As the Iran war pushes oil prices over $100 a barrel, and ships are attacked and mines are being laid in the Strait of Hormuz, a taboo has been broken and nuclear energy is back in fashion. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen acknowledged that “the current Middle East crisis is a stark reminder” that it was “a strategic mistake for Europe to turn its back on” nuclear energy. 

She was speaking at an International Atomic Agency summit hosted by France. Just days before the summit, French president Emanuel Macron spoke — a nuclear submarine looming behind him — of the need to increase the country’s stockpile of nuclear warheads for the first time in several decades. “In this dangerous and uncertain world,” Macron said, “you have to be feared if you want to be free.” 

In February, the ‘New START treaty’, a mutual agreement between Russia and the U.S. to reduce and limit their nuclear arsenal, officially expired. The U.S. said China had conducted secret tests and that Beijing had to be part of any future non-proliferation agreement. For its part, the Chinese accused the U.S. government of seeking to mask its own expansionist ambitions. In the wake of the Iran war, started apparently because the Iranian regime was just days away from securing a bomb, other countries have spoken openly of their nuclear ambitions. After the start of the Iran war, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un spoke pointedly about preparing a nuclear-ready navy while inspecting a new destroyer and observing the testing of nuclear-capable cruise missiles. Even Polish prime minister Donald Tusk said Poland “will not want to be passive when it comes to nuclear security in a military context.”

On X, Tusk posted that Poland is in talks with France about joining its nuclear deterrence program. “We are arming together with our friends,” he wrote, “so that our enemies will never dare to attack us.” France is the only nuclear-capable European country, its systems (unlike the UK’s) completely independent of the U.S. and its new deterrence framework will include collaborations with Germany, Poland, Greece, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium. Macron is calling France’s new strategy “advance deterrence,” a willingness to spread French nuclear armaments across the continent. A senior Pentagon official said the U.S. would “obviously at a minimum strenuously oppose” European countries seeking to acquire nuclear weapons. The U.S., as part of a NATO agreement, already deploys over 100 nuclear weapons in Europe — in Germany, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey. 

Europe’s anti-nuclear tradition grew out of grassroots movements in the 1970s. In West Germany, protests against a planned nuclear plant in the small wine-growing town of Wyhl began when local farmers feared pollution would destroy their land and crops. By the 1980s, millions of Europeans were protesting nuclear weapons and the deployment of NATO missiles across the continent, bringing nuclear security debates into the public arena and pushing governments toward disarmament efforts. The political impact of those protests were long-lasting. Across Europe, nuclear energy programs were curtailed or abandoned entirely. Denmark banned nuclear power plants in 1985, Germany shut down its last nuclear reactors in 2023, and several countries imposed strict limits on nuclear development. Nuclear technology, whether for energy or weapons, remained politically toxic in much of Europe. But, as Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen said European deterrence “is necessary because the military threat from Russia is expected to increase,” and its reliance on U.S. military support can arguably no longer be taken for granted.

At the Paris summit, China, Brazil, Belgium and Italy all signed up to a pledge to triple global nuclear capacity by 2050. South Africa signed the pledge earlier this month. The war in Iran has once again made clear that the world must wean itself off fossil fuels. The U.S. — which imposed additional tariffs on India for buying Russian oil and thus helping to finance the continuation of the war in Ukraine — has, since the start of the attack on Iran, told India it can continue to buy Russian oil. Delhi promptly bought 30 million barrels of Russian crude oil. But this month India also signed a deal with Canada to receive uranium to expand its nuclear energy program. But in 1974, Canada provided India with nuclear technology for peaceful uses that were promptly put towards the building of nuclear weapons. Nuclear collaborations between the two countries were suspended for decades. It’s not a coincidence that those ties are once again being revived in the current geopolitical context. A growing clamor for nuclear energy has clear proliferation risks.

While France has been talking about greater nuclear deterrence, most European states are speaking about a revival of nuclear energy as an alternative to fossil fuels and as a means to achieve climate goals. The vast energy requirements of AI and data centres is also prompting nations to adopt an “atoms for algorithms” strategy, to be, as Macron said, “at the ​heart ​of ⁠the artificial intelligence challenge.” But to talk about energy alone is to ignore the appeal nuclear deterrence has for nation states trying to navigate dangerous geopolitical straits. Iran was attacked ostensibly because it was on the verge of having a bomb. Favored nations such as Saudi Arabia are able to sign nuclear pacts that remove non-proliferation guardrails, but the actions of the U.S. and Israel in Iran will make the bomb attractive to many more as a national security strategy.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

Related Articles

The strike, the illusion of regime change, and what comes next

Jim Muir

The AI-powered ‘forever wars’ start now

Simon Allison

An execution stayed: Why the Islamic Republic might cling to power in Iran

Jim Muir

The post As Iran burns, a new age of nuclear proliferation begins appeared first on Coda Story.

Julia E, an 18-year-old influencer from Germany, was hanging out with her family on the Palm Jumeirah beach when she heard a blast and saw a fireball erupt into the sky. She knew tension was mounting following the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran the previous day, but she didn’t imagine Dubai would be on the frontline. “I was a little scared,” she says. “Usually you just read about it in the newspapers, you see it online, but when you see it in front of you, it’s a different feeling — like your heart just drops.”

