Recently Ray Dalio wrote an article titled The Big Thing We Are in a World War and It Is Not Going to End Anytime Soon . I read it on LinkedIn, and this essay is my reply to it. Dalio is an American investor and the founder of Bridgewater Associates , which is one of the largest hedge funds in the world. He is known for his long term historical frameworks and his belief that economic and political cycles repeat over centuries. His work carries weight because he has spent decades studying patterns in markets and states. That is why his argument deserves a serious response rather than a casual dismissal. Dalio starts with confidence. He builds a clean arc, a world that behaves the way older worlds behaved. But the structure has changed, and once you look at the material conditions, the mechanics do not hold. He sees a rising power and a declining one. He sees blocs forming because blocs formed before. He sees the United States anchoring one pole and China anchoring the other, with ever...

  It was Tuesday 7 April in the evening when BBC News interviewed Michael Baumgartner , a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives serving on the Foreign Affairs Committee. The subject was the escalating crisis with Iran. The immediate spark was a social media post from President Donald Trump . The words were simple and catastrophic. A whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again. Let that sentence sit in the mind. A sitting American president, on a public platform, threatening the erasure of an ancient civilisation. The vocabulary is not metaphor. It is not strategic misdirection. It is the language of annihilation. Yet when the BBC interviewer asked whether this constituted genocidal rhetoric , Congressman Baumgartner did not hesitate. Oh no, he said. Not at all. And so the theatre begins. The strange ritual of contemporary Republican politics, in which elected officials must take the impulsive, the reckless, and the plainly dangerous...

For three centuries Switzerland has been the quiet witness at the edge of Europe’s storms. It was born from the wreckage of the Thirty Years War and it learned early that survival required silence. Through Napoleon’s march, through the industrial killing fields of the First World War, through the nuclear standoff of the Cold War, Switzerland held its line. It guarded the wounded. It hosted the Geneva Conventions. It kept the channels open when enemies refused to speak. It behaved, in its own way, like one of Hemingway’s mountain sentinels, watching the world’s violence from a cold height, refusing to be drawn into the madness below. That long silence ended this month. The Swiss Federal Council has now said aloud what it once only whispered. In an interview with SonntagsZeitung, Defence Minister Martin Pfister stated with clinical clarity that “the Federal Council is of the opinion that the attack on Iran constitutes a violation of international law.” He went further, saying that “the A...

On 28 February 2026 the United States began a large military campaign against Iran. President Trump eventually offered four objectives. Destroy Iran’s missile capabilities . Eliminate its navy. Prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapon . Cut off funding to its proxies . The list sounded decisive. It was not matched by the outcome. The strikes lasted about two weeks. The United States spent an estimated ten billion dollars on munitions and operations. American service members were killed. Hundreds of Iranian civilians died. Oil markets collapsed. The Strait of Hormuz , which carries one fifth of global oil, was effectively closed. Regional allies were hit by retaliation. The cost was immediate. The purpose was not. There was no evidence of an imminent threat to the United States. This was a war chosen in comfort and justified in hindsight. On 22 March Trump announced a five day pause. He spoke of productive conversations with Iran. Tehran denied any direct talks. The pause was present...

  Since Donald Trump’s rise to political prominence, questions about his mental stability have been at the centre of public and professional debate. His unpredictable behaviour, impulsive decision-making, and confrontational leadership style have raised concerns among mental health professionals, political analysts, and even some former allies. While his supporters view his approach as a necessary disruption of the political establishment, critics argue that his behaviour reflects deeper psychological and cognitive issues. So, is Donald Trump unstable? Psychological Perspectives on Trump’s Mental State From a clinical standpoint, some mental health professionals have suggested that Trump exhibits signs of psychological instability. In 2017, a group of 27 psychiatrists and psychologists contributed to The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, a book in which they warned that Trump’s behavior posed a “clear and present danger” to the nation. The authors described traits such as narcissis...

  For the past 15 years, the UK economy has been stuck in a cycle of low growth, high debt and political instability. Public services are strained, businesses are struggling to expand and the government has turned to spending cuts to balance the books. But how did Britain end up here — and is the Conservative government’s economic record to blame? To understand the roots of this stagnation, we need to examine the key policy decisions, political missteps and structural challenges that have shaped the UK’s economic trajectory since the financial crisis of 2008 . Austerity (2010–2016): Shrinking the State In the wake of the 2008 financial crash, David Cameron’s government introduced sweeping austerity measures aimed at reducing the budget deficit. Under Chancellor George Osborne, the government slashed public spending, including cuts to local government budgets, welfare benefits, public sector wages (which were frozen for years) and infrastructure projects. The goal was to rest...