(A Russian refinery burns on the outskirts of Moscow. Over the past 100-plus days, Ukraine has struck at least 24 out of Russia’s 34 major oil refining facilities, driving oil processing in Russia to its lowest level since 2005)

What happened to the more stable world we assumed had emerged after 1989-91? Multilateralism and the rules-based order are foundering, not because of inherent flaws, but because their beneficiaries have not defended them.

At a deeper level, allies have still not responded to the wave of large-scale aggression building for over a quarter century.

The main purpose of the United Nations, as spelled out in article 1 of its Charter, is “to maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace (…).”

Yet when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, we did little. When Iran scaled up its proxy wars in Syria, Yemen and Gaza, we ducked. We let the Taliban retake Afghanistan. Many still hope Russia can be bought off with just part of Ukraine.

These acts of aggression are not limited to large-scale conventional wars. They now include political and information warfare aimed at preventing democracies from taking decisive action, pushing them into isolationism or redirecting them to do active harm, as the current US Administration has done and Orban did in Hungary, to the alliances on which our multilateral system is built.

Why have we not taken action to stop this?

In some cases, our citizens did not see these threats coming.

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It’s not because the Kremlin thinks they’re winning on the battlefield. It’s because Russia’s Chekist dictatorship thinks they’ve made allies incapable of defeating them.

Remember: under Trump, US support for Ukraine dropped to almost zero.

In a recent piece in The Times, Edward Lucas termed the current national mindset in the UK “squishy” on hard issues of strategic policy and collective defence.

A recent poll by Ipsos found 48 percent of Britons would be unwilling to take up arms to defend the UK under any circumstances — a far cry from previous eras.

Lucas puts this down to reluctance to face up to the reality of Russian aggression — assassinations on British soil, acts of sabotage, undersea cable-cutting.

“Our muddle-headedness and timidity stem from years of deceit,” as he puts it.

But cover-ups and official reticence are only part of the problem.

Russia is dominating an unseen front, where democracies have lost the upper hand.

In a statement released on July 4^th — the 250^th anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence — prime minister Mark Carney quoted the following famous statement from president Franklin D. Roosevelt, which he made in 1936, the same year Nazi Germany hosted both the winter and summer Olympic Games:

“The noblest monument to peace and to neighbourly economic and social friendship in all the world is not a monument in bronze or stone, but the boundary which unites the United States and Canada.”

For most of two centuries, Canada’s undefended border with the US was a testament to the power of vibrant commerce, free politics and military alliance.

Today the principal threat to our ability to act decisively as a sovereign democracy is not from across that border — despite new risks emanating from there.

It comes from the information frontier.

We do not even know, in hard terms, to what extent China, Iran and Russia are dominating and manipulating today’s online platforms.

A recent report entitled ‘Britain Under Strain’ found Russia and Iran to be exploiting divisions to seed extremist narratives, often with devastating consequences.

Twitter/X is known to be a keystone of Russian influence worldwide.

Since 2023, TikTok and other platforms have disseminated Anti-Semitic, Anti-Zionist and Anti-Israeli narratives on an industrial scale, in the most provocative forms.

Such online influence has real-life consequences.

In the UK, no major political party yet endorses rejoining the Common Market or the European Union — even though most Britons now realize Brexit (heavily backed by Russia online) was a mistake.

In the US, the current president — twice elected with Russian help — regularly threatens or sues tech platforms and media that displease him.

In Canada, Alberta separatism has become a ballot question — mostly because MAGA and other Russia-directed online assets gave it a boost.

(‘Foreign Interference Incident Flow — Source -> Target’, July 8th 2027 from the Centre for Foreign Interference Research)

As this flow chart shows, Russia devotes massive efforts to so-called ‘active measures’ — complex influence operations that include huge and growing online assets that are agile, focussed and global. China is equally prolific, but its priorities often track Moscow’s. Iran and other hostile autocratic states also dedicate substantive resources to generating online, institutional and political influence. The US, EU, UK and Canada — in that order — remain the top targets for this combined foreign interference onslaught.

Cognitive, information, political and psychological warfare — whichever term you prefer — is not a fringe issue. Democracies lose when citizens no longer find their footing in well-informed, fact-driven, diverse, lively and relevant debate.

Extreme and hateful views introduced by malign actors are subtracting more heavily from this equation today than we realize.

Canadians spend on average about 20-minutes per day with edited journalistic news sources. They spend about two-and-a-half hours on social media.

So long as Russia, Iran and China have decisive influence over the latter (as we know they do), we will be in serious trouble. We’ve effectively out-sourced part of our national conversation to authoritarians.

What are these people really like? On June 15^th, Putin advisor Nikolai Patrushev gave a chilling interview entitled ‘When war is on the doorstep’. In it, he tried to draw an improbable and indeed outrageous parallel between the 1941-44 Nazi siege of Leningrad and Ukrainian drone attacks on St. Petersburg refineries today.

His underlying purpose was almost certainly to prepare Russian readers for a potential hybrid attack on the Baltic states — one which may happen as early as this summer and would certainly be blamed by Moscow on Ukraine or NATO in a transparent attempt to divide allies.

Patrushev is deeply deluded, as Putin was before him. But today’s Chekist-dominated Kremlin remains confident Russia will prevail in its aggressive war mainly because it still expects and is making elaborate arrangements to ensure Moscow’s cognitive influence campaigns tip France, Germany, Italy, the UK or other allies into their camp — via Le Pen, the AfD or other like-minded leaders.

We can hope the Kremlin is wrong about this. But many thought Trump could never be re-elected — until he was, with devastating consequences for Ukraine.

Under the influence of the current online ecosystem, with its heavy daily dose of malign foreign influence, “a third of Britons said they believed capitalism had failed and that a ‘communist revolution’ was necessary,” according to the same report.

Russians themselves have bought into even more extreme beliefs.

Here is what Patrushev thinks about Ukraine, victim of the genocidal war of conquest, invasion and occupation that Russia launched in 2014 and enlarged in 2022:

“The majority of Ukrainians do not want to fight and do not view Russia as an adversary, yet they have no say in the matter. Neo-Nazi gangs, sponsored by London and Brussels, keep the population in a state of fear and exercise complete control over Zelensky. In essence, we are currently carrying out a mission in Ukraine to rescue our brothers who have fallen under neo-Nazi occupation. Naturally, the heirs of Goebbels habitually turn everything upside down, spinning tall tales about Moscow supposedly seeking to conquer Ukraine.”

Hitler made similarly unhinged arguments about the countries he invaded. In a full democracy or any reasonably normal country, someone who made such crudely baseless statements would be dismissed as a crackpot.

Even today most Russians — heavily imbued as they are with the toxic influence of ceaseless propaganda — would still have a low level of conviction around the notion that Ukraine is run by ‘neo-Nazi gangs.’

Yet coming from Patrushev, we have to take this official lunacy as what it is — the deeply-held ideology of a very radicalized authoritarian state.

Given this backdrop, gasoline shortages alone are unlikely to divert today’s Kremlin or today’s fascist Russian society and state from the path of aggressive war on which they remain embarked — especially when they fully expect their information war edge to continue to drain allied resolve to oppose them.

Russia will not be defeated so long as its propaganda is silently taking us unawares on this undefended front.

We have not taken strong enough action to support Ukraine because we haven’t told ourselves the full story of what’s happening.

Our democracies are stumbling and even failing on these issues because public opinion remains squishy — sodden under a continuing waterfall of deceit.

In the 1930s we moved to protect information space with public broadcasters, broadcasting acts and strong action against state-backed foreign propaganda.

We need the same level of serious action today — to defend a digital information frontier that is very different but no less important.

Today’s Russia is confident of its online superiority to the point of over-confidence. Patrushev’s interview will have pleased Kremlin zealots but his scrambled fabrications about history and Ukraine are vulnerable to exposure and demolition.

Revealingly, in this long interview Patrushev did not once mention his career-long comrade Russian president Putin — whom he has effectively succeeded for now as top dog in the shrinking but still shadowy corrupt circle that runs Russia.

To take this sputtering crew out for good, we need to make the information front work for democracy once again — preferably quickly.

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(Protesters in London, England in 2021)

In recent months, some have erroneously concluded that US dysfunction under Trump is giving China an opening to exercise global leadership.

This thinking is wrong-headed for many reasons.

It’s a mirage, a hallucination and a false positive. The latter occurs, in a binary classification, when a test result incorrectly indicates the presence of a condition. To see Beijing as a global leader is to identify a false positive.

Here are five grounds for this conclusion:

First, China is a top-down, totalitarian dictatorship that conducts comprehensive surveillance of its population at home and diaspora abroad. No autocratic state of this type has ever exercised global leadership, which requires a level of engagement, openness and capacity to inspire emulation that today’s China self-evidently lacks. With Chairman Xi’s aggressive efforts to take full control of public and private sectors, the influence of multinational bodies where China has significant weight — such as the G20 — has actually declined in recent years.

Second, China is engaged in concerted, long-term efforts to destroy distinctive ethnic, cultural, linguistic, political and religious communities. Beijing’s decades of genocide against Tibetans and Uighurs are well documented. China has also rolled back the partial independence of nascent institutions needed to uphold the rule of law. It has dismantled democracy, basic political rights and media freedom in Hong Kong. It has hunted dissidents and human rights defenders, while engaging in stunning levels of transnational repression in Europe, North America and elsewhere. Oppression on such a scale is incompatible with global leadership of any kind.

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(Mourners accompany the body of deceased ‘supreme leader’ ayatollah Khamenei in Tehran on Monday, July 6th, 2026)

It’s difficult to assess the war with Iran without a broader perspective.

Many believe this conflict began on February 28^th, when the US and Israel launched a major air campaign to destroy Iran’s uranium enrichment and nuclear weapon programmes, ballistic missile and other military capabilities.

Some recall the twelve-day war last summer (June 13^th to 25^th, 2025) when Israel hit targets across Iran. They also recall Trump’s January 3^rd, 2020 drone strike near Baghdad international airport that killed major general Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Quds force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).

Some believe Iran’s aggression began when Trump exited the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2018 — or when Obama negotiated it back in 2015.

But to understand this year’s phase of the war we need to look much further back.

