The diplomacy of the deal by Markus Gibbons

There is a touch of a perfectly Trumpian feel about sending Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff to negotiate the end of a war, again; two men whose principal qualifications are proximity, confidence and deal-making instincts are dispatched to solve a problem that has defeated armies, diplomats and generations of statesmen.

Their recent journey from Moscow to Kyiv was presented as another attempt to revive a peace process that has repeatedly stalled. The meetings themselves are not the problem. Diplomacy requires talking to enemies, and somebody has to talk to Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The question is why these two men, again.

Witkoff and Kushner have already accumulated a peculiar record in the Middle East. Their negotiations over Iran produced optimism, confusion and ultimately failure, while their involvement in the Israel-Gaza diplomacy has raised uncomfortable questions about where private interests, family connections and public responsibilities begin and end. That matters because diplomacy is not real estate. A failed property negotiation can lose money; a failed geopolitical negotiation can lose cities, lives and countries.

The suspicion therefore does not have to be that Kushner or Witkoff are secretly selling peace for personal profit. That would require evidence. The more serious question is whether the structure surrounding them creates incentives that make such suspicions inevitable.

Witkoff is a businessman. Kushner is a businessman and the president's son-in-law. Their worlds are populated by investors, property developers, sovereign funds, Gulf billionaires and political leaders. In that environment, relationships are assets. Access is currency. A diplomatic meeting can be simultaneously a diplomatic meeting and a networking opportunity, even when nobody explicitly intends it to be.

That is precisely why modern democracies developed rules separating public office from private enrichment. The appearance of a conflict can be almost as damaging as the conflict itself, because diplomacy depends upon trust. When an envoy arrives in a capital, everyone at the table must believe that the envoy's only objective is the agreement in front of him.

Ukraine makes the problem even more acute. The eventual peace will involve reconstruction on a colossal scale, energy infrastructure, land, ports, minerals, finance and security guarantees. Whoever helps shape the settlement will inevitably stand near the greatest commercial opportunities of post-war Europe. That does not prove corruption. It proves that extraordinary safeguards are necessary.

And there is another problem: competence. Negotiating with Putin is not a television deal-closing exercise. Putin has spent years studying Western impatience, exploiting divisions and turning negotiations into instruments of strategy. He understands that Washington wants a headline called peace. Moscow wants a settlement that converts battlefield gains into permanent political leverage.

If American envoys repeatedly fail to deliver sustainable agreements yet remain indispensable, the obvious conclusion is not necessarily conspiracy. It may simply be that Trump values loyalty and personal chemistry over institutional expertise.

That is more worrying than a secret plot. A democracy can investigate corruption. It is harder to investigate incompetence when incompetence is celebrated as unconventional genius.

Kushner and Witkoff may yet help produce durable peace. If they do, they deserve credit. But peace should not require faith in personalities. It requires transparent interests, professional diplomacy and accountability.

The world has seen enough private deal-making dressed as public policy. Ukraine deserves something better than another handshake whose fine print nobody is allowed to read.

Democracy’s dangerous moment by Jennifer Stephenson

On September 15, the world will once again celebrate the International Day of Democracy. There will be speeches, flags, conferences and solemn declarations about freedom, participation and the sovereignty of the people. Politicians will congratulate themselves for believing in democracy, perhaps immediately before explaining why their opponents, journalists, judges or inconvenient voters are somehow the problem.

The irony is difficult to miss. Democracy has rarely looked more necessary and, in many places, more fragile. The great danger today is not always the traditional coup d’état, the military appearing on television or the dictator abolishing parliament overnight. Modern authoritarianism has become considerably more sophisticated. It often arrives wearing a suit, carrying a ballot paper and promising to restore order, greatness and common sense.

The authoritarian of the twenty-first century does not necessarily want to destroy elections. He wants to win them, then make sure that nobody can meaningfully defeat him. That distinction matters. Democracy is not simply the ritual of putting a piece of paper into a box every few years. It is the uncomfortable machinery surrounding that ballot: independent courts, free media, functioning parliaments, opposition parties, peaceful protest, transparent institutions and the right to tell the government that it is wrong without being treated as an enemy of the nation.