The fear was not an emotion she expressed on Instagram. Julia’s family moved to Dubai from Germany in 2024, tempted by the business potential of an emirate that aggressively marketed itself as the influencer capital of the world — a digital utopia carved out of the desert, with its gleaming skyscrapers and Insta-ready waterfronts. Dubai’s state-backed Creator HQ offers content creators long-term residencies, legal support, networking opportunities, training and an environment geared towards digital entrepreneurship. Influencers need a permit to legally operate in Dubai but taxes are negligible — 5% VAT on taxable income from clients in the UAE over AED 375,000 (about $102,000), and a flat 9% corporate tax on income exceeding AED 1,000,000 (about $272,000). It has attracted over 50,000 content creators to Dubai, which has a population of about 4 million.

With 60,000 followers on TikTok and Instagram, Julia is looking to build her own marketing company in Dubai. In an effort, she says, to comfort her younger brother, she recorded a video shortly after witnessing the explosion. It showed Julia, a palm tree and the glittering night skyline behind her, with the caption: “You live in Dubai, aren’t you scared?” The video cuts to a montage of Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and other Emirati sheikhs: “No, because I know who protects us.” The short video is set to an AI-generated rendition of the Belgian singer Stromae’s ‘Papaoutai’, a song that laments the loss of a father.

According to Julia, she was the first content creator to post an ‘Are you safe?’-style video, a now viral trend across the Gulf as influencers counter the narrative of a region in turmoil. 

“I decided to make that video,” she says, “because I did feel safe. And I wanted to spread some positivity and my perspective that we are still being protected and we still have someone behind us here.” As Iranian drones hit the Gulf, including luxury tourist hotels destinations like Fairmont, The Palm hotel and the Burj Al Arab hotel, there was a wave of schadenfreude online. Some users outside Dubai could not contain their glee that the city’s glossy surface, its influencer-curated image of sunkissed luxury, had been ripped apart. The distress of those who spend their working hours flaunting luxury and throwing shade at the cities they come from, were, it has to be admitted, amusing to many.

But Dubai’s influencers doubled down, as the war spiralled and airports shut down, stressing the city’s safety, walking around in crowded public spaces, praising “the best air defense systems” and the men behind it: a reaction so seemingly choreographed that people questioned whether it was part of a government PR campaign. 

On March 3, the UAE’s president and crown prince were conspicuously filmed on a stroll through a Dubai mall, reassuring bewildered shoppers. It was eerily reminiscent of Volodymyr Zelensky’s “The President is here” video from four years ago, when Russia invaded Ukraine. Vogue Arabia, headquartered in the UAE, praised Gulf leaders and wrote about the influencer campaigns and the people’s “unwavering faith in their nation’s leadership and its steadfast commitment to protecting those who call it home.” 

As inviting as Dubai is to influencers, they must acquire advertiser permits that can cost up to $4,000 and are told to respect the state and avoid circulating rumors and unverified information or any content that can harm the UAE’s foreign relations or “offend or compromise national unity or social cohesion.” In the wake of Iran’s strikes, the UAE’s Public Prosecution announced that "anyone who shares or republishes content from unknown sources may face legal accountability under the country’s applicable laws, even if they are not the original creator of the content.”

There is a sense of vulnerability among Dubai’s influencers, says Zoe Hurley, associate professor of media at the American University of Sharjah and author of the 2023 book ‘Social Media Influencing in the City of Likes: Dubai and the Postdigital Condition’. “They haven't necessarily been trained professionally. They don't have institutional guardrails protecting them, or any formal buffer zones that might have protected people who are putting themselves out there.” she said. Hurley made a distinction between “influencers who are here on holiday who don't live here and who are followed by, say, people in the UK” and homegrown ones, representing diasporas in Dubai — from South Asia, the Levant and Europe — “who people are turning to because they're the thought leaders in their communities.”

None of the influencers we contacted in Dubai or across the Gulf confirmed ever being prompted or paid to post positive content. The German NTV network, however, reported concerns voiced by German influencers: "I don't know what I'm allowed to say and what I'm not allowed to say," one posted, "We're not allowed to post anything!” said another. These stories and reels have since been deleted.

Julia made another video, responding to the accusations that influencers were essentially providing a PR service for Dubai. “I will tell you exactly how much I got paid,” she says. “Dubai pays me in business… in safety… in connections… with weather.” She adds that, unlike in Dubai, she would never venture outside alone in her native Germany after 8 at night.

This point about Dubai’s safety — leaving things in the car without being scared to be robbed, or walking alone at night — is echoed widely among European expatriates in the Emirates and Saudi Arabia who compare it to the relative anxiety they feel in Europe. Telegram’s CEO, Pavel Durov recently made the same point: “Unfortunately, I had to leave Dubai for Europe a week ago — so I’m not only missing the free fireworks from Iran, but also exposing myself to greater risk. Given Europe’s crime rates, Dubai is statistically safer even with missiles flying.” Elon Musk shared the sentiment, writing that “No country is perfect, but Dubai and UAE broadly are objectively safer and better run than many areas of Europe.” Notorius influencer and ‘manosphere’ icon, Andrew Tate, still facing human trafficking and rape charges in Romania, posted a video of himself dancing on a yacht “as bombs fall.” His brother Tristan Tate chimed in, comparing air attacks in Dubai to stabbings in London. 

What these influencers don’t discuss is Dubai’s underbelly, an invisible city occupied by an underpaid migrant workforce, their treatment explained away on the grounds that they make more money in Dubai than they would in the poor countries in South Asia and Africa that they come from. While the influencers enjoy government-sponsored benefits and status, these other migrant workers remain bound under the kafala (sponsorship) system that binds their residency status to their employer. Despite reforms, under the system their status remains uncertain, their earnings precarious, and imprisonment or fines for relatively minor offences is common. There are no golden visas for laborers and maids, never mind darker reports about human trafficking and sexual and physical abuse. 