Iran’s war actually began in 1978-79 with the revolution itself.

First, it targeted Iranians themselves.

For eight years, it was directed against Iraq.

Iran’s Khomeinists intervened in Lebanon’s civil war to counter US and Saudi influence and build Hezbollah into the proxy threat to Israel it remains.

After the misguided US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Iran exploited chaos there, then later in Syria and Yemen, to build more proxy armies. This gave their axis real teeth.

After Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 — at Ariel Sharon’s initiative, but also at the urging of the US and its allies — Iran made Hamas a formidable military machine co-located within hospitals and schools, embedded in densely populated civilian areas, supported by a massive tunnel network, camouflaged by the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), funded by Iranian, Qatari and other foreign donors.

For decades, Israeli leaders warned about these threats.

They only acted decisively to end them after the October 7^th, 2023 Hamas attacks.

But Iran has been the main threat to Israel since 1979.

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(Protesters outside the US Supreme Court on November 5th, 2025)

Is it safe to say that Trump – despite clearly autocratic inclinations and closeness with dictators that mean the US harm – will not topple, with Samson-like destructive force, the load-bearing pillars of his country’s democracy?

While no one should have any illusions about his capacity for mischief, the latest signs are that constitutional democracy in America will survive this onslaught.

Less than ten months ago, we devoted an essay (‘Fundamental Questions’ from August 27^th, 2025) to seven potential vectors of democratic deterioration in the US. While there has been backsliding on these fronts, there are plenty of grounds today for arguing that the patient, while ailing, is no longer at risk of flat-lining.

It’s not just that Trump is wildly unpopular in his lame-duck stage as president: his most dangerous projects appear to have been thwarted or at least de-fanged.

Here’s why:

Mid-terms will definitely happen. Democrats are gaining traction on issues from affordability and public services to foreign policy and trade. Far from establishing a ‘managed democracy’ on the Kremlin model — whereby Russia’s rulers control both governing and opposition parties — Trump and his team have inspired an impressive range of political voices that zealously criticize and disparage him.

Democrats enjoy a five to seven-point lead over Republicans. They are projected to win back the House, though on current forecasts the GOP would retain the Senate. The list of potential 2028 Democratic candidates for president includes — beyond the usual suspects — impressive new names such as Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia and Senator Raphael Warnock of the same state, as well as Governors Andy Beshear, Wes Moore and Gretchen Whitmer of Kentucky, Maryland and Michigan respectively. Any one of them would be a huge breath of fresh air.

As for independent media, the US now ranks 64^th out of 180 countries in the Reporters Without Borders 2026 World Press Freedom Index — its lowest place ever, representing a drop of seven spots in only one year. The White House has continued to threaten media with massive lawsuits while using all the institutional clout at its disposal to engineer a restructuring of major media holdings that has bolstered the influence of right-leaning tech hyper-scalers.

Yet people still roundly criticize the president’s unhinged policies and excesses.

The same story applies to the rule of law. Even after threatening judges and law firms in unprecedented ways, Trump has nevertheless seen a steady stream of key rulings go against him — on issues from birthright citizenship and deportations to funding freezes, tariffs and even re-naming the Kennedy Centre.

Thanks to the wise positioning and principled action of Jerome Powell, the independence of the Federal Reserve has been bent but not broken.

The US has not become a police state – after the alleged killing of a civilian in Minneapolis on January 7^th, 2026, triggering bipartisan backlash, proactive ICE enforcement tactics have become less prevalent and the number of overall arrests has declined slightly.

Despite appallingly perverse leadership at the FBI, Homeland Security, and as Director of National Intelligence, the US defence, intelligence and national security communities continue to fulfill their statutory mandates — albeit amid massive political obstacles. The CIA been particularly immune to disruption.

With regard to alliances, the US remains a member of NATO. While openly threatening not to uphold article five of the North Atlantic Treaty and withdrawing from many UN and other international agencies, funds and programmes, the US has sustained the main institutional frameworks of the postwar era — Bretton Woods, the WTO, NATO, Indo-Pacific alliances and the UN itself. They remain intact, even if the stuffing has been knocked out of many of them.

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(A June 8th, 2026 welcome ceremony on Kim Il Sung square in Pyongyang, North Korea for Chairman Xi Jinping of China)

Beyond repression at home and aggression abroad, few things unite dictators, except one — a shared obsession with avoiding accountability for their crimes.

Impunity is a powerful incentive to consolidate and never to relinquish power. After decades of unbridled rule, judicial immunity curdles into a fierce addiction.

It drove Assad in Syria and Orbán in Hungary. Assad still expects to be shielded from justice by Moscow, where he now lives. Orbán, still in Hungary, counts on latent Fidesz support to prevent new investigative committees in parliament or a proposed new office for national asset recovery and protection from triggering confiscation of family assets or other legal proceedings. If his expectations are are wrong, as we hope they are, he is likely to move to a more forgiving Trumpian or Russian jurisdiction.

For today’s major dictatorships, impunity is a spur to armed conflict. Pakistan embraced the US deal with the Taliban during Trump’s first term as a prelude to reasserting full control over Afghanistan. By ending two decades of UN-sanctioned NATO and international presence in Kabul, Pakistan sought to duck scrutiny of its five decades of relentless proxy war and state sponsorship of terrorism.

With the Hamas-led terrorist attacks of October 7^th, 2023, Iran unleashed a war it hoped would engulf Israel — removing the main obstacle to Iranian aggression.

China works through the World Health Organization, UN Human Rights Council and other international bodies to ensure the true story of the global COVID outbreak, PRC transnational repression, genocide in Tibet, forced labour in Xinjiang and the systematic repression of China’s Muslim populations is never told.

Russia is equally devoted to undermining effective accountability mechanisms across the UN system. Through Trump, Moscow has weakened US oversight and aims to do the same across Europe, including in the UK.

When the International Criminal Court (ICC) indicted Putin and other Russian leaders for war crimes, Moscow quietly sought indictments for Netanyahu and other Israelis, knowing this would undermine ICC credibility. They were right.

Impunity can be a bridge binding dictators to unscrupulous democratic leaders. Netanyahu is motivated to make common cause with Russia and other autocrats partly because he was charged in November 2019 with bribery, fraud and breach of trust, which his desperate efforts have so far failed to quash.

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(A tanker at the LNG Canada facility in Kitimat, BC in November 2025)

Canada is a country of many strengths. Yet one of our principal failings has always been complacency. We’ve been in a lengthy phase of it. Is it starting to end?

I’m afraid it’s still too soon to tell.

In its latest form, Canada’s complacency has been on our radar since April 24^th, when Jen Gerson of The Line wrote an excellent piece on ‘The cost of Canadian complacency’. While her diagnosis was eloquent, she avoided specifics.

I would like to outline two particularly egregious cases from the past decade.

The first relates to energy.

The two biggest shocks to the global economy since 2014 have come from states that are major energy suppliers. Russia has produced as much as eleven million barrels of petroleum per day and was Europe’s top supplier of natural gas. Iran was exporting as much as two million barrels of oil per day as recently as early this year.

Yet both countries have made it their habit and indeed stated policy to invade, occupy and destroy other countries. Russia has been engaged in an escalating war of aggression in Ukraine for twelve long, bloody years. Moscow has taken the side of despotism and brutality in countless other states. Iran’s proxies have literally wrecked Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and a good part of Iraq. Yet both Russia and Iran have done all this while remaining major energy suppliers.

It seems obvious that the international response to Russian and Iranian aggression — which in the case of the latter still includes a standing threat to destroy the state of Israel — should have been to exclude these belligerents from global energy trade. Indeed, under article 41 of chapter seven of the United Nations Charter, which provides for a range of “actions with respect to threats to the peace, breaches of the peace and acts of aggression” it is explicitly stated that “measures not involving the use of armed force (…) may include complete or partial interruption of economic relations and of rail, sea, air, postal, telegraphic, radio, and other means of communication, and the severance of diplomatic relations.”

By continuing to buy oil and gas more or less normally from Iran and Russia long after they had engaged in these flagrant acts of aggression, allies and member states of the UN generally have effectively been ignoring basic provisions of the Charter.

Now imagine a different scenario. Consider a chain of events by which Canada had set out, with genuine national conviction, in 2014, immediately after Russia’s first invasion of Ukrainian Crimea and Donbas, to double Canadian oil production and put Canada in a position to replace up to half of Russian petroleum exports. Imagine if we had decided to become a major LNG exporter, as Australia and the US have done. When Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine happened in 2022 and Iran’s proxy Hamas attacked Israel in 2023, Canada would have been in a position to reduce the world’s energy dependence on both aggressor states.

With surging Canadian supply, Europe, the US and other allies might have been confident enough to embargo Russian and Iranian oil and gas exports much earlier, depriving those regimes of the economic oxygen they needed to keep up the fight in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Ukraine.

Such a policy could have saved countless lives and made Canadians richer.

Instead we find ourselves in a situation where most of our relatively limited energy sales to buyers outside of North America still pass through the US, which purchases Canadian oil and gas at a discount. Since 2014 we have increased our oil production by barely one million barrels per day. Our gas production rose from about 15 billion cubic feet per day (bcf/d) in 2014 to about 18 billion bcf/d now. We shipped our first LNG just last year and still have only modest oil export capacity on Canada’s west coast, with no pipeline to the east even planned.

As a result, Canadians are poorer. Russia continues to export about seven million barrels of oil per day, without much of a discount. Iran was still exporting up to two million barrels per day up to April 13^th, 2026, when the current US naval blockade of Iranian ports began. How long will it continue? We just don’t know.

Canada’s failure to become an energy superpower and swing global supplier as Russian and Iranian aggression increased was a choice, not a circumstance imposed by external factors, lack of available resources or logistical infeasibility.

The main vehicle for or agent of this choice to be less affluent, while leaving democratic allies vulnerable to less reliable and less scrupulous sources of supply, was of course Justin Trudeau, whose government was elected with a majority in 2015 and re-elected with minorities in 2019 and 2021. It remained in office until 2025 thanks to a supply and confidence agreement that lasted until late 2024 with the NDP — itself fiercely opposed to expanding Canada’s oil and gas industries.

