US Hubris Caused the Ukraine War
A conversation with Professor Jonathan Haslam on Hubris: The Origins of Russia’s War Against Ukraine
Ian Proud, Sep 03, 2026, https://thepeacemonger.substack.com/p/us-hubris-caused-the-ukraine-war?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=3221990&post_id=213955256&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
The war in Ukraine did not begin because nobody saw it coming. It began because too many people in Washington decided the warnings did not matter.
That is the argument of Professor Jonathan Haslam’s book, Hubris: The American Origins of Russia’s War Against Ukraine. After reading it, and after talking to him at length, I think the title is earned. Not because Russia bears no responsibility for launching a war. It does. But because the road to that war was paved, over three decades, by American policy after the Cold War — and by a Western inability to understand responses from Moscow that were, in fact, highly predictable.
Haslam did not set out to write a book about Ukraine. His publisher asked a simpler question: why, after the end of the Cold War, did things not get better?
The answer he found in the archives was not a mystery of Putin’s psychology. It was a record of American decisions.
Fear of being pushed out of Europe
The United States did not greet the Soviet collapse as an unalloyed gift. George H. W. Bush and his advisers feared that the rationale for American power in Europe would disappear with the enemy.
NATO had been the instrument that kept Washington in the European security order.
If that order no longer needed an American security umbrella, the United States might be edged out of a market and a political theatre it considered essential.
Haslam’s point is not that Europeans were clamouring to evict America. They were not.
It is that Washington acted as if they might — and concluded that NATO had to be preserved, then enlarged, then given a purpose beyond the defence of Western Europe.
When Bush floated the idea of expanding NATO’s remit globally, François Mitterrand’s reaction was blistering. The Soviet Union had just collapsed. Why expand the alliance’s mission across the planet?……………………………………………………..
NATO expansion appealed to migrant communities in the United States whose families had suffered under Soviet domination. It also appealed to a bureaucracy that, Haslam argues, had learned to need enemies………………….
The people who did know Russia were cut out. George Kennan — the architect of containment, no romantic about Moscow — opposed enlargement as a provocation that would end in confrontation……………………….
Strobe Talbott, Clinton’s own point man on the former Soviet Union, wrote that putting Ukraine on a NATO membership list was dangerous and would lead to conflict.
Haslam found that memorandum in the files. Read it now and the hair goes up on the back of the neck.
Almost everything Talbott feared came true…………………………………..
From the mid-1990s, Washington was already contemplating Ukraine as a future NATO member, even while selling Moscow the Partnership for Peace as something other than enlargement by another name. The Russians noticed the gap between the language of partnership and the practice of expansion.
They were meant to.
Or rather, they were not meant to be taken seriously when they did.
To Russian military planners, Ukraine and Crimea were not sentimental extras. They were part of the southern strategic depth of the state — as Canada or Mexico are to American security thinking, as Cuba was in 1962…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
None of this is an argument for Russian victory, or for pretending the invasion of 2022 was a policing action. It is an argument for ending the habit of describing a war as unprovoked while refusing to study the provocations that were obvious to every serious Russia specialist from Kennan onwards.
Haslam’s conclusion is the one many officials still cannot say in public: the United States did not start the fighting. It started the reasons for the fighting.
If that is even half right, then more weapons and more slogans will not substitute for a settlement. They will only prolong the economic cost and the human misery.
I have spent enough years on the Russia account, including in Moscow, to know how unpopular that message is in Whitehall. It remains no less true.
Policy built on the assumption that the other side will not respond is not moral clarity.
It is negligence with a press office.
Haslam’s book is the archival case for that view. Our conversation just scratches the surface of what is a meticulously researched work that should be essential reading for politicians, policy makers and pundits in the west.
Read Hubris.
Then ask why the people who were right in the 1990s were treated as old men who did not understand the new world — a world that has since delivered exactly the confrontation they described.
You can watch conversation here:
The Russian Art of War – Why the West Has No Strategy and Ukraine will lose
Baud is careful to stress that understanding an adversary is not the same as endorsing them. Intelligence, he reminds us, comes from the Latin intelligere — to understand. Without that understanding, diplomacy becomes impossible and force becomes the only remaining instrument.
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A conversation with Colonel Jacques Baud
Ian Proud, Aug 28, 2026, https://thepeacemonger.substack.com/p/the-russian-art-of-war-why-the-west?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=3221990&post_id=211519795&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Colonel Jacques Baud, former Swiss strategic intelligence officer and author of The Russian Art of War: How the West led Ukraine to Defeat, has spent decades studying how different military cultures understand and wage war. His detailed, heavily referenced book — written early in the conflict — remains one of the clearest explanations of why Russia continues to hold the strategic advantage in Ukraine.
Baud’s central argument is simple but profound. During the Cold War, both NATO and the Warsaw Pact organised their forces around three interlocking levels of warfare: tactical, operational and strategic.
After 2001, Western armies largely abandoned the operational level as they shifted to counter-terrorism.
Fighting insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan reduced war to a series of tactical engagements.
When the same mindset and equipment were transferred to Ukraine, the results were predictable.
Russia never made that shift. Its art of war remains built on the classic three levels.
Early in the Special Military Operation, deep operational thrusts toward Kyiv and Kherson were designed to create strategic pressure and force negotiations. When that phase ended, Russia adjusted — not by descending into pure tactics, but by systematically destroying Ukrainian forces while still linking tactical actions to operational and strategic goals.
Ukraine, trained and equipped largely by the West, has remained stuck at the tactical level.
This difference explains much of what we see on the battlefield. Russia’s objectives have been consistent: protect the population of the Donbas, prevent Ukrainian NATO membership, and secure a neutral buffer.
The Istanbul draft of March 2022 already reflected these goals, drawing on historical models of neutrality such as Austria in 1955 and Switzerland in 1815.
The West, by contrast, has never articulated clear, measurable political objectives beyond the vague slogans of “weakening Russia” and “supporting Ukraine.”
Without clear objectives, there can be no coherent strategy and no exit plan.
Industrial capacity reinforces the disparity. Russia’s state-influenced military-industrial complex can prioritise and scale production — whether of artillery shells, missiles or drones — with a flexibility that privatised Western industry lacks.
Lead times for systems such as Patriot missiles are measured in years.
Once Russia recognised the importance of drones, it moved from relative disadvantage to local superiority through industrial mobilisation.
Baud is careful to stress that understanding an adversary is not the same as endorsing them. Intelligence, he reminds us, comes from the Latin intelligere — to understand. Without that understanding, diplomacy becomes impossible and force becomes the only remaining instrument.
The tragedy is that a clearer grasp of Russian thinking in 2022 might have spared Ukraine much of the destruction that followed.
The conversation ends with a sober conclusion. Russia has a coherent political-military strategy underpinned by industry, energy and time.
The West and Ukraine are fighting a war by committee with no clear strategic destination.
In such conditions, the side that knows what it wants — and organises itself accordingly — almost always prevails.
You can watch the full conversation here:
Provoked: How Decades of American Policy Set the Stage for Catastrophe in Ukraine
In conversation with Scott Horton
Ian Proud, Aug 29, 2026
In my conversation with Scott Horton about his landmark book Provoked: How Washington Started a New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine, one theme emerged with striking clarity: the Ukraine war that began in 2022 did not erupt from nowhere. It was the culmination of more than three decades of deliberate American choices.
Horton’s eight-hundred-page account is not a polemical rant but a meticulously documented timeline. Drawing on thousands of primary sources, he traces the story president by president—from George H.W. Bush through Clinton, the younger Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden.
The central argument is straightforward and devastating: successive U.S. administrations systematically dismantled the post-Cold War settlement, broke explicit assurances given to Moscow, and treated Russian security concerns with open contempt.
The most consequential early breach concerned NATO expansion.
During the negotiations over German reunification in 1990, James Baker, Helmut Kohl, Hans Dietrich Genscher, Robert Gates and others repeatedly assured Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move “one inch to the east.”
Those assurances were not casual asides. They formed the basis on which Gorbachev agreed to allow a reunified Germany to remain inside the alliance while Soviet troops were still stationed in the east.
Later State Department reviews under Warren Christopher quietly confirmed that the Russians had every reason to believe those promises were binding. Yet the Clinton administration proceeded with expansion anyway, first into Central Europe and later, under George W. Bush, into the Baltic states—leaving the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad stranded behind NATO lines.
Opposition to this course was widespread and bipartisan. With great prescience, George Kennan, the architect of containment, warned that the policy would produce a “devastating reaction” from Russia and that the very people dismissing those concerns would later claim the reaction proved their point.
Two-thirds of the Council on Foreign Relations opposed expansion. Career diplomats, military officers and even hardline hawks such as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski argued that Ukraine required a special neutral status—something resembling the Cold War Finland or Austria model—precisely to avoid a catastrophic collision.
Those voices were ignored.
The pattern continued.
The 2008 Bucharest Summit promised eventual membership to Ukraine and Georgia without a membership action plan or credible security guarantees—the “worst of all worlds,” as several analysts later described it.
Color revolutions, the deliberate sidelining of the Partnership for Peace, and the refusal to implement the Minsk agreements further eroded any residual trust.
When the same cohort of officials who had driven the policy under earlier administrations returned under Biden – most notably Daniel Fried – the trajectory accelerated toward open conflict.
Horton is careful not to justify Russia’s invasion. He simply insists that calling the attack “unprovoked” is an exercise in willful blindness.
The word itself, repeated endlessly by Western governments and media, seeks to close off inquiry rather than invite it.
Horton’s book reopens that inquiry with forensic detail—names, dates, cables, memoirs—leaving readers free to draw their own conclusions.
What makes Provoked essential is precisely this refusal to operate on the short time horizon of the daily news cycle.
Most public discussion still treats either 2014 or 2022 as year zero. Horton shows that the roots stretch back to the moment the Cold War ended, when a victorious America chose (to quote the title of Professor Jonathan Haslam’s also excellent book) hubris over restraint.
The result is a tragedy that was both foreseeable and avoidable.
I am taking the book with me on holiday.
It is heavy—literally and figuratively—but the weight is justified.
Anyone who wants to understand how we arrived at the present catastrophe, rather than simply recycle the slogans of the moment, should read it.
You can see the full conversation here.
The nuclear history of Port Hope – told in “Blind Faith”.
