Before Donald Trump puts his fake-tanned face on a 24-carat gold, 250th birthday commemorative coin and a US$250 bill, here’s a few cautionary tales that should give the American president food for thought but probably won’t.

In a much earlier era Alexander the Great was the first ruler to put his noble visage on a coin and other early kings followed like Offa the Great in early England with a beautiful coin that is still being dug up.

In modern times nearly all the men who put their mugs on their country’s circulating money were despots and dictators, or at the very least autocrats.

By my count there’s at least a dozen and here in no particular chronological order are some of them.

Spain’s General Francisco “El Caudillo” (the chief) Franco was responsible for a civil war that caused decades of misery. In Cuba the Castro brothers somehow managed to take their army-run country backwards over a long period of autocracy. Fidel’s brother Raul is still going in his mid-90s but hasn’t much to show for his time in power. In Latin America some met sticky ends, like Dominica’s Rafael “El Jefe” (“The Boss”) Trujillo who was assassinated in 1961 after 31 years of death and destruction. And of course Saddam Hussein was hanged in 2006.

None were revered after their passing. Paraguay’s Alfredo Stroessner was exiled to Brazil in 1989 after a brutal 35-year regime that impoverished nearly everybody except for his inner circle.

Mobutu Sese Seko, the “Lion of Zaire”, presided over a steadily deteriorating currency. Like others we know, he was given to self-aggrandisement. He gave himself a new name that translated as “the all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake.” In fact, what he left was nearly worthless coins.

Syria’s president Hafez al-Assad, the father of Bashar who is currently a guest of Putin, had huge posters of himself erected all over the country. He managed a stagnant, state-dominated regime that blew up in his son’s face.

Similarly, the first president of Turkmenistan, Saparmurat Niyazov, was, to quote the words of a numismatist, “a real fruitcake who loved himself too much”. That’s actually an understatement. The self-styled “Leader of all Turkmen” insisted that his autobiography be mandatory reading in schools, universities, government departments and even by applicants for driving licenses. A life-long Communist, Niyazov shut all the hospitals outside the capital with the helpful advice: “If people are ill, they can come to Ashgabat (the capital).” Turkmenistan’s “president for life” died in 2006 after looting the country of billions of dollars.

Still very much alive is Equatorial Guinea’s president Teodoro Obiang Nguema who inherited from the former president, his uncle Francisco Macias Nguema, a fondness for putting his face on circulating coins. After seizing power of sub-Saharan Africa’s only Spanish-speaking country from his uncle in 1979 in a military coup and having him put to death, Obiang has presided over the richest country in the region thanks to oil revenues. That’s in terms of gross domestic product per capita, but not in terms of money in the hand. While Obiang launders oil revenues all over the world, 75 percent of the population have to cope on a dollar a day.

Haiti’s Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, are right up there for sheer dysfunctionality and brutality. Papa Doc began well enough as president in 1957. He was a trained doctor who had dispensed much-needed medical care, but he soon turned into the “voodoo” president with his dreaded Tonton Macoute paramilitary who murdered thousands. Between them, Papa and Baby Doc ran Haiti for nearly 30 years until the son’s ousting in 1986 -- and look what they left. At last count it took 174 of the local currency, the Haitian Gourde, to buy a pound sterling. Over half the population exist on three dollars a day.

Brazil’s Getulio Vargas is an exception. While happy to put his face on coins and notes, he systematically reformed the economy. He committed suicide in 1954 as the army under another dictator launched a coup and in short order precipitated a crisis of inflation and debt repudiation. On all the evidence, the army is hopeless at running a country.

Bear in mind we’re talking generally about circulating rather than commemorative currency. In Europe it’s quite common for reigning monarchs to put their head on a circulating coin, but in America it’s plain illegal. General Washington refused to do so in his lifetime although Calvin Coolidge permitted his visage to go on a commemorative coin three years before he left office.

Congress still must approve Trump’s $250 bill, but it probably will on current form.

It had to happen, and the number of countries legislating limits on teenage use of smart phones is on the rise.

According to a Unesco report, no less than 114 education systems worldwide have applied nationwide bans of varying severity in schools, equivalent to nearly 60 percent of all countries. Since late 2025 alone Bolivia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Georgia, Maldives and Malta have joined the rush. Others are poised to follow suit while some, like France, are debating whether to toughen up its own early rules.

In America, where there is no initiative from Washington, most of the states are taking matters into their own hands as the evidence accumulates about the wilful emotional damage caused by the digital giants. The Unesco study reveals that TikTok, for instance, bombards young females at intervals of a few seconds with messages about eating disorders.

All the signs are that the digital giants are rapidly losing the battle for the hearts and minds of school-age people. And it’s in the nick of time.

Now it’s up to adults to show the way.

Passing through London this month, I noticed ninety percent of people were engaged with their phones most of the time. On the fast train to Stansted Airport, perhaps half a dozen out of about sixty people in the carriage weren’t engaged with their phone. As the train hurtled through the English countryside with its rivers and lakes, spired cathedrals, villages of stone, fields full of cattle and sheep, scarcely anybody looked up.

Nobody’s here anymore.

Demonstrating humanity’s ability to abuse a great invention, phones have turned into a scourge that is shrinking our lives and sidelining observation. “To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe,” said Marilyn vos Savant, the American polymath writer. And since she’s got an IQ of 228, I’m inclined to believe her.

Pigeon post

The ubiquity of the smart phone took everybody by surprise.

For centuries communication moved at the pace of whatever was transporting it, and from antiquity until the early middle ages it was pigeons that bore the news over long distances. Egypt and Greece, in particular, used these amazing birds a lot.

In the absence of pigeons, the news went by word of mouth. In 490 BC poor Pheidippides had to run about 40 kilometres from Marathon to Athens to bring news of the Greeks’ great victory over the Persians before, it’s said, collapsing with the famous words: “We won!” Later, it was galloping couriers who carried dispatches, changing horses as they went.

Trans-oceanic communication was another matter altogether. As late as 1880 it took letters up to six months to get from Europe to Asia-Pacific. And as readers of Antoine de Saint-Exupery will know, mail didn’t start going regularly by air until the 1920s – and at considerable risk to pilots flying over seas and mountains in rickety aircraft.

By then telegraph and Morse code had been in operation since the 1830s, but mainly for military purposes. And while Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone in 1876 allowed people to speak to each other, it wasn’t until after the Second World War that most Americans had a phone. So it took more than a thousand years of communication before people could pick up a phone – and it was of course on a landline.

In 1973, American engineer Martin Cooper changed the game. He launched the mobile phone when he made the first call on a brick-like, two and a half-pound, hand-held Motorola. Suddenly the phone was untethered. And in just half a century the smart phone has become ubiquitous.

Miraculous tools

Granted, phones are miraculous tools. They’ve become essential for financial transactions, electronic passports, personal and professional connections among other usefulness. They’re a boon for getting your story out; no more tapping away in telex offices in remote places. And speaking of connections, international calls have gone from thrilling but prohibitively expensive events to frequent, almost mundane occurrences. In the late 1960s, freezing to death, I waited in a London phone box for a long-booked Xmas call to my parents in New Zealand. I had all my coins ready to drop into the pay box. I was excited about ringing home. The call never came and I trudged back home in the snow.