Canada’s failure to launch in the energy sector is linked to the second specific form of Canadian complacency I would like to mention: indifference to foreign interference.

China remains engaged in brutal and pervasive forms of transnational repression in Canada, as Terry Glavin, Sam Cooper and others continue to report.

Russia seeks to influence Canada through continuous active measures, including by placing propaganda films in Canadian festivals, whipping up pro-separatist sentiment in Alberta and promoting extremism in almost every major form online.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its recruited proxies continue to promote Anti-Semitism, including attacks on and harassment of Canadian synagogues and other Jewish Canadian communities and institutions.

Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) has long been the primary global sponsor of the extremist Khalistan movement, which also promotes violence.

These acute forms of foreign interference have not gone unnoticed in Canada. We even had a Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference in Federal Electoral Processes and Democratic Institutions, which was established on September 7^th, 2023 and issued its final report on January 31^st, 2025. But its proceedings were never credible, its recommendations were thin, and its legacy has sunk almost without a trace.

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(Thyssen-Krupp Marine Systems type 212 submarine [Kongsberg])

This month Canada faces its first large-scale military procurement decision following yet another decade of darkness, when very little was achieved. Which submarines should we acquire to meet our current strategic requirements?

This is an opportunity to acquire a first-rate core capability — after more than a century of fragmented, politicized outcomes for our underwater fleet. After all, Canada’s first submarines were bought in 1914, not by Ottawa, but by BC under premier McBride in response to a German U-boat scare in the Pacific. Despite building a massive surface fleet during the Second World War, Canada spent that conflict mostly crewing and commanding British submarines.

In the postwar era, distinguished naval officer Vice Admiral Harry DeWolf proposed, as chief of the naval staff for the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN), that Canada acquire a nuclear-powered submarine fleet. His proposal was declined in 1960 on grounds of very high cost and US reluctance to share nuclear technology.

DeWolf pivoted his support to a Canadian surface fleet specializing in anti-submarine warfare (ASW). Canada nevertheless acquired three British Oberon-class diesel-powered submarines in the 1960s, as well as four Victoria-class boats starting in 1998. During the Cold War Canada bought two US Navy submarines.

On June 6^th, 1987 the government released a white paper calling for ten to twelve Canada-class nuclear-powered attack submarines. In a speech to the United Nations in December 1988, Soviet communist party general secretary Gorbachev announced unilateral troop reductions in Eastern Europe and an end to the interventionist Brezhnev doctrine. The second proposal for nuclear-powered Canadian submarines was cancelled in the April 1989 budget due to rising deficits, the end of the Cold War and shifting priorities — a ‘peace dividend’, as it was then termed.

Today’s Canadian patrol submarine programme represents a substantial opportunity to launch a capability that will serve Canada’s long-term strategic interests. It was encouraging to learn on October 30^th, 2025 that RCN commander Vice Admiral Angus Topshee considered both short-listed designs to be “excellent” — and suitable to meet Canada’s requirements.

Now we need to decide which submarine’s military capabilities are superior in order to get on with the hard and urgent task of commissioning a fleet of up to twelve new vessels. Four factors should make the choice very clear.

In terms of stealth, specialized features including a diamond-shaped, non-magnetic hull for active sonar defeat, as well as fuel-cell quietness, make the German-made ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems (TKMS) type 212 among the stealthiest diesel-electric/air independent propulsion (AIP) boats in the world, often matching or exceeding top nuclear-powered general-purpose attack submarines for low acoustic profile when moving slowly or submerged under battery power. The type 212A has been described as “undetectable by contemporary passive sonar”; the newer type 212CD, which Canada would be acquiring, is marketed as “quieter than snowfall.” The Korean-made KSS-III is simply less stealthy.

As for Arctic and high latitude conditions, the German-made type 212CD has been deliberately developed to meet Norwegian and German requirements for operations in the North Atlantic and Arctic. The 212CD’s non-magnetic steel, compact size, superior under-ice performance and ability to surface through thinner ice gives the TKMS design a ‘silent loitering’ profile the KSS-III cannot match. The 212CD has Kongsberg mine-avoidance/navigation sonars and echo sounders optimized for polar environments that enhance this hunter-killer role. It also has a longer continuous submerged time than the KSS-III due to more efficient fuel-cell AIP.

In performing anti-submarine warfare (ASW) tasks — a major focus for any expanded Canadian subsea fleet — the 212CD’s advanced sonar suite (including bow/conning tower arrays, large-aperture passive flank arrays and towed arrays, as well as the sonars and echo sounders mentioned above) make it a superior ‘ambush predator’. The German design also features integration, propulsion, endurance and weapons systems optimized for northern/Arctic choke-point operations, giving it clear advantages in this harsh environment, contributing further to mission success and survivability.

Finally, the 212CD has by definition superior interoperability with NATO and other allied forces. Korean builder Hanwha Ocean — formerly Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering — has to date built or been responsible for 23 submarines; Hanwha has exported them only to Indonesia. Germany’s TKMS, by contrast, has built or supplied over 200 submarines over six decades to 27 navies, including Italy, Norway, Singapore, India, Turkey and South Korea.

Germany and Korea are Canada’s allies. In May 1952, a company of the Royal Canadian Regiment was deployed to Geoje island, near today’s Hanwha shipyard, to restore order in a prisoner of war camp; on May 2^nd, 1945 the Canadian parachute battalion arrived just ahead of Soviet forces in Wismar, where TKMS builds submarines today. But a design co-developed by two NATO member states specifically for Arctic archipelago operations against Russia offers a wider range of built-in operational benefits for Canada and its allies.

Those still touting the Korean proposal tend to highlight its larger size and crew, blue-water reach and potential industrial benefits for Canada in other sectors, including automotive manufacturing. These points are not directly relevant to strategic military requirements. Indeed, many advocates of the Korean KSS-III design point to its vertical launch system (VLS), a feature of their bid that could provide six to ten cells for cruise or ballistic missiles. Yet this additional option is not a stipulation of the current Canadian patrol submarine programme. In fact, a superfluous VLS capability could detract from the fleet’s ‘stealthy hunter’ role.

(NATO warships and submarines taking part in Dynamic Mongoose 2026, an ASW exercise off the coast of Norway)

One overriding consideration should seal the deal for the TKMS type 212CD design. With the return of US isolationism and impulsive unilateralism, which now often favours autocracies over allies, Europe is already bearing the main burden of military support for collective self-defence in Ukraine, as well as forward presence in the Baltic states, Romania, the Mediterranean and elsewhere. These allies are looking for signs — beyond the brigade we command in Latvia and recently increased military support for Ukraine — that Canada remains strategically committed to the defence of Euro-Atlantic space, especially as Russia’s grey zone war via sabotage, attacks on undersea infrastructure and hybrid operations continues to escalate.

In this context, a decision to procure a relatively untested Korean platform for Canada’s largest-ever submarine procurement would risk undermining the trust now underpinning the all-important coalition of the willing within NATO. By purchasing a proven capability from Europe’s leading economy, Canada would be paving the way towards deeper forms of defence industrial cooperation with the EU. We would also be enlarging a shared allied capability and enhancing NATO unity of effort. To miss this opportunity would be a blow both to our longer-term partnerships with EU and NATO members and to our reputation as a reliable ally.

In a febrile world of escalating conflicts, this decision must be guided by Canada’s urgent need for the right war-fighting capabilities and by alliance imperatives. On grounds of superior undetectability, operational seamlessness with allies, and ASW excellence, the German-made TKMS type 212CD ought to be Canada’s choice. Once this decision is made, we should return as our next long-term priority for Canada’s underwater fleet to nuclear-powered blue-water submarines, with VLS weapons and the ability to remain submerged indefinitely under Arctic ice.

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(A cargo ship in the strait of Hormuz [Amirhosein Khorgooi / Associated Press])

After 90-plus days of war, what impact have the US and Israeli air campaign and continuing naval blockade of Iranian ports had on the Khomeinist regime?

From the start, our view at The Diehard Optimist has been that allied policy in response to decades of Iranian aggression has been far too weak and incoherent.

We held this view long before the US and Israel began their June 2025 air strikes or the air and naval campaign launched on February 28^th, 2026. Our view last summer was that the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) had failed to end Iran’s proxy wars or its nuclear ambitions – and that Trump’s first term repudiation of JCPOA had created a void which Tehran exploited by scaling up regional aggression and enrichment of nuclear materials.

When the larger joint air campaign began on February 28^th, we were skeptical about Trump’s ability to see it through to a successful conclusion – largely because of his failure to bring allies on board; his indifference to freedom, human rights and the rule of law; and his closeness with Russia, Iran’s long-time strategic ally.

As far back as 2017 I have been calling on allies “immediately to implement political and economic sanctions against relevant state entities in Iran, Pakistan, Russia and other state sponsors of terrorism and violent extremism.”

With Assad waging genocidal war on his own people, at that time with Iranian and Russian backing, I also suggested in early 2017 that: “All available international air power should be employed to target and destroy Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), Hezbollah, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and other terrorist groups in Syria.”

Obviously, neither of those things — sanctions or air strikes to stop Assad —happened in 2017 or at any point during Trump’s first term or under Biden.

As a result, Iran’s axis of resistance continued to gather steam, culminating in the October 7^th, 2023 Hamas terrorist attacks against Israel.

Israel’s military operations since that time have cut back the military capabilities of the axis to perhaps one-third of their peak levels.

Hezbollah retains tens of thousands of fighters in Lebanon, with an arsenal of 20,000 or so rockets and missiles. But their leadership ranks have been decimated and Assad’s fall cut Iran’s land bridge to Lebanon via Syria.

Terrorist networks supported by Iran in Yemen for well over a decade remain active, but have kept attacks below a threshold that would attract renewed Saudi or UAE military engagement. Iran-backed Shia militias in Iraq have been mostly integrated into state structures, prioritizing political influence over kinetic attacks. Hamas has lost most of its leadership, and is no longer capable of mounting major attacks.

Yet so long as the Khomeinist IRGC remains in power in Iran, the prospect of revived Iranian threats to Gaza, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen or other states will remain.

So what has the US-Israeli campaign achieved to date?