Remove those things and an election can become little more than political theatre. This is why the current democratic retreat should worry even those who are tired of politics. Authoritarianism feeds on political exhaustion. It thrives when citizens conclude that nothing changes, politicians are all corrupt, institutions are useless and perhaps the strongman deserves a chance to “clean things up”.

That is precisely when the strongman arrives with a broom. He promises simplicity in a complicated world. He offers enemies instead of explanations, slogans instead of solutions and nostalgia instead of a future. He tells angry citizens that their problems are caused by immigrants, minorities, intellectuals, journalists, judges, foreigners, Brussels, Washington, Moscow, Beijing or whoever happens to be convenient that afternoon.

And democracy, with its endless arguments and irritating compromises, suddenly looks terribly inefficient. But democracy was never designed to be efficient in the authoritarian sense. It was designed to prevent one person from becoming too efficient at acquiring power. That is its genius.

Democracy deliberately creates friction. Parliament argues. Courts interfere. Journalists investigate. Opposition parties complain. Citizens protest. Governments lose elections. Presidents discover that they cannot simply do whatever they want.

It can be maddening. It is also freedom. The authoritarian instinct is therefore remarkably predictable: attack the referee, discredit the journalist, intimidate the judge, demonise the opposition and convince citizens that institutional restraints are obstacles to the national will. Eventually, the machinery designed to protect democracy becomes portrayed as the enemy of democracy.

This is how democracies can die without a dramatic final scene. There is another uncomfortable truth. Democracies do not collapse only because authoritarians are ambitious. They collapse because ordinary people become indifferent. Freedom becomes something assumed rather than defended. The right to speak becomes background noise. Independent journalism becomes annoying. Political compromise becomes weakness. Facts become optional.

And suddenly the citizens discover that the institutions they regarded as permanent were merely temporary arrangements maintained by generations of people who cared enough to defend them. The International Day of Democracy should therefore be less a celebration than an annual warning. Democracy is not a monument. It is a habit.

It survives when citizens vote, question, organise, protest, read, argue and refuse to surrender their judgement to political messiahs. It survives when governments accept defeat and opponents accept victory. It survives when power understands that winning an election does not mean owning the country.

Most importantly, democracy survives when citizens understand that freedom is not guaranteed by the Constitution, the courts or parliament alone. It is guaranteed by people who refuse to let anybody take it away. That may be the most important lesson of Democracy Day in this increasingly authoritarian age: democracy does not need perfect citizens. It needs vigilant ones.

#eMagazine Ovi Dark - Issue #04 - The porcelain depths

 

Welcome to the fourth issue of Ovi Dark. This time, we descended into the alleyways where noir and the supernatural bleed into one another like ink into wet paper and we brought back stories.

Tales of detectives who solve murders committed by things that were never alive. Of femme fatales with reflections that move a half-second late. Of rainy nights when the only witness is a ghost who wants something in return for the truth. Of …Hell.

Why do these two genres fit together like a bullet in a chamber? Because both understand that the real horror isn't the monster. It's the knowledge that the world was never fair, never safe, never ours to begin with. Noir taught us that everyone's guilty of something. The supernatural simply asks: what if that something can never die?

Ovi Dark - Issue 4
Pulp Fiction Short Stories
September 2026
Ovi eMagazines Publications 2026

Ovi Dark - Issue #04

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Quoths #002 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

Caricaturist oddballs turn everyday life
into a hilarious masterclass of absurd logic, rapid-fire quips
and gloriously unhelpful advice.

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Ian Glim #016 #cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

A bewildered soul navigating global complexities armed
only with earnestness and a sharp, sarcastic wit.

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The Talarico catch by Howard Morton

There is definitely something comically about the Republican panic surrounding James Talarico. Here is a young Texas Democrat who talks about Christianity without treating it as a political weapon, about faith without turning it into a loyalty test and about government without pretending that every social problem can be solved by shouting “America” loudly enough. He is, inconveniently for the Republican establishment, exactly the sort of politician conservative America once claimed to want.

Talarico is a good Christian, a Texan, articulate, young and thoroughly comfortable discussing morality. He does not arrive wrapped in the cultural armour of the professional culture warrior. And that may be precisely why he is dangerous.

The modern Republican Party has become extraordinarily dependent on defining Christianity as a property of the political right. Its politicians routinely present themselves as defenders of faith while treating compassion, poverty, immigration, education, and the dignity of strangers as optional accessories. Talarico exposes the contradiction simply by asking what Christianity actually demands of those who claim to practise it.

That is an uncomfortable question in a movement increasingly addicted to political theatre. Donald Trump, meanwhile, has never seemed particularly interested in Christianity as a theological tradition. He is interested in Christianity as political architecture: a constituency, a symbol, a voting bloc, a vocabulary of belonging. Talarico represents something much more troublesome, a Christian who does not require Trumpism to validate his faith.

So the attacks begin. The accusations, distortions and increasingly elaborate attempts to portray Talarico as something sinister are not really about him. They are about controlling the boundaries of acceptable political Christianity. If a Democrat can speak about Jesus, morality and compassion while simultaneously challenging Republican orthodoxy, the monopoly becomes considerably harder to maintain.

This is why misinformation becomes useful. When an opponent cannot comfortably be defeated on the substance of his argument, the argument itself becomes the target. A young politician can be turned into a caricature, a sentence can be stripped of its context, a policy position can be transformed into an accusation about his character, and suddenly the public is debating an imaginary Talarico rather than the real one.

It is an old political trick, but Trump has industrialised it. There is also something deeply Texan about the irony. Texas politics has long cultivated the mythology of the independent individual: someone who speaks plainly, distrusts central authority and answers to conscience rather than fashion. Yet the Republican establishment increasingly expects precisely the opposite from its members, a remarkable discipline of obedience.

Talarico's greatest offence may therefore be that he refuses to behave according to the script. He is young enough to represent a generational change, Christian enough to challenge the Republican claim to religious ownership, Texan enough to puncture the stereotype that progressive politics is somehow alien to Texas, and rhetorically skilled enough to make the argument in public without apologising for it.

That combination is unsettling. Trump's political machine understands something important: ridicule is harmless only when nobody listens to the person being ridiculed. If the target is articulate, authentic and capable of attracting people outside the traditional partisan tribe, ridicule becomes defensive rather than dismissive. It tells the audience that the target has entered dangerous territory.

And perhaps that is the real Talarico problem. He does not need to become a Republican to understand Texas. He does not need to abandon Christianity to reject Trumpism. He does not need to shout louder than his opponents to make them nervous.

Sometimes the most threatening politician is simply the one who walks into a room carrying an inconvenient moral vocabulary and refuses to let the people who have monopolised it tell him he has no right to use it.

For Trump and his Republican allies, that is considerably more frightening than another Democrat screaming from the opposite side of the barricade. It is the possibility of a different Texas. And that is the one thing political machines fear most.

The billionaire’s far-right ATM by Jemma Norman

Amazingly, parties that spend their days denouncing global elites somehow become extraordinarily popular with global billionaires. Reform UK can rail against Westminster, Brussels, immigrants, woke institutions and the metropolitan establishment, while the cheques arrive from people whose wealth is so enormous that ordinary democracy begins to look like a quaint hobby practised by the middle classes.

Now comes another injection of questionable millions from the cryptocurrency universe, the latest reminder that the far right has discovered an extraordinarily convenient political principle: capitalism is dangerous when it belongs to foreigners, but wonderfully patriotic when it belongs to your donors.

The contradiction should be embarrassing. Instead, it has become the business model. Reform UK presents itself as the voice of the forgotten British citizen, the angry pensioner, the squeezed taxpayer, the person who believes the country has been stolen from them. Yet its political ecosystem increasingly resembles something rather different: an investment portfolio in which wealthy individuals place enormous sums on a particular version of Britain they hope will eventually reward their interests.

