told you about meeting Hugh Walpole when I was at Oxford getting my D.Litt. I was staying with the Vice-Chancellor at Magdalen and he blew in and spent the day. It was just after Hilaire Belloc had said that I was the best living English writer. It was just a gag, of course, but it worried Hugh terribly. He said to me, 'Did you see what Belloc said about you?' I said I had. — 'I wonder why he said that.' 'I wonder,' I said. Long silence. 'I can't imagine why he said that,' said Hugh. I said I couldn't, either. Another long silence. 'It seems such an extraordinary thing to say!'—'Most extraordinary.' Long silence again. 'Ah,well,' said Hugh, having apparently found the solution, 'the old man's getting very old.'

P. G. Wodehouse, Performing Flea. A Self-Portrait in Letters, ed. W. Townend (Copyright 1953), p. 128.

Mystery

A Russian woman once told me that women like three things in men: courage, a sense of humour, and mystery.

I'm not good at mystery. I talk too much about myself.

The other two, I'm reasonable at and I drop mysterious hints about my past life into conversations on occasion.

Many people tell me I am MI6, which I am not.

Men find mystery attractive in women but for some unknown reason only brunettes can be mysterious.

A moment's reflection told me the reason. It's the same reason why sunlit uplands are not mysterious whereas dark forests are.

Former British diplomat Ian Proud on X

The problem with the 'Russia caused Brexit' hoax, is that it isn't really about Russia, but about the tear-filled liberal regret that Brexit happened and the need to blame someone. Not the voters who, on the basis that many in Westminster consider most working class people to be childish, insufficiently educated and gullible, must have been misled. But the Russians, because Russia is the font of all ill. 

Let's be clear, what I am not saying is that Russian intelligence doesn't conduct hostile activity against British interests. They do. 

By the same toke, British intelligence conducts hostile activity against Russian interests.  

Bolt driver today

He told me how much he admired Britain for Brexit. When I asked him whether joining the European Union had done Romania more good than harm, he was quite sure that it had done Romania far more harm than good. Foreign companies have eaten up the Romanian market. 

He blamed most of the world's problems on America and Israel, which he considers are the same country now. 

He blamed Zelensky who he thinks takes cocaine for the Russian invasion of Ukraine and said, as an actor, he is completely unprepared to be a politician. The people behind this war are the defence companies. 

Romanians with good jobs mostly think very differently although you get some free thinkers among them.   

I forgot to ask him what he thought about Calin Georgescu or the sovereignists or about Putin. 

I know 18% of Romanians admired Putin according to a poll in September 2025 but I certainly don't. His attack on Ukraine was worse than a crime it was a blunder, like the American attack on Iran. But both attacks were terrible crimes, to whit mass murder. 

The very compromised Romanian judges

The European Union could insist that, like in Moldova and Albania, external auditors audit the personal wealth of Romanian judges but they won't do this. Romanian judges are not like the judges of 25 years ago: submissive to external pressure . They will declare that this is an assault on judicial independence which, of course, it would be

The PSD would insist that if the European Union does anything to attack the independence of the Romanian judiciary it will enable the far right to come to power, which it would.

The website Recorder that caused all the embarrassment, to use a very weak word for it, for the Romanian judges by broadcasting a documentary in which very courageous judges spoke out about the widespread corruption among their colleagues is in a very vulnerable position.

It's true that because it is crowd-funded it isn't answerable to rich donors. But it only takes one judge to award damages of, let's say, €2 million to some politician who claims to have been defamed by the website for the website to go out of business.

Please bear in mind that the Romanian court that annulled the first round of the presidential election in November 2024 (which the peace/anti Nato candidate Calin Georgescu won) is part of the same corrupt web that the Recorder documentary cast light on.

The European Union very characteristically says nothing about this because they wanted Georgescu to be removed from the scene. Rather as they say nothing about Israeli war crimes, while quite properly condemning the much fewer Russian war crimes.

The European Union is an undemocratic, corrupt, and largely useless institution but unfortunately it will be with us for a very long time. In Romania it does at least provide checks and balances on the appalling Romanian system of government.

Low though the European Union is, the Romanian political and judicial systems are very much lower.

Things that every reasonably well informed person already knows

"The United States is everywhere in retreat." Chas Freeman

"Had it not been for Boris Johnson and Victoria Nuland -- who personally forced Zelensky to reject the deal Ukraine and Russia were about to sign in Istanbul in 2022 -- this horrific war that has killed more than a million and consumed much of Ukraine would have been long over." Glenn Greenwald 

"Thousands are held in Israeli torture camps." Headline in Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz