There’s something almost too neat about JD Vance suddenly becoming the face of America’s most fragile diplomatic file. A vice president once cast as a reluctant defender of foreign wars now finds himself leading negotiations with Iran, long hours, high stakes and no clear victories. If you’re looking for the early scaffolding of a presidential campaign, this is exactly what it looks like.
But let’s not pretend this is purely about statesmanship. Vance’s role in the Iran talks is not accidental. It’s political positioning under the cover of diplomacy. While Donald Trump oscillates between threats, boasts and contradictory messaging about the conflict, Vance occupies a different lane, calmer, quieter and more measured. That contrast matters. It’s not just stylistic; it’s strategic.
Reports suggest Vance was never the loudest cheerleader for the war in the first place. In fact, he was seen as one of the more skeptical voices about deeper U.S. involvement. That skepticism hasn’t disappeared, it’s simply been repackaged. Instead of open dissent, what we’re seeing now is something more subtle, participation without ownership.
That’s a delicate balancing act. Vance is inside the room, leading negotiations, absorbing the credibility that comes with it. But he’s also not the one who launched the conflict, escalated tensions, or made maximalist demands. That distinction could prove invaluable later.
Because let’s be honest, these talks are not going well. The negotiations have so far produced “goodwill” but no deal, despite marathon sessions and heavy diplomatic investment. Iran remains resistant, the ceasefire is shaky, and the broader regional situation is volatile. Even the messaging from Washington has been muddled, with conflicting statements about participation and progress.
In political terms, this is a risky assignment. But it’s also a calculated one. If the talks fail, Vance can point to structural obstacles, Iran’s intransigence, the complexity of the conflict, or even mixed signals from the administration itself. If they succeed, even partially, he can claim credit as the man who stabilized a crisis others inflamed. It’s a classic “heads I win, tails I don’t lose much” scenario.
More interesting, though, is what Vance isn’t saying. There’s been no dramatic break with Trump, no headline-grabbing criticism of the administration’s Iran strategy. Instead, there’s a kind of disciplined silence. And silence, in politics, is rarely neutral. It allows Vance to maintain loyalty while quietly differentiating himself. He doesn’t need to attack Trump’s approach outright, he just needs to embody an alternative.
And that alternative is already taking shape: less bombast, more restraint; less improvisation, more deliberation. The contrast becomes sharper when Trump publicly floats military threats or claims that a deal is practically done, only for reality to say otherwise. In that environment, Vance’s more cautious tone starts to look not just different, but presidential.
Of course, there’s a danger here. Vance could end up owning a failed process, especially if the administration decides to escalate militarily after talks collapse. He’s close enough to be implicated, even if he wasn’t the architect.
But that risk may be precisely the point. Presidential campaigns are rarely built on safe bets. They’re built on visibility, on moments where a politician can step onto the world stage and be seen handling pressure.
That’s what this is. Vance is not openly running, at least not yet. But he’s building a narrative, the skeptic who became the negotiator, the insider who understands the costs of war, the steady hand in a volatile administration.
Whether that narrative holds depends on how this crisis ends. But one thing is already clear: this isn’t just diplomacy. It’s audition.
There was a time when diplomacy moved at the pace of cables, briefings and carefully staged summits, when language was calibrated, ambiguity was strategic and silence itself could be a tool. Then came the era of the thumb, impulsive, immediate and unfiltered. In this new register, Donald Trump did not merely disrupt political norms; he redefined the tempo and tone of global communication, often reducing complex geopolitical realities to bursts of contradiction and spectacle.
The damage is not easily measured in treaties broken or alliances formally dissolved. It is subtler, more corrosive, an erosion of trust, the essential currency of international relations. When messages oscillate between threat and conciliation within hours, when policy appears to be shaped as much by mood as by method, counterparts are left not just wary, but disoriented. Diplomacy depends on predictability, even among adversaries. Trump’s communication style replaced predictability with volatility.
Consider the broader implications of such erratic signaling. In regions already fraught with tension, ambiguity can be dangerous. Words from a U.S. president are not casual remarks; they are signals interpreted by militaries, markets and governments alike. When those signals conflict, the margin for miscalculation widens. A contradictory post about negotiations, whether involving Iran, Pakistan or any other sensitive axis, does not exist in a vacuum. It reverberates through embassies and intelligence briefings, forcing allies to second-guess and adversaries to probe for weakness.
But the consequences extend beyond foreign policy. Trump’s rhetorical style normalized a kind of public discourse that privileges immediacy over accuracy and confidence over coherence. In doing so, it seeped into other domains, education, public health, even civic life. When leaders communicate in absolutes one day and reversals the next, institutions built on expertise begin to appear optional. The result is not merely disagreement, but fragmentation: a public less able to distinguish between informed guidance and performative assertion.
Globally, this fragmentation carries weight. American influence has long rested not only on military or economic power but on the perceived stability of its institutions. When that stability appears compromised—when messaging from the top seems inconsistent or untethered, other nations adjust. Some hedge, forming new alliances or strengthening regional blocs. Others exploit the uncertainty, advancing their own agendas in the gaps left by a distracted or unpredictable superpower.
Prosperity, too, is affected. Markets thrive on clarity, or at least on patterns they can interpret. Sudden shifts in tone, threats of tariffs followed by reversals, praise for adversaries followed by condemnation, introduce a kind of noise that complicates decision-making for businesses and governments alike. Investment hesitates. Long-term planning becomes more cautious, more fragmented, more defensive.
To frame all of this as the product of a single individual’s “thumbs” may seem reductive, but it captures something essential about the moment: the compression of consequence. In earlier eras, the machinery of governance filtered impulse through layers of deliberation. In Trump’s case, that machinery often appeared bypassed, or at least overshadowed, by direct communication channels that rewarded speed and provocation over reflection.
The danger, then, is not only in what was said, but in how it reshaped expectations. If global leadership becomes synonymous with unpredictability, if contradiction is recast as strategy rather than instability, the norms that underpin cooperation begin to fray. And once frayed, they are not easily restored.
History will likely debate the extent of the damage, parsing policy outcomes and geopolitical shifts. But the tonal shift, the sense that the world’s most powerful office could speak in bursts of contradiction and still be taken seriously, may prove to be one of the more enduring legacies. In diplomacy, as in life, words matter. When they lose their weight, so too does the fragile architecture they are meant to support.
There is something outright absurd about commemorating the International Day for Multilateralism and Diplomacy for Peace at a moment when the very idea of diplomacy feels not just strained but openly disregarded. The phrase itself carries a certain polished optimism, the kind favoured in conference halls with soft lighting and carefully worded communiqués. Yet outside those rooms, the world appears to be operating on an entirely different script.
Consider the ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia, now less a conflict and more a grinding demonstration of endurance, attrition, and geopolitical stubbornness. Diplomacy has not disappeared here; it lingers in the background like a forgotten understudy, occasionally stepping forward for brief, tentative appearances before being ushered offstage by missiles and mobilizations. Negotiation exists, but it is tentative, conditional, and often overshadowed by the louder language of force.
At the same time, tensions between the United States and Iran oscillate between icy silence and sudden escalation, as though both sides are locked in a ritual they no longer fully control. Each gesture, whether conciliatory or confrontational, seems calibrated less for resolution and more for signalling strength. Diplomacy, in this context, risks becoming performative, a series of moves designed to maintain posture rather than produce peace.
And then there is Israel’s increasingly aggressive posture toward its neighbours, a dynamic that further complicates an already volatile region. Here, the rhetoric of security and survival often eclipses the possibility of mutual understanding. The cycle is familiar, provocation, retaliation, justification and repeat. Diplomacy is invoked frequently, but more as a shield for action than as a genuine pathway toward de-escalation.
What unites these disparate conflicts is not merely their severity, but the way they expose a deeper erosion of trust in multilateral frameworks. Institutions designed to mediate, to convene, to restrain, these are still in place, but their authority feels diminished. Agreements are reached and then questioned. Norms are cited and then bent. The rules-based order, once presented as a stabilizing force, now appears negotiable, contingent, and, at times, selectively applied.
It would be easy, perhaps too easy, to dismiss the International Day for Multilateralism and Diplomacy for Peace as a hollow gesture, a symbolic nod to ideals that no longer carry weight. But that interpretation, while tempting, risks missing something important. The persistence of such a day, however disconnected it may seem from reality, reflects a stubborn refusal to abandon the concept of diplomacy altogether. It is less a celebration than a reminder, an insistence that the alternative, a world governed entirely by unilateral action and perpetual conflict, is not one we can afford to normalize.
Still, reminders alone are insufficient. Diplomacy cannot survive as a ceremonial language spoken only on designated days. It requires credibility, consistency and above all, a willingness among powerful actors to accept constraints on their own behaviour. Without that, multilateralism becomes little more than a rhetorical device, invoked when convenient and ignored when inconvenient.
So yes, there is a dissonance, sharp and undeniable, between the ideals embodied in this international observance and the realities unfolding across the globe. Calling it a “joke” captures the frustration, but perhaps not the full picture. It is not a joke so much as a paradox: a solemn recognition of peace in an era increasingly defined by its absence.
And perhaps that is precisely why it persists. Not because the world is peaceful, but because it is not and because, despite everything, the idea of diplomacy remains too necessary to discard, even when it feels least convincing.
Could Oba Ladoja be part of a plot to impeach a governor who is almost at the end of his tenure? He himself having suffered that indignity when he was governor of the state.
Ibadan, the capital of Oyo State, is not new to political upheavals. The sprawling ancient city was home to Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the first premier of the Western Region. Ibadan was started by warriors who proved their mettle in defending the Yoruba land from marauding Fulani warriors. Ibadan also has a proud legacy, “ija’gboro larun Ibadan,” meaning street brawling is the legacy of Ibadan. Ibadan saw a huge political fight of seismic proportions when the feud between the departing first premier of the Western Region, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, and his successor led to a declaration of a state of emergency in the Western Region and subsequent massive election rigging, which snowballed into the tragic three-year civil war in Nigeria. It all began in Ibadan at the very Secretariat built by Chief Awolowo and used today by the governor of Oyo State, Seyi Makinde. Seyi Makinde, an indigene of the city, is governor of Oyo State.
But Seyi Makinde has no blood of Awolowo in his veins. Awolowo was a statesman; Seyi Makinde is a politician. Awolowo does not play games; Seyi Makinde is a game player who gambles with the destiny of the people of Oyo. Awolowo was a goal getter with an unequalled record for the rapid progress of his people in the Western Region; Seyi Makinde is in the class of late Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintola, a rabble-rouser who revels in power. Akintola was a grassroots politician who told lies to deceive the people to keep them following him. Seyi Makinde is also a rabble-rouser, a man who hugs Klieglight and would not mind lying.
Akintola begged Awolowo to succeed him, something which Awolowo did not want to do because of Akintola’s well-known lackluster performance. But Awolowo had to bend to pressure from some elders of the region in a compromise, probably for the first time in his life. He yielded power to Akintola, who immediately went for the jugular of the leader of their party, the Action Group (AG). Akintola would no longer be subject to party discipline and control until he caused mayhem, which disrupted all that the AG had achieved.
If tradition is kept in Oyo State, which inherited the secretariat infrastructure that Awolowo built, Seyi Makinde will be sitting on the table and chair that Awolowo sat on, which Samuel Ladoke Akintola also inherited and sat on. Seyi Makinde is the reincarnation of the late Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintola. Seyi Makinde seems to have attended the political school of Akintola and graduated with flying colours.
The conflicting colours that Seyi Makinde wears are likely to snowball again into big problems in Ibadan of seismic proportions. Just as Tafawa Balewa, the first prime minister of Nigeria at independence, had a hand in the crisis that brewed between Akintola and Awolowo, where Akintola was used in an attempt to dislodge Awolowo from his confrontational politics against oppressors, today’s president of Nigeria, Bola Tinubu, a man best described in Machiavellian terms, is at the center of a row that may terminate the current democracy as it did that of the first republic. God forbid, but the nation must not fold its arms.
Other dramatis personae in the unfolding crisis are the Olubadan of Ibadan, Oba Rasidi Ladoja; Mrs. Florence Ajimobi, wife of the former governor of the state, late Ishaq Ajimobi, who gave the baton to Seyi Makinde as governor; the Speaker of the State House of Assembly, Adeboye Ogundoyin, who became speaker at 32 and has done seven years as speaker; the Chief Whip of the Assembly, Gbenga Oyekola; the dictator, Seyi Makinde, whose word is law in Oyo State; and Ayodele Fayose, former governor of Ekiti State. Especially hilarious in the drama is the posture of Gbenga Oyekola, the chief whip, who described the governor, Seyi Makinde, as his “boss.”
