The rise of the toll booths by Mathew Walls

There are few things more impressive in geopolitics than watching a superpower manufacture a crisis and then discover that everybody else has brought a cash register. Donald Trump’s latest adventures around the Strait of Hormuz have produced precisely that spectacle. What was supposed to demonstrate American dominance has instead reminded the world that maritime power is less like owning a motorway than owning a very troublesome crossroads. Close the road, threaten the traffic, rattle the barriers, and sooner or later somebody arrives with a collection box.

Now Vladimir Putin appears to have noticed the opportunity. The Kremlin has always possessed a finely tuned instinct for monetising disorder. Where other governments see a crisis, Moscow tends to see a market. Where Washington sees deterrence, Moscow sees leverage. And where everyone else sees another dangerous stretch of sea, Putin sees something resembling a toll road.

The irony is delicious. America spent years lecturing the world about maintaining freedom of navigation, only to discover that freedom becomes rather expensive when the global security architecture is handled like a casino chip. Every escalation in Hormuz sends another nervous shudder through the shipping industry. Every threat encourages companies to reconsider routes, insurance and risk. Every disruption creates incentives for other powers to insert themselves as indispensable middlemen.

The Red Sea, naturally, is where this gets particularly absurd. A waterway that should be a geographical fact has increasingly become a political bargaining table. Ships do not merely sail anymore; they calculate. They negotiate with geography, armed groups, governments, insurance companies and whichever geopolitical entrepreneur happens to be standing beside the channel with a hand extended.

Putin understands this instinctively. Russia does not need to control every route. It merely needs the world to believe that Russia can complicate enough of them. That is a different kind of power: not ownership, but nuisance value elevated into strategy.

And Trump, with his characteristic affection for maximum pressure and minimum patience, has proved remarkably helpful. The American president appears to believe that international politics works like a property dispute in which the loudest neighbour eventually gets the largest parking space. Unfortunately, oceans do not behave that way. Nor do markets. Nor do allies. Nor, for that matter, adversaries.

The consequences are larger than another quarrel over shipping fees. Every time Washington turns a strategic chokepoint into an arena for brinkmanship, it weakens the assumption that international commerce can operate above the ambitions of individual powers. Countries begin hedging. Companies begin rerouting. Rivals begin experimenting. Soon the exceptional becomes routine.

And once toll booths appear on one route, others are encouraged to build them. This is the great unintended gift of Trump’s foreign policy: he keeps demonstrating that American power can be used in ways that encourage other powers to imitate its most coercive habits.

Putin, naturally does not need an invitation. He merely needs another crisis, another frightened shipowner and another stretch of water where somebody can say, with a perfectly straight face… Pay up.

The longest red card by Kasie Hewitt

There is a peculiar spectacle unfolding in world football, the man at the centre of the storm appears increasingly determined to remain seated in the chair from which everyone else seems to want him removed. Gianni Infantino, president of FIFA, has perfected the political art of surviving the room after the furniture has been rearranged.

The accumulating calls for his resignation matter, but they matter less than the geography of his remaining support. Football, like politics, is rarely governed by principle alone. It is governed by alliances, favours, institutional memory and, occasionally, the comforting belief that the devil one knows is preferable to the devil waiting outside the executive suite.

Infantino's defenders are not necessarily united by affection. Some may simply calculate that the current arrangement works for them. Parts of Africa and Asia remain useful pillars. Argentina and Mexico are particularly important political territory. The United States, too, represents an awkwardly powerful relationship, especially as football's commercial and geopolitical centre of gravity continues its long migration towards North America.

This is what makes Infantino difficult to dislodge. A football president does not need universal popularity. He needs enough votes, enough allies and enough institutions willing to stand beside him when the criticism becomes deafening.

That distinction is crucial. The modern FIFA presidency is not merely an administrative position. It is a small exercise in international statecraft, complete with presidents, regional blocs, diplomatic language, competing interests and an astonishing capacity for institutional self-preservation. The football itself can sometimes seem like the least important character in the room.