Yet far from rosy-spectacled predictions at the time of its invention, the smartphone has not been of unalloyed benefit for mankind. It’s too often manipulated against humanity’s interests, as proved by mountains of studies and scores of (increasingly successful) lawsuits against the digital giants, for example by education authorities protesting against “under the desk” messages infiltrated into pupils’ devices that deliberately undermine the learning experience. The digital oligarchs have far too much power; it says a lot that Elon Musk felt he could accuse the British government of fascism simply because it attempted to block his algorithms from allowing smart phone users to undress people.

The phone exercises its fascination because of the speed and volume of a highly seductive package that distracts from the world outside it. Some in the so-called wired generation have scorn for the real world– one PR guy for a digital currency once messaged me that “the metaverse is more real than the universe”. I’ve not heard from him since the crash of so many digital coins.

But the smartphone isn’t reality. I think the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius got it right 2000 years ago: “Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life.”

Or, as basketball coach Yogi Berra put it: “You can observe a lot by just watching.”

Giggle versus Tickle sounds like a comedy routine, but it’s actually a landmark legal case in Australia.

In a ruling in mid-May, the Federal Court ruled against a female-only site called Giggle for Girls on the grounds it wrongfully barred a trans-woman called Ms Tickle. The legal arguments are highly convoluted but the outcome, according to some commentators, is that the judgement may raise all kinds of practical considerations about access to what are currently female-only places.

Women’s rights are entering a challenging era but, if nothing else, Giggle versus Tickle provides an opportunity to look at the long and frequently horrifying fight for women’s equality.

As late as the seventeenth century, so-called witches were hurled into the North Sea off St. Andrews in Scotland. If they drowned, that was God’s judgement. If they survived, that was the work of the devil. You couldn’t win.

Religion-based misogyny lurked everywhere around that time. My wife and I often pedalled past a little stone shrine to Maggy Wall erected just outside a village called Auchterarder in the lower Highlands. She was supposedly caught talking to ravens and, in 1657, became one of the last of the witches burned at the stake.

Taking Europe and the American colonies together, the 300 years between 1450 and 1750 were a terrible time for those accused of witchcraft. Historians put the death toll at between 40,000-60,000, of which 75 to 80 percent were women.

For a depressing but enlightening read, you can’t do better than Gemma Liviero’s An Age of Winters about attempts to extinguish diabolism in a village in Germany in the 1600s.

On a lighter note, roughly three centuries later the invention of the bicycle served to illustrate the persistence of misogyny.

In France, a horrified all-male medical profession warned that women would succumb because of their allegedly weaker lungs and even be unable to bear children. In Britain, women were hauled before the magistrate on grounds of indecency for wearing “rational dress”, short skirts that didn’t get caught in the chain. And in America, Amelia Jenks Bloomer went one better and wore her notorious knickers of the same name.

In every case though the girls won the day despite pretty much universal hostility from overwhelmingly male politicians, newspaper editors and other forces for the status quo.

For a long time the United States, land of the free, kept women in chains. It took a 72-year campaign to win something as basic as the nationwide right to vote, in 1920, although different states allowed women’s suffrage much earlier. As late as the 1850s though, women couldn’t own property, become lawyers or doctors and, if they were permitted to work, it was generally in menial jobs at a fraction of men’s pay. They could however be beaten by their husbands.

America’s been catching up ever since. In sport for example, as late as 1975 just one in 27 high-school girls in the US played sport. (Now it’s about one in three.)

That may have been something to do with the fact that it was men who traditionally ran sporting organisations, like the Olympics.

After male journalists invented stories about female 800-metre runners collapsing from exhaustion in the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics, that was good enough for the all-male International Olympic Committee. Although film showed all nine women finishing in good shape, the gentlemen of the committee preferred to believe the following wildly inaccurate report in the New York Evening Post: “Below us on the cinder path were 11 wretched women, five of whom dropped out before the finish, while five collapsed after reaching the tape.”

So while men had a full plate of events including marathons, women were banned from running further than 400 metres for another 32 years. But when the event was reinstated in 1960 at the Rome Olympics, Russia’s Lyudmila Lysenko won gold without dying. In fact, none of the 27 competitors in the heats and final suffered any kind of lasting injury.

The marathon was one of the last bastions to fall. Although the Boston and New York marathons allowed women to enter in 1972, famously in the case of Boston after an outraged official tried to pull Kathrine Switzer off the course in the 1967 event, it took the Olympic committee another 12 years to follow suit. That was in the LA Summer Olympics of 1984 when American Joan Benoit Samuelson triumphed in 2 hours 24 minutes. Nothing wrong with her lungs. In fact, she’s still running.

Meantime, as women’s rights takes another course, the four-year saga of Giggle versus Tickle still has some way to run. Giggle plans to appeal to a higher court.

You can’t go wrong in politics by promising a hard line on crime, as the leader of Reform UK Nigel Farage would surely agree after his party’s sweeping victory in elections for local councils in Britain in May.

In a shock result Reform UK won over 1,450 seats and took control of 14 councils after Farage declared Britain to be lawless with a society “on the brink of collapse”. He promised among other things to recruit 30,000 more police on top of the current 230,000 -strong force, aggressive stop-and-search procedures in areas of high knife-crime, life sentences for repeat violent offenders, the banishment of some criminals (especially foreign ones) to jails in Albania or Estonia to avoid overcrowding in the nation’s clinks, zero tolerance of shop-lifting and phone theft.

The problem with the silver-tongued Farage is that he has a point. It’s a fact that UK police prosecute only one in five shop-lifting offences and investigate one in ten burglaries at best.

No criticism of the police, they’ve been given too much to do. But people want to feel safe inside their own homes and Reform UK has caught the message.

But will the party’s version of zero-tolerance work?

The problem with the somewhat glib Farage and his Reform UK is credibility. This is the man who thought Elon Musk’s disastrous Department of Government Efficiency was a great idea and he’s a fan of Donald Trump and his private army called ICE. The president says ICE has saved several cities such as Minneapolis from total lawlessness, although it’s not apparent to the local police, mayors or anybody else. The true purpose of Trump’s ICE may come clear in the mid-term elections.

Private armies

Yet private armies are on the rise. They aren’t called that but they take various forms – a compliant police allied with a tame judiciary (Belarus), brutal military (Venezuela), official enforcement (Russia), armed security (Iraq and many other countries), well-rewarded mercenaries (Africa).

Police forces being relatively a new phenomenon, this is actually how it used to be. Most of the empires of the ancient world were carved out by foreign mercenaries – soldiers for hire. Rome’s immensely wealthy general Licinius Crassus was only able to crush the slave revolt of Spartacus in 71BC by financing an army of 30,000 mercenaries, a huge force for the time. Crassus was more businessman than soldier. He made his money through real-estate speculation and slave-trading.

Much later, for nearly 300 years the Medicis and other princely bankers in Italy often hired the condottieri, itinerant soldiers, to conquer rival cities. The word condottieri, meaning “contractors”, says it all. They were a roving military who sold their swords to the highest bidder.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was the turn of the rich European trading giants such as the Dutch, French and British East India Companies that conquered territories much further afield with private armies. At 260,000 men, the standing army of Britain’s East India Company actually grew to outnumber the official British forces in India.

In the twentieth century it was a maverick Scot, David Stirling, who established the first private military company (PMC). The founder of the SAS that repeatedly struck behind enemy lines during WW2, Stirling was behind GB75, a post-war private armed force that, he said, would take over Britain in the event of left-wing governments, just like the fascist Oswald Mosley threatened in the 1930s. More respectably, Stirling’s WatchGuard International sold security and military training to foreign governments. Another PMC, the blandly named Executive Outcomes actually went into battle in Africa in the 1980s and 90s and is credited with winning conflicts in Sierra Leone and Angola.

Today, behind the scenes PMCs are growing rapidly. Quasi-armies, they are big business. For instance, G4S boasts 800,000 personnel operating in some 85 countries on government contracts, mainly in the protection of important infrastructure. Others, like Russia’s state-funded Wagner group is an army by another name that lurks in the shadows. It’s not the force it was after the assassination of its leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, restaurateur-turned mercenary who was sometimes called “Putin’s chef”, but Wagner has been notorious for its brutality on behalf of Central African dictators.

Farage isn’t talking about a private army. Instead he seems to want to rely on the established police. However other British leaders including Boris Johnson have promised before to get tough on crime without much happening. The question is whether an extra 30,000 police will make all that much difference when between 5.5 million and 20.5 million incidents of shop-lifting occur every year, not to mention 250,000 domestic burglaries. The clear-up rate would have to go through the roof to justify Farage’s promises.

Since 2000 the British police force has grown from 144,000 to its present 230,000 -- and still crime continues to grow. Is this just another of Reform UK’s populist lines? It’s hard to see coppers chasing every shop-lifter down the High Street or lying in wait behind a hedge to nab would-be burglars.

There wouldn’t be enough spare to deal with the really serious stuff.

Did Caroline Ellison read Going Infinite, the book by Michael Lewis about her old boss Sam Bankman-Fried while she was in prison? Ellison was released in January after serving 14 months of her two-year sentence for her role in the collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange.

As for Bankman-Fried, he has plenty of time to read the book because he won’t be out until 2044, five years early for good conduct. By then the founder of FTX will be 54.

Ellison got off lightly for turning what the British justice system calls Kings Evidence and spilling the beans about the stealing of US$8bn from FTX customers among various other breaches that are all too typical of the world of cryptocurrencies.

By my reckoning, quite apart from Bankman-Fried, in just the last couple of years crypto-crooks burgled about $500m, which doesn’t say much for what the idealists hoped would become an alternative medium of exchange that replaces the fiat, trust-based currency issued by central banks. So far, the history of “altcoins” doesn’t exactly fill one with confidence.

American David Chaum’s digicash, an early electronic payment based on cryptographic technology that was intended to ensure anonymity, went bankrupt in 1998, four years after its establishment. A clever and original idealist, Chaum is credited with much of the brain work behind cryptocurrency.

Next we got b-money, a short-lived electronic cash system that grew out of a book called The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto that basically thumbed his nose at official currencies and governments in general. Then American computer scientist Nicholas Szabo’s bit gold, a highly complicated sequential system of generating money by extremely computer-smart people, paved the way for bitcoin.

Some say Szabo is actually Satoshi Nakamoto, the fake name of the man behind bitcoin that first appeared in 2009. He denies it but bitcoin and its imitators have seen their fair share of scams. In quick succession we also got namecoin that grew out of bitcoin, then litecoin and peercoin among others.

While some of these cryptocurrencies process billions of dollars safely enough, investors in the “cryptoqueen” Ruja Ignatova’s OneCoin got done for $4.4bn. BitConnect promised the world but investors lost $2.4bn. In 2018 a joint operation by British and American investigators seized as much as $14bn from Cambodians running a “pig-butchering” scam which inveigled naïve investors and seekers of romance into buying cryptocurrencies off fake trading platforms.

In the early 2020s crypto-crooks in America were splashing half a million dollars a night in clubs and buying fantastically expensive gifts for their girlfriends, all with stolen cryptocurrencies. They’ve since been caught but that doesn’t help the victims.

Even if there’s no fraud, the value of cryptocurrencies is highly volatile and bubbles have been bursting at regular intervals over the last 15 years. As a deputy governor of the Bank of England Sir John Cunliffe pointed out a few years ago, the price movements of bitcoin have been “twelve times more pronounced than the S&P500

Yet some countries including El Salvador and Cuba accept bitcoin as legal tender, although neither are exactly role models for economic management. China, once the world’s biggest market for cryptocurrencies made up its mind in 2021 and made all transactions illegal.

There’s much confusion about digital money. As Martha Bennett, vice-president and principal analyst at global advisory firm Forrester Research wrote in a perceptive article in late 2025, “despite their name, cryptocurrencies fail the test of what constitutes ‘money’: Their volatility means they’re not a store of value, they’re not a universally accepted means of payment, and they’re not a unit of account anywhere.”

The big risk with cryptocurrencies is their opacity and rapid growth. While they might be very clever – indeed central banks are learning from crypto technologies that “offer a prospect of radical improvements in financial services”, notes Cunliffe, there’s too much of them. As of early 2026, there’s something like $2.8 trillion of crypto-assets floating around, some of it getting into the mainstream financial services, and that’s worrying the wiser heads.

In the words of the man from the Bank of England: “Financial stability risks currently are relatively limited but they could grow very rapidly if, as I expect, this area continues to develop and expand at pace.”

Cunliffe was talking in 2021 before Bankman-Fried’s FTX hit the deck. He’d be more worried now.

Anybody wanting a seat at the final of the FIFA World Cup in July will have to find anywhere between US$38,000 and $2.3 million dollars at latest prices, an awful lot to pay for a humble soccer fan.

But ticket prices will certainly rise higher yet under FIFA’s system of allocation that is unapologetically based on what people are prepared to pay. “We are in the market [the United States] in which entertainment is the most developed in the world, so we have to apply market rates,” explains president Gianni Infantino in defence.

In FIFA’s interpretation of the market, the football body has virtually relinquished all control over ticket prices. If FIFA lists tickets too low, argues Infantino, they will be snapped up by re-sellers who will charge more because ticket-gouging is permitted in America. That’s pure capitalism in the absence of any regulation to prevent sky-high prices.

But FIFA has made sure to profit from those prices. It does this by taking a 15 percent purchase fee from the buyer of each ticket plus the same percentage from the re-seller. As more thoughtful analysis shows, that means the fans who buy the resold ticket must pay 30 percent more than the original price. There’s no evidence whatsoever that Infantino cares about this – he says FIFA needs the money for the sake of the game.

As for the top-priced tickets, Infantino said in a glib observation: “If somebody buys a ticket for the final for $2 million, I will personally bring a hot dog and a Coke to make sure that he has a great experience.” It’s unlikely that the holder of a $2 million ticket will be interested in a Coke and a hot dog even if the FIFA president himself brings it to the seat.

However that’s just the final. Tickets for the group games are on general sale. By my count in early May they range from around $400 for the lower-ranking clashes to about $5,000 for the big games. Is this too much? The market will decide and, if re-sellers are left with tickets on their hand, they will have to discount them and maybe lose money. And that’s capitalism too.

Infantino is not wrong in wanting to turn a big profit from a hugely expensive four-year event, FIFA’s cash cow, but the problem with his organisation is its opacity. You never quite know what’s really going on. According to its effusive websites, the Infantino-run FIFA is the great guardian of football, an organisation of impeccable integrity devoted to the furtherance of the people’s game that pours money into all kinds of worthy projects.

“Our long-term investments in talent, governance and infrastructure are building a future worthy of the world’s game – and of the billions who love it. Much of what we see on the pitch today is the result of tireless effort off it”, FIFA gushes. “I am proud of the work that has restored this great institution to its rightful place. FIFA is once again a trustworthy and respected organisation, present at every table where it matters most. We organise events, develop the game and provide opportunities for girls and boys everywhere – no matter where or when they were born.”

In short it’s practically perfect and everything’s going swimmingly. Above all, it’s a body that says it has shed the taint of Sepp Blatter.

THE BLATTER ERA came to an end with the notorious raid at Zurich’s US$2,000-plus a night Baur au Lac hotel when seven senior FIFA officials were arrested just over a decade ago. It’s a beautiful hotel with a private park overlooking Lake Zurich and the Alps, and it was the FIFA boys’ preferred location for over a decade. One family has managed Baur au Lac for seven generations, but it’s unlikely any of those generations saw anything like what happened on that day.

At the behest of the FBI which had spent years on the investigation, Swiss police mounted the raid. Within days a 47-count indictment landed on two FIFA vice-presidents and assorted others, some of whom promptly pleaded guilty. They were charged with racketeering, wire fraud and money-laundering conspiracies among numerous other offences that had occurred over a 24-year period. The purpose was “to enrich themselves through the corruption of international soccer.”

The offences were comprehensive, to put it mildly. Sports executives had paid “well over $150 million in bribes and kickbacks” for marketing and broadcasting rights over those years. As the case unfolded, it revealed a systematic strategy of screwing the sport for personal gain. “It has profoundly harmed a multitude of victims, from the youth leagues and developing countries that should benefit from the revenue generated by the commercial rights these organizations hold, to the fans at home and throughout the world whose support for the game makes those rights valuable,” argued the US prosecutor.

Essentially, the FIFA Seven among others had their hands in the till – and it was a big till. Between 2011 and 2014, according to the indictment, the organisation made $5.7 billion in total revenues and 70 percent of it came from television and marketing rights for the 2014 World Cup, always the biggest earner.

Despite the raid, some of the FIFA boys didn’t get the message. They continued to patronise the Baur au Lac hotel and on December 3, 2015, they were hit again when more were swept into the net. The ringleader, president Sepp Blatter, got away with it. He was acquitted twice by Swiss courts but FIFA’s ethics committee has kicked him out of the sport until 2028. It will be interesting to see what happens then.

To his credit it was Blatter who saw the opportunities in global football. Over many years he turned FIFA into a hugely influential and lucrative organisation by leveraging the global popularity of the game. It’s just that he had a strong sense of entitlement.

BUT has FIFA learned its lesson?

A ginger group of dissenters argued in a much-quoted letter in 2025 that FIFA is “arguably more poorly governed today than it was ten years ago” at the time of the Baur au Lac raids, citing “key structural flaws” and a “dysfunctional governance model”.

Although it’s not clear to me they’ve made their case, the basic argument is that FIFA hasn’t spent its fast-growing revenues on the good of the game (as it often claims). Instead it’s been pumping money into all kinds of member associations and confederations to win over their loyalty. A number of ex-Blatter era insiders back these arguments. But FIFA repudiates these them, citing a wide range of endorsements of its new direction from various third-party bodies and regulatory organisations whose job is to keep the organisation on song.

“The 2015 scandal marked a ­turning point for the organisation, allowing a new FIFA to emerge,” the body insists. “Thanks to the intervention of the US authorities back in 2015, we have been able to fundamentally change FIFA from a toxic organisation at the time, to a respected and trusted global sports governing body focusing on its ­mandate to develop football all around the world.”

Should FIFA be given the benefit of the doubt? It’s clear that Infantino’s FIFA has poured money into football development, in fact seven times more than under Blatter and among other achievements developed the women’s game into a world standard crowd-pleaser. And there’s been no financial scandals – or at least none we know about.

FIFA’s problem is that it keeps shooting itself in the foot. The FIFA Peace Prize awarded to Donald Trump by Infantino was demeaning. In the most syrupy of language Infantino said: “We want to see hope, we want to see unity, we want to see a future. This is what we want to see from a leader and you definitely deserve the first Fifa Peace Prize.” Really?

It’s also Infantino who claimed that the exclusion of Russia from international competition had achieved nothing, an argument in total contradiction to what others sports administrators say that the banishment of Russia’s doped athletes is helping uphold the integrity of competition.

And why did FIFA’s former chief medical officer, Swiss neurologist and professor Jiri Dvorak, suddenly lose his job when he was investigating Russia’s doping of footballers? He was a 22-year veteran of the organisation who had conducted invaluable work on football-related injuries.

If FIFA wants credibility, it needs to tell the complete story rather than self-serving flim-flam.

But if it can’t tell the complete story, what’s it hiding?

What will be left of Russia after the departure of Vladimir Putin?

As his once-iron grip on the nation reportedly begins to slip amid widening dismay over the abortive war with Ukraine, the Russian president is said to be in serious trouble for the first time in 26 years.

Putin critics are voicing their discontent and getting away with it. There’s rumours about growing dissatisfaction in what was once his loyal inner circle. And it’s reported that the Russian president is increasingly nervous of assassination, so much so that he’s strengthened his security.

Yet he can’t put all of the critics behind bars or lock them up in psychiatric clinics, as he’s fond of doing. Nor is it possible to stifle dissent for ever in a nation of 143 million increasingly dissatisfied citizens. Eventually the boiler blows, as earlier Soviet leaders learned to their cost.

ON CHRISTMAS DAY 1991 the body of Lenin was surely spinning in his mausoleum. Watched by incredulous Muscovites, the hammer and sickle flag of the Communist party was being lowered from the top of the Kremlin to be replaced by the white, blue and red-striped flag of Russia. Emblem of the Bolshevik revolution, the hammer and sickle had been the official symbol of Soviet-style communism since 1924 – and now it was gone.

The mighty Soviet Union – what Ronald Reagan damned as the “evil empire” -- had collapsed. And the nutty theory of centralised economic management had gone with it. It took some 70 years to prove the inherent impossibility of Marxist economics – “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”. While open capitalist economies had done well for their citizens, the closed centralised system had performed dismally.

However the disintegration caught just about everybody by surprise. Like many other scholars of the Soviet Union, Oxford University’s professor Archie Brown believed the Iron Curtain was “impervious to fundamental change.”

Nails and shoes

Economists were probably the least surprised. In the 18 years of Leonid Brezhnev’s corrupt term in office up to 1982, productivity in factories and farms varied between poor and pitiful. Indeed some economists said that in the more remote regions they could have learned something from medieval farmers. As the World Bank put it soberly, “the Soviet Union had an unusually high ratio of capital to output,” meaning disastrously low bang for the buck.

Yet desk-bound bureaucrats kept on publishing five-year plans that specified how many tons of nails or pairs of shoes must be produced while the Brezhnev economy turned into “the most under-achieving economy in the world”, according to the World Bank. And that included nations in Africa.

After the death of Brezhnev it was the turn of the ruthless Yuri Andropov, a former head of the KGB, to cause more damage. The shelves of shops, especially outside Moscow, soon emptied of many everyday consumer goods (except vodka). Staples such as bread, meat and vegetables were often unavailable. Power cuts were common, even in freezing winters. State services such as health were barely adequate. Worse for Andropov, the high oil prices that had rescued the Brezhnev economy were falling. Most citizens didn’t know how badly off they were though because the party-run media published nothing but pro-Soviet propaganda.

In the patriotic pursuit of Olympic medals, athletes and swimmers were doped to the eyeballs, often to their lasting ill-health.