First, Iranian missile, ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programmes have been severely degraded. It would take Iran several years, without external support, to develop a deployable nuclear weapon. Iran’s arsenal of existing missiles and its capacity to produce new ones has been roughly cut in half.

Second, the regime has lost many of its top leaders, including ayatollah Khamenei. But no serious armed opposition has emerged inside Iran and the regime’s repressive capabilities on the ground across the country remain robust.

Third, the regime has not given up its nuclear ambitions. Large stockpiles of uranium enriched to various grades remain untouched by US and Israeli strikes at facilities beneath Pickaxe Mountain and elsewhere.

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(‘Putin’ yesterday with deputy premier Dmitry Patrushev, who referred to him as Pavel Nikolayevich, not Vladimir Vladimirovich, his real name)

While Ukraine seizes the initiative in the drone war and weakens Russian supply lines with targeted strikes, the inevitable Russian response is already clear.

They are escalating.

In recent days, Russia has attacked civilians in Romania with a drone. They hit central Kyiv with missiles. They are reportedly preparing a major hybrid attack on a NATO member state — possibly Estonia or Latvia, or perhaps elsewhere.

These are indeed signs of desperation, as Moscow runs out of strategic options to end the war on its terms. No one should under-estimate the scale of Ukraine’s innovation-driven achievement in the drone war, which is collapsing Russia’s on-paper numerical battlefield advantages into irrelevance.

But Moscow’s nihilistic posture is hardening. One week ago, US secretary of state and national security advisor Marco Rubio reported that peace talks had stalled and no negotiations were underway.

For the first time in well over a year, the Kremlin cannot count on its prize asset in the White House even to try to impose Moscow’s will on Ukraine or its allies.

If a compliant US cannot deliver, the Kremlin will try increased military force. Mobilization of a million soldiers. Strikes against Ukraine. A hybrid operation to divide NATO. By applying enough pressure, Moscow seeks to bring Europe to heel. They assume that, with the help of online legions, a Trump will be elected in France, Germany, the UK — or all three. Then Ukraine will break.

The Kremlin has always thought this way about this war.

All of them wanted to win back Ukraine by corruption, sabotage and subversion.

Doubting a full-scale invasion would succeed, a hard core tried to talk Putin out of it in late 2021 and early 2022.

Now the same group blames Russia’s ‘loss’ of Armenia, Hungary, Moldova and Syria — plus the weakening of allies in Iran and Venezuela — on Putin’s pig-headed move.

They are determined not to make the same mistake twice.

They still aim to seize remaining areas of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia oblasts not yet occupied by Russian forces — and ultimately all of left-bank Ukraine and Ukraine’s Black Sea coastline — only after critically weakening Ukraine’s allies and partners as a prelude to defeating Ukraine itself.

These may be pipe dreams, but they animate the Kremlin’s current masters.

This hard core still believes Trump and Xi will save them. They expect pro-Russian Slovakia to be joined by other EU members with pro-Kremlin affiliations. They are confident Khomeinist Iran will prevail because Trump always turns tail.

They are returning to the game they would have pursued if the full-scale 2022 invasion had not taken place: a wide-ranging campaign of sabotage, political corruption and undermining democracy to weaken NATO and its members.

Who are ‘they’?

Nikolai Patrushev and his colleagues in the Kremlin’s long-term Chekist brain trust.

They’ve been running the country for nearly 30 years and aren’t about to stop now.

They are also trapped.

Trapped in delusions about an impending collapse of Euro-Atlantic democracy.

Trapped in lies told by commanders who claim victories for Russian forces on the front in Ukrainian Donbas and elsewhere that have not happened.

Trapped in unrealistic assumptions about the resilience of Moscow’s war economy.

Trapped in complacency about the willingness of Russians to die for a cause most already know is irredeemably lost.

Trapped behind the facade of a double that cannot yet be discarded because peace on Russia’s terms has not been achieved.

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(Separatist activists at a May 3rd pro-US rally in Edmonton)

Two major factors have brought Canada to the point where an Alberta separatist movement is consistently making headlines across the country.

The first one has a long history.

Albertans (and others in western Canada) have always reacted strongly to policies made in Ottawa that did not serve their interests.

The United Farmers of Alberta, which governed the province from 1921 to 1935, was a direct reaction to the National Policy of Sir John A. Macdonald, which created a captive market for eastern manufactures. The failure to achieve reciprocity with the US denied Alberta farmers a lucrative outlet for grain and other crops.

The Alberta Social Credit Party, in government from 1935 to 1971, was a response to Ottawa’s late adoption of Keynesianism in the Great Depression. Aberhart and Manning offered their own schemes to put money in the pockets of Albertans and save farmers from bankruptcy. Servus Credit Union — the largest in Canada today — and Alberta Treasury Branches (now ATB Financial), founded in 1938, are contemporary institutions that grew our of that era.

By penalizing Alberta for its oil wealth, Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s National Energy Policy fuelled alienation and populism across western Canada, becoming one of the key triggers for the founding of the Reform Party of Canada in 1987.

Today a legitimate new grievance has arisen because of federal government policies championed by Justin Trudeau after 2015 that seriously constrained the growth of Canada’s oil and gas sector.

In concrete terms, Canadian oil production in 2015 was about 3.7 million barrels per day (bpd). Today it is about 1.5 million bpd higher, at 5.2 million bpd.

In 2015, the United States produced 9.4 million; today it produces 13.6 million bpd — a gain of 4.2 million bpd.

Over a decade oil production grew faster in the US than in Canada.

But if Canada had not had industrial and consumer carbon taxes; if we had not banned new pipelines, refineries and tanker traffic on the Pacific coast; if we had reduced the discount on Alberta oil by opening new markets; if we had not triggered the largest capital exodus in Canadian history, estimated by RBC to total $1 trillion — Canada might easily be producing 2.0 million bpd more oil today.

The current price for West Texas intermediate crude is US $91 — or $125 Canadian. So $250 million per day in exports was lost to Canada over the past decade.

That means $91 billion in exports was lost per year. With $2.30 in total economic impact for every dollar in exports, Canada lost over C$200 billion in annual GDP.

By failing to build mines, port infrastructure and LNG export capacity over the same period, the total national opportunity cost was likely over C$350 billion — well over ten percent of today’s nominal GDP of C$3.24 trillion.

If Canada had retained a competitive tax and regulatory system over all sectors of our economy, our GDP today would almost certainly be far higher.

Canadian GDP per capita would be, on average, ten or even 20-30 percent higher.

The most direct, most brutal impact of this punitive policy was in Alberta.

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(The effigy of a Jewish man with a noose around his neck, Montreal, May 2026)

(Continued from our previous essay)

Most historians agree Hitler and the Nazi regime were motivated to wage wars of conquest at least partly by hatred of Bolshevism and rivalry with the British empire and the United States. But from the start, the primary goal of Nazi Germany was to restore the empire it had lost in 1918 and destroy the Jewish people.

In fact, they saw these objectives as inter-linked. The 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact made Stalin’s USSR a key enabler of the Holocaust, which intensified dramatically after the Nazis had occupied most of western Europe.

By 1945, the Jewish population of the USSR had fallen to about 2.3 million. It stayed at this level until 1959, when it began to fall again.

By 1971, only 2.1 million Jews were left in the Soviet Union. In the 1970s and 1980s, about 300,000 emigrated. After 1988, about 1.7 million more left.

Most went to Israel, but also the US, Germany and other countries.

Today Russia has a remaining core Jewish population of only 132,000.

Consider the scale of this decline. From a peak of about five million Jews living mostly in the Pale of Settlement around 1900, Russia’s Jewish community has fallen back to being just over half the size of Toronto’s.

Pinchas Goldschmidt, the Swiss-born chief rabbi of Moscow since 1993, resigned and left Russia in 2022, shortly after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began.

What does this mean? As we rightly work to ensure Holocaust remembrance continues for future generations, we often forget the role that the Russian empire, the Soviet Union and post-1991 Russia have played as primary drivers of Anti-Semitism, enablers of pogroms and the Holocaust itself.

From the time of the partitions, Russia placed stringent restrictions on Jewish life. Starting in the early 1880s, it has been convulsed by imported and self-inflicted Anti-Semitism in times of peace, war, revolution and dissolution on a scale that has that reduced the Jewish population of Russia, once home to half the world’s Jews, to two percent of its level in 1900. Far less than one percent of the world’s Jews now live in Russia. Why? Because Russia remains the world’s most prodigious source of Anti-Semitic disinformation, policy and propaganda.

In fact, it is fair to say that the two greatest sources of Anti-Semitic ideology and violence for the past 150 years have been Russia and the Nazi regime.

The Nazis were defeated in 1945. But Russia continues to fuel Anti-Semitism through state propaganda, active measures and support for terrorism.

In pursuing this indescribably vile and dangerous agenda, Moscow’s main ally since 1979 has been Iran’s Khomeinist regime, still dedicated to Israel’s destruction.

Today’s resurgent Anti-Semitism in Toronto and around the world is mostly stoked by deliberate programmes of online hate speech backed by Russia and China, as well as activists with links to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a banned entity.

This systematic campaign of disinformation has obscured, for many, the reality of Iran’s aggression, proxy wars and state sponsorship of terrorism.

It sustains the myth in Europe and Canada that UNRWA was a humanitarian agency serving Palestinians, rather than a thoroughly compromised front for Hamas.

It has made it ‘fashionable’ to be Anti-Zionist — even though Canada spearheaded the postwar establishment of Israel as a vibrant democracy and homeland for Jews in response to the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust.

This massive disinformation has left our authorities so far unwilling to end Anti-Semitic hate speech, incitement or violence in Montreal, Toronto and elsewhere. Instead our governments fail to act to prevent deliberate targeting of people and institutions because they are Jewish — when they could do much more.

Five years before my father was born a riot took place in Christie Pits after Torontonians who sympathized with the Nazi cause unfurled a huge Swastika flag at a baseball game where one of the teams was predominantly Jewish.

Beyond Protestant-Catholic violence around the annual Orange Day parade, that riot may have been Toronto’s most “shameful episode” — in the phrase of Marcus Gee’s foreword to The Riot at Christie Pits by Cyrill Levitt and William Shaffir.