And hovering over this international carnival of billionaire political activism is Elon Musk, who has somehow transformed himself from technology entrepreneur into a roaming political weather system. He appears wherever the far right needs oxygen, money, publicity or a spectacularly wealthy man willing to shout into the microphone.

Musk's political interventions have developed their own peculiar grammar. He talks endlessly about freedom while boosting movements whose politics often depend upon making other people's lives less free. He presents himself as an enemy of establishment power while using his extraordinary personal influence to bend political conversations towards causes that happen to coincide remarkably well with his own ideological and commercial interests.

The remarkable thing is not that a billionaire has political opinions. Billionaires are allowed opinions, just as everyone else is. The problem begins when private wealth acquires the capacity to turn those opinions into political infrastructure.

Money does not merely buy advertisements. It buys attention. Attention becomes visibility. Visibility becomes legitimacy. Legitimacy becomes electoral momentum. And suddenly a political movement that might once have been dismissed as the angry corner of the internet is sitting in parliament, writing policy and presenting itself as the authentic national voice.

This is the strange new aristocracy of democratic politics: not hereditary dukes in velvet robes, but cryptocurrency billionaires, technology tycoons and platform owners carrying smartphones instead of swords.

The far right understands the arrangement perfectly. It offers billionaires something traditional parties increasingly struggle to provide: uncomplicated politics. No tedious conversations about inequality. No awkward questions about workers' rights. No philosophical wrestling with why concentrated wealth might itself be a problem. Instead, point towards migrants, minorities, bureaucrats, judges, environmentalists, universities or whatever other convenient enemy is available that morning.

The billionaire gets influence. The populist gets money. The voter gets another angry speech about taking the country back.

Everyone appears to win except democracy. There is, of course, nothing inherently suspicious about wealthy people donating to political parties. Democracy permits political participation, including generous political participation. But democracy becomes unhealthy when political influence begins resembling a luxury product available only to those wealthy enough to purchase it.

That is the deeper danger behind the latest millions. The question is not simply who gave the money, or how much. It is what kind of political system we are constructing when movements claiming to represent ordinary people increasingly depend upon extraordinary fortunes.

Perhaps the most revealing irony is that the far right constantly warns ordinary citizens that someone else is controlling their country. Sometimes that someone is an immigrant. Sometimes it is Brussels. Sometimes it is a university professor. And sometimes, apparently, it is a billionaire standing behind the cheque.

The politics of the covered face by Yash Irwin

The balaclava, that humble knitted garment once associated with bank robbers, burglars and exceptionally cold fishermen, has acquired a new political career. It is now apparently part of the national argument about protest.

There is a perfectly reasonable argument for restricting face coverings when they are being used to conceal identity while committing violence or intimidation. A democracy cannot seriously defend the right to demonstrate as a right to become anonymous while threatening everyone else. If someone throws a bottle at a police officer and then hides behind a mask, society has a legitimate interest in knowing who that person is.

But the difficulty begins when governments and police forces start treating anonymity itself as suspicious. The right to protest has never been merely the right to stand politely in a designated area holding a professionally printed placard while remaining perfectly identifiable to the state. Protest exists precisely because sometimes people are angry with the state. Historically, political dissent has often required anonymity, concealment and protection from retaliation. Whistle-blowers, dissidents, persecuted minorities and citizens living under hostile political conditions have not always had the luxury of showing their faces.

Britain, of all countries, should understand this distinction. It has spent centuries congratulating itself on its traditions of liberty while periodically discovering that liberty becomes inconvenient when somebody actually uses it.

The danger is not necessarily the Portsmouth restriction itself. The danger is the gradual normalisation of exceptional powers. Every new restriction arrives wrapped in reassuring language: public safety, intimidation, disorder, prevention. Nobody announces, “We are taking another small step towards a society in which protest is increasingly managed.” They announce that they are protecting everyone.

And sometimes they genuinely are. That is what makes the argument difficult. There is a difference between policing behaviour and policing appearance. Violence is behaviour. Threats are behaviour. Destruction is behaviour. Wearing a black balaclava is an appearance. The two may overlap, but they are not identical. A democracy becomes nervous when symbols start becoming evidence.

The British temptation is always to believe that if the police are given one more power, everything will become slightly more orderly. It rarely works quite like that. Powers created for the obviously dangerous have a habit of migrating towards the merely inconvenient. Today's violent extremist can become tomorrow's angry protester, and yesterday's troublesome protester can eventually become part of the political mainstream.

The face, meanwhile, remains stubbornly political. A face says: I am here, and I am prepared to be recognised. A mask says something different: I am here, but I am not prepared to give you that power over me.

Sometimes that second statement conceals a thug. Sometimes it conceals a frightened citizen. Sometimes it conceals somebody who simply does not trust the authorities. The sensible answer is therefore neither sentimental permissiveness nor authoritarian enthusiasm. Police should pursue violence aggressively, but restrictions on anonymity should be precise, temporary and demonstrably necessary. Otherwise the balaclava becomes less a security problem than a convenient metaphor.

A free society should be capable of looking beyond the face. It should also be careful about becoming so frightened of hidden faces that it forgets what democracy is supposed to protect underneath them.

Ant-sized Culinary #015 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

In the bustling undergrowth of Picante Hill, Anton the culinary ant dons his oversized toque and delivers deliciously chaotic cooking wisdom, one tiny misadventure at a time.

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The Falklands, courtesy Trump by John Kato

There are moments in international politics when history does not return so much as stumble drunkenly back into the room, knocking over the furniture and demanding to know why everyone thought it had left. Argentina’s President Javier Milei has just provided one of those moments by resurrecting the Falklands question with the confidence of a man who believes geopolitics is a motivational seminar and sovereignty can be recovered by shouting loudly enough.

His declaration that the Malvinas “are ours” was hardly unexpected. Argentine governments have claimed sovereignty over the islands for generations. What makes the latest performance more disturbing is the political weather surrounding it. Milei appears to believe that the winds have changed, and Donald Trump, characteristically, has managed to blow on them.

Trump’s suggestion that Britain might not automatically receive American support in a conflict over the islands, apparently because Britain had not been sufficiently helpful to Washington over Iran, was the sort of remark that once would have been dismissed as diplomatic nonsense. Today, it has become strategic oxygen.

Milei immediately inhaled. Britain, he declared, was declining. Argentina was flourishing. The United States was Argentina’s reliable partner. British and Israeli companies operating around the islands could face sanctions. Meanwhile, Buenos Aires is accelerating plans for an integrated military base in Tierra del Fuego.

It is difficult to imagine a more combustible mixture of nationalism, personal political theatre and great-power ambiguity.

The Falklands are not merely some remote collection of windswept islands in the South Atlantic. They are one of those historical wounds that never quite scarred over. Britain and Argentina fought a war over them in 1982, and the British victory became woven into the mythology of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. For Argentina, the defeat became another chapter in a national argument about sovereignty, humiliation and military dictatorship.

The extraordinary thing is that, after decades of relative stability, politicians are once again discovering the electoral usefulness of the wound.

Milei has plenty of domestic reasons to enjoy the theatre. Argentina remains a country undergoing painful economic transformation, with austerity, inflation and social discontent making political distraction extraordinarily convenient. Nothing unites a country quite like a foreign enemy, preferably one separated by an ocean and carrying an old imperial reputation.

But Milei's calculation becomes considerably more dangerous when Washington enters the picture. Trump has repeatedly demonstrated that alliances, in his conception of international politics, are transactional arrangements rather than enduring commitments. Countries are expected to pay, support, obey or otherwise demonstrate usefulness. The old language of solidarity between allies is replaced by the language of invoices.