Under Andropov the Kremlin turned into an even more dangerous and power-hungry hotbed of deceit and corruption than it had been under his predecessor. He preached “the destruction of dissent in all its forms”. Some former Brezhnev cronies reportedly committed suicide rather than fall into the hands of the KGB.

Fortunately, Andropov didn’t last long in power – in fact he ran the Soviet Union from a hospital bed for the last year of his life. His successor, propaganda specialist Konstantin Chernenko, fared even worse. Also ill at his appointment, he lasted just 13 months before dying in early 1985.

Perils of perestroika

The seeds of destruction had always been there but now they took root. Mikhail Gorbachev, a smiling former agricultural worker and lawyer, promised perestroika – a programme of reconstruction that included free elections rather than rigged ones. To their horror senior party officials lost seats and, with them, the many privileges they had always assumed as their right. Under glasnost, meaning roughly transparency, the sale of long-banned books was permitted such as Orwell’s anti-totalitarian Animal Farm and even The Gulag Archipelago, the horrifying account by Alexander Solzhenitsyn of life in a prison camp. The ridiculous five-year plans were abolished.

But it didn’t work because it was too late. After so long as a command economy, the Soviet Union wasn’t ready to be a market-based one where prices were based on what people thought products were worth and were prepared to pay. The factory managers didn’t know what to do. What wages should they pay? How much should they charge? How much should they produce? There were no answers.

And then the satellite countries exercised Gorbachev’s “right to choose” and bolted from the Iron Curtain as fast they could. They’d had enough of the Soviet yoke.

Events then happened fast. As the economy crumbled, in 1991 the Stalinist rearguard in the Kremlin mounted a coup and put Gorbachev under house arrest in the Crimea. It took the intervention of Boris Yeltsin, the president of the most populous state of Russia and a power base for aspiring politicians, to send the generals running by denouncing the coup from the top of a tank. But there wasn’t much left of the Soviet Union – in fact Yeltsin had negotiated its dissolution behind Gorbachev’s back.

The great reformer was toppled and the hammer and sickle was hauled down.

Parallels in power

In 1999 it was Putin, a KGB man by career and inclination, who succeeded Yeltsin in power. Now, more than a quarter century later, the parallels between Putin’s Russia and the old Soviet Union are inescapable.

Brezhnev launched an expensive, losing war against Afghanistan that pushed spending on defence to 27 percent of gross domestic product. Currently, Russia is pouring about 40 percent of the entire state budget into the Ukraine war, running at up to a billion dollars a day. The total economic impact stands at about US$2.5 trillion over the last five years, according to reliable estimates, and the Russian military is on the back foot.

The Russian economy still depends on fossil fuels, just as it did under Brezhnev, even though the world’s energy is rapidly pivoting towards renewables. Inflation is running at over 20 percent. And the economy’s been in steady decline for years under Putin despite all kinds of tricks by the central bank.

Dissent has been crushed and propaganda is at full throttle. School curriculums are centrally controlled. And so many Russian athletes were doped for the 2012 London Olympics and other events that only a handful of clean ones are now allowed into international competition. As for vodka, consumption has risen to its highest level in a decade.

It can’t be too long before the boiler blows.

Trump has his toadies. Putin has his puppets – and one of them is on the way out.

Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban, a former Communist-hater who ended up throwing in his lot with the Russian dictator, will ignominiously depart office in May after a landslide defeat that few expected, including even the incoming prime minister Peter Magyar.

It was a victory by the people and for the people that triggered jubilation in the streets of Budapest after the aspiring dictator’s disastrous 16-year rule. In the teeth of gerrymandered electorates, blatant vote-buying, a rigged constitution, crony capitalism and corruption of the justice system, Hungarians threw out the worst prime minister in all of Europe.

The defeat of Orban’s Fidesz party was a huge relief for Brussels and a smack in the eye for Trump-type populism. Indeed the current occupant of the White House (the “Worst House”, according to comedians) despatched vice-president JD Vance all the way to Hungary to campaign for Orban. “I love Viktor!”, bellowed Trump into a recording played to a pro-Orban gathering by his top toadie.

It didn’t make any difference. The Hungarians had endured enough.

Hungary, whose economy is roughly the size of Munich’s, is now one of the poorest countries in the EU. Economic growth drags along at 0.4 percent. Unemployment is at a ten-year high. As the New York Times explains, Transparency International rates Hungary as the most corrupt country in the EU, right up (or down) there with Bulgaria. The ousted prime minister’s friends and family control much of the economy. Indeed Orban’s son-in-law has become one of the richest men in the entire country, all from a standing start.

If this sounds familiar, it’s how dictators work. While they milk the country in their own interests, they proclaim their patriotism. (In his last winning election Orban promised a “golden age” for Hungary.) It’s what Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman describes as “grand theft autocracy”. If dictatorship wasn’t so destructive, it would be laughable as a glimpse into the past shows.

Start with statues

Every dictator starts in the same way. First, erect lots of statues to yourself as did Kim Il Sung the grandfather of North Korea’s current despot, Kim Jong Un, because it builds a cult of worship. Even today, after three generations of despotism, wedding couples throw flowers before these bronze monuments to grand theft autocracy. In the same way Syria’s ousted dictator Bashar al-Assad festooned highways and byways with giant-sized posters of his smiling face while bombing his own people.

That’s how the cult of Mao spread through China. Grand masters of art were put to work churning out images of a smiling and avuncular figure. Even though he was probably of average height, the Great Redeemer was shown towering above an adoring multitude while wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat, just like the ordinary peasant he very much wasn’t.

It was all carefully managed. As Jacques Ellul, the late French authority on dictatorships, observed at the onset of Mao’s disastrous Cultural Revolution, the purpose is to swamp the people’s consciousness. “The orchestration of press, radio and television to create a continuous, lasting and total environment renders the influence of propaganda virtually unnoticed precisely because it creates a constant environment,” he wrote.

Also, it’s not a bad idea to add a few inches to your height. Romania’s despot between 1965 and 1989, Nicolae Ceausescu, suddenly grew about six inches after learning a few things during an official visit to China and North Korea. Before the visit he was just five feet and five inches, not nearly imposing enough, and he ordered a few dozen high-heeled shoes. Simultaneously, Ceausescu acquired a new title – “Genius of the Carpathians” – along the lines of Kim Il Sung who started out as a mere “Great Leader” but eventually graduated to “Eternal President of the Republic.”

Not to be outdone, Ceausescu’s wife Elena was so impressed by the status of Mao’s actress wife, Jian Qing, that she announced herself as “Mother of the People” and awarded herself a basket of degrees. Official sites immediately proclaimed her as “a scholar of international renown”, a veritable female Einstein.

Personality cults

The master of personality cults was Josef Stalin. In fact Mao learned all he knew about self-deification from the Soviet tyrant. One of his many stooge poets once gushed: “O great Stalin, O leader of the peoples. Thou who broughtest man to birth.. Though who fructifies the earth etc. etc.……” Similarly, Kremlin-paid writers dutifully delivered up novels and short stories with happy socialist endings while painters churned out massive canvases of state banquets, weddings, public meetings and other thrilling events that generally featured Stalin in the most prominent position.

In most personality cults, the message steadily becomes ever more preposterous. Not content with his humble origins, Kim Il-sung gave himself a supernatural birth in a holy mountain, with stars exploding in the heavens, and declared himself a fashion icon (basically a uniform and four-inch heels) whose birthdays were celebrated all around the world.