Blind Faith: The Nuclear History of Port Hope, Ontario January 15, 2015 by Dennis Riches @DennisRiches “……..hibakusha (the Japanese word for radiation victims) become invisible. When a new group of people become victims, such as in Fukushima in 2011, they feel that they have experienced a unique new kind of horror. For them, for their generation, it is new, but for those who know the historical record, it is a familiar replay of an old story. The people of Fukushima should know by now that they are bit players who have been handed down a tattered script from the past.
A case in point is “Blind Faith,” the superb 1981 book by journalist Penny Sanger, about the small irradiated Canadian town of Port Hope on the shores of Lake Ontario. (See the timeline at the end of this article) [2] In the 1970s it faced (and more often failed to face) the toxic legacy of processing first radium, then uranium for nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants.
In a saner world this book would not be out of print and forgotten. It would be a classic text known by everyone who has ever had to share his town with a dangerous corporate citizen. Then there would be no surprises when a nuclear reactor explodes or a cancer cluster appears somewhere new. It wouldn’t be a shock to see the victims themselves fall over each other in a rush to excuse their abuser, beg for a continuation of jobs and tax revenue, and threaten the minority who try to break the conspiracy of silence.
On the back cover of the 1981 paperback edition of “Blind Faith” there was an endorsement by the late great Canadian writer Farley Mowat, who passed away in the spring of 2014:
Penny Sanger has written a fascinating and fearsome account of the emotional turmoil that engulfs a small town when it discovers that its major industry is a threat to the health of its citizens. This is a classic account of how economic power enables industry to ride roughshod over those who must depend on it for their daily bread.
Although I wrote above that “Blind Faith” illustrates universal truths about what happens to communities contaminated with radiation, there are always unique aspects of the situation that come into play. In this case, we see the extreme complacency and obliviousness of Canadian society to the role that the country played in the development of nuclear weapons and nuclear power.
The uranium refinery in Port Hope was a key element in the Manhattan Project. ………
One stand-out account is that of a widow whose husband, a long-time Eldorado worker, had died of lung cancer at age 50. He had worked at Eldorado for over twenty years, during the era when workplace monitoring and standards were non-existent. Her husband was no longer there to say whether he too was “philosophical” about it and “couldn’t be bitter about it” like his wife and his daughter claimed. The widow said that in spite of her husband’s shortened life, they were grateful for the good jobs and university education that the children were able to get. Thanks to Eldorado, they had come up in the world.
Penny Sanger passed no judgment on this thinking, but I find it to be a rather disturbinging example of working man’s Stockholm Syndrome. The victim has internalized the values of the captor, and lost self-esteem and critical thinking skills in the process. The bereaved family shrugs that they “can’t be bitter about it.” They’ve internalized the value that children have to go to university to live worthwhile lives, and it’s alright if parents have to kill themselves to accomplish this goal.
It seemed to never occur to any of the Port Hope boosters that there were dozens of similar towns in rural Ontario that had found ways to survive without hosting toxic industries. I know a family of Polish immigrants who landed in Port Hope in the 1960s, and they managed to get by without working for Cameco. The children had the sense to leave town after high school when they saw their friends going straight to grim lives working with the yellowcake down at the plant. One of them managed somehow to get a couple of university degrees after he left town.
This lack of imagination among the terminally hopeful applies more widely. Not only do company towns fail to imagine less toxic ways to live, but large nations also fail to imagine new paradigms for energy and economic systems……..
“Blind Faith” is available on a website dedicated to the history of Port Hope. Since it is out of print and over thirty years old, I asked the author if she would allow its free distribution as a pdf file. She gave her permission, but of course the common sense rules apply. If you want to sell the book, ask the author for permission. If you redistribute it free, in whole or in part, do so with proper citation.Read it in a web browser:
http://www.porthopehistory.com/blindfaith/blindfaith.htm
Free download (permitted by author):
Penny Sanger, “Blind Faith” (pdf) (McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1981), 135 pages. http://www.mintpressnews.com/MyMPN/blind-faith-nuclear-history-port-hope-ontario/
Book. The Russo-Ukrainian War: Follies of Empire
By Richard Sakwa, 22 July26 https://www.ceris.be/blog/the-russo-ukrainian-war-follies-of-empire/
Overview
The number of casualties in the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war is rapidly approaching 1.5 million, with no resolution in sight … a staggering reality. Seeking to make what sense is possible of this catastrophic conflict, Richard Sakwa meticulously explores the origins, course, and consequences of the war in the sweeping context of global and domestic politics since 1945.
Sakwa’s balanced analysis centers on what he perceives as the five levels of the conflict: the dynamics of Ukrainian politics, the evolution of Russo-Ukrainian relations, the relationship between Russia and the West, broad changes in international politics, and the prospects for a viable and sustainable peace. In explaining―without endorsing―the logic behind actions on all sides, his goal is to contribute to a path toward that peace.
Reviews
“Sakwa offers a transcendent explanation for how the war in Ukraine fits into a decimated relationship between Russia and what he calls the US-led political West…. Even those who believe that the war grew out of a dance that Russia and the West did together, but that Russia’s choice in February 2022 is indefensible, will find much in the book to ponder and much in Sakwa’s hopes for the war’s outcome and future Russian-West relations to admire.”
