David Patrikarakos is the author of 'War in 140 Characters: How Social Media Is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century' and 'Nuclear Iran: The Birth of an Atomic State'
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If Iran has performed one role in the time of coronavirus it’s been as a harbinger of things to come. Early in the year, when we in the West were still blasé about the corona-thingy that would be ‘nothing more than the seasonal flu’, the regime was already having to deny reports that Iranians were
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When you’re desperate you do stupid things, and when you do stupid things, you often make what was once merely a desperate situation dire. It’s a lesson I thought Iran’s ruling clerical elite had internalised. Seemingly not. The Islamic Republic is a revolutionary state; it came about after Iranians overthrew the Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, in
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Throughout the lockdown I’ve been nagged by a persistent thought. As I sit indoors and read the news; as I alternate between cooking and takeaways; as I venture outside into the socially-distanced streets; and as I listen to commentators catastrophise about lockdown Britain, it is there. The thought is simple: what if all this –
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If coronavirus has taught us anything it’s that if you really want to understand something of a state’s essential character, look at how it battles a pandemic. This crisis has divided humanity up variously, but most markedly along national, if not occasionally stereotypical, lines. Germany reacted with organisation and efficiency; it has made, on balance,
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Yet again the news from Pyongyang is both disconcerting and vague. Yet again North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is rumoured to be seriously ill or dead. Kim went missing from public view on 11 April and has not yet reappeared. It was an abrupt disappearance after several public engagements and ample news coverage at the
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They said we were going to uncouple from the Middle East. Barack Obama, they said, was going to pivot to Asia. Donald Trump was, finally, going to get the United States the hell out of there. Intellectually, politically and, most importantly of all, militarily, we were going to put this most vexatious of regions behind
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The Great Game of the 21st century is upon us and as ever it’s a scramble for resources. This time, though, the thirst is not for land or diamonds or gold. Personal protective equipment has become the oil of the contemporary moment: desperately needed by a world that is strafed by coronavirus. Britain has its own
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These are discombobulating times. A deadly pandemic; the United States at sea, China belligerent and the EU at war with itself. British politics was in flux before the virus hit. Now it is vertiginous. The Tory party, long seen as the guardian of the status quo, has been forced to change tack as it deals
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It’s over then. After almost five years, Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure as Labour leader has come to a close. Corbyn ended as he led: with the petulance and ill grace that has characterised his political career. As Corbyn slopes to the backbenches to resume a life of fruitless campaigning, Keir Starmer steps up to replace him.
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History has not usually been kind to the Jews. But even by its low and morbid standards, the 14th century was a time of chaos. From 1348 to 1351 between 30 and 60 per cent of Europe’s population died from the Black Death, a plague that strafed continents. Hundreds of Jewish communities perished too, their inhabitants slaughtered
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‘How do you deal toughly with your banker?’ This was the not quite rhetorical question that Hillary Clinton asked Australia’s then-prime minister Kevin Rudd at a lunch back in 2010. In the prophylactic language of the diplomat she was then, Clinton was asking how the world should deal with an ever more aggressive China, and
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In the name of God. These words define the Islamic Republic of Iran. They stretch across its official paperwork and correspondence; they drive its constitution; they drop from the lips of its Ayatollahs leading Friday prayers; and they imprison its people. In Iran, the Velayat-e Faqih, the ‘rule of the jurists,’ holds that those best
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Few words have as great a hold on the contemporary imagination as ‘disinformation.’ Few words are as ubiquitous in contemporary discourse or as pervasive in political mud-slinging. Donald Trump castigates the ‘fake news’ media for perceived bias against him; Hillary Clinton blames foreign influence operations for her election loss. Disinformation, propaganda, lies: whatever you wish
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A.D. Miller’s gripping new book is set largely during Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution, which Miller covered as a journalist. Ten years later, I reported on the aftermath of the country’s 2014 Euromaidan Revolution. Independence Square details the first event and prefigures the second. It is several things: a thriller, a political novel and a statement
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Drama and tragedy continue to envelop Iran. Just hours after the regime struck two US bases in Iraq on Wednesday, Ukraine International Airlines flight PS752 crashed after taking off from Tehran en route to Kyiv. All 176 passengers and crew members on board were killed. Iran almost immediately claimed that the plane had suffered a
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So it happened. Iran has just struck back against the United States for its killing of Quds force chief Qassem Soleimani on 3 January. The Iranians had vowed to retaliate from almost the moment that their most potent – and famous – commander was killed. Iran’s leader Ali Khamenei had vowed a “severe revenge.” Now
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It has been 24 hours since America droned Qasem Soleimani near Baghdad airport. Now both Iran and the United States are getting ready to deal with a new reality in the Middle East that has (quite literally) exploded into being. There is a mutual recognition that when Soleimani died, the old rules of the game died alongside
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In the early hours of the morning, Iraqi State television reported that the leader of Iran’s Qud’s Force, Qasem Soleimani had – along with six other people including Iraqi militia leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis – been killed in a US strike near Baghdad airport. Make no mistake: this is the most significant military assassination in
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A Russian ship has just rammed a Ukrainian vessel, opened fire on it and captured its sailors. Ukraine has called it an act of war, and legally it may be right. But more than this the act reveals the nature of the true Russia. At this year’s Helsinki summit, some were aghast at how subservient Donald
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‘Myshkin’ wants ‘a tiding ending’ to his life and has settled down to write his will. An ageing Indian horticulturalist, his childhood nickname (after Dostoevsky’s protagonist in The Idiot) remains. It is the first sign that this is a novel about people out of sync with their times and their surroundings. Abandoned by his mother