He issued a statement on social media about a meeting that was held between Seyi Makinde and the legislators in the governor’s house. It is important to note that Seyi Makinde does not live in government quarters but in his own house in an estate called Kolapo Ishola. So imagine that the House of Assembly building had shrunk and was not able to contain the legislatures, and so they moved to the private house of the governor. After the meeting held around April 14, both the Speaker and the Chief Whip issued statements. The speaker said he had gone to the palace of Oba Ladoja to seek his support for a governorship ambition he nursed. During the visit, Ladoja asked him to help impeach Seyi Makinde and he will help him to clinch the House of Representatives constituency. Ladoja also offered him an unnamed huge sum of money.
Speaker Ogundoyin’s statement will probably be acceptable to the Mongols. He was the one seeking Oba Ladoja’s help, and now it was Oba Ladoja begging him to impeach Seyi Makinde with the offer of a seat in the House of Representatives and huge cash. Mind you, Ladoja is not from Ibarapa, from where the Speaker hails. Meanwhile, the son of Oba Ladoja, Sola, has disclosed that it was Ogundoyin who begged him to take him to Oba Ladoja. The statement of Gbenga Oyekola was no less amusing and illogical. After their meeting with the governor, he narrated the story of the speaker and how he rejected the huge sum of money and how he, as a member of the House Assembly, will never betray his “boss,” Seyi Makinde. This was a man elected into the assembly to provide checks and balances to the governor. How much worse flattery and servitude can be. A logical analysis is that both statements were part of a plot to undo the Olubadan and get to Senator Sharafadeen Alli.
Meanwhile, Ayo Fayose, himself a terrible character, had alerted the whole state that there was a plan being hatched to dethrone Oba Ladoja, an alert which both the Oba and the government of Seyi Makinde denied. Seyi Makinde had tried to scheme out Sharafadeen Alli, the consensus APC candidate for the Oyo gubernatorial race in 2027. He had commanded the Olubadan to coronate Sharafadeen and two others as part of the lesser obas in the city, a very unpopular thing among the indigenes. Sharafadeen and his two colleagues Obas had refused to attend the coronation, giving excuses, but Seyi Makinde went ahead, absenting himself but sending his deputy to do the coronation. The scheme is that Sharafadeen cannot be an oba and politician at the same time. How the government thinks it could coronate the obas that have no traditional bearing with the obas concerned, who were not in attendance, and whose governor also didn’t attend is a bitter pill to swallow.
It may look odd to the indigenes of Ibadan; it may look odd to Oba Ladoja and to his council of chiefs, but not to Seyi Makinde. Seyi Makinde is ambitious; he wants to be vice president to Atiku Abubakar. He has pledged to deliver Oyo State to Atiku and allegedly promised 10 billion naira as a gift. People are saying this money will come from the Oyo State purse, where the governor has been spending freely in recent weeks. A top-weight politician told this reporter that Seyi Makinde bought 351 cars for all the councillors in the state, for 26 million naira each, and power bikes for all the ward chairmen in the state who are not in the employ of the government, at 6 million naira a bike. The politician said Seyi Makinde was just trying to justify spending the huge money now available to him as part of the Tinubu largesse after he removed the subsidy on oil.
Sharafadeen Alli, the APC consensus candidate for the Oyo governorship contest who is at the center of the crisis also accused the governor, Seyi Makinde of spending 1.5 billion naira on the failed coronation. He said the purpose of what he called wasteful spending is not for the coronation but for Seyi Makinde to make an expenditure in order to allegedly pilfer money he will use for the 2027 elections. Seyi Makinde was suspected to be angling to coronate Sharafadeen Alli so as to edge him out of the gubernatorial contest. The Oyo state law is that an oba cannot participate in politics.
Could Oba Ladoja be part of a plot to impeach a governor who is almost at the end of his tenure? He himself having suffered that indignity when he was governor of the state, an indignity he suffered in the hand of a totalitarian power monger, Olusegun Obasanjo, president between 1999 and 2007. Nothing is beyond politicians in the pursuit of their selfish interests. Oba Ladoja may want to be grateful to Tinubu, who sponsored his legal defense from the High Court to the Supreme Court in his impeachment, a case Ladoja won. Tinubu, now having offended Nigerians with his harsh and inhumane policies, is hell-bent on winning a second term by all means. So Ladoja is a nice catch for him to win all Yoruba states to counterbalance the North East and North West who are pushing their people to punish Tinubu with their votes because he has cut them off from their traditional means of making money through government appointments denied to them.
Currently, two Yoruba states are not in the hands of the APC, Oyo and Osun states. Osun is difficult because the governor of the state is loved by the people, having been seen to have performed. So Oyo State is a battle that Tinubu must win. Seyi Makinde, rather than deploy resources to electricity and quality education, has neglected these vital areas and goes on populist programs like payment of salaries and pensions, which are good and a must, but electricity and education will guarantee the development and the future of the state. He could do both, but he has decided to concentrate on one and store up money for his vice presidential ambitions in 2027.
What about Mrs. Ajimobi? Nobody should put anything beyond her. She has just been appointed an ambassador to Austria, and she will want to show gratitude to President Tinubu for the appointment as well as revenge for the defeat of the candidate of her late husband in the 2023 election. The winner of that election was Seyi Makinde. Whatever the reason, the state is bigger than anybody, and a collapse of it is dangerous to all politicians. If they keep this in mind, they will prevent a repeat of the calamity that Akintola engineered through his unbridled ambition. If they don’t, the nation will suffer once again.
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.
There is something almost ritualistic about the way British politics devours its leaders. The details change, the names rotate, the headlines evolve but the underlying mechanism remains stubbornly intact. Prime Minister Keir Starmer now finds himself caught in that machinery, not because of a collapse in policy or governance, but because of the gravitational pull of scandal politics where association often matters more than evidence, and outrage outruns proportion.
At the center of the current storm is Peter Mandelson’s appointment and his past associations, now reframed through the toxic lens of Jeffrey Epstein. The opposition has seized the moment with predictable urgency, demanding resignation not merely as a matter of accountability, but as a political strategy. The argument is less about governance and more about perception: that proximity to controversy is itself disqualifying, regardless of context or nuance.
This is not new. British political history is littered with moments when leaders, often effective, sometimes transformative, have been brought low not by failures of statecraft, but by the slow drip of reputational damage amplified into a flood. The pattern is clear: isolate a controversy, attach it to the leader, repeat it relentlessly and allow public trust to erode under the weight of insinuation.
What makes this episode particularly striking is the asymmetry between the scale of the accusation and the scale of the response. Starmer’s government has, by most conventional measures, pursued stability in economic management, sought to rebuild trade relationships, and maintained a coherent defence posture in an increasingly volatile global landscape. These are not trivial achievements. They are the very benchmarks by which governments are supposed to be judged.
And yet, none of that seems to matter in the current climate. Instead, the political conversation has been hijacked by a narrative that thrives on outrage rather than substance. The opposition, leaning heavily into populist rhetoric, has found fertile ground in framing the issue as one of moral collapse. But beneath the indignation lies a striking absence of constructive alternatives. There is little in the way of a coherent economic vision, no detailed roadmap for trade, no serious engagement with the complexities of national security. What exists instead is a politics of reaction: loud, emotive, and strategically simplistic.
This is where the danger lies not just for Starmer but for the broader democratic culture. When political discourse becomes dominated by scandal cycles, it creates incentives that reward performance over policy. It encourages opposition parties to prioritize character attacks over constructive critique and it pressures governments to govern defensively rather than ambitiously.
There is also a deeper, more uncomfortable question at play: whether the threshold for political survival has become so fragile that any sustained controversy, regardless of its substantive merit, can trigger calls for resignation. If that is the case, then leadership itself becomes precarious, contingent not on effectiveness but on the ability to withstand the next wave of outrage.
None of this is to suggest that scrutiny is unwarranted. Accountability is a cornerstone of democratic governance, and public figures must be held to high standards. But there is a difference between scrutiny and opportunism, between legitimate concern and manufactured crisis. When that line is blurred, the result is not stronger democracy, but a more cynical and volatile political environment.
Starmer’s challenge, then, is not only to navigate the immediate controversy, but to resist being defined by it. That requires more than political survival; it requires reasserting a narrative grounded in policy, competence, and long-term vision.
Whether that will be enough is another question entirely. History suggests that once the machinery of scandal is set in motion, it is difficult to stop. But history also shows that leadership is, at times, measured by the ability to endure precisely these moments and to emerge with substance intact, even as the noise grows louder.
There are moments in international politics when a shift is less about policy and more about perception when the language leaders choose begins to separate a government from a nation, a strategy from a people, and, ultimately, accountability from abstraction. Italy’s recent decision to suspend the renewal of its defense cooperation agreement with Israel is one of those moments.
What makes this development noteworthy is not simply the policy itself, but the framing behind it. The emphasis on “the current situation” signals something deeper, a growing willingness among Western leaders to draw a distinction that has long been politically uncomfortable, the difference between the actions of a government and the identity of a state.
For years, criticism of Israeli military operations has often been flattened into broader, less precise narratives. Governments hesitated, wary of appearing to delegitimize an entire nation or alienate a longstanding ally. But that hesitation is beginning to erode. The language is changing. And with it, the political calculus.
At the center of this shift is a recognition that the policies of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, particularly those shaped by ultra-nationalist and far-right coalition partners, are not synonymous with Israel itself. That may seem obvious in theory, but in practice, it has taken years of escalating tensions, civilian suffering, and international unease for leaders to say it out loud, even indirectly.
This matters because words shape consequences. When governments begin to isolate responsibility, placing it squarely on leadership rather than on an entire country, they open the door to more targeted forms of pressure. Diplomatic measures, economic decisions, and defense agreements can be recalibrated without crossing into blanket condemnation. It is a more precise form of accountability and arguably a more effective one.
Italy’s move reflects a broader pattern that is slowly emerging across Europe and beyond. Allies are not necessarily abandoning Israel, but they are signaling that support is not unconditional. There is a line, however faint or inconsistently applied and some now believe it has been crossed.
Critics will argue that such distinctions are politically convenient that they allow leaders to appear principled while avoiding the harder question of what meaningful consequences should follow. That critique is not without merit. Symbolic gestures, after all, are easier than sustained policy shifts. But symbolism still carries weight, especially in diplomacy, where perception often precedes action.
What is different now is the accumulation of these signals. One government hesitates. Another recalibrates. A third begins to speak more openly. Individually, each step may seem modest. Collectively, they suggest a turning point in how Western allies engage with Israel’s current leadership.
This is not about rewriting alliances overnight. Israel remains a strategic partner to many, and those relationships are deeply embedded in security, intelligence and political frameworks. But alliances are not static. They evolve, sometimes quietly, in response to changing realities on the ground.
The real question is whether this shift in tone will translate into sustained policy changes or whether it will fade as geopolitical priorities reassert themselves. History offers examples of both outcomes. Outrage can dissipate. Lines can blur again. But once a distinction is made publicly, it is harder to fully erase.
Perhaps the most significant implication of Italy’s decision is not what it does immediately, but what it permits others to consider. It creates space, for debate, for dissent and for a more nuanced conversation about responsibility and accountability.
And in a political landscape often defined by binary choices, that space may be the most consequential development of all.
He who would understand the Plains must ascend the Eternal Hills, where a man’s eyes scan Infinity. He who would make use of understanding must descend on the Plains where Past and Future meet, and men have need of him. - Talbut Mundy Om-The Secret of Abbor Valley
The current tensions and armed violence on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier and the Khyber Pass which links the two countries brings to mind the theosophical novel King of the Khyber Rifles (1916) written by Talbot Mundy, who birth anniversary we note on 23 April.
The novel was written by Talbot Mundy, in part, to express the workings of karma, that ancient law of individual responsibility which gives humans their dignity. “We act and react, do and leave undone, think and refuse to think, stand firm or are seduced while karma- incorruptible and inescapable –inscribes our spiritual progress on the rolls of destiny. The Law adjusts all balances and measures, the exact effort of every thought and deed, detecting each hidden motive.”
Talbot Mundy (1879-1940) was born in England as William Lancaster Gibbon but used the name Talbot Mundy when he started to be published in 1911. Probably, he also wanted to put his English past behind him as he became highly critical of British colonial policy, though he remained influence by the example and the writing style of Edward Bulwer-Lytton who tried to use the popular novel such as Zanoni (1842) as a way of shaping mass public opinion. In Zanoi, Zanoni is an immortal sage and member of a secret brotherhood dedicated to helping humanity and holding esoteric knowledge. Bulwer-Lytton was an early advocate of feminism with the idea that women are more spiritually advanced than men, a theme that Talbot Mundy develops in his books.