— Robert Legvold, Columbia University
“In this deeply researched book, Richard Sakwa displays a balance rare in Anglophone writing on the subject of the Russo-Ukrainian war…. Sakwa’s superb account should be read by all who want to understand the origins of this tragic, unnecessary conflict, and how it might be ended.”
— Robert Skidelsky, University of Warwick
“Sakwa’s analysis advances the most articulated interpretation of the war through the lens of sovereign internationalism. A must-read for all those who want alternative explanations of the broader framework of the conflict, accompanied by detailed analysis of the course and consequences of the war.”
— Marlene Laruelle, George Washington University
Edge of Armageddon: why does one of the world’s top thinkers believe we’re nearing nuclear apocalypse?
Putin is so terrified of Ukraine becoming a member of Nato: that would enable the west to place nukes in the country
“With Nato weapons, Ukrainians bombed St Petersburg and they tried to bomb Moscow. So a country with nuclear weapons is being ‘bombed’ by the British. Not the British pushing the button, but the bombs come from Britain, as well as from Germany and France, with less from the US.”
In a chilling new book, theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli says we’re back on the brink – and this time, leaders chronically lack the nous of Kennedy and Khrushchev. So why is he against rearming?
Stuart Jeffries, Thu 25 Jun 2026, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jun/25/armageddon-physicist-carlo-rovelli-nuclear-apocalypse
Should European members of Nato be rearming in the face of the Russian threat? And if not, I ask Carlo Rovelli, why not? The Italian theoretical physicist seems a good person to answer these questions since his timely new book, 85 Seconds to Midnight, is subtitled A Physicist’s Argument against Rearmament.
Rovelli, 70, brown eyed, genial, with enviably luxuriant grey locks, removes his glasses before answering. “The idea of the Russian military being a threat to Europe is ridiculous. Russia can’t even get to Kyiv! A few years ago, Russia had 4% of the world’s military spending and Nato had 40%.”
At the same time, though, Russia has more than 4,000 nuclear warheads, making it the planet’s biggest stockpiler. “So we cannot take Russia down,” says Rovelli, “because it would react.” Of the three nuclear superpowers – Russia, US and China – only China has resolved not to be a first-use nuclear state. Russia, like the US, reserves the right to respond to conventional attacks with nuclear strikes.
The real problem, Rovelli suggests, is mutual fear. “We are trapped in a lack of reciprocal trust. We sleepwalk through these patterns of everybody becoming more armed, more aggressive.” He cites what happened a few weeks ago in St Petersburg. “With Nato weapons, Ukrainians bombed St Petersburg and they tried to bomb Moscow. So a country with nuclear weapons is being ‘bombed’ by the British. Not the British pushing the button, but the bombs come from Britain, as well as from Germany and France, with less from the US.”
Why was this so frightening for Rovelli? “It’s the first time a [superpower] with nuclear weapons has been actually bombed. There was a situation in which if you have nuclear weapons, you don’t get invaded. You don’t get bombed. No more.”
Rovelli invites me to consider what that bombing looks like from the Kremlin’s perspective. Moscow has long feared western aggression, he argues. A key moment came in 1962 when Americans placed nuclear missiles in Turkey. That, he argues, prompted then Soviet premier Khrushchev to put nuclear weapons in Cuba, the US’s back yard.
True, the Cuban missile crisis was de-escalated by Khrushchev and US president Kennedy, but Russian fear of western invasion persists. That’s why, Rovelli suggests, Putin is so terrified of Ukraine becoming a member of Nato: that would enable the west to place nukes in the country. Hence, Rovelli argues, Putin embarking on his full-blown invasion four years ago.
Rovelli believes this Russian aggression has caused a whirlwind of fears and clamours for rearmament in western Europe. “You have the French government saying French people should be ready again to sacrifice their children; the British government saying we should be ready for war because it might happen; the German government saying all this anti-war sentiment in schools is not good and we should change education, make war more acceptable. This is motivated by the idea that Russia is invading Europe. It’s nonsense.”
But isn’t it sometimes right to be fearful? Indeed, isn’t the lesson of the second world war that western European countries should have rearmed sooner to counter a demagogue bent on expansion? “I think everybody should read Mein Kampf,” he replies, referring to Adolf Hitler’s 1925 autobiography and manifesto. “Mein Kampf does not say, ‘We are German, we are the strongest, we are going to run the world, we are great, we are white, we are Aryans, whatever.’ It says, ‘We are weak. And the only way we have to survive is to become stronger and overcome the others.’ So what fuelled the violence of nazism was fear.”
Today’s Middle Eastern conflict has a similar basis, Rovelli contends. “What fuels the aggressiveness of Israel is fear. What fuels the aggressiveness of Hamas is fear. They are going to destroy us in Gaza unless we are aggressive. To answer fear with fear, to escalate, seems to me disgusting.”
But isn’t this naive? Putin isn’t just acting out of fear, surely, but is prompted by some warped sense of historical destiny to claim Ukraine. “That’s obviously nonsense. You create these narratives that fuel tribal ideology. And that’s exactly what we don’t want. I don’t think anybody has any natural historical right to anything.”
Why should we listen to what theoretical physicists have to say about rearmament? Yes, Rovelli is the go-to guy to explain loop gravity, the theoretical framework that merges quantum mechanics with Einstein’s general theory of relativity. He is also a great populariser of difficult ideas in such books as Seven Brief Lessons on Physics and The Order of Time. But when it comes to war and realpolitik, theoretical physicists have often proved themselves utter boobs.