As Gee added in the 2018 revision to his foreword, “It was also the dawn of something new and really quite wonderful. It is no exaggeration to say that the city where Jew and Gentile once beat each other bloody is now the hope of the world.”

Those words could not be written today.

Beyond eight cities in the US and four in Israel, Toronto is one of four more cities — the three others are Buenos Aires, London and Paris — that are home to the world’s largest Jewish populations.

We are the only one whose motto is ‘diversity is our strength’.

Yet today we are failing our Jewish neighbours and fellow citizens.

We have left them and the entire Canadian population unprotected from hate speech backed by a hyper-aggressive Russian state. We have left them and our city vulnerable to violence orchestrated by terrorist and criminal networks backed by Iran, whose operatives continue to organize in Canada on an alarming scale.

Today’s Anti-Semitism in Canada deserves a much firmer response from all levels of government — as well as from law enforcement and the justice system.

We have made Toronto a city where people of all backgrounds are free to celebrate their ethnicity, culture and religion; to choose their gender identity and sexual orientation; to embrace indigenous and immigrant heritage; to explore art, social perspectives, political views and human values of limitless range. But we only achieved this by standing firm against hate.

I’m not sure what my father would say about what our Jewish friends are going through in Toronto today.

For a start, I know he would be agog, stunned and angry — just as many Canadian Jews, their friends and allies are bewildered, disoriented and frightened.

Standing up to this current wave of Anti-Semitism is a new test for Toronto and for Canada. Standing against Anti-Semitism is a hallmark of civilization. Allowing, appeasing or apologizing for it are signs of decline and failure.

We will not defeat war, aggression or bullying in the world by ignoring them at home.

We must end the scourge of Anti-Semitism now.

Torontonians and Canadians must show that hate speech has no place in our society; that the lessons of the Christie Pits riot and None Is Too Many policy of the 1930s and 1940s were learned once and for all; that Russia and Iran are today’s aggressors, seeking to destroy Ukraine, Israel and all democracies; that Israel and Ukraine are historic and enduring allies, friends and partners with an inherent right to collective self-defence that deserves our full support.

Those who celebrate Al Quds Day; chant ‘globalize the Intifada’ at intersections; scream ‘death to Israel’ in Jewish neighbourhoods; or hang Jewish men in effigy in the streets of Montreal have unveiled today’s Swastika flag.

Our response today must be very firm.

Russia and Iran are waging wars in Europe, Asia and Africa. They are simultaneously stoking extremism to polarize our societies and debase our response.

The roots of Anti-Semitism are deep and horrific. In 1939, hatred of Jews was a primary motive for aggression that quickly became a world war.

Russia and Iran are trafficking in such hate again today. We need to show the courage and wisdom to confront and end it here in Canada — and to defeat Russian and Iranian aggression abroad. Failure to do so will put us rapidly at risk of wider conflicts at home and overseas.

Russian chauvinist aggression has always been fuelled by Anti-Semitism, just as Nazi ideology was. Since 1979, Iran has given Moscow a new set of capabilities — dubbed the ‘axis of resistance’ in 2002 — for persecuting Jews.

Israel has rightly fought back, just as Ukraine under a Jewish president is battling valiantly to remove a huge part of Europe from the charnel house that the Russian and Soviet states have been over centuries for Jewish and other minorities.

Canada needs to take swift action against Anti-Semitic hate and join our allies to defeat chauvinistic Russian and Iranian aggression worldwide.

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(Part of a Toronto Voters’ List from 1949)

In the neighbourhood where my father grew up in the late 1940s and early 1950s, many families were Jewish.

He would regale us endlessly with stories of his life with this wonderful, warm, caring and successful community, its many memorable characters and the distinguished mark they had left on Toronto, Ontario and Canada. A huge number of these neighbours became lifelong friends. My childhood, albeit on a different Toronto street, followed a similar pattern — filled with bar and bat mitzvahs, seders and vibrant Jewish households.

My father was born only five years after the Christie Pits riot, which took place just six months after Hitler had seized power in Germany. This jolt of violence in a Toronto park showed the reach of Anti-Semitic Nazi ideology in 1933.

Like most Canadians, we grew up celebrating Canada’s role in ending Nazi tyranny — vowing never to allow the hate speech that led to the Holocaust ever to take root again.

My father died a few months’ into the large-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. He did not live to see the October 7^th, 2023 terrorist attacks that plunged Toronto, Canada and most democratic societies into a dark period of renewed Anti-Semitism, unprecedented since the 1930s.

Very sadly, Anti-Semitism in Europe, North America and worldwide has been on a steady upward trajectory since the late 2010s.

After October 7th, 2023, it spiked almost uncontrollably.

According to B’nai Brith Canada, the number of Anti-Semitic incidents across Canada — including harassment, vandalism, and violence reported via hotlines, monitoring, and other sources — rose from about eight per day in 2022 to 20 per day now.

Statistics Canada and the Toronto Police Service report that hate crimes directed against Jews or Jewish institutions now represent between 70 and 80 percent of all religiously-motivated hate crimes committed in Canada and in Toronto.

Think about what this means. Put aside for a moment your views on the Israel Defence Forces, prime minister Netanyahu or Israeli national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, whose appalling antics this week have been rightly condemned.

The cruel and dispiriting reality is that Canadian Jews are facing abuse, harassment and often violence because of the actions of the state of Israel.

No other Canadian community today faces such open and widespread expressions of intolerance. Iran recently killed tens of thousands of civilians. Russia is committing genocide in Ukraine, raining hellfire down on civilians every day. The People’s Republic of China is trampling the rights of Uighurs, Tibetans and other ethnocultural groups, as well as democratic activists in Hong Kong.

Yet Iranian, Russian and Chinese Canadians do not face open expressions of hatred or intolerance on anything close to this level for the crimes of those states.

Why is this? It is far too convenient to cite Anti-Semitism’s long history, and note its resurgence after the October 7^th attacks and ensuing conflict in Gaza.

The reality is that hate speech and large-scale hate crimes do not arise out of thin air.

The current wave of virulent Anti-Semitism in Canada and elsewhere is being promoted by online hate propaganda campaigns mounted by Russia, China and Iran, as well as networks of operatives supported by the Khomeinist state.

Canadian governments, national security and law enforcement bodies have not done nearly enough to counter this propaganda, the networks that support it and the false narratives it has been driving.

So long as our inaction continues, the current wave of unchecked Anti-Semitism is likely to grow — forcing Jewish friends and neighbours to confront the dark forces that, in many cases, prompted them to emigrate to Canada in the first place.

Take one example. On October 21^st, 1905 Zlynka, a town then part of Chernihiv governorate in the Russian empire, was upended by an anti-Jewish pogrom.

Now in Russia’s Bryansk oblast very close to the Belarusian border, Zlynka had 812 Jews out of a total population of 5,408 as recently as 1897.

After the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, under the influence of extremists like the Black Hundreds, waves of Anti-Semitic hate and pogroms rolled over Russia. With the publication in 1903 of the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a conspiratorial Anti-Semitic tract produced by Russian secret police operating in Paris, violence became more frequent. Russia’s defeat by Japan in a major 1904-05 war fed even more Anti-Jewish violence. More Jews decided to flee Russia.

One family that left Zlyatka was that of Judah Schumiatcher. At the urging of his son, Judah and his wife decided to emigrate in 1910 with their children. By 1911, they were in Canada. Judah died in 1922 in Calgary, where he is buried. His passing was lamented by the whole community.

The son in question took the name Morris. Born in Zlyatka on October 17^th, 1893, he became Morris Smith in Calgary, famous for launching the Smithbilt Hat Company — operating first in the Beltline neighbourhood, then in Inglewood.

Morris Schimiatcher/Smith served in the Canadian army in the Great War and a reserve unit of highlanders in the second. In 1946, Smithbilt produced the iconic ‘White Hat’ — a symbol of the Calgary Stampede, Alberta and Canadian culture ever since. Morris Smith died in Calgary in 1953.

The Schumiatchers migration from Zlynka was typical for Canadian Jews — most of whom emigrated from the Russian empire between 1880 and 1914.

Before the First World War, the Russian empire accounted for between two-thirds and three-quarters of Jewish emigration to Canada. Austria-Hungary (mostly Galicia) furnished ten to twenty percent. Others came from Romania and Germany.

Jews had never been welcome in Russia. Starting in 1791, they were confined by Catherine the Great to the Pale of Settlement — an area roughly corresponding to today’s Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Lithuania and eastern Latvia.

Outside that area — including in large cities like Moscow, Riga and St. Petersburg — Jews needed special permission to live and work. Zlynka is one of the rare towns in today’s Russia that had been within the Pale of Settlement.

Before being incorporated into Russia, Jews had flourished for centuries within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and its predecessor regimes.

In 1750 — over two decades before the first of three partitions of Poland — the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth hosted the world’s largest Jewish population, amounting to 750,000 out of a global total of about 1.2 million.

By 1880 there were roughly 7.8 million Jews worldwide — about half of whom lived in Russia’s Pale of Settlement, which had previously been part of Lithuania, Poland and right-bank Ukraine. By 1897, the global Jewish population was well over ten million, with half still living in Russia.

But Jews were leaving Russia. By 1914, about two million Jews, mostly from Russia, had emigrated to the United States and Canada.

Another half million followed in the 1920s and 1930s.

By the time the world’s Jewish population reached its peak of almost seventeen million in 1939, about ten million lived in Europe — one third in independent Poland; about three million in the Soviet Union; the rest in Austria, Hungary, Germany, Romania, the UK, France and elsewhere. Over five million Jews lived in North or South America, mostly in the US, 166,000 in Canada.

By 1939 Zlynka had only 432 Jews. Most were killed in the Holocaust of bullets during the post-1941 Nazi occupation. Only a tiny handful survived the war.

Even with the establishment of the state of Israel in 1947 and the flourishing of postwar Jewish populations in the United States, Canada and elsewhere, the global Jewish population is about sixteen million — one million less than in 1939.

The Holocaust continues to cast a long and awful shadow.

(To be continued)

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(Marshal Zhukov arriving on Red Square on June 24th, 1945 riding Kumir (‘Idol’), a stallion from the NKVD cavalry division)

(Continued from our previous essay)

Stalin himself seems to have been almost embarrassed by the war’s legacy. Nervous about the prestige and power of the Red army in general and Marshal Zhukov in particular, he delayed a victory parade on Red Square until June 24^th, 1945.