London-based barrister Caoilfhionn Gallagher described the UAE’s exploitation of migrant workers as a “grubby reality, with rampant human rights abuses.” She said she had “acted for people prosecuted and jailed in the UAE for daring to work with human rights organisations or criticise the authorities,” referring to the mass trial in 2024, when 43 people, among them human rights activists, had been “subjected to enforced disappearance, solitary confinement and incommunicado detention.” 

The contrast between the city that influencers show their followers and the city built on the abuse of migrant labor is one that governments across the Gulf want to bury. The UAE’s 2031 vision sees creative industries contributing up to 5% of the country’s GDP. 

For decades now, the UAE has been trying to diversify its economy, to pivot away from its reliance on hydrocarbons. It is betting on the digital economy and tourism to be the cornerstones of economic growth. 

But for all the bravado on display, rich people and Western influencers are fleeing the Gulf, as war with Iran continues. Influencers unable or unwilling to leave, must keep grinding. Narcissus could not stop staring at his reflection even as he was dying. Will Dubai’s influencers be allowed to look away from their reflections in the city’s famous mirrored skyscrapers?

Related Articles

The strike, the illusion of regime change, and what comes next

Jim Muir

Turn off, tune out: Australia takes its kids off social media

Isobel Cockerell

What we miss when we talk about the “Middle East”

Natalia Antelava

The post The influencer bubble: Can content creators continue to airbrush the Gulf? appeared first on Coda Story.

Kleptocracy is a global system, which allows crooks, thieves, oligarchs, tycoons, and the like to enjoy their wealth while evading any responsibility to the society where they obtained that wealth. It infects different countries to different extents, and I’ve been very impressed by the Bloomberg investigations into how kleptocratic the Iranian elite has become. If you’d like a shortcut to those investigations, this new video is worth watching. Obviously, Iran’s regime has been vicious and aggressive from the start, but I do think there is a new kind of vicious aggression that develops when a country’s elite becomes kleptocratic, and thus is — in essence — colonising its own country. 

If it is extracting wealth, hiding that wealth offshore and thus secure in its future, it is able to take risks and make decisions without concerning itself about their effect on ordinary people. “While ordinary Iranians contend with a collapsing currency, rising prices, fuel shortages and now war, elites like (Hossein) Shamkhani have translated political lineage into global capital — buying property abroad, securing foreign passports and moving freely through systems that everyday citizens cannot enter,” Bloomberg notes.

Much of the elite’s ability to enrich itself has come from its evasion of Western sanctions, which Iranians have had decades of practice in learning how to dodge. And the role of cryptocurrencies in enabling Iran’s kleptocrats is clearly significant, as demonstrated by this report from Chainalysis. But of course the backbone of the corruption has been the elite’s control over trade, and thus its ability to move value to safe havens like Dubai (that’s not looking as safe as it did of course but, don’t worry, the money can easily find a new home), which gives it the security to fire missiles without worrying too much about retaliation.

In this though, I’m not sure Iran is particularly unusual. A lot of the governments involved in the crisis in the Middle East are a bit like those F. Scott Fitzgerald characters who “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness”.

Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu has been dancing on the edge of a corruption trial for the best part of a decade, ever since he was indicted in 2019 for, among other things, accepting “hundreds of thousands of pounds in luxury gifts from billionaire friends”. Donald Trump’s family has assets worth more than double what they were just two and a half years ago. The earnings from crypto alone are enough to guarantee the most comfortable of futures. These two are very definitely careless people, as is everyone around them.

If this ill-planned military adventure ends badly, then the elites of none of the combatant countries will end up suffering in the way that ordinary Iranians, Israelis or Americans will. This sense of impunity infects much of the discussion of the war: how, for example, could someone who feels any connection to other people be exulting in their death in the way that U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth does? In this bloodthirstiness, as in so many other aspects of kleptocracy of course, Russia led the way, but the rest of the world is catching up and I don’t think we’re ready for what that will look like.

An important aspect of this, again long visible in Russia with its dreadful public services and military failure in Ukraine, is that corruption does not just enrich elites, it also degrades state capabilities. “Corruption at the top always rolls downhill. Once it becomes open and acknowledged, it leads to corrupt and slovenly acts throughout a system,” as Phillips Payson O’Brien argues, in a piece which builds on another article in which he lays out how the Russian model might be worth applying to much of what’s happening in the United States.

This of course adds fresh weight, not that it’s needed, to the urgency of shoring up defences not just against foreign interference in the democratic processes of those countries that still have them, but to getting big money out too. It’s great that a U.S. politician has, for the first time, taken the Political Integrity Pledge and won (though admittedly only a primary), but just to get to the stage of standing in the general election, he’s had to raise more than $20 million. Too much of that and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.

This week at Tether

Talking about real money, the latest episode of Tether watch is a weird one: our favourite crypto concern has just invested $50 million in a smart mattress company. Now admittedly, that isn’t even two days’ worth of last year’s profits, so it’s not exactly a big deal for CEO Paolo Ardoino but it’s still sufficiently sinister to be worthy of mention.

I find it disturbing enough that tech companies are harvesting our browsing history to make money from, but it’s a whole other level to have Tether — Tether!?! — monitoring what people get up to in bed. It’s all, apparently, about personal sovereignty, which is to say you should stop trusting big companies with your data and instead trust it to Tether, including with what’s happening in your head: “Paolo's $200 million acquisition of a majority stake in brain-computer interface company Blackrock Neurotech may not be because he is optimistic about the size of the brain-computer interface market, but because he does not want the brain-computer interface to be controlled by others”.

Historians are going to be so confused by this; assuming of course that there will still be historians, which may be an over-optimistic assumption about a future with brain-computer interfaces.

The need to know your enemy

I’ve been talking to quite a lot of people about money laundering of late, and one of the enduring problems is the lack of reliable ways to gauge the scale of the problem. We’ve been saying it’s between 2% to 5% of the world economy since the late 1990s, but beyond repeating that age-hallowed guesstimate, how do you measure it? 

Often we turn to other measures, such as how many suspicious activity reports get filed, or how many fines get imposed. So, on that note, is it good or bad that the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority imposed fines last year of just £124 million, a decline of 78% from half a decade earlier? Maybe this means there’s 78% less crime? Or maybe it means that the FCA has stopped investigating 78% of crime? Or maybe 2021 was just a really big year for fines (which it was)? Or maybe something else happened?

The answer to this is that we should properly investigate money laundering not just criminally but also academically, looking at gaps in statistics and devising new methods of measuring how large the criminal economy is, rather than rely on proxies for it. That would not only help us identify what to target, but also help us see what techniques are working as criminal wealth rises and falls. As it stands, it feels like we’re waging a war without a clear idea of where the enemy is, and what the final goal might be, and there’s quite enough of that going on elsewhere at the moment.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

Related Articles

Can a Task Force set up to punish the little guy, take on Trump?

Oliver Bullough

The new boss? Not the same as the old boss

Oliver Bullough

How Stablecoins make it easy to sidestep sanctions

Oliver Bullough

The post Why Kleptocrats go to war without a care in the world appeared first on Coda Story.

When the United States and Israel started blitzing Iran last weekend, eyes turned to the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean. The British-administered archipelago is home to a strategically vital US air base on the island of Diego Garcia. Would US President Donald Trump be using it in his “Operation Epic Fury”?

It's fair to say Trump probably didn't give a damn about Misley Mandarin’s opinion. But the self-styled “interim first minister” of Chagos, who recently upped sticks from Britain in a “super, super secret” mission to take up residence on the long-deserted Peros Banhos atoll, gave Washington his official “blessing” anyway.

I spoke via WhatsApp to the 47-year-old Chagossian in his base camp: basically a few tents, with a solar generator and a Starlink satellite connection enabling him to beam reels to his 10,000 Facebook followers. He quit his job as a bus driver in London to come here, determined to halt Britain’s plan to hand over what he considers to be his land to Mauritius after a long-running decolonization battle.

“We’re British citizens here. We’re not moving,” he said.

Mandarin wants the land of his forebears to remain under the rule of Britain, the former colonial ruler that booted out about 1,500 native Chagossians, including his own father, to make room for the U.S. military base in the late 1960s. The removal consigned Chagossians to a miserable fate in newly independent Mauritius.

Now on home turf, Mandarin, his 72-year-old dad, and two other Chagossians have dodged immediate deportation: they’ve obtained an injunction from a British court allowing them to stay until a hearing on March 13. Since their arrival, two more Chagossians have joined them. “We can do self-determination right now. We don't want to cut any links with Britain. We're not looking for independence,” Mandarin says.

“The next generation will decide on independence.”

Marriage of convenience

Life on Île du Coin, the largest island on Peros Banhos, is simple. The daily routine revolves around catching fish and finding a supply of fresh water. The new residents collect overnight rainfall in tarpaulin sheets to drink. Bathing involves a dip in the sea to wash off dirt, followed by a splash of precious rainwater to rinse. 

Mandarin appears to be relishing the experience. Soon after his arrival, the former army cook, who has bags of swagger, posted a video of himself cooking up “naan fromaaz”, or cheese naan, in a skillet on a makeshift stove. “Pa bizin madam isi mwa!” he jokes. I don't need a wife here!

The Chagossians arrived on the island on 16 February, accompanied by former army officer Adam Holloway, a former Conservative MP who recently defected to the radical right Reform UK party.

Reform, which is surging in the polls, is leading opposition to a bilateral treaty that would see Britain cede sovereignty of Chagos to Mauritius, while paying an average of £101-million ($135-million) per year to maintain a lease on Diego Garcia over the coming century. Negotiations began after the International Court of Justice ruled in 2019 that Britain should transfer sovereignty of Chagos to Mauritius “as rapidly as possible.”

The sleek yacht that brought the group on the five-day journey from Sri Lanka and travels back and forth with supplies was paid for by British-Thai businessman Christopher Harborne, a mega-donor to Reform. Its name is No Excuse – as in, “no excuse for us not to stay on Chagos,” says Mandarin.

Reform UK and the Chagossians make for curious bedfellows. On the one hand, there's a political party that has floated plans to create a Trump-inspired, ICE-style agency to carry out mass deportations in Britain. 

On the other, there’s Mandarin’s dad, finally back home after being brutally evicted from his atoll at the age of 14. “I will not go back to England. I want to die here,” said Michel Mandarin, as he set foot on his cherished Chagossian soil.

The unlikely pairing has had cause for joint celebration. Two days after they arrived, Trump withdrew his approval for the UK-Mauritius transfer treaty, which was supposed to provide legal certainty for the base in a hypothetical world governed by the rules-based international order. 

It turned out the president was annoyed at British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s refusal to sanction the use of Diego Garcia for the Iran offensive. “DO NOT GIVE AWAY DIEGO GARCIA!” he told the British prime minister. The treaty was paused. Then war broke out and a beleaguered Starmer agreed to “defensive” strikes from Diego Garcia.

On Île du Coin, war seems like a distant prospect, even if it is potentially less than 200km (about 125 miles) away in Diego Garcia. As Tuesday drew to a close, there had so far been neither sight nor sound of the US’s deadly B-52, B-1, and B-2 bombers in the slightly overcast skies.

Kicking the can

Mandarin left Mauritius at age 22. He joined the British army in a bid to improve his lot and later became a bus driver in south London. He says he always felt like a second-class citizen in Mauritius, with “no opportunity to progress”.

Rights groups have charted how evictees from Chagos struggled to cope in Mauritius, many of them ending up trapped in an urban nightmare of poverty, mental illness, and addiction — with little sympathy from their hosts. Many Chagossians left for Britain after securing citizenship rights.

Now the fate of their homeland is being decided by a treaty negotiated over their heads. Last year, a UN committee on racial discrimination warned that the treaty could perpetuate “long-standing violations” of Chagossian rights.

The treaty says Mauritius is “free” to resettle islanders on any of the Chagos islands — except Diego Garcia. But there is no binding obligation for it to do so and the exclusion of Diego Garcia rankles. The deal also includes a £40-million trust fund to be managed by Mauritius, which has been criticised as a ruse by Britain to avoid paying proper compensation. 

“People talk about decolonisation, but if Britain did the wrongs, Britain should have to repair the wrongs — not kick the can to Mauritius,” says Mandarin. “Or they will get away with it.”

One of the reels he has filmed on Île du Coin features an industrial oven that was used by colonial officials to burn the islanders’ dogs before they were evicted. Officials threatened the islanders with the same fate if they refused to leave. Britain must pay compensation, he says.

'Belongers'

Mandarin’s joint odyssey with Reform UK has provoked mixed feelings among the Chagossian diaspora in Britain, Seychelles, and Mauritius. 

“He’s put us back in the centre of the story, but will we be overshadowed by Reform’s agenda?” asked one Chagossian in the English town of Crawley – home to a 3,500-strong Chagossian community — who is also opposed to the deal.

As the treaty was being negotiated, Chagossians’ concerns were largely swept under the carpet as a complicating factor in a pragmatic decolonization drive.

The hard right has capitalized on the deal’s major flaw, positioning itself as the main champion of Chagossians, just as their ancestral land finds itself embroiled in a conflict that could upend the global order.

One video recently posted by Reform leader Nigel Farage saw him express outrage after being “denied access” to Île du Coin for the delivery of “humanitarian” supplies to Mandarin and his men, racking up a cool 4.7 million views on X. 

Asked whether he is being used by Reform and its supporters, Mandarin is sanguine. He says he also contacted the left-wing Green Party for support, but it never replied. “Only Reform responded. At the end of the day, it’s politics. You have to make your own judgements for the sake of your people,” he says. 

He views the upcoming hearing as a potential “turning point in our fight”. The injunction barring their removal was granted on the basis that their location was too far from the base to pose a security threat. “If the court says they can’t remove us, then maybe more people will come,” he says. “This is our people. This is our time. We’re not visitors — we’re belongers.”

Related Articles

The Identitarians are back: How a discredited worldview dominates the global agenda

Josephine Lulamae

In Hungary, it’s Central Asia to the rescue

Katia Patin

When globalization was king and home was elsewhere

Shougat Dasgupta

The post The Belongers: What the Chagos Islands tells us about the new world order appeared first on Coda Story.

Between them, the United States and Israel struck more than 2,000 targets within the first 24 hours of their war with Iran.

For even the largest militaries, it is an almost impossible task to identify, select and then precisely locate such a high volume of targets. But the U.S. military had some help. Claude, the “next generation AI assistant” built by Anthropic, was used in the planning of ‘Operation Epic Fury’. This, even though the Department of War recently labeled Anthropic a “supply chain risk”.

Anthropic is one of the world’s leading AI companies. Together with Palantir, another Big Tech company, it has been working since 2024 with the Pentagon to embed its systems in military decision-making – creating what is arguably the operating platform of present-day U.S. warfare and intelligence. Even though secretary of defense Pete Hegseth said the company “delivered a master class in arrogance and betrayal” and that the government would “cease all use of Anthropic's technology,” the company is too integrated into modern U.S. warfare for it not to be essential to the U.S. attack on Iran. The question might be not whether companies like Anthropic can ringfence their tech but whether the Pentagon might just commandeer it. 

Craig Jones, an academic who studies automated kill chains at the University of Newcastle, has told reporters that “the AI machine is making recommendations for what to target, which is actually much quicker in some ways than the speed of thought.” Similar AI systems have been used by Israel to coordinate its bombing campaign in Gaza, which is among the most destructive in human history. 

Among the first hits in the United States and Israel’s aerial bombardment of Iran was the Shajarah Tayyebeh primary school for girls, in the southern town of Minab. It was a Saturday morning, and school was in session. According to Iranian state media, at least 165 people were killed, mostly young girls between the ages of seven and 12. Another 96 were severely injured. Eyewitness and open source intelligence reports corroborate the claims of mass civilian casualties. Both Iran and Israel have denied responsibility. The United States has said it is “looking into” allegations that the school was destroyed by one of its missiles. Maybe, given the volume of the bombardment, they’ve lost track. 

It is too soon to know why the school was targeted – or whether it was an error. Either way, the U.S. military’s reliance on AI raises difficult questions.

AIs get things wrong all the time. Maybe it’s an extra finger in an AI-generated image, or a ‘hallucinated’ reference in a research report. Or, maybe, an algorithm sends a missile to the wrong address. That’s why Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said that weapons “that take humans out of the loop entirely and automate selecting and engaging targets” are simply not reliable enough. That position — along with Anthropic’s refusal to allow Claude to be used for mass domestic surveillance (although they are just fine with foreign surveillance) — led to the Pentagon cancelling a $200-million contract with the company on Friday, the day before the attacks on Iran began. The Department of War immediately signed a new deal, minus any ethical guardrails, with OpenAI.

Anthropic’s confrontation with the Pentagon has burnished its reputation as an “ethical” AI company. But it may have found its ethical backbone too late. Critics argue that even within Anthropic’s “red lines”, there is enormous potential for abuse, while a “human in the loop” does not necessarily prevent mistakes — raising questions about who, exactly, is responsible when these mistakes result in fatalities. Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur for Palestine, accused Amazon, Google and Microsoft in a 2025 of being “complicit in genocide” for providing cloud storage systems to the Israeli military. Anthropic’s integration into the U.S. military has been much deeper.

While Israel and the U.S. are waging an AI-powered war, Iran is responding with a technological revolution of its own. The Islamic Republic has pioneered the production of low-cost one-way attack drones, most notably the Shahed-136, which costs just $34,000 to produce and as much as $4 million to shoot down. These are battle-tested: Russia has launched an estimated 57,000 Shahed-type drones in its war against Ukraine. Despite U.S. reliance on its own high-tech AI-powered systems, an American version of the Shahed also made its debut, alongside Claude, in the attack on Iran. 

In response, Iran has aimed more than 1000 drones at neighboring Gulf states since the war broke out on Saturday. Hundreds have been shot down, but even the most sophisticated air defences struggle with this sheer volume, and dozens have struck their targets, threatening to prolong this war and cause more damage to U.S. allies than anticipated. It is significant that these targets included at least three Amazon data centers in Dubai and Bahrain. Just last month, Amazon announced that it was making Anthropic’s Claude available to its Middle Eastern customers. Claude experienced two global outages this week — it is not clear if these were related to the data center attacks. 

Tech evangelists promise that artificial intelligence will, one day, cure cancer, end poverty and greatly increase our quality of life. But the new technology’s most obvious impact has been on warfare. For those with access to them, AI systems like Claude make it dramatically easier to bomb hundreds of targets at the same time — and much harder to figure out who is accountable when something goes wrong. On Truth Social, Donald Trump — who has promised to stop wars, not start them — posted approvingly that technology and munitions now mean Wars “can be fought ‘forever,’ and very successfully.” 

As the bombing of Iran continues, we are not far from a time when AI not only parses data to select targets, it actually chooses when to pull the trigger. And advanced AI models have far fewer qualms, for instance, about deploying nuclear weapons than humans faced with similar scenarios. One day, when — if — war crimes investigators are able to pin down exactly who is responsible for killing dozens of young girls in Minab, tech bosses may find themselves implicated alongside military and political leaders. “The AI did it” can’t be their defense.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

Related Articles

The strike, the illusion of regime change, and what comes next

Jim Muir

The future according to Silicon Valley’s prophets

Isobel Cockerell

AI, the UN and the performance of virtue

Abeba Birhane

The post The AI-powered ‘forever wars’ start now appeared first on Coda Story.

This is going to be a big year for the Financial Action Task Force, the world’s standard-setter on money laundering regulations, under its new president Giles Thomson. Quite apart from the standard folderol of plenary meetings, reports and publications, it is due to send a mission to assess the United States.

This whole process will not be quick, and there will be the usual abundant opportunity for acronyms, circumlocution and horse-trading. But eventually the hooves are going to have to hit the road. There is simply no way of hiding the fact that, under Donald Trump, the United States has broken its promise to bring greater transparency to shell companies; nor that it has scaled back prosecution of financial crimes, pardoned convicted financial criminals, and unleashed a crypto frenzy.

Throughout its history the FATF, set up by the G7, has been able and willing to overlook transgressions from big countries that it wouldn’t tolerate from smaller ones. It punished the remote island states of Niue and the Marshall Islands in its first ever blacklist for their lack of transparency around shell companies, for example, while merrily tolerating the fact that not even the Federal Bureau of Investigation could figure out who owned a corporation in Nevada. Nauru got punished for moving dirty Russian wealth while the UK and Switzerland didn’t.

The FATF’s structure, which ensures it is dominated by large economies, is a classic example of how, if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu. But, in the past, those large economies have at least pretended to go along with its recommendations. They’ve made promises, passed legislation, convened working groups, said the right things: all of which has given everyone the diplomatic cover they need to keep each other off the naughty step.

Trump’s not doing any of that, and it’s hard to believe that he’s going to change that habit. If the FATF criticizes his administration, I think we can safely assume Trump won’t take that well, and could — if past behavior is any guide — pull the United States out. But if the FATF doesn’t criticize what he’s been up to, it will lose all credibility. 

Speaking for myself, I think the FATF’s conception, structure and techniques are all flawed, perhaps irreparably, and that it has been part of the problem, rather than part of the solution, for most if not all of its 37-year history. Perhaps, therefore, Giles Thomson should get ahead of the looming fiasco by declaring a complete overhaul of the whole organization, re-examining its recommendations, its memberships, its strategy, and more.

What are the chances of that happening? Well, here’s some news from the Pacific: “Papua New Guinea one step away from being blacklisted, global money laundering watchdog warns”. Is Papua New Guinea the problem? No. Do we get anywhere by pretending that it is? Also no. Will the FATF carry on regardless anyway? I would love to be surprised by the answer to that question.

The need to clean house 

I’m a big fan of this video from Transparency International’s UK chapter, which lays out the inglorious history of corruption in British politics, and urges the government to be more ambitious in its new piece of legislation. TI has pointed out three areas where it thinks the government should go further, and I agree with all of them, but I would also like to see a complete ban on crypto donations, which would help prevent compliance departments being overwhelmed by automated efforts to circumvent donation limits.

I would also urge you to read this comment piece from RUSI about the threat to democracy posed by big funders from the American right, which has significance far beyond British politics. The world’s remaining democracies have been slow to recognize how radically the values of many U.S. billionaires have diverged from what we traditionally associate with conservatism, and to shore up their defences against them. “The task now is to strengthen our democratic guardrails — calmly, transparently and proportionately — before those boundaries are redrawn by others,” the writers Neil Barnett and Eliza Lockhart conclude.

Transparency International’s Russian chapter has been in exile since 2022 for obvious reasons (last year, for example, it had to issue a statement to argue that “fighting corruption is not terrorism”) but it has continued to conduct really valuable investigations into how illicit wealth flows in and out of its home country, including a recent one detailing the use of shell companies in the UK’s tax havens to trade with Russia, and identifying $8 billion worth of transactions.

The worst offender as a source of opaque companies was the British Virgin Islands, though Bermuda was also a problem, moving sanctioned products — including lead and zinc — as well as oil and other fossil fuels, a surprisingly large number of yachts, and a jet that ended up belonging to Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov (whose ill-health is, apparently, once more the subject of speculation, poor chap).

“For many years now, we have observed a dysfunctional equilibrium in which illicit financial flows, tax evasion, sanctions circumvention, and other forms of misconduct are channelled through firms and intermediaries registered in unaccountable jurisdictions,” TI-Russia notes. Fortunately, however, the British government is hosting an illicit finance summit this June and so has the perfect opportunity to set an example by making sure this kind of thing stops happening on the territory it’s responsible for if nowhere else.

Here’s an interesting story from the Netherlands, where luxury firm Louis Vuitton was fined half a million euros for failing to identify customers spending large amounts of cash. This case was part of an investigation into the Chinese money laundering technique known as ‘daigou’, in which value is transferred internationally not via the financial system but by buying expensive objects and then reselling them in China. High-end fashion is often used in the system, and it will be intriguing to see if other countries follow the Dutch lead and investigate unusual cash purchases.

And here’s a piece on our favorite crypto company Tether, which is apparently valued by market participants at between $200 and $350 billion. That is less than estimates made in the summer, but still an awful lot of money. Fun fact: finance firm Cantor Fitzgerald has a five percent stake in Tether, which is thus worth $10 to $17.5 billion, via a convertible bond. Another fun fact: Cantor Fitzgerald is owned by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s children. 

Interesting question, would the prospect of your family earning a windfall of that size affect how stringently you would approach the regulation of a financial institution accused of involvement in industrial-scale money laundering? Lutnick, who led Cantor Fitzgerald for over 30 years, is of course not the kind of man who would let petty cash cloud his judgement, so this question is of academic interest only, but still, worth thinking about.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

Related Articles

Why we must make elections cheap again

Oliver Bullough

‘Iceberg, right ahead’ & the rise of Chinese laundries

Oliver Bullough

How Stablecoins make it easy to sidestep sanctions

Oliver Bullough

The post Can a Task Force set up to punish the little guy, take on Trump? appeared first on Coda Story.

That Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, should disappear, or be disappeared, from the scene was not a novel notion. 

Throughout my nearly five years in Tehran at the turn of this century, speculation about his health and longevity was a near-constant background hum. He was reported, or rumoured, to be mortally stricken by prostate cancer, his constitution already weakened by an assassination attempt in 1981 that left his right arm largely useless. Who would succeed him was far from clear, and the object of further speculation. 

As he lived on into more recent times, reaching the same age of 86 attained by his predecessor – the Islamic Republic's founding father Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini – the prospect of his demise became a more immediate issue, though the question of succession remained equally shrouded in uncertainty. As Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei was the commanding voice behind the ruthless crackdown that took the lives of tens of thousands of citizens early this year in the latest and greatest of many escalating protests, at which the slogan "Marg Bar Diktator!" — Death to the Dictator! — became an increasingly prominent slogan. 

Their wish was confirmed to be true at 5 a.m. local time on Sunday morning by Iranian broadcasters. The previous morning, Khamenei’s compound in Tehran was demolished as the Israeli-American onslaught got under way while the Ayatollah was heading a meeting of the Defence Council. That ensured that top military figures were also killed, including the commander of the Revolutionary Guards, Mohammad Pakpour, the Army Chief of Staff Abdolrahim Musavi, and Khamenei's top military adviser, Ali Shamkhani, who had been wounded but survived the attack in June last year. 

The Iranian leadership appears to have been caught by surprise, as it was last year when the opening Israeli strike, which culled many top military leaders as well as nuclear scientists, was launched between two rounds of indirect negotiations between Iran and the U.S. Oman, which was mediating the talks, was furious then, denouncing Israel as the real destabilising factor in the region. 