“We physicists,” Rovelli concedes, “did create this thing [nuclear weapons]. It is our poisoned gift to humankind. But historically, the voices of scientists – raising awareness about the nuclear risk – have been effective.” It was thanks to the wisdom of scientists and other intellectuals, he argues, that Gorbachev and Reagan were convinced to sign the now defunct 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (Start).
Equally true, though, is that theoretical physicists have been disastrous for humanity. Rovelli cites his countryman Enrico Fermi who in 1934 found a way to shatter atomic nuclei – giving humanity a new source of energy. “But the gift is too great,” writes Rovelli. “A small bit of uranium can release energy to demolish cities, burn alive millions of human beings and destroy civilisation itself.”
Consider too what happened in Copenhagen in 1941 when two great theoretical physicists, the Dane Niels Bohr and the German Werner Heisenberg, met. Bohr, who soon after the meeting was spirited to the US, came away from the meeting convinced that Nazi Germany was making a nuclear bomb to win the war.
Rovelli takes up the story: “Once in the US, Bohr said, ‘Look, this is a sketch given to me by Heisenberg of an atomic bomb.’ And it was definitely not. It was a sketch of a peaceful nuclear reactor. One of the outcomes of that was that the Manhattan Project was motivated by a belief that Nazi Germany was close to having nuclear bombs, which was completely unfounded.”
The unintended consequence, as Rovelli puts it in his book, was “the burning alive of 200,000 men, women and children in Hiroshima and Nagasaki”. Not, as some have argued, to end the war more quickly but as an immense demonstration of US power – or as he puts it: “The scream of the gorilla beating its chest and telling the forest that it is the strongest.”
Surely there were other and possibly better rationales to dropping nuclear weapons on Japan than that? I remind Rovelli of a conversation at Princeton he had with his friend and mentor, the late relativity theorist John Wheeler, who worked on the Manhattan Project. Wheeler believed bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justified to spare the enormous number of American lives that would be lost in a mainland invasion.
“John was one of the people I admire most, and half of my thinking is based on what he did,” recalls Rovelli with a sad chuckle. “He was the one who first recognised my work.” But when Wheeler invited the young Rovelli to Princeton, the pair fell to talking about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “I found the argument he used – it’s OK to kill many hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians to save the lives of a few American boys – disgusting. Not a few American boys in America living a life – but sent there to conquer an island which is not American. Japan had already lost the war.”
Rovelli’s early years help explain his revulsion for rearmament. He was jailed as a student for refusing the draft in Italy. “I’m Italian and we remember fascism grew with the idea that war is beautiful. War is what makes us great. War is fantastic.”
Let’s talk about Iran, I suggest. Isn’t it entitled to have nuclear weapons if Israel and the US do? “I don’t think we should think in terms of absolute right,” says Rovelli. “We have to live together, so we have to find compromises. If Iran did not feel under threat, it probably wouldn’t feel the need to go nuclear.”
The title of Rovelli’s book comes from the 2026 edition of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that set the Doomsday Clock at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest we’ve ever been to nuclear catastrophe. For Rovelli, the stupidity of our leaders has increased that risk. He thinks that everybody – from Trump, Putin and Netanyahu to the leaders of Nato and Iran – lacks the good sense shown by Khrushchev, Kennedy, Gorbachev and Reagan each of whom, he believes, helped pull humanity back from Armageddon.
As we finish, Rovelli asks me: “What politician has the courage to say, ‘Rather than making my own country stronger, I want to make humankind better’?’” Perhaps it’s not just my shortcomings but the nature of humanity’s plight in 2026 that no one comes to mind.
85 Seconds to Midnight by Carlo Rovelli is published by Penguin (£9.99). To order your copy, go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
New Book: The Dangers of Ionising Radiation
A Scientific Guide to
Radiation Risks for Government Agencies, Legal Professionals and Medical
Clinicians, by Dr Ian Fairlie.
Ethics Press 25th Feb 2026,
https://ethicspress.com/products/the-dangers-of-ionising-radiation
Book -Secretary Of Perpetual War
by Caitlin Johnstone (Author), Timothy P Foley (Author)
Part of: JOHNSTONE (28 books) https://www.amazon.com/dp/1923372157?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
As the US murder machine ramps up for yet another war of aggression against yet another oil-rich nation in Venezuela, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has been trying to meme his way out of a major scandal after he was exposed as having authorized the “double-tap” murder of men who survived a US missile strike on a boat in the Caribbean.
In mockery of the uproar over the news, Hegseth posted a meme on Twitter featuring an AI-generated image of the children’s book character Franklin the Turtle with the caption “Franklin Targets Narco Terrorists”. The phrase “narco terrorists” is the slogan the Trump administration has come up with to justify its extrajudicial executions of alleged drug traffickers which it has been using as a pretense to amass a major military presence in the waters near Venezuela.
I personally am glad the US has swapped out the name Department of Defense for the far more honest name Department of War. When was the last time the American military was used to defend the United States? It never happens. Call it what it is. Only thing more honest would be to call it the Department of Perpetual War.