That is precisely the kind of uncertainty that ambitious nationalist leaders can misread. Britain may indeed have problems. It has economic difficulties, political exhaustion, military constraints and a population understandably less enthusiastic about distant wars than governments sometimes imagine. But decline is not the same thing as helplessness, and Argentina should remember that the Falklands are populated, defended and governed as a British territory. The inhabitants have their own political preferences, which are inconveniently more important than the romantic maps of Buenos Aires.

The most absurd part of this drama is that nobody actually needs another Falklands war. Yet history has a nasty habit of returning whenever politicians convince themselves that history belongs to them. Milei says the winds of change are blowing. Perhaps they are. But winds in the South Atlantic can become storms very quickly. And if Trump has taught the world anything, it is that sometimes the most dangerous foreign-policy instrument is not a missile. It is a sentence.

The occupation’s final argument by Regan O'Sullivan

Every Israeli-Palestinian generation discovers the same injustice, gives it a new vocabulary, appoints another committee to discuss it and then watches the facts on the ground become harder to reverse. Meanwhile, the occupation continues its patient work. It does not need dramatic speeches. It needs only time.

That is why Ed Miliband’s willingness to act against extremist settler violence matters. Not because sanctions or diplomatic pressure will suddenly produce peace, but because refusing to confront the machinery of permanent occupation is itself a political decision. Silence is not neutrality when one side possesses overwhelming military, legal and administrative power and the other watches its land disappear beneath roads, fences, outposts and settlements.

The disturbing development is not merely that settler violence has increased. It is that the distinction between the violence of individuals and the policy environment that enables it has become increasingly difficult to maintain. When ministers speak openly about removing Palestinians from territory they claim, when settlement expansion is treated as routine government business, and when proposals such as the E1 development move forward despite their implications for the territorial continuity of a future Palestinian state, the question ceases to be simply one of policing extremists.

It becomes a question of state policy. Israel's supporters in Europe and North America have spent decades insisting that criticism of Israeli governments must not become hostility towards Israel itself. That distinction is not merely legitimate; it is essential. But it works both ways. Defending Israel's existence does not require defending every action of an Israeli government. Supporting Israeli security does not require accepting permanent Palestinian dispossession. And opposing anti-Semitism does not mean closing one's eyes when Palestinians are subjected to abuses that would provoke outrage elsewhere.

Indeed, those who genuinely care about Israel's long-term security should be among the loudest voices demanding an end to settlement expansion and settler impunity. A country cannot bomb its way out of a political problem created by denying another people a credible political future. Security without justice becomes an endless security operation, and an endless security operation eventually becomes the political system itself.

The two-state solution has been declared dead so many times that one begins to suspect it has developed the stubbornness of a cockroach. Yet its disappearance would represent something much more serious than the failure of another diplomatic formula. It would mean accepting a political reality in which millions of Palestinians remain permanently subordinated without sovereignty, while Israel continues to control the territory between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River.

That is not a solution. It is a permanent conflict with better public relations. Israel's allies therefore face an uncomfortable choice. They can continue treating settlement expansion as an unfortunate disagreement between friends, issuing carefully worded statements while facts are manufactured on the ground. Or they can finally acknowledge that friendship sometimes requires saying no.

This is where Miliband's position deserves support. International pressure should not be understood as punishment for Israel but as an attempt to prevent an irreversible political disaster. If the occupation becomes permanent, the two-state idea will eventually cease to be a diplomatic objective and become a historical obituary.

And there is an even darker irony. Every settlement that makes a Palestinian state less viable is often presented as strengthening Israel. In reality, it may be strengthening the very forces that make Israel's future more dangerous: permanent confrontation, radicalisation, international isolation and the gradual destruction of the possibility of compromise.

The tragedy is that none of this is inevitable. Israel still has the capacity to choose a different direction. Its allies still possess leverage. Palestinians still deserve political freedom, security and dignity. Israelis deserve the same. The essential question is whether politics can still interrupt the geography being constructed around them.

Because once the map becomes permanent, diplomacy becomes archaeology. And by then, everyone will discover that the two-state solution was not killed in a single dramatic moment. It was buried one settlement, one eviction and one act of impunity at a time.