And that is the deeper problem. When governing bodies become primarily concerned with preserving the legitimacy of their leadership, criticism is easily transformed into a conspiracy, opposition into disloyalty and demands for reform into threats to stability. The language is familiar from politics because the machinery is familiar from politics. Power rarely describes itself as power. It calls itself continuity.

Infantino has benefited from precisely that vocabulary. His supporters can point to expansion, investment, global tournaments and FIFA's enormous financial reach. They can argue that football has become more international, more commercially ambitious and more geographically inclusive. Those are not trivial achievements. Nor is it unreasonable for poorer football nations to view the distribution of FIFA's money through a different lens from wealthy European associations accustomed to having disproportionate influence.

But money can purchase loyalty without necessarily purchasing legitimacy. The danger for Infantino is therefore not that every federation suddenly agrees that he must go. The danger is that enough federations begin to believe that defending him costs more politically than replacing him.

That is how football revolutions actually happen: not with a dramatic whistle, but with a gradual change in calculation.

For now, the president remains a formidable opponent precisely because he understands the arithmetic. He knows where his friends are, knows which relationships matter and knows that football's governing map is considerably larger than Europe.

His critics may have the moral argument. He still has the votes. And until those two things become the same thing, the red card remains stubbornly in the referee's pocket.

The park that knows you by Casey Norris

For centuries, cities have treated parks as pleasant interruptions to urban life. They were places where lawns softened concrete, where benches offered a brief pause between errands, where children burned off impossible quantities of energy while adults pretended not to answer work emails. Parks were designed largely around aesthetics, maintenance budgets and available land. If they happened to improve mental health, that was considered a fortunate side effect rather than the central purpose.

Perhaps it is time to reverse that logic. Imagine a city park built not simply to be beautiful but to guide the human mind through carefully designed psychological pathways. A place where every bend in the trail, every cluster of trees, every sound of falling water and every change in texture beneath bare feet has been deliberately composed to reduce anxiety, restore attention and invite quiet reflection. Such a park would not manipulate visitors. It would simply acknowledge something modern cities have stubbornly ignored: the brain is part of urban infrastructure too.

Urban planners routinely calculate traffic flow down to the second. Engineers model flood risks decades into the future. Architects simulate sunlight, wind and energy efficiency with astonishing precision. Yet the emotional experience of moving through public space often remains an afterthought. We continue to design cities primarily for machines while expecting humans to adapt.

Nature has never worked that way. There is a reason dense green canopies calm us. A shaded path lowers not only temperature but mental vigilance, encouraging the nervous system to shift from perpetual alertness towards recovery. Small waterfalls do more than decorate landscapes. Their gentle, irregular sounds obscure traffic noise without demanding conscious attention, creating an acoustic refuge that feels remarkably private despite being public. Even the simple act of walking barefoot over smooth stones, cool earth or soft grass forces the mind into the present moment. One cannot endlessly rehearse tomorrow's worries while paying attention to every sensation underfoot.

These experiences are not luxuries. They are increasingly becoming necessities. Modern cities have become astonishingly efficient at generating low-grade psychological exhaustion. Notifications follow us into cafés. Advertising occupies every available surface. Traffic competes with construction, emergency sirens and aircraft. Even leisure often becomes another form of consumption, demanding purchases, reservations and performance. The result is a population surrounded by stimulation but starved of restoration.

This is where psychologically designed parks become something more than attractive public amenities. They become preventive healthcare disguised as landscape architecture. Critics might object that this sounds suspiciously therapeutic, as though municipalities were attempting to prescribe emotional states through gardening. Yet every built environment already influences behaviour. Airports encourage urgency. Casinos reward disorientation. Shopping centres quietly choreograph movement to maximise spending. No one accuses these spaces of being neutral. Why should parks pretend to be?

The difference is intent. Designing environments that gently reduce stress is a far more humane ambition than designing environments that quietly maximise commercial activity. If cities already accept responsibility for clean drinking water, safe streets and breathable air, acknowledging psychological wellbeing as another public good seems less radical than overdue.

The greatest irony is that none of these ideas are especially futuristic. Streams have soothed people for millennia. Forest canopies existed long before skylines. Walking barefoot is among humanity's oldest habits. The innovation lies not in inventing new therapies but in recognising ancient human instincts as worthy of deliberate civic investment.

Perhaps the park of the future will not dazzle us with spectacular architecture or monumental sculptures. Instead, it will offer something rarer: permission for the overstimulated mind to become quiet without effort. In an age obsessed with productivity, that may be the most revolutionary public service a city can provide.

Maples & Oranges #070 #cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

Taunting oranges in the midst of other fruity links,
constantly spreading the wares of their juicy gloom.

For more Maples & Oranges, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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Farage’s long walk back to the joke by Regan O'Sullivan

Nigel Farage’s political career has always contained an amusing contradiction. He has presented himself as the great insurgent against Britain’s political establishment, yet the more seriously he is taken, the more conspicuously he seems to return to his natural habitat: political theatre, populist slogans and the increasingly uncomfortable role of national laughing stock.

The irony is that Mr Farage does not appear to understand the distinction between winning attention and winning authority. He has mastered the first. The second remains elusive.

For years, his great political gift was to make complicated frustrations sound wonderfully simple. Immigration became a number. Brussels became a villain. Britain’s economic difficulties became evidence of betrayal. The establishment, whatever it happened to mean on the particular afternoon, became the enemy. It was politics reduced to pub argument, television soundbite and flag-waving certainty.

There was something effective about it. Britain’s political class underestimated the appetite for such rhetoric. Mr Farage exploited that complacency brilliantly. He helped transform grievances that had once been treated as marginal into central questions of British politics.

But insurgents face an awkward problem when they begin approaching power: the jokes become responsibilities. A protest movement can promise everything. A government must decide what it can actually deliver.

That is where Mr Farage’s political persona begins to look rather less impressive. His greatest asset, his ability to turn political frustration into performance, is also his greatest weakness. Governing requires tedious things, budgets, trade-offs, institutions, negotiations, competence and the patience to explain why yesterday’s promise cannot survive contact with tomorrow’s arithmetic.

Populism dislikes arithmetic. It prefers moral certainty. Mr Farage has built much of his career on the idea that Britain’s problems are caused by politicians who are either incompetent, dishonest or insufficiently patriotic. There is a certain convenience in such a worldview. It eliminates the need to admit that some problems are genuinely difficult, that governments face constraints and that voters themselves sometimes demand contradictory things.

The trouble begins when the populist becomes the establishment he once mocked. A prime minister cannot forever campaign against the system. Eventually he becomes the system. The angry outsider becomes the man signing the papers. The television provocateur becomes responsible for the consequences of his own slogans.

That transition could be Mr Farage’s political Waterloo. His supporters may regard criticism as confirmation that the establishment fears him. But ridicule is more dangerous than hostility. A politician can survive being hated. It is harder to survive being regarded as unserious.

Britain has historically had a peculiar relationship with political absurdity. It can tolerate eccentricity, theatricality and even spectacular incompetence for surprisingly long periods. But British voters eventually ask the oldest political question of all: does this person actually know what he is doing?

Mr Farage’s challenge is therefore not simply to become prime minister. It is to convince a country accustomed to seeing him as the professional protester that he can become a professional statesman.

That requires more than changing the suit, the podium or the language. It requires changing the political product. The danger for Mr Farage is that he has spent so long perfecting the character of Nigel Farage that the character may now be more politically valuable than the man. He can fill a rally. He can dominate a television studio. He can produce an excellent headline.

But Downing Street is not a television studio. And Britain, after the applause has stopped, will still be waiting for the bills to be paid.

Floating Through Time #Poem #Painting by Nikos Laios

Wrapped in music,
Wrapped in arias,
In operas and blues,
In pop and jazz,
In folk music and rock,
In electronic and dance,
Floating over the chaos
And hatred of the world,
Over the conflicts and
The religious and racial divisions,
Communing with the soul of the world,
With the timeless human condition,
With the love and transcendence
Of human connections and the
History of decades past
And with the melancholy
Of what has been lost,
Wrapped in music,
Floating through
Time.

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With a digital painting from Nikos Laios

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Check Nikos Laios' eBOOK, HERE!

The reflecting pool of blame by Cassandra Sparks

There is something almost perfectly Washingtonian about a scandal involving the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool; the water is murky, the paint is peeling, somebody is furious and everyone appears determined to blame someone else.

David Hearn, a 67-year-old former Olympic canoeist, was accused of vandalising the pool. Prosecutors have now dropped the charges. That should have been the end of a rather strange episode. Instead, it has become another small but revealing drama in the larger American theatre of political grievance, where even a malfunctioning public swimming pool can be recruited into the culture war.

The original accusation had a certain Trump-era neatness. The pool was damaged, therefore somebody must have attacked it. And if somebody attacked it, why not blame the “Radical Left Lunatics”? The phrase has the advantage of requiring neither evidence nor elaboration. It is less an explanation than a political seasoning, sprinkled liberally over any inconvenience.

The trouble is that water has never been especially receptive to partisan narratives. The Reflecting Pool was renovated for $14m and given an “American flag blue” spray-on lining, a description that sounds less like architectural restoration than something ordered for a particularly patriotic municipal swimming pool. Then came algae blooms and peeling paint. Suddenly the grand symbol of American democracy was experiencing the sort of maintenance problems familiar to anyone who has ever owned a shed, a bathroom or a house built by the lowest bidder.

Now the explanation appears to be considerably less cinematic: a “botched” installation. That matters, because incompetence is rarely as politically satisfying as conspiracy. There is no villainous mastermind in a basement, no shadowy revolutionary cell armed with paint scrapers, no ideological cabal plotting the destruction of Abraham Lincoln's reflection. There is simply the possibility that a renovation went badly.

Yet this is precisely where the affair becomes more interesting than the pool itself. Jeanine Pirro, the US attorney for Washington, initially embraced the vandalism theory but has now blamed the renovation. Trump, apparently displeased by this change of direction, has suggested that she might be fired. Thus a broken pool has produced a miniature lesson in the modern Republican Party: loyalty is increasingly measured not by whether an official follows the evidence, but by whether the evidence arrives at the politically approved destination.

The danger is not merely comic. Institutions depend upon the ability to distinguish between what happened and what one wishes had happened. Prosecutors are supposed to follow facts. Contractors are supposed to deliver what they were paid to deliver. Presidents are supposed to resist turning every administrative mishap into a political morality play.

Instead, America increasingly seems to demand that every cracked surface reveal an enemy. There is, of course, a genuine irony here. The Reflecting Pool exists to provide a serene visual counterpoint to the Lincoln Memorial. It is designed for reflection. Yet the surrounding political culture appears incapable of reflecting on anything. The first instinct is accusation, the second outrage, the third dismissal, and only much later, if at all, comes the inconvenient business of asking what actually happened.

Perhaps the pool's greatest service to the republic is therefore accidental. Its peeling blue surface has exposed something beneath the paint. The problem was never merely algae. It was the national addiction to blame.

Trekking Chat #013 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

They trek across surreal cartoon streets, armed with quirky sarcasm
and boundless humor. They map uncharted valleys, befriend bizarre creatures
and find the real adventure in their square frames.

For more Trekking Chat, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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The rejoicing students of Yobe State University by Tunde Akande

A video clip with an accompanying short essay is currently circulating on social media. This is obviously part of the propaganda with which Preident Bola Tinubu and his acolytes are pushing forward to fight the coming 2027 election. It featured about 20 students said to be from the Yobe State University who were in a very happy mood celebrating the restoration and payment of their NELFUND upkeep allowances after it was suspended.

I have received it twice now. At first I was swept off my feet when I watched the video. Here were young Kanuri students jubilating singing a Yoruba song praising Bola Ahmed Tinubu. Though their Yoruba may be difficult to decipher for those of us who are Yoruba, you will no doubt see their joy. Are we getting to the Nigeria of our dreams where Kanuris, Fulani, Kare-Kare, Ngizim, Bade, and Bolewa in Yobe State and the entire North will celebrate a man who is not from their tribe who is the president? Are we getting over our tribalism? Is President Tinubu’s student loan scheme by the NELFUND he set up truly working miracles

I decided to watch it again for a second time. It was then it became clear I had been scammed by a propagandist. We are in the season of election and octopus Bola Tinubu is featuring, asking Nigerians to return him for a second and final time.

The Catholic Bishops had also just visited the president during which they reminded him of the hard realities of Nigerian life. What they said was not new to all Nigerians but that it came from clerics who live very close to Nigerians they shepherd and therefore know intimately gives their visit a certain measure of authority more than whatever anybody had said or written on the issue before.

One of the Bishops, His Eminence, Cardinal John Onaiyekan, Catholic Archbishop Emeritus of Abuja had been very bitterly truthful in his assessment of the poor state of affairs in the nation. Nigerians have become poorer since 2023 when the president took office and the truth is there on the streets, he told Tinubu frontally. The Archbishop spoke with his characteristic candour and boldness.

The presidency’s media team did not spare the Archbishop either. Their reaction was followed by a gale of propaganda, one of which was this video of some Yobe State University students rejoicing over their upkeep allowance of N20,000 per month which the writer had described in glowing terms as if the allowance was 20 million naira monthly. Twenty thousand naira after Tinubu’s policies had reduced the naira to not more than a piece of tissue paper will not fetch the student transport cost for more than three days to their campus if they are off campus as many state universities are.

Why the restoration in the first place? The propagandists would have us know that it was suspended because of a delay in “a digital wallet issue.” That is an obvious cover up for a deliberate lapse perhaps caused by the inability of the government to fund the budget since year 2025. The students jubilating were not “massive”; they could not be more than twenty and that would not qualify for the highly emotional word “massive.”

The propagandist said “history was being made in Yobe” but that is not true because student’s loan has a long history that began in the days of General Yakubu Gowon’s military administration that gave Nigeria’s higher institutions students loan they didn’t need just because Gowon had so much money and he did not know what to do with it. And because the students did not need any loans because university tuition including hostel accommodation were virtually free, they ended up squandering the loan on buying electronics and motorcycles which killed some of them as they rode them dangerously on campuses and in the cities.

Chief Bisi Akande, former governor of Osun State, a man who rose from grass to grace by dint of hard work and self-development, wrote in his autobiography, My Participation, that Tinubu loves to follow the American pattern of doing things and that he used to moderate him on them. Like General Gowon, the president has inflicted another American pattern needless loan on the students because he simply cannot run a disciplined government where every available naira will be mobilized to give Nigerians a free education at all levels.

It is lazy thinking to say there is no resource to provide free education to Nigerians even now. There never will be such a time when there will be enough money as it is in the mind of these lazy thinkers to do whatever is necessary. So it was told Obafemi Awolowo of the defunct Western Region that he would need another seven years to give free education to the people of the old Western Region. Awolowo, a hard worker and a hard thinker, insisted on starting immediately and the headstart the Yoruba enjoy till today is the effect of that free education policy.

Awolowo had a saying then which I recommend to President Bola Tinubu and his colleagues: “Where there is a will, there is a way.” But those who will do this will not buy SUVs for themselves as official cars, will not award huge contracts to their proxies in order to make a private gain for themselves, will not engage in white elephant projects, will not live in grandiose accommodations, will not dine as if they throw parties every day off tax payers money and will curtail expensive and frequent junketings abroad. They will stay home because it is their home, and proffer solutions to the problems they were elected to solve.

Why were the students of Yobe State University jubilating? They may have been induced by some politicians who want to deceive the nation that President Bola Tinubu has a popular rating all over the country. But much more than that, the students were following the pattern of their progenitors. They had been spending the money on frivolities before, and when it resumed, and it was N60,000 at a go for three months, they had more money to drink beer, smoke cigarettes and visit the cafeteria. Some of them will spend theirs on drugs which have overtaken the campuses. I hear the cafeteria of those days have disappeared from the universities and have given way to dirty “bukateria” now. Still the student have places to squander the freebies from the government.

Anybody who wants to study the current state among the students should interview the parents who bear the burden of the prohibitive increase in financing students in the universities now. I’m one of such parents. The list before me for ‘our baby of the house,” who will graduate in a few months, is staggering. Things that were not part of university fees in our time have found their way in by a government that could not supervise its universities. I have legacy fee, sign out T-shirt and black jeans, project, suit to attend the project defense and probably another one for graduation. My wife and I are not illiterates, we also attended higher institutions. My wife said we would not pay. I countered that we would have to because we don’t have to exclude our son from what is going on.

Cardinal John Onaiyekan,had told Tinubu the raw and painful facts on the sad faces Nigerians now wear everywhere, if nobody has told him again, let him remember what a young boy told him two years ago as he passed through Idumota in Lagos, his primary constituency, ‘ebi npawa’,(we are hungry). Nigerians are really hungry. Renewed hope should not just be huge money put in the hands of a few who failed at the polls to run around with propaganda or some political jobbers who are eager to cross over to the APC. I hear a close associate of Governor Seyi Makinde in Ibadan who couldn’t make the governorship nomination crossed over recently with a rumoured N120 million Renewed Hope Agenda bribe. This fetched the APC two billboards (front and back) between Bode and Idi Arere in Ibadan. Another bigwig allegedly collected 4 billion naira to be Renewed Hope Agenda ambassador and to buy Ankara fabrics for all Renewed Hope Agenda events in Oyo State. This is how our scarce resources are squandered in Nigeria.

First Published in METRO

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Tunde Akande is both a journalist and pastor. He earned a Master's degree in Mass Communication from the University of Lagos.

The First Nations of the future by Emma Schneider

For this year’s International Day of the World's Indigenous People the contradictions feel unusually stark. In the United States, the debate surrounding immigration has drifted into territory that would have sounded absurd a generation ago. Reports of immigration enforcement officers questioning or detaining Native Americans because they were perceived as foreigners reveal something deeper than bureaucratic incompetence. They expose an unsettling irony. The descendants of the continent's oldest inhabitants can find themselves pressured to prove they belong while newcomers to the political conversation confidently decide who counts as American.

It is difficult to imagine a more revealing symbol of modern nationalism than demanding documentation from people whose ancestors lived on the land centuries before passports, border checkpoints or the United States itself existed. It illustrates a political instinct that increasingly places paperwork above history and administrative certainty above cultural reality. Yet America is hardly alone in presenting indigenous identity as something negotiable.

Across the Pacific, China's relationship with its own ethnic minorities demonstrates a different but equally powerful form of pressure. Here, the objective is less about questioning citizenship than reshaping identity itself. Uniformity becomes a political virtue. Distinct languages, religious traditions and cultural practices are tolerated only so long as they remain comfortably subordinate to the state. Diversity is celebrated in museums and festivals but regarded with suspicion whenever it carries independent political meaning.

Different governments employ different methods. One bureaucracy asks for identification. Another rewrites textbooks. Another relocates communities for economic development. Another builds dams, mines forests or drills for minerals while insisting that national prosperity requires sacrifice. The vocabulary changes; the destination rarely does.

What makes indigenous communities particularly inconvenient is not merely that they occupy valuable land. It is that they remember alternative ways of belonging. Their histories often refuse the neat timelines modern states prefer. Their claims cannot always be measured in property deeds or administrative districts because they rest on relationships with landscapes that predate constitutions and cadastral surveys.

Modern states adore maps with clean borders. Indigenous cultures frequently inherited landscapes without them. That difference remains profoundly political.

The twenty-first century likes to imagine itself as an age of expanding rights, yet indigenous peoples continue to experience a peculiar inversion. They are celebrated as symbols while ignored as citizens. Their crafts become luxury products. Their languages appear in tourism campaigns. Their ceremonies attract curious visitors. But when discussions turn toward land rights, environmental stewardship or political autonomy, admiration rapidly gives way to anxiety.

Governments frequently discover that they appreciate indigenous culture far more than indigenous power. The paradox grows sharper as climate change accelerates. The same communities once dismissed as obstacles to development now possess generations of ecological knowledge that scientists increasingly recognise as valuable. Suddenly, the people long portrayed as relics of the past become potential guides to humanity's future. Yet recognition remains selective. Their wisdom is welcomed; their demands often are not.