How Zionism was sold to the world
Harriet Malinowitz’s new book, “Selling Israel: Zionism, Propaganda, and the Uses of Hasbara,” reveals how Israeli propaganda and public relations promoted Zionism while concealing Palestinian oppression and dispossession.
Mondoweiss, By Eleanor J. Bader November 29, 2025
There are a number of pressing questions at the heart of Harriet Malinowitz’s newly released book, Selling Israel: Zionism, Propaganda, and the Uses of Hasbara. “How could what was initially a small group of Eastern European Jewish thinkers and activists convince the Jews of the world to agree that they were all one ‘people’ undergoing one shared threat with one shared path to salvation – as well as a shared imperative to seek it?” she asks. “How could they convince the rest of the world to include them in the family of nations? And how could they convince all involved – including themselves – that their project of liberation was a benign and noble one to which they were entitled, producing no casualties or collateral damage?”
The answers to these queries are at the crux of Selling Israel, and the book not only systematically examines them, but dives into how hasbara – globally enacted but Israeli government-instigated propaganda and public relations efforts– has been used to boost Zionism, diminish the perception of Palestinian oppression, and promote the fallacy that the 78- year-old country began as a land without people.
The exhaustively researched work was touted by Publisher’s Weekly as “an impressive and meticulous challenge to established narratives.”
Malinowitz spoke to reporter Eleanor J. Bader about herself, her research, and her findings shortly after the book’s publication.
Malinowitz………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… During my own time on a kibbutz, there were Palestinian men working in the fields not far from the kibbutz members and international volunteers, but when we were all called in for a break in the “breakfast hut,” I saw that they simply kept working. I also met and drank tea with Palestinian merchants in the “shuk,” or Arab market, in Old Jerusalem, so I realized that what I’d been told about everyone in Israel being Jewish was untrue. I was told they were “Israeli Arabs” – without any coherent explanation. This left me completely baffled. Still, I was sure that I must be the one who wasn’t getting something…………………………
……………………….. I read Lenni Brenner’s 1983 book, Zionism in the Age of Dictators, which talked about Zionist complicity with Nazis. That provided another jolt.
I knew just enough to be excited by the first Intifada in 1987. But by the time of the second Intifada in 2002, people had cell phones and I could hear gunfire in Jenin via Democracy Now! on the radio. There were now blogs and listservs which carried information in new ways. But I was still naïve enough to be astounded that Israel refused to let a UN fact-finding team into the area.
This was a real turning point for me……………………………….
…………………………………… when I returned to the U.S., I plunged into research on the history of Palestine and of Zionism and eventually merged those interests with my research on propaganda, already well underway. I soon knew that I wanted to write a book on Zionism and propaganda, but it took me twenty years to complete the project!
Bader: The idea that God promised Israel to the Jews is largely unchallenged. Why is this?
Malinowitz: I think people are afraid to mess with other people’s religious beliefs, particularly where God is concerned. Plus, a lot of people believe the claim!
Bader: You write that Israelis rarely invoked the Nazi Holocaust before the 1960s because it was felt that the loss of six million Jews seemed like a sign of weakness, as if they’d gone to their deaths “like sheep to the slaughter.” Yet you also note that the genocide was seen by David Ben-Gurion to be a ‘beneficial disaster.’ Can you elaborate?
Malinowitz: I was shocked by how disparaged survivors of the Holocaust were in the country’s early years, as if they were a stain on Israeli masculinity that had to be expunged. Later, though, there was an ideological shift; the Israeli military reassured the world that they were strong, determined, and capable of fighting back if attacked, but at the same time the Holocaust could be invoked as a reminder of their perpetual victimhood, justifying all their exploits in the name of averting another genocide against the Jewish people. Similarly, the Holocaust has been used strategically when it serves international fundraising or is needed to garner empathy for Israel as an allegedly beleaguered nation.
Bader: Zionism was mostly promoted by Ashkenazi Jews who put forward the idea that there is one unified Jewish people. How did that idea spread?
Malinowitz: Zionism started out as an idea hatched by Eastern and Central European Jews, emerging in response to their own dire situation in the late nineteenth century. ………….For me, the claim that Israel represents all Jewish people is a fallacy. I, for one, was never consulted about this!
………………………………………………………………Malinowitz: Doubt can be a powerful weapon. There is a template that was developed by the tobacco industry that Zionists, climate and Holocaust deniers, Armenian genocide deniers, and others have used. The idea is there are competing narratives and both should be equally considered – rather than examining their credibility. This was why it took so long to convince the public that smoking caused cancer – because industry operatives challenged scientific expertise with their own “research,” leaving people thinking that the jury was still out and they might as well go on smoking until there was a clear and present danger. It’s been the same with Nakba denial. If the Zionists didn’t really force the Palestinians out in 1948, then they bear no responsibility for the refugees, right?
Bader: The idea that Israel is essential to Jewish survival has long been accepted as true. Why did alternatives to Zionism fail to gain traction?
…………………………………………………………………….., Zionists pushed the idea of Israel as the only solution t0 antisemitism, the only way Jews could be safe. …
…………………………………………………………………………..https://mondoweiss.net/2025/11/how-zionism-was-sold-to-the-world/
Radioactive Governance
The Politics of Revitalization in Post-Fukushima Japan
by Maxime Polleri, Sales Date: January 2026
https://nyupress.org/9781479836833/radioactive-governance/
Examines the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster
The 2011 Fukushima Dai’ichi nuclear disaster was the worst industrial nuclear catastrophe to hit Japan. It was a major event, rated at the highest severity, which released radioactive elements into the power plant’s surrounding environment when back-up systems failed and could not sufficiently cool the nuclear reactors. At least 164,000 people were permanently or temporarily displaced.