During Stalin’s remaining years in power and those of his successor Nikita Khrushchev, no parade was held on Red Square on May 9^th.

They understood that the Soviet ‘victory’ had only emerged gradually and awkwardly from a series of unimaginable horrors. The war’s early disasters had made the atrocities of Russia’s civil war seem quaint by comparison.

Decimated by Stalin’s unrelenting purges in the 1930s, the Soviet army was totally unprepared in June 1941 for Hitler’s onslaught, which sliced quickly through all of Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states, as well as the most populated areas of European Russia, to reach the Volga and Caucasus in the south. In the north, Nazi forces encircled Leningrad, which was brutally starved into near-submission.

The Nazis raised their flag on Mount Elbrus, the highest peak in Europe, on August 21^st, 1942. By November, they had taken the city of Vladikavkaz.

Soviet forces suffered hideous defeats. To keep soldiers from deserting en masse, cruelly efficient disciplinary units under NKVD control murdered an estimated one million Soviet servicemen.

This uncomfortable history was of course ruthlessly suppressed.

But the reality was clear to tens of millions of eyewitnesses who survived. When the Red army advanced, it left devastation, famine and sexual violence in its wake. Astonishing numbers of Ukrainians, Belarusians, Latvians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Poles and others nevertheless took up arms to oppose or resist Soviet forces, knowing conquest by Moscow would only mean a new subjugation.

For all of these reasons, full Soviet military parades took place on Red Square after 1945 only on three occasions, all major anniversaries, in 1965, 1985 and 1990.

It was only after the collapse of the Soviet Union that May 9^th ‘victory day’ parades on Red Square became an annual event.

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Much ink was spilled in recent weeks over Moscow’s fascist parade on Red Square, which for the first time this year lacked military hardware of any kind and had to ask Kyiv’s permission to proceed without fear of Ukrainian drone attacks.

A fundamental issue remains unresolved: what kind of victory was won in 1945?

Certain features are clear enough. By late spring 1945, western Europe had been liberated — mostly by American, British, Canadian and French armies. They defeated Nazi occupiers in Italy, France, the Benelux and Scandinavian countries, as well as in Greece and most of Germany, By May 8^th, the Nazi regime lay in ruins.

By late summer, Japan had also been defeated, which liberated many more countries and territories. These are the victories we celebrate on May 8^th in Europe and on August 15^th and September 2^nd in Asia. For many independent states freed by allies from Nazi or Japanese tyranny, these anniversaries meant an end to violence and repression and the start of democratic renewal.

However, the Soviet Union and Russia never celebrated these anniversaries. Stalin did not see the Nazi surrender at Reims on May 7^th, which was effective on May 8^th in western time zones, as sufficient.

At his insistence, a second instrument of surrender was signed in the Soviet-occupied sector of Berlin late on May 8^th, when Moscow was already in the early hours of May 9^th. Stalin announced this formal victory to the Soviet people later that day.

This was much more than ceremonial one-upmanship. By carving out a moment in history in which Soviet commanders would have pride of place, Stalin aimed to demonstrate that without the scale and sacrifice of the Red army, the Nazi regime would have remained in power. He wanted to be seen as Europe’s pre-eminent conqueror. In all subsequent ideology and propaganda, Moscow sought to ensure the lion’s share of credit for Nazi defeat went to the Soviet Union.

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The only real debate behind the scenes in Moscow is about who will take over from ‘Putin’ — the exhausted lookalike who never really filled the space left by Putin but was a convenient placeholder for feuding factions over three years.

All signs indicate this interregnum is coming to an end.

What are those hints? The public profile of ‘Putin’ is in sharp decline. He said very little about the US-Israeli war against Russia’s ally Iran, or Trump’s naval blockade. Russia lost its main proxy in Europe. Moscow’s Afrika Corps is playing defence in the Sahel. Ukraine’s deep strikes are decimating Russian refineries and ports. Rumours of bunkers and coups, likely stoked by the Kremlin itself, are back.

The double’s schedule is thin. Since the start of this month, his only public appearances have been with a truck plant director and the head of Mordovia, an impoverished republic of 800,000 in the Volga basin.

On the last day of April he was ‘busy’ interviewing candidates to run Dagestan, an even poorer republic in the Caucasus decimated by recent floods. In a sign of the times, Moscow’s choice fell on yet another ethnic Russian.

‘Putin’ is not even allowed to speak himself about his regular chats with Trump, which are instead summarized on the Kremlin website by an aide.

The Soviet Union went through a period of gerontocracy in the early 1980s under a series of ageing leaders — Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko. Fascist Russia is now in an analogous period, as the Putin brand fractures and dilutes.

None of this means change is imminent. No Gorbachev is waiting in the wings.

But autocratic Moscow is at an impasse. One major obstacle continues to block the transition to a new government, and eventually a new president.

This is Ukraine’s heroic resistance to the pressure it has been under for over a year from Trump and his team, acting as conduits for Kremlin’s attempts at coercion. In a nutshell, Ukraine has refused to give up the parts of Donbas it still controls — the so-called ‘fortress belt’ — because it knows from bitter experience and centuries of history that such concessions would only feed further Russian aggression.

The Kremlin succession was supposed to happen after the war ended on Moscow’s terms. Trump’s arm-twisting and cutting of virtually all US military assistance to Ukraine was supposed to deliver this result.

Yet Trump has not delivered. Instead Ukraine has taken the initiative in the drone war, has damaged energy and military infrastructure across Russia, and is now helping Gulf states defend themselves from Iranian attacks.

As a result, any new Russian president would take office in conditions of growing domestic penury and repression. The Russia internet has been heavily restricted. Bank accounts are facing confiscation. National mobilization to cover battlefield losses may see over 300,000 young men conscripted as early as this month.

All of this has led to a new ‘battle under the carpet’ — a Russia idiom widely used to refer to power-brokers scrambling for advantage behind closed doors.

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(British prime minister Tony Blair with Russian presidential candidate Vladimir Putin at the Mariinsky theatre in St. Petersburg on Saturday March 11th, 2000. The performance was a premiere of Prokofiev’s War and Peace, a four-hour opera adapted from Tolstoy’s novel that was directed by Mariinsky director Valeriy Gergiev, a Putin fanatic, later a fierce supporter of Russia’s genocidal invasions of Ukraine.)

Democracy has been backsliding for two decades. Large-scale conflicts are multiplying. International trade and energy markets are in crisis. Direct investment — beyond AI — is in a slump. How did we get here?

The roots of today’s malaise can be traced back to four major mistakes — all made at the very start of this century. All of today’s major threats — authoritarianism, aggression, economic nationalism — have their origins in 2000-01.

The first mistake was allied misreading of Vladimir Putin. President Bill Clinton had met him on September 12^th, 1999 — when Putin was still only prime minister — at the APEC summit in Auckland, New Zealand. This was in the middle of the false-flag apartment building bombings, organized by Putin’s crony Patrushev, that terrorized Russia, were blamed by the Kremlin on Chechens, and propelled Putin to the presidency as a ruthless wartime leader.

It was Tony Blair who made the cardinal error. He accepted an invitation floated by, as senior MI6 officers later confirmed, a senior Russian intelligence official. As a result, Blair was in Russia on March 10-11^th — just over two weeks before Russia’s March 26^th presidential elections. He praised Putin effusively, calling him “impressive” and “highly intelligent” — someone who “wants to modernize his country.”

This helped Putin win. It also blunted allied criticism of Moscow’s genocidal war in Chechnya for which the UK provided significant military exports to Russia. Putin visited the UK in April, after his election victory, then again in 2001 and in 2003 for a state visit. In all, Putin came to the UK seven times as president — five times with Blair as prime minister and twice when Cameron was in office.

During Putin’s December 2001 visit Blair told Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya — murdered in 2006 for her criticism of Russian atrocities in Chechnya — that: “It’s my job as Prime Minister to like Mr Putin.” Italy, France and Germany welcomed Putin as president even more often — eleven, seventeen and eighteen times, respectively, over only twelve years. Prior to Trump hosting Putin in Anchorage last summer, the Russian president’s last visits to G7 countries were to a G8 summit in the UK in 2013 and to the fall UN General Assembly in New York in 2015.

Needless to say, the damage done by Russia to international peace and stability was seriously exacerbated by this continuous failure of G7 leaders to: (i) see Putin for what he was; (ii) deter or respond decisively to genocidal wars and invasions in Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, Ukraine, Libya, Mali and elsewhere; or (iii) fully arm Ukraine.

The second major strategic mistake was allied failure to counter Iran’s proxy wars. When Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon on 2000, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) doubled down on support for Hezbollah, which began to hijack the Lebanese state. In the wake of the failure of the Middle East Peace Process at Camp David, also in 2000, Arafat and the PLO became more dependent on terrorist groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), both heavily backed by Iran.

They launched the second intifada. In response to George W. Bush’s ‘axis of evil’ speech, Iran formally launched its axis of resistance in 2002. At first, Iran’s proxy network comprised Hezbollah in Lebanon, Assad’s regime in Syria and Hamas/PIJ in the occupied territories. The US-led invasion of Iraq broke Sunni-dominated Baathist power but boosted Iran-backed Shia militias in Iraq, giving Tehran an even wider range of proxies to use to disrupt and influence events across the Middle East, culminating in the October 7^th, 2023 terrorist attacks against Israel.

The third allied mistake was to welcome China into the WTO in late 2000. China did not meet WTO requirements for currency policy, rule of law, market access, transparency or non-discrimination. It still does not meet them. The hopes entertained by many in the 1990s that China would become an open society with free markets were never realized: in fact, the opposite has occurred. Instead China today is a repressive surveillance state with a top-down, mostly planned economy, which marginalizes entrepreneurs. China now relies on backward-looking mercantilist manipulation to expand exports, undervalue its currency and block imports — in effect, externalizing the costs of weak domestic demand. This approach is generating massive, untransparent levels of debt, which are unsustainable. As Michael Pettis has recently argued, this addiction to exports may end up bankrupting China. In the meantime, it has allowed the Chinese Communist Party to upgrade its military capabilities and extend its machinery of repression to support genocide at home, intimidation of dissidents worldwide, support for Russia’s war against Ukraine, weapons for Iran’s wars in the Middle East, and threats against Taiwan.