That’s probably why his son, the current Dear Leader’s late father, was by far the world’s greatest golfer. The pint-sized Kim Il Jong once shot 18 holes in 38 under par, a round that included numerous holes in one. (History does not record who marked his card.) Students of dictatorships will remember that when this particular Kim passed on, the western media ran gleeful headlines about “the death of the world’s greatest golfer”.

Mao also gave himself extra-terrestrial powers; it was students of Maoism who “inspired a million people to subdue a tidal wave”, raise entire cities and generally perform miracles. By the 1970s, before it all went wrong, the old hard-eyed General Mao Zedong had been converted into the smiling Uncle Mao who was said to be 10,000 years old.

Eventually, self-deification breeds a fatal delusion. Mao was completely unprepared when his old comrades turned on him. As Romanians starved from food shortages, Ceausescu had himself photographed inspecting bountiful displays of fruit and vegetables, all made from polystyrene, and demanded that government-run television showed programmes of farms producing huge crops. Not long afterwards, he and his wife would be shot after a summary trial.

More recently, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein genuinely believed his ill-trained and under-equipped troops could defy modern armies. And Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi made jokes about the “fireworks” of NATO aircraft weeks before his own regime fell. Few dictators die of old age.

Meanwhile in the Worst House the current occupant portrays himself variously as a jut-jawed statesman, peace maker, pope and even as Christ, not to mention a great golfer.

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When volunteers, teachers and pupils of a little school in Denmark begged and borrowed tools, equipment and aeronautical technology to build a wind turbine, they unwittingly launched an energy revolution.

There was considerable opposition at the time to government plans to adopt nuclear power and the Tvindkraft turbine, as it was named, showed that it was technically feasible to harness energy from the wind. A marvel of technology, Tvindkraft was the world’s first multiwatt turbine and it changed Denmark’s course.

Instead of going nuclear, Denmark became the hub of the global revival of wind power.

Today, nearly 50 years later, nature in the form of wind provides about 12 percent of the world’s electricity and nearly all of that’s happened since the turn of the millennium. The International Energy Agency expects global wind capacity to nearly double by 2030. And yet the wind has always been free and its energy has been harnessed in various forms on land since the ninth century. But still some don’t – or won’t --see it. Anti-wind turbine protests, especially in America, are blocking many projects – perhaps as many as one in four – that could make the air we breathe cleaner.

Sometimes humanity has a dismaying failure to see past the immediate present.

Charging forward

Even before the 1900s, electric vehicles were far superior to petrol-fuelled ones -- quiet, emission-free, easy to start and particularly popular with women. Ferdinand Porsche began his career by designing battery-powered carriages.

Range anxiety wasn’t much of a problem at the time; the Detroit Electric could cover up to 160 kilometres on a single charge. And it’s only now that small electric trucks are making a welcome comeback a hundred years after their first appearance – an American company called Hartford Electric Light ran a successful battery-exchange service for trucks between 1910 and 1924.

The electric vehicle was displaced by the discovery of cheap oil, the low price of Henry Ford’s Model T, an increasingly reliable combustion engine, people’s desire to travel greater distances, and in my opinion a failure to pour science into batteries. It’s food for thought that electric boats have been plying some of Germany’s pristine lakes for over a hundred years.

Scandalous Bloomers

As for two-wheeled transport, when the first bicycles appeared in the 1880s, the French medical profession warned that women would suffer from dire medical consequences including breathlessness, fainting and permanent damage to vital organs. Some countries tried to ban women from racing these new-fangled machines and high society was shocked and horrified by women wearing bicycle-friendly Bloomer pants.

History is littered with humanity’s short-sightedness about great inventions. When electric refrigerators appeared in the early 1900s, the naysayers said they would never compete with the ice delivery man. But where’s the ice-delivery man now?

Recorded music in the form of the phonograph was ridiculed by musicians for the admittedly poor quality of its sound, but never realised that it would improve. It took 20 years for microwaves to catch on. In the 1930s rocket scientists were considered to be unhinged as they laid the foundation for space travel like the voyage of Artemis II. As for computers, an eminent scientist once told me how he and his colleagues liked to play with a machine called a computer “but we couldn’t see what it would be useful for”.

Some scepticism is understandable. Dishwashers were invented in the 1890s and, although highly popular in hotels and other commercial establishments where the benefits were obvious, they didn’t catch on in the home until the 1950s when they became cheaper and domestic plumbing rose to the challenge.

Devil’s work

But back to wind power. As I wrote in New Energy World recently, the first modern experiments date back to the 1880s when Scottish engineer, professor James Blyth, kept the lights on at his holiday cottage with a towering, eight-bladed turbine of his own design and construction that produced enough energy to serve a nearby village. Far from being grateful, the villagers condemned this God-given power as “the work of the devil” and turned him down. In the same decade American Charles Brush’s elaborate slow-spinning, 144-blade turbine provided his laboratory’s energy for 20 years and Dutch scientist Poul la Cour invented regulator-controlled blades.

The reluctance of some Americans to embrace the wind is at odds with their history. In remote areas off the grid, from the 1920s many farmers and other businesses ran energy from little turbines located near their homes. And American manufacturers produced ingenious wind-harnessing technologies for much of the twentieth century and sold them all over the world, even into Africa.

Meanwhile the Tvindkraft turbine is still turning. Over the years it’s had a lot of maintenance and worn-out parts replaced, but it stands as testament to people who could see past the immediate present.

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At its narrowest point it’s scarcely 20 miles wide. Only two ships can cross at any one time. And it’s eminently defensible.

It should have been obvious to the White House that the Iranians would wield their biggest weapon – the Strait of Hormuz – if their country ever came under attack.

After all, that’s exactly what they’ve been doing in various guises for 500 years or more, as soon as it became clear that this notorious bottleneck in global trade was a natural strategic asset that could be deployed at will.

And now they’re doing it again.

To summarise the chaos Tehran has created by firing a few rockets: instead of well over 100 ships a day sailing serenely down the strait, a nervous few are dribbling through, most under escort, at the behest of Iran, while thousands lie at anchor. As 20 percent of the world’s oil and gas is blocked, the energy security of scores of countries has come under threat.

The passage of other vital commodities has stopped. The world’s largest oil flow has been interrupted.

Fear in the shipping lanes

As maritime experts point out, the Iranians are sowing fear into the shipping world. Simply by threatening to blow up tankers — which are, after all, floating bombs — maritime insurance has gone sky high and set in train the string of events that has inevitably sent petrol prices soaring.

A maritime analyst at Spain’s CISDE University, defence specialist Rafael Muñoz Abad, writes:

“Fear is the [invisible] force behind the closure of the Strait of Hormuz… the fear of shipowners and fleet operators of losing their floating assets, their vessels. The lifeblood of the global economy.”

A history of control and conflict

This is ancient history for Iranians. They fought the Portuguese in the sixteenth century for control of the strait, in a period when it was the sea route for other valuable commodities — spices, silk, pearls and Arabian horses.

As the EBSCO library reveals, the Ottoman Empire’s Topkapi files show that from about 1515 the Portuguese essentially ran the strait from a fortress and customs house that they built on the little island of Hormuz. They extracted customs revenues and tolls from passing ships.

Eventually, in an alliance with the English in the form of the East India Company, which wanted valuable trading rights, the Safavid Persian Empire (as it was then) expelled the Portuguese in 1622 and took back the strait.

Iran has little reason to love the West. In 1951, when one of the nation’s heroes, the reforming prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh, nationalised the oil industry after years of exploitation by Anglo-Persian Oil (later BP), Britain despatched the Royal Navy to blockade Iran’s oil exports.