Perhaps the Iranian leaders — and the Omani mediators — thought that such a dirty trick could only be pulled once. But it has happened again, with no evidence that the talks in Geneva had broken down. The chief Omani negotiator, Badr Albusaidi, was livid. Only hours before the strike, he was in Washington for meetings “to explain that a peace agreement between the U.S. and Iran is now within reach. No nuclear weapons. Not ever. Zero stockpiling. Comprehensive verification. Peacefully and permanently. Let’s support the negotiators in closing the deal.”

After learning of the attack, he expressed his outrage in another tweet: “I am dismayed. Active and serious negotiations have yet again been undermined. Neither the interests of the United States nor the cause of global peace are well served by this. And I pray for the innocents who will suffer. I urge the United States not to get sucked in further. This is not your war.”

But Donald Trump and the U.S. were already thoroughly sucked in, and it was indeed their war, or at least his. According to the Israelis, the date had been decided jointly weeks before, after months of planning. Which meant that the Geneva negotiations, focused on the nuclear issue, were simply deceptive camouflage designed to give time for the U.S. to complete the marshalling of its biggest naval and air buildup in the region since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. 

Trump and the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu soon made it clear that the campaign now had little to do with the niceties of Iran's nuclear programme: the agenda was regime change in Tehran, and a surprise attack to decapitate the regime was an essential element. 

With Iran's air defences largely taken out in last year's 12 days of war, it was like shooting fish in a barrel. Hundreds of air, missile and drone strikes were carried out on missile launchers, military bases and other targets around the country, with inevitable "collateral damage", including a girl's primary school in the southern town of Minab where scores of children were reported killed.

The Iranians did their best to live up to their dire warnings of deadly reprisals against Israel, and against American bases and allies on the Arab side of the Gulf and elsewhere. Missiles hailed down on airports and other installations in Kuwait, Bahrain, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and even Oman, despite its active mediation. While some U.S. bases may have been hit, so too were many civilian sites such as Dubai's iconic Burj al Arab hotel. Explosions too are being heard in Beirut, after Hezbollah fired rockets and drones at northern Israel to "avenge" Khamenei's death and the Israel Defense Forces struck back.

Air traffic was halted throughout a region rich in international hubs, sowing chaos worldwide. Iran's declaration that the strategic Strait of Hormuz was closed to shipping forced cargo shippers to suspend the voyages that transport some 20% of the world's oil and a lot of liquid gas, causing tremors through international markets. Once again, a decision taken by a tiny circle of men in Washington, Jerusalem and Tehran instantly rewired daily life, reminding us who actually gets to pull the global emergency brake.

What all this would do to Iran's relations with the Arab side of the Gulf was one of many open questions. While Oman was actively mediating, the other Arab oil states had been pressing the Americans not to allow a campaign that would predictably destabilise the region, and declaring their airspace not available for any hostilities. But any sympathy for Tehran quickly evaporated when the missiles started flying in: the Gulf Arab states closed ranks.

Trump and the Israelis made it clear that this was not one quick spectacular strike, but an ongoing campaign that would last days, perhaps even weeks. Presumably at the end, Iran would find its missile capabilities "obliterated," in Trump's favourite term, along with any nuclear activities. 

Once the bombs stop falling, Trump and Netanyahu urged, the Iranians should come out of their basements and take over a government that would be theirs for the taking. A historic opportunity that would likely not recur for generations, Iranians were told. 

But it is hard to imagine such regime change being wrought remotely from the skies. The regime lost little time in filling the leadership vacuum, setting up a three-man ruling council in line with the constitution, composed of the President, Masood Pezeshkian, the head of the Judiciary, Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei, and Ayatollah Alireza Arafi from the Council of Guardians. All regime loyalists, and the latter two noted hard-liners. So business as usual as far as they are concerned. But the fact is that the assassination of the Supreme Leader and the attendant bludgeoning of the regime's capabilities will inevitably usher in a new and unpredictable phase in Iran's turbulent history.

On the streets, reactions were fractured: jubilation in areas that had long chanted “Death to the dictator”, state-promote mourning in others, but also fear and a grim resignation, an understanding that power vacuums are often filled with fresh repression or civil war.

A smooth transition to a peaceful democracy is about the least likely scenario among the many possibilities. So too is an imminent return of the monarchy, with a comeback by Israeli-backed Reza Pahlavi, son of the Shah ousted by the 1979 revolution. So far there has been no sign visible to the outside world of a split in the ranks of the defenses built up by the Islamic Republic, which still has regular military forces numbering around 400,000, Revolutionary Guards of up to 190,000, and its auxiliary militia enforcers, the Basij, who may be able to mobilise around a million at street level. 

There must be much anger among regime loyalists, which may fall on the heads of any opposition protestors who imagine they can move in and take over the reins of government from the bombed-out wreckage of the Islamic Republic. The U.S. military is not likely to be able to remain engaged in the detail of defanging the regime once the main thrust of the campaign is done. But Israel likely will. Its equivalent of the CIA, the Mossad, has spent years building up formidable intelligence at street level, and will be doing its utmost to continue hamstringing the regime from within and fomenting opposition.Among the many unanswerable questions is whether all this will lead simply to chaos and fragmentation, which is probably Israel's preferred outcome, or to a more compliant regime willing to compromise with the U.S. in order to get crippling economic sanctions lifted. As Trump concedes the war might last weeks, who knows what Iran will eventually emerge from the smoke and the rubble?

Related Articles

The phoney war: Will the U.S. strike a decisive blow against Iran?

Jim Muir

An execution stayed: Why the Islamic Republic might cling to power in Iran

Jim Muir

The end of the Tehran-Damascus axis

Jim Muir

The post The strike, the illusion of regime change, and what comes next appeared first on Coda Story.