Talbot Mundy left home when he was 16 to go to India, then Africa, the Middle East, and finally settled in the USA. He took a different wife in each geographic area, perhaps as a way to understand better the culture. The women characters in his novels are all a doorway to deeper understanding of spiritual insights and as keepers of the best of the specific culture. He went to India first in 1899 as a relief worker in Baroda and then in 1901 to report for newspapers on the fighting on the northwest frontier, which served as background for King of the Khyber Rifles. He met his first wife, an Englishwoman living in India and married in 1903. He developed a dislike for English colonial life in India with its contempt for Indian culture. He absorbed the Indian myths of spiritual masters and secret societies that were positive agents of world events — themes that he developed especially in his The Nine Unknown (1924) — a secret society founded by the Emperor Asoka around 270 BCE and which continued to the present, helping social and political reforms but secluded from open view. It is a theme developed later in Black Light and for short stories which he wrote in the USA for Adventure, a magazine of popular fiction.
Influenced by the example of Richard Burton (1821-1890) who combined experiences in India and Africa along with an interest in sexual practices — Burton having translated and introduced to Western readers the Kama Sutra, Talbot Mundy left India for Africa, where he met the woman who became his second wife. Africa played a lesser role in his novels but served as background for many of his short stories. After his short stay in Africa, he moved to the USA, where he divorced again and married his third wife, who was a member of a religious movement with its roots in New England, Christian Science.
From his Christian Science wife, he absorbed the idea of the power of positive thinking which fitted in with the thought power of Indian yogis. Talbot Mundy became President of the Christian-Science-related Anglo-American Society Relief Effort for Palestine, a society that was focused on aid for the Armenians who had fled what had become Turkey and were now living in the Middle East, especially Lebanon and Palestine. In 1921, Mundy left the US to continue to work on Middle East causes, both to help administer the relief efforts and to write for the Jerusalem News.
By 1922, he had again divorced and married his fourth wife, Sally, who had also been doing relief work in the Middle East. Mundy, who was already critical of British colonial policy in India, quickly came to dislike British policy in the Middle East. He wrote a series of novels and short stories with Jim Grim, an English intelligence agent, as hero and as an avenue for Mundy’s cynical views on English policy-making.
By 1924, he had moved back to the USA where he lived in San Diego, California at the Point Loma Theosophical Movement headquarters. There he wrote his best theosophical novel, Om, the Secret of Abbor Valley. For five years he was the editor of The Theosophical Path, and worked closely with Katherine Tingley (1847-1929), the head of the Point Loma movement.
In 1929, he left Point Loma for New York City, where he took rooms at the Masters Building on Riverside Drive which had been created by Nicholas Roerich as a center for interaction among all the arts — music, painting, dance — . Mundy used some of Nicholas Roerich’s experiences in Asia, especially Tibet, and Roerich’s interest in Shambhala, a hidden city from which spiritual masters would send messengers to influence positively world events. Much of the Shambhala myth is used in Mundy’s King of the World. In New York, Mundy was active in theosophical and astrological circles, though none of his New York writings matched the power of Om, which merits being discovered by those who have not read it. For his bread and butter, Mundy wrote the radio scripts for the popular youth radio program “Jack Armstrong: the All-American Boy” which continued until the late 1940s-early 1950s.Jack Armstong was the adventure side of Talbot Mundy without the spiritual dimension or the political critique.
(1) For a fuller account of his life see Peter B. Ellis The Last Adventurer: The Life of Talbot Mundy (1984)
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Rene Wadlow, President, Association of World Citizens
There is something almost theatrical about Europe’s current demographic anxiety, governments lament shrinking workforces, economists warn of unsustainable pension systems and hospitals quietly strain under staffing shortages, yet migration policy often remains trapped in a political time warp. Against this backdrop, Spain’s move to regularize hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants is less radical than it is honest.
Let’s be clear about what is being proposed. Granting permanent residency to migrants who have already been living in the country, contributing informally, and staying out of trouble is not an act of reckless generosity. It is a recognition of reality. These individuals are not hypothetical arrivals at the