Perhaps the greatest misconception surrounding indigenous peoples is that they represent history rather than modernity. They are not survivors preserved inside cultural amber. They are contemporary citizens navigating smartphones, elections, universities and global markets while carrying identities that existed long before any modern nation-state claimed sovereignty over their homelands.

The International Day of the World's Indigenous People should therefore be less about commemorating endurance than confronting hypocrisy. A society does not prove its respect for indigenous communities by hosting festivals or issuing commemorative speeches. It proves it by ensuring that the first peoples of a land never again have to persuade governments that they belong there in the first place.

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Read the special Ovi magazine issue about the Indigenous People, HERE!

Aegis without arrows by Edoardo Moretti

The latest Russian missile and drone assault on Kyiv accompanied by renewed pleas from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for more anti-missile systems exposes a strategic contradiction that has been growing for months. Ukraine's need for advanced air-defence interceptors remains immense, yet its principal military backer, the United States, is increasingly confronting the uncomfortable reality that even the world's largest defence establishment cannot endlessly supply sophisticated munitions without confronting its own stockpile limits. Wars, it turns out, consume weapons faster than modern industrial economies produce them.

For much of the past three decades, Western militaries operated under assumptions shaped by expeditionary warfare. Precision, technology and limited engagements replaced the industrial-scale attrition that characterised the twentieth century. Production lines were optimised for efficiency rather than volume. Defence manufacturers delivered expensive missiles in manageable quantities, not by the tens of thousands demanded by prolonged conflicts between conventional armies.

Ukraine has shattered those assumptions. Every Russian missile intercepted represents another sophisticated Western interceptor removed from already finite inventories. Patriot missiles, NASAMS interceptors and other high-end systems are marvels of engineering, but engineering brilliance does not translate into unlimited supply. Building them requires specialised components, highly trained workers, complex testing and months, sometimes years, before delivery. Factories cannot simply triple production because geopolitics demands it.

This is the uncomfortable arithmetic behind Washington's increasingly cautious language regarding missile stockpiles. American planners must think beyond Ukraine. The Indo-Pacific looms large. Deterring China requires credible reserves. The Middle East remains volatile. American forces stationed around the world require protection. A superpower that exhausts its own inventories risks weakening deterrence everywhere simultaneously.

That reality does not diminish Ukraine's predicament. Civilians sheltering beneath apartment blocks in Kyiv care little for Pentagon logistics or congressional procurement schedules. They experience only the immediate consequence of insufficient air defences: exploding buildings, collapsing infrastructure and mounting casualties. Zelenskyy's frustration is therefore understandable. His government judges success in days survived rather than decades of strategic planning.

Yet indignation alone cannot manufacture missiles. The deeper lesson extends beyond Washington and Kyiv. Western governments spent decades assuming that economic strength could compensate for limited industrial readiness. Defence production became another sector shaped by globalised supply chains, lean inventories and budgetary efficiency. Russia's invasion has demonstrated that military power ultimately rests upon factories as much as generals.

This industrial awakening is already transforming defence policy across Europe. Governments that once debated marginal increases in military expenditure are now discussing long-term production capacity, strategic reserves and joint procurement. Air-defence systems are no longer niche capabilities reserved for specialist units. They have become national necessities.

There is also an irony impossible to ignore. Russia sought to intimidate Ukraine through relentless missile attacks. Instead, it has forced NATO members to rediscover the strategic importance of industrial resilience. Steel, electronics, explosives and manufacturing capacity have returned to the centre of geopolitical competition. The twenty-first century's defining arms race may be fought not only in laboratories but on factory floors.

The tragedy is that production cycles move slowly while missiles fly quickly. Diplomacy, procurement and industrial expansion all operate on timelines measured in years. Air raids unfold in minutes. Until that gap narrows, Zelenskyy will continue demanding more interceptors, Washington will continue balancing competing priorities, and ordinary Ukrainians will continue paying the price for a world rediscovering that modern warfare is ultimately a contest not merely of courage or technology, but of industrial endurance.