The fourth allied mistake was indifference towards the state structures enabling and hosting Al Qaida since it was founded in Peshawar, Pakistan in 1988. This relative lack of care continued after the attack on the US navy destroyer USS Cole on October 12^th, 2000, when it was refuelling in Aden, Yemen, which followed bombings of US embassies in East Africa in 1998 that killed 224 people and injured over 4,500. The USS Cole incident came as the Clinton Administration was winding down ahead of November 7^th US presidential elections. Ironically, the incoming Bush Administration did not adopt a strategy for countering Al Qaida until September 10^th, 2001.

(Port side damage to the guided missile destroyer USS Cole as photographed on October 12th, 2000 [US Navy/AFP])

Disregard of Al Qaida was quickly replaced by neglect of Pakistan’s role. When the US responded to the 9/11 attacks, the military focus became Afghanistan — though Osama Bin Laden had crossed into Pakistan’s Kurram agency on December 16^th, and remained there until killed by US special forces on May 1^st, 2011. Al Qaida number two Ayman al-Zawahiri also fled to Pakistan early on, surviving to return to Taliban-held Kabul in 2021, where he was killed by a US strike in 2022. The failure to counter Pakistan’s systematic support for Al Qaida and the Taliban led to the failure of the US-led mission in Afghanistan and the Taliban’s return to power, with Pakistan’s full support, in 2021. The final phase of Pakistan’s military campaign in support of this objective began exactly five years’ ago today.

These mistakes had far-reaching consequences. Complacency towards Putin led to growing European and British energy dependence on Russia — the proceeds of which fuelled Moscow’s wars of conquest starting in 2008. Appeasement of Iran and Pakistan allowed terrorism to escalate into a worldwide threat, setting the stage for the emergence of ISIS and Al Qaida offshoots in many theatres. China’s manipulation of its economy to boost exports to achieve growth despite weak domestic demand led to global imbalances that still fuel populism.

These were not small miscalculations. They were strategic decisions, with disastrous outcomes. In 2018, former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove, who had been in that office at the time of Blair’s visits, admitted — with considerable retrospective regret — that by orchestrating this visit the UK had been consciously aiming to help Putin win the election — as well as to promote the interests of oil giant BP. Many senior policy-makers knew that Pakistan and Iran were backing groups that killed NATO troops in Afghanistan and mounted terrorist attacks across Europe. But they were unwilling to confront this aggression. They believed such issues could be managed — until they no longer could. Generations of politicians and business leaders, especially in the US, defended commercial integration with China, while refusing to acknowledge any causal relationship between China’s inflated exports and the hardship, alienation and populism they engendered across OECD and many other economies.

The highest price of all for these mistakes was paid by Syrians, Ukrainians, Afghans, Palestinians and Israelis — as well as the citizens of dozens of other countries affected by Russian military adventures, Chinese support for autocrats or Iran’s reckless war-mongering. The UK has paid a very specific price, in the form of Brexit, for misjudging Putin and accommodating massive Russian oligarch influence over two decades. The US is still facing a reckoning in the form of Trump, whose obvious subservience to Moscow on many issues is still dismissed as a hoax by many Americans. The blows to US and NATO military prestige inflicted by Pakistan in Afghanistan; by Iran in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere; and by Russia in Syria, Libya and elsewhere have yet to be fully tallied. France, Germany, Italy and other states (including Canada) have also paid a high price for complacency in the face of escalating Russian, Chinese and Iranian hybrid attacks, which reshaped public opinion and damaged democracy.

The response to these four major mistakes was delayed by pervasive online disinformaton and polarization — mostly fuelled by China, Iran, Pakistan and Russia. In an essay published last September, we described today’s world as still paralyzed by the aftermath of these mistakes, with autocrats in the ascendant.

There are some signs that autocrats may finally be losing ground. US and Israeli military action against Iran has already curbed the capacity of the Khomeinist regime to sustain its proxy wars. But these gains could still be reversed, especially given Trump’s beholdenness to Iran’s main partner, Moscow. The solution now is for all allies to respond properly to aggression, as the US is doing with its naval blockade of Iran, and to sanction countries that sponsor aggression or distort their economies to achieve artificial and ultimately unsustainable trading advantages.

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(Taliban fighters in Kandahar, September 1st, 2021/AFP)

Tomorrow it will have been five years since Pakistan launched the final phase of its campaign to reconquer Afghanistan.

They did not carry out this campaign with regular forces. They did it with deniable, irregular troops belonging to listed terrorist groups.

The Pakistani army is organized into nine corps — five of which are based in Punjab, facing India. I Corps is in the northern areas of Kashmir, which have been occupied by Pakistan since partition. V Corps is based in Sindh.

XI Corps is based in Peshawar in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, facing Afghanistan. XII Corps is in Quetta, Baluchistan, also facing Afghanistan.

(The badge of Pakistan’s XII corps, based in Quetta)

But there is another silent, unacknowledged corps. It does not wear a uniforms. It wears shalwar kameez. It carries a mixed bag of weaponry. It is not in the formal chain of command. It includes the Taliban and other terrorist groups.

These unacknowledged units report through Directorate S of the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s hydra-headed equivalent of the the Soviet Union’s KGB, to the chief of the army staff (COAS).

They are the covert action arm of Pakistan’s armed forces, supporting terrorist proxies engaged in continuous combat, subversive and terrorist activities in Afghanistan, Kashmir, India, elsewhere in South Asia, the Middle East and around the world.

Five years ago this week, these assets were poised to begin their march on Kabul, violating almost every major term of a disastrous UN-supervised agreement the Taliban had signed with the Trump administration in 2020.

We should not have been surprised that this was happening. We were told at the time what was about to happen by the architect of strategic depth, Pakistan’s policy of large-scale support for terrorist proxies in Afghanistan and elsewhere to compensate for a brutal defeat by India in what is now Bangladesh in 1971.

These are the words General (r) Mirza Aslam Beg wrote in a column in The Nation, a Pakistani daily, on April 20^th, 2021:

“If the foreign troops do not leave by May 1, 2021, the Taliban in any case, would launch an all out offensive to consolidate their hold over the held territories, forcing the Afghan government under siege, in towns and cities.”

And so they did, with their Pakistani sponsors (who go unmentioned by Mirza, but are very much implied in everything he writes) in full support. On May 1^st, 2021 the Taliban, Haqqani network and other groups backed by Pakistan’s army controlled much of Afghanistan’s rural hinterland. But the cities were still under the formal control of Afghan government forces numbering in the hundreds of thousands. As late as February 2021, over 9,500 NATO troops remained in the country. Afghanistan had and still has 34 provinces: as late as the end of July 2021, not a single provincial capital had fallen to the Taliban or other proxies of Pakistan’s Directorate S.

(The Taliban flag over Kabul’s presidential palace, August 15th, 2021)

Then on August 6^th Zaranj in Nimroz fell. By August 12^th-13^th, the Taliban were in Kandahar. On August 15^th, Kabul fell to the Taliban.

On September 4^th, the director general of ISI Lt. Gen Faiz Hameed — who was responsible for Directorate S and the operation as a whole — visited Kabul where he took tea in the Serena Hotel and assured the world that ‘everything would be fine’.

Why did Pakistan and its proxies succeed? Because the US was cutting off air and logistical support to Afghanistan’s national security forces. Because policy-makers in Washington and chanceries around the world stubbornly believed that a moderate Taliban would emerge, ready to engage in power-sharing with Afghanistan’s legitimate government — a legacy of twenty years of regular voting and a parliament whose lower house was over one-quarter female. Because there was no strong political pressure in Europe, North America or anywhere on governments to change course or take a strong stand against these trends. Because, to be brutally honest, allied political leadership and public support for Afghanistan and for using armed force to defend political freedoms and basic human dignity had evaporated.

The result is that, as we noted in a previous essay, we lost. Allies lost. The US lost. NATO lost. Afghans lost — almost overnight — the fragile gains of two decades.

The result has been a series of denials. The US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction alleged in November 2023 that the Taliban were diverting large amounts of US humanitarian funding, as well as military equipment left behind by US forces, to support their regime, including its violent reprisals against members of the previous government.

There are persistent rumours of a secret US deal with Taliban by which Washington continues to make payments to them in return for assurances that Afghanistan will not be used as a training ground for international terrorism and that groups associated with the Taliban will not target US assets or personnel.

Given that Al Qaida’s current leadership has been inviting terrorists from around the world to train in Afghanistan, any confidential assurances given in 2020-21 would appear to have been as worthless as the paper on which they were written — like the US-Taliban agreement itself, which both Pakistan and the Taliban shredded.

None of this has prevented Trump from becoming a ‘pal’ of Pakistan’s current COAS, himself a former DG ISI for a previous phase of Taliban recovery.

Of course, to keep up appearances Pakistan has court-martialled Faiz Hameed and given him a stiff prison sentence, ostensibly for helping Imran Khan. General Bajwa, COAS as the Taliban returned to power, is apparently in poor health. The new regime is playing up the threat to Pakistan from the Taliban, TTP, ISIS in Khorasan and other terrorist groups based in Afghanistan — as if Pakistan had had nothing to do with their genesis or with sixty years of terrorist sponsorship across the region.

The Taliban regime in Kabul remains Pakistan’s proxy – just as or even more so than Assad, Hezbollah, Shia militias in Iraq, the Houthis and Hamas have been Iran’s proxies in the axis of resistance for over two decades.

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For over a decade, Ukraine and Israel have been fighting direct aggression.

In Israel’s case, it was a threat from lethal Iranian proxies metastasizing on their borders in the aftermath of allied failures in Lebanon, Iraq and Syria — which the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action did noting to address.

In Ukraine’s case, it was a direct invasion — the very fact of which Moscow denied for years — of Crimea and parts of Donbas in early 2014 by Russia using recruited agents, special forces and rebadged army units.

Amazingly (but perhaps in retrospect unsurprisingly), this surge in aggression coincided with an allied exit from combat.