In 1953, an MI6- and CIA-backed coup overturned Mossadegh and reinstalled the West-friendly shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Framed for treason, Mossadegh spent the rest of his life under house imprisonment following sham trials orchestrated by the US — an injustice for which the Barack Obama administration has apologised.

It was only in 1979, when the Iranian Revolution overthrew the shah, that the country formally claimed authority over the Strait of Hormuz. Since then Iran has been at constant loggerheads with the US, albeit more of a victim than an aggressor.

The US joined Saddam Hussein’s Iraq after it invaded Iran in 1980, triggering the eight-year “tanker war” in the strait. Its attempts to develop nuclear weapons after 2000 brought down heavy economic sanctions from the US and European allies.

Over the years “Death to America” has become almost a national slogan.

Power, isolation and escalation

However, Iran has an unfortunate ability to alienate just about everybody in its neighbourhood. For the last decade it has been harassing and seizing foreign-flagged ships in the strait. Thousands of rockets have been pointlessly fired at its mortal enemy, Israel. Bigoted clerics preach hate for the West and enforce a primitive anti-female culture.

But now the boot is on Iran’s foot. It is clamping an even tighter hold on its prime weapon and making even more dire threats.

In March a top official in the regime railed:

“The strait is closed. If anyone tries to pass, the heroes of the Revolutionary Guards and the regular navy will set those ships ablaze.”

Unfortunately, they have the muscle to do so. According to experts at the Brookings Institution, Iran has stockpiled an arsenal of up to 6,000 mines and a hundreds-strong fleet of attack craft, including midget submarines, among other weaponry that can create havoc.

New pieces in the History Repeats series are published here weekly.

Now that death-dealing rockets are flying all over the Middle East once again, it might be a good time to ask what is the point of wars?

There’s quite a few going on right now – big ones in Ukraine, Iran and Lebanon, smaller sporadic ones in Palestine, Sudan and Myanmar, and gang’s war-like violence in Haiti, Mexico and Ecuador. Pakistan and Afghanistan are at each other’s throats once again. And Syria continues to be ravaged by revenge and sectarian-related violence.

We can look at the effects of war in several ways, but loss of life is a good start.

Quite apart from the misery of having destruction all around you, in 2025 alone 280,000 civilians died in various conflicts, according to war-tracking research.

The human cost of war

It’s always ordinary people who suffer the most.

Historians of China’s civil wars over the centuries have added up the numbers and concluded that in the 60 years of the Three Kingdom’s battle for supremacy between three dynasties in 220-280AD about 40 million died and China’s population collapsed from 56 million to 16 million. In the seven-year Lushan Rebellion in the mid-700s, at least 13 million lost their lives in a disastrous depopulation. The Qing Conquest of the Ming Dynasty in the 17^th century saw off about 25 million amid a terrible famine.

During roughly the same period as America’s Civil War when about 750,000 soldiers died (and an unknown number of civilians), the Taiping Rebellion accounted for anywhere between 20-100 million deaths in a killing spree by armies on the march.

Here’s a little-known fact dredged up by historians of Genghis Khan and his successors. It wasn’t until the middle of the 20^th century that the population of Asia, eastern Europe and Middle East caught up to the levels prevailing before the Mongol Conquests 700 years earlier.

The economic cost of war

Economically, wars are invariably disastrous except for the military industrial complex that feeds them.

Napoleon’s campaigns ruined the French treasury. Kaiser Wilhelm’s invasion of France in 1914 ended up by impoverishing Germany as it ran out of food, oil, money and, of course, soldiers before leading to the workers’ rebellion that forced him to flee to the Netherlands. Hitler’s war repeated the feat by bankrupting the Fatherland and killing over five million of its young men, all to no avail.

In Asia, between 1950-1953 the much-ignored three-year Korean War left economies of the north and south threadbare. North Korea was saved by Soviet capital while US aid rescued South Korea – but where would you rather live now?

The 20 years of war in Vietnam impoverished a once-flourishing agricultural economy that took decades to rebuild.

And finally, the Iraq war. Distinguished economists like Joseph Stiglitz estimate that it cost the US alone between $1-2 trillion dollars counting interest payments and veterans’ medical bills. The Iraqi economy was of course smashed.

And today? The state of the Russian economy mirrors what’s happening in all these war-wrecked countries. As Putin taxes businesses to the hilt to pay for his war and pays generous signing-on bonuses to recruits so he fills the fatal pipeline to the front, neglects vital infrastructure such as bridges and metros, and is forced to rescue oil companies (instead of the other way around), the country is in what impartial economists describe as an unstoppable slide.

History tells us a lot. In all of these conflicts, the unravelling follows a familiar pattern. Launched with powerful propaganda that stirs up gullible people to embrace a glorious mission, it soon descends into the awful reality of mass deaths, economic hardship and widespread suffering.

In the long run everybody loses.

The historic problem remains: how to wage peace?

New pieces in the History Repeats series are published here weekly.

Editor’s note: This piece is part of the History Repeats series, originally published before being brought together here on Substack.

At the World Economic Forum’s annual gathering in Davos this January, two speakers took about 20 minutes each to make a profound impact.

A third took 72 minutes to make a fool of himself and his country.

But to start with the first two, Canadian prime minister Mark Carney, one of the finest minds on the world stage, concisely summarised why his country is turning its back on its historic neighbour, the United States, and forming new economic partnerships and enduring friendships around the world in what he described as a “rupture” rather than a transition. And he said all this without once mentioning America!

In another thought-provoking speech, EU president Ursula van der Leyen happily described how Europe is taking a similar course in partnerships in defence, commerce and politics, also avoiding any but the briefest reference to the culprit.

Predictably, the 72 minutes of intellectual nullity came from Donald Trump as he rambled on about America’s intentions to seize Greenland while occasionally mixing the country up with Iceland. The speech, if that’s what it can be called, was bereft of meaningful content but full of boastfulness about how great America is, despite evidence to the contrary. He finished with this immortal observation: “The United States is back, bigger, stronger, better than ever before, and I’ll see you around.”

(Hope not.)

Meanwhile we are entitled to ask ourselves what’s happened to political speech-making in America?

When American Political Speech Meant Something

It was infinitely better nearly 180 years ago when Abraham Lincoln gave his famous address at Gettysburg during the civil war. He didn’t take 73 minutes or even 13 minutes. The speech is only 238 words in length but has been remembered ever since as “a monumental act”. Lincoln always prepared his speeches carefully, writing them out in longhand and then editing them.

And then there’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s stirring inaugural address in the middle of the Great Depression when he assured a nation on its knees that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”. Perhaps only the barely suppressed fury of his Day of Infamy speech after Japan’s invasion of Hawaii is quoted more often.

Nor has anybody forgotten John F. Kennedy appealing to fellow-Americans in his own inaugural speech in 1961 “to ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country”.

Martin Luther King’s spell-binding I Have A Dream speech in 1963 that called for racial equality has been ranked at the top of America’s top 100 public addresses of the twentieth century. Every word rang with conviction and purpose.

Not all of the ranking speeches were stirring appeals to idealism. Radical activist Malcolm X’s The Ballot or the Bullet delivered in the Cory Methodist Church in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1964 made the top ten. Despite its blunt headline, it was a beautifully measured speech that sought to unite black people against white oppression. “Whether we are Christians or Muslims or nationalists or agnostics or atheists, we must first learn to forget our differences. If we have differences, let us differ in the closet; when we come out in front, let us not have anything to argue about until we get finished arguing with the [white] man.”