Radioactive Governance offers an ethnographic look at how the disaster was handled by Japan. Unlike prior nuclear-related narratives, such as those surrounding Chernobyl or Hiroshima, which focused on themes of harm, trauma, and victimization, the Japanese government consistently put forward a discourse of minimal or no radiation-related dangers, a gradual bringing home of former evacuees, a restarting of nuclear power plants, and the promotion of a resilient mindset in the face of adversity. This narrative worked to counter other understandings of recovery, such as those of worried citizens unsuccessfully fighting for permanent evacuation because they were afraid to go back to their homes.
Providing a rich theorization of how both governments and citizens shape narratives about catastrophic events, Radioactive Governance not only displays how Fukushima became a story of hope and resilience rather than of victimization, but also how radioactive governance shifted from the nuclear secrecy that characterized the Cold War era to relying on international organizations and domestic citizens to co-manage the aftermath of disasters.
No To Nuclear – Why Nuclear Power Destroys Lives, Derails Climate Progress, and Provokes War
By Linda Pentz Gunter, 8 Oct 25, https://www.plutobooks.com/product/no-to-nuclear/
There is no silver bullet for the climate crisis—but that hasn’t stopped people searching. Seizing its chance, the nuclear power industry wants us to believe that theirs is the only technical fix for our deliverance. The public, politicians and the media have been easily swayed.
This should come as no surprise. After all, the pro-nuclear PR campaign is richly funded and has an army of lobbyists sowing myths while the industry reaps the rewards of taxpayer-funded subsidies.
No To Nuclear calls the industry’s bluff. Blasting aside its claims to be safe and green, Linda Pentz Gunter makes the irresistible case that nuclear power is too slow, too expensive, too dangerous and too integrally connected to the nuclear weapons complex, to serve as a rational energy choice.
The book also delves into the lives of Indigenous peoples and communities of colour, who have been harmed the most by the nuclear sector, and questions whether the way we devalue nature and the environment is costing us the chance of a genuinely just energy transition.
Book Review: A Call to Arms About the Threat of Anti-Science
By Dan Falk. 10.03.2025. https://undark.org/2025/10/03/book-review-science-under-siege/?utm_source=Undark%3A+News+%26+Updates&utm_campaign=00d7f4a4e8-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_5cee408d66-185e4e09de-176033209
“Science Under Siege,” by Michael E. Mann and Peter J. Hotez, is an impassioned manifesto against attacks on science.
In the 1995 book “The Demon Haunted World,” the astronomer Carl Sagan warned that the United States was turning its back on science, and that the consequences would be dire. Near the start of their new book, “Science Under Siege: How To Fight The Five Most Powerful Forces That Threaten Our World,” Michael E. Mann and Peter J. Hotez cite Sagan’s vision of science as a “candle in the dark,” and argue that what the astronomer feared is now coming to pass. In fact, readers may get the impression that the situation is already much worse than what Sagan envisioned.
While Sagan was primarily concerned with the rise of pseudoscience, Mann and Hotez fear that we’re now in the midst of an anti-science boom, led by people, corporations, and governments who intentionally spread false or misleading information. “Anti-science has already caused serious illness and mass casualties in the near term,” they write. “Unmitigated, it will in the long term take millions more lives, produce misguided national policies, and have long-lasting catastrophic consequences, including potentially, the destabilization of our civilization.”
Mann and Hotez are not merely observers, but scientists who have found themselves on the front lines of the ongoing attacks on science. Mann is a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, and director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media. Hotez is a pediatrician and vaccine scientist at Baylor College of Medicine, where he is also the co-director of the Texas Children’s Center for Vaccine Development. In 2022, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on a patent-free Covid-19 vaccine.
While attacks on science have taken many forms, the authors highlight the current pushback against vaccines and skepticism over climate science as two of the most urgent issues. Mann and Hotez describe the resistance to climate science and vaccines as a one-two punch, but add that there is a third punch as well, in the form of mis- and disinformation. The authors point to the devastating consequences of resistance to public health measures, especially vaccines, which came to the fore during the Covid-19 pandemic, the death toll from which currently stands at 1.2 million Americans, according to the World Health Organization.
Many of those deaths, they suggest, could have been prevented had people been vaccinated and followed social distancing and mask guidelines. And they’re not shy about saying who’s to blame: “The deaths occurred mostly along a political partisan divide,” they write, “with those living in Republican-majority (‘red’) states disproportionately suffering most of the deaths and disabilities as a consequence of being targeted by propaganda and misinformation from elected leaders, extremist media, and the modern political Right.”
Resistance to vaccines isn’t new, but the authors argue that the anti-vaxx movement reached new heights as the pandemic wore on: “Heading into 2023, the pandemic’s fourth year, we witnessed an expanded alliance of malevolent billionaires, tech bros, and high-net worth individuals — plutocrats, prominent podcasters, and far-right extremists, including Steve Bannon and the ‘Proud Boys’ — marching at anti-vaccine rallies and joining forces with the more established antivaccine activists.”