US troops had left Iraq by the end of 2011. The NATO-led air mission in Libya ended even earlier — in October 2011. No allied ground forces ever deployed there.

NATO forces handed over full responsibility for combat operations in Afghanistan to the Afghan National Army (ANA) on December 28^th, 2014.

Earlier in 2014, the US and a few allies launched an air campaign in Syria against the Islamic State in Syria/the Levant (ISIS/ISIL); by 2018-19, there were about 2,000 US troops in Syria, together with sundry allied special forces. They took little action against Assad’s forces and none against Iranian proxies.

In other words, as Iran and Russia mounted existential threats to Israel and Ukraine, allied combat operations were winding down.

The US remained Israel’s strategic military partner. Starting in 2015, Canada, the UK and US launched small military training missions for Ukraine. But otherwise the victims of Iranian and Russian aggression were left to fend for themselves.

Then came the big Russian invasion of 2022. Allies boosted military support. But the US cut it off in 2025. The EU is now finally making a 90 billion euro loan available to Ukraine that constitutes a sizeable overall increase.

Yet allies have avoided military operations, let alone combat, in support of Ukraine.

When Hamas terrorists attacked Israel on October 7^th, 2023 — partly to distract from Ukraine — allies provided little direct support to Israel outside existing channels.

Apart from partial interdiction of a few Iranian drones and missiles, allies stayed out of this conflict. Canada and others have even curbed military exports to Israel.

This decade of military inaction started to change last June when the US joined Israel in a twelve-day air campaign to destroy Iranian military and nuclear sites.

On February 28^th, 2026 Israel and the US launched a five-week operation that killed Iranian senior leaders, destroyed most of their navy, and seriously damaged the capacity of the Khomeinist regime to pursue ballistic missile, nuclear weapon, uranium enrichment, drone, air defence or other military programmes.

On April 13^th, the US blockaded Iranian ports.

The Diehard Optimist has been sceptical from the start about the Trump Administration’s Iran strategy. We doubted that a president so in thrall to the Kremlin could curb or prevent, in any enduring way, a Russian ally’s ability to pursue proxy wars or aggression in other forms.

We had observed the TACO trade, and were glad it applied to Canada and Greenland as well. We were not aware — until very recently — of Trump’s hawkish views on Iran from the 1980s, dating all the way back to the 1980 hostage débâcle.

Be those circumstances as they may be, the US has now re-entered combat against a major aggressor on a scale we have not seen for well over a decade.

This military campaign so far has not been flaky or impulsive. It has reflected competent military planning by the Pentagon and CENTCOM. So far it has devastated Iran’s military and war-fighting capabilities.

Now the blockade is devastating their economy.

We have not seen naval blockade of one or more country’s ports or shipping on such a scale since the 1990 Gulf War or the 1962 US naval quarantine of Cuba.

By way of comparison, the blockade of Venezuela earlier this year involved one carrier strike group — about a dozen warships in total.

The 1962 operation in Cuba was much larger, as were operations in the Persian Gulf in the 1990s, which continued for over a decade after Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. The US now has three carrier strike groups supporting its blockade of Iran.

The US position is stronger partly because US oil production is eight million barrels per day higher than in 2010, making it the world’s top producer.

What will be the result of this blockade?

The first goal should be to end Iran’s external aggression, including its nuclear ambitions. The second should be to end domestic repression in Iran. The third should be to set conditions for a new regime that unlocks the potential of this great country and its people. Will any of these goals be achieved?

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(St. Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv built in 1011)

For Moscow, lies are weapons of war.

For several years after 2014, Russia pretended it was not invading Ukraine. In 2022 feeble fibs about NATO and ‘Ukrainian Nazis’ presaged a larger onslaught.

Only a dwindling number of people — including Bulgaria’s next prime minister — still believe such fabrications. They aim to deflect, distract and exhaust.

The reality is that the Russian empire conquered territories now constituting Ukraine starting in the mid-seventeenth century. By the time of the third partition of Poland in 1795, Moscow had absorbed left- and right-bank Ukraine (including the Cossack Hetmanate), Volhynia, Crimea and southern coastal areas. Only Eastern Galicia, Bukovina and Transcarpathia remained under Austrian control.

Even under Russian and Austrian suzerainty, Ukrainian, Crimean, Polish, Galician, Ruthenian, Jewish, Belarusian, Greek, Romanian, Cossack, Transcarpathian Hungarian and other identities still flourished. But sovereign control of Ukraine lay mostly in Moscow and, after 1712, in St. Petersburg.

After 1815, Russia’s tsar became king of Congress Poland.

Ukrainians, Poles, Belarusians and others rose up against Moscow at regular intervals over two centuries of domination.

In 1917, Ukrainians proclaimed an independent republic. In 1991, they regained full independence, which they have been defending ever since.

Moscow is embarrassed by this tortured history. So they try to re-write it. In July 2021 — less than a year before the full-scale invasion — Putin published a pseudo-intellectual ‘article’ on “the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians.”

This fascist manifesto was meant to cloak his obsession with reconquering Ukraine in a veneer of historical respectability. As with all tracts by autocrats bent on retaking lost territories by force, it is a load of cliché-ridden, propagandistic palaver.

Its vacuousness also explains why Ukraine is winning. Putin claims Ukraine is predestined by culture, ethnicity, language and religion to be subordinate to Russia. He ascribes all moments of Ukrainian autonomy to foreign hands — Europeans (usually Poles, Lithuanians or Germans), or after 1991, Americans.

These claims are just another deceitful confection.

They are anchored in one central assertion, which has a very long provenance. As the Kremlin ‘article’ puts it: “Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians are all descendants of Ancient Rus, which was the largest state in Europe.”

So what was ‘Rus’ — or Київська Русь in Ukrainian?

It was a principality founded by Norse/‘Varangian’ traders from what is today Sweden who settled at Novgorod before making Kyiv their capital around 882.

Under Grand Prince Sviatoslav, Kyivan Rus conquered the Khazar Khaganate, whose rulers were Jewish with a capital near Astrakhan, around 965.

Under Grand Prince Yaroslav the Wise (978-1054), who ruled for 35 years, Kyivan Rus had a claim to be Europe’s largest state.

Kyiv was one of Europe’s largest cities. Yaroslav’s daughters married kings of Norway/England, Hungary and France. Over two centuries, members of the Rurikid clan entered over 60 marriages with European royal households.

Agatha, another daughter of Yaroslav, probably married an exiled member of the English royal house of Wessex in Hungary. She became the mother of Saint Margaret of Scotland — ancestor to every subsequent Scottish monarch save one.

These ties are detailed in ‘The Ruling Families of Rus’ – a 2023 book by Christian Raffensperger and Donald Ostrowski. It builds on a 2013 work by Raffensperger — ‘Reimagining Europe: Kievan Rus’ in the Medieval World, 988-1146’.

For obvious reasons, today’s Kremlin fascists have a hard time accepting that Kyivan Rus became a major European power before Moscow was even founded. In 880, ‘Rus’ was a group of Norse warriors; by Yaroslav’s time, it was a Slavified state — decades before Moscow was hewn out of the boggy forest.

In Kyivan Rus, Moscow had no role. Less than a century after Moscow’s founding, it was sacked by the Golden Horde — as were cities like Vladimir and Kyiv itself.

Kyiv regained its freedom relatively quickly, when Grand Duke Algirdas of Lithuania defeated a Tatar force in 1362-63.

Moscow continued to pay tribute to the Mongol state until 1476 and faced down Tatar military power in 1480 under Ivan III. Even then, Crimean Tatar khans sacked Moscow again in 1521 and 1571. In the sixteenth century, six other major attempts were made to take Moscow and four more in the seventeenth century.

Moscow only started to become a force in European history after the Golden Horde and the Crimean Tatar Khanate had been defeated.

Moscow launched its conquest of Siberia in the 1580s; by 1598, it controlled most of western Siberia. By the 1630s it had reached Yakutia and the Pacific.

These conquests are memorialized in the St. George’s Hall of the Great Kremlin Palace. Some territories were lost in 1917 but — by allying with Hitler and steam-rolling Churchill and Roosevelt — Stalin expanded Soviet territory.

When the USSR fell apart, and Ukraine, Belarus and other states resumed their independence, many in Moscow expected another restoration to follow in due course within the framework of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

When this did not happen, Moscow used Chernomyrdin to turn economic screws. When Ukraine still chose Europe in 2004-05, Moscow fed oligarch-led corruption, eventually installing their placeman Yanukovych in 2010.

When Yanukovych tried to eviscerate Ukraine’s cooperation with Europe in 2013, he was ousted. Moscow invaded in 2014 and again in 2022.

Only a hardened ideologue could still see ‘historical unity’ between invading Russians and the Ukrainians who have been defeating them at such great cost.

In fact, Moscow is not an heir to Kyivan Rus but rather to the Golden Horde. Moscow’s military success under Ivan III came with — in the words of the great British medievalist John Fennell — “cultural depression and spiritual barrenness. Freedom was stamped out within the Russian lands. By his bigoted anti-Catholicism Ivan brought down the curtain between Russia and the west.”

Towards the end of the 360-year era of Kyivan Rus, Galicia-Volhynia in the west and Vladimir-Suzdal in the east vied for influence, as did Chernihiv and Smolensk.

Moscow was not a factor. Free Kyiv joined the grand duchy of Lithuania. When Crimeans sacked Moscow, Kyiv was in the Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth.

Yet when Ivan IV made himself tsar in 1547 and Peter the Great emperor in 1712, they claimed to rule “all Russia” or “all the Russias.”

The very word ‘Russia’ implied Moscow and Kyiv were one, as Putin absurdly argued. This claim to the Kyivan Rus legacy is both retrospective and fraudulent.

They are not one. British monarchs may have a stronger claim to be kings of France.

Moscow’s only path to Kyiv is invasion and violent irredentism. National freedom, self-determination and the rule of law are with Ukraine and Kyivan Rus.

To defeat Moscow’s aggression, Ukraine needs more support, as a decorated Canadian army officer has argued today. It should have been invited to join NATO years ago.

We need to see Kyivan Rus as a European and Ukrainian story — one that has often required defending against invaders from the east.

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