Eloquence Across Genders — and Across Eras

It’s interesting that nearly a quarter of a list of the top 100 compiled just before the millennium were made by women, including Hilary Clinton’s 1995 address to the United Nations World Conference on Women. This ranked her way ahead of husband Bill’s only

speech to make the list. And while Barbara Bush’s commencement speech at Wellesley College in 1990 made about half-way, husband George doesn’t feature at all.

Although the compilers of the list argued the quality of these addresses showed it was a mistake to “bemoan the death of eloquence”, Donald Trump’s certainly doing his best to prove them wrong.

A very short history of political satire

A thick skin and a sense of humour are just about the most important requirements of a president of the USA. Unfortunately for Donald Trump — but luckily for his growing army of political satirists — he’s got neither.

That is fundamentally why he forced the abrupt departure of late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, only to see him reinstated a few days later to his undisguised frustration. But before Trump goes after ALL the political satirists, as he’s promised his humourless followers, here’s a cautionary tale.

I know he won’t read it because Trump doesn’t read, but here it is anyway.

From ancient Greece to Tudor England

Political satire is much older than 79-year-old Trump. Well over 2,000 years ago, the Greek playwright Aristophanes mercilessly ribbed the politicians and leading lights of the day in plays that packed 10,000-seat houses. One particular target was a populist politician named Cleon, which may ring a bell. Yet Aristophanes was never imprisoned, tried in court or otherwise shut down. In fact, he won awards and was widely admired.

Fast forward a couple of millennia to Tudor England of the 1600s, when the Mother Goose rhymes were veiled commentaries on the social and political events of the royal house. And a little more than a century after that came Gulliver’s Travels, which not everybody knows is a social satire.

Written by clergyman Jonathan Swift, this timeless book pulls the leg of just about everybody — pompous politicians, hapless intellectuals and the very stupid.

Incidentally, it was Swift who coined the name “yahoos” for the latter.

America’s long relationship with political humour

America also has a long acquaintance with political satire.

Mark Twain didn’t spare the feelings of elected officials over burning issues such as slavery, and later Will Rogers’ gentler brand of the art won him a huge audience.

And as the Voice of America (since shut down by Trump, who firmly believes he’s the voice) pointed out in a fascinating article, the First Amendment has specifically protected political satire for 235 years under the name of free speech.

Television turns satire into a national sport

The advent of television accelerated political satire in the US. The late George Carlin took the mickey out of a lot of things, but one of his best lines was: “In America anyone can become president. That’s the problem.”

Starting in 1975, Saturday Night Live has cordially insulted most presidents. Chevy Chase used to impersonate a Gerald Ford who dropped papers everywhere, forgot things and once fell over a Christmas tree.

These days there’s so much political satire in America that it’s become an academic subject, largely because of Trump.

A professor, Alison Dagnes, wrote a book called A Conservative Walks into a Bar: The Politics of Political Humor, while another professor, Robert Lichter, helped pen Politics Is a Joke: How TV Comedians Are Remaking Political Life.

Why Trump can’t take a joke

Most presidents take it all in good humour — except Trump. In his first term he appeared a couple of times on Saturday Night Live but gradually got annoyed at Alec Baldwin’s buffoonish impersonation of him. Now he rants that no channel has a licence to make jokes about him.

What Trump doesn’t seem to realise is that late-night comedians hardly have to invent anything because the White House is providing their material for free. When Melania donned one of her verandah-brimmed hats to a royal garden party during the recent two-day visit to Britain, a woman comic said: “God, she’s wearing a UFO.” And later, when her face was almost completely hidden: “Is she really in there?”

Now that Trump’s been thwarted in shutting down Jimmy Kimmel, he really has made up his mind to go after ALL of the late-night lampoonists, including Jimmy Fallon, who also does a good impersonation of The Donald.

The president is always the biggest target

It’s not going to work though. As Professor Dagnes points out, “the president is 100 percent of the time the most satirized figure in American politics.”

You may have noticed something about Trump: he never laughs.

Any historian could have foreseen the disruption now beginning in global shipping and trade. It’s the direct result of America’s punitive and economically indefensible tariffs against just about every country in the world — as well as its port penalties against Chinese-built and Chinese-operated ships.

But nobody asked the historians.

And now we’re running into trouble that looks uncomfortably like the 1930s and the fallout from the Smoot–Hawley Act, which slapped a wall of punitive tariffs — effectively taxes — on imports into the United States.

One of Washington’s worst policy mistakes, Smoot–Hawley deepened, spread and prolonged the Great Depression. It devastated international commerce and created misery for ordinary people.

Nearly a century later — despite American leaders once vowing never to repeat the error — Trump’s so-called “Day of Liberation” tariffs and port penalties are disrupting global trade all over again. They are raising the price of goods that Americans rely on and will, in time, reduce their availability.

What the tariffs are doing — and why the president is wrong

First, the price of thousands of products is rising in America because, contrary to the president’s claims, it’s US importers who pay the tariffs — not the exporters. Trump is wildly wrong to say that the US Treasury is collecting “trillions” from other nations.

Second, American exporters are now being hit by retaliation. Beijing has begun imposing its own port penalties on US-flagged ships. In mid-October, for instance, the German owners of the container ship Matson Waikiki were ordered to pay US$1.7 million for docking in Shanghai. This is precisely the same tit-for-tat, beggar-thy-neighbour pattern seen in the 1930s.

Third, American ports will soon see shipping diverted elsewhere — for example, to Canadian ports where rail can take over. It’s already happening.

And fourth, major manufacturers are simply going where the welcome is warmer. China’s BYD, for instance, has abandoned plans for a huge American plant in favour of building one in Brazil.

In short, America is shooting itself in the foot.

The 1930s déjà vu — and what Smoot–Hawley really caused

This is very nearly a re-run of the 1930s. Reed Smoot, an obstinate senator from Utah, believed local farmers were being hurt by agricultural imports. With Congressman Charles Hawley, he crafted the infamously protectionist Smoot–Hawley laws — passed despite the pleas of 1,000 far more rational economists.

The consequences were catastrophic. As I wrote in The Great Crash, “the lifting of rates on dutiable imports into the United States to the highest levels in more than a century effectively erected a blockade around the home markets.” Soon the ratio of duties collected to the value of imports hit 60 percent.

This was exactly what Smoot and Hawley wanted — but, predictably, other countries retaliated. Global trade collapsed by two-thirds between 1929 and 1934. The prices of wheat, cotton, tin, rubber, sugar, coffee and countless other commodities plummeted. Producers everywhere were ruined — including in America, where exporters of wheat, cotton, tobacco and lumber lost up to half their markets. At one point, sawdust sold for more per ton than wheat.

Across the United States the damage was appalling. Steel production slumped to 12 percent of capacity. Railroad freight — a key indicator of economic activity — fell by a third. Automobile production halved. And as export markets vanished, vessels were abandoned to rust at moorings around the world.

The lesson America still hasn’t learned

Smoot had obviously never read Adam Smith. In The Wealth of Nations (1776), Smith showed that tariffs, import quotas and protectionist policies raise prices for consumers, limit choice, and reduce a country’s standard of living.

And here we go again. One can only hope America comes to its senses before today’s downward spiral gathers speed.

Incidentally, despite overwhelming evidence that his policies were disastrous, Smoot never changed his mind.