Khawaja Asif declared open war against the Taliban — the organisation Pakistan’s own intelligence services built, funded and protected for thirty years. Islamabad cannot bomb its way out of a problem it spent three decades constructing. What changed is not the enemy. The machine turned around.
Brian McGinnis walked into a Senate Armed Services hearing in full Marine Corps uniform and screamed until Capitol Police broke his arm. A firefighter from North Carolina. His wife is Palestinian. In India he would have been branded anti-national before the press conference ended.
Washington launched the US-Israel war on Iran without consulting a single ally and is now surprised the world will not follow. A superpower without allies is an island with a large military budget. The willingness to look away — once extended — does not return on request.
France criticised and kept its bases open. Germany stayed quiet and offered Ramstein. Spain said what every European government privately believed: we are a sovereign country and will not participate in an illegal war. Consistency, in European foreign policy, is the rarest form of courage.
Itamar Ben-Gvir walked into the Knesset wearing a noose — a symbol with one precedent in Israeli legal history. The death penalty bill he championed targets Palestinians with discriminatory criteria. Democracy is not only elections. It is also equality before the law.
Kim Jong Un runs concentration camps and starves his people. He also looked at Iran’s ruins and drew the obvious conclusion: nuclear weapons are the only guarantee against American military action. The argument is made by a monster. That does not make it wrong.
Pakistan seeded the nuclear crisis it is now asked to resolve. Abdul Qadeer Khan transferred centrifuge designs to Iran. Washington pardoned Islamabad without consequence. Now the same Washington routes its Iran diplomacy through Pakistan. The bad actor designation expires when you become useful.
For decades, the United States shielded Israel from binding accountability at the ICJ and the ICC. That shield is cracking — not because Washington has changed its position, but because an increasing number of states are willing to act without it.
There was a time when the men and women who led nations understood the office demanded something of them. That seriousness — imperfect, sometimes hypocritical, but real — has largely gone. What replaced it is performance. The world is run by people who confuse visibility with leadership.
John P. Wihbey has spent years studying how digital platforms reshape public discourse and political power. In this conversation, he addresses the governance gap at the heart of the information age — and why the solutions being proposed are not yet equal to the problem.
John Wihbey’s Governing Babel confronts the central problem of the digital age: social media platforms have become the public square, and nobody elected them. Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand why content moderation is a political problem, not a technical one.
India had a democratic tradition worth defending. What has been surrendered — press freedom, judicial independence, minority protections — was not lost in a coup. It was given away incrementally, each compromise justified by the next election. The ground, once lost, is hard to recover.