They rebuke Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican member of Congress, for calling those who administer vaccines “medical brown shirts,” using language associated with Nazis. And (not surprisingly) they chastise those who continue to give oxygen to the long-debunked alleged link between vaccines and autism.
Then there’s the climate crisis. The world is warming, global wind patterns and ocean currents are shifting, ocean levels are rising, and extreme weather events are becoming more frequent. Mann and Hotez call out many sources of climate misinformation, including “petrostates” — nations whose revenues are largely derived from fossil fuels. (The petrostates are one of the five “powerful forces” referenced in the book’s subtitle, the others being plutocrats, propagandists, the press, and pros — referring to scholars who use their credentials to promote unsupported or contrarian views.) Of the petrostates, Russia tops the authors’ list. Citing Russia’s dependence on fossil fuels and its authoritarian leadership, including what they see as a desire to destabilize Western democracy, they write: “These factors combine in a perfect storm of consequences for the global spread of civilization-threatening antiscience.”
Physicists unleashed the power of the atom — but to what end?
From laboratory quirks to Earth-shattering weapons, a chain of discoveries reached a devastating conclusion.
Book Review, By Ann Finkbeiner
Destroyer of Worlds: The Deep History of the Nuclear Age Frank Close Basic (2025)
First, let’s clear up some potential confusion: in Destroyer of Worlds: The Deep History of the Nuclear Age, ‘deep’ in the subtitle means, not the minutiae of historic events, but ‘scientific’. Physicist Frank Close’s latest book discusses the physics and chemistry behind nuclear weapons — that is, the understanding of the atom and the energy it holds. The story begins with the discovery of electric currents that couldn’t be blocked by solid materials and ends with the technological ability to blow cities off the map.
Nature 28th July 2025, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02350-y
Book- Before Our Very Eyes, Fake Wars and Big Lies: From 9/11 to Donald Trump
Before Our Very Eyes, Fake Wars and Big Lies: From 9/11 to Donald Trump. March 2025
World-famous political analyst and editor Thierry Meyssan draws on his last 10 years in the thick of the action in Syria and Libya, where he served personally as an adviser to those governments. In “Before Our Very Eyes,” he shares the inside story of the 21st century regime change wars.
He lays bare the “Arab Spring,” the “revolutions” against Gaddafi and Assad, and the rapid rise of the jihadist monster ISIS, as masked operations of the US empire, “leading from behind.”
In “Before Our Very Eyes” he chronicles the onslaught against Syria and Libya, from the viewpoints of three camps: the foolish ambitions of the French neocolonialists, the fanaticism of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the lust for world domination of the Anglo-Zionist-American Empire.
We see how the Anglo-American axis (the US, UK, and Israel discreetly behind the scenes) deployed their iron grip on the world’s money and media to propagate a fake scenario of human rights violations. This was the cover story for the real scheme — to utterly disable the Muslim world by bringing it under the sword of fanatics like the Brotherhood, Al-Qaeda and ISIS. Vassal regimes like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan and the Emirates were assigned to do the heavy lifting.
For public relations purposes, the US pretended to fight half-heartedly against ISIS – which in fact it had intentionally created in Iraq, to divide and conquer the insurgency. The US then covertly ferried the terrorists into Libya and Syria. It continues to prop up ISIS by devious means. Thus the wars on Libya and Syria were based on treachery and fakery from start to finish – but the suffering of millions of innocent victims is all too real. A most murderous masquerade!
Memoirs of Mohamed ElBaradei: “The Age of Deception”
MEHR 17th March 2025 TEHRAN, Mar. 15 (MNA) – Firouzeh Doroshti has translated the memoirs of Mohamed ElBaradei, who served as the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in the book titled ‘The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times.
The book “The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times” which includes the memoirs of Mohamed ElBaradei from his three terms as the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has been translated by Firouzeh Doroshti and is now available in bookstores across the country.
This book takes a scrutinizing approach to nuclear diplomacy in a tumultuous phase of modern history.
The book “The Age of Deception” is viewed as a crucial resource for gaining insight into the complicated nature of nuclear diplomacy. ……
Mohammad ElBaradei, an Egyptian-born Lawyer, was the Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from 1997 to 2009.
A Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and the longest-serving Director General, who got the honour of becoming Director General Emeritus of the agency towards the end of his service.
The book is a compelling account of chronological events and challenges faced by the IAEA during his tenure.
The book covers three decades of his work on cases including Iraq, North Korea, Libya, Iran, and Pakistan, and exposes double standards adopted by the U.S. and other Western nations.
It sheds light on the behind-the-scenes workings of international organizations and the challenges of maintaining neutrality in a politically charged environment.
The book shows how ElBaradei felt that different standards were being applied to different countries’ nuclear programs.
Arguments in his book revolve around the three underlying principles of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
These essential facets of the treaty include the pledge by the (non–nuclear) members not to try and obtain or develop nuclear weapons, a sincere effort on the part of all members to lead the world towards complete disarmament, and thirdly to facilitate the use of atomic energy for peaceful purposes in all member countries with particular consideration for the needs of developing countries.
Reported by Tohid Mahmoudpour https://en.mehrnews.com/news/229527/Memoirs-of-Mohamed-ElBaradei-The-Age-of-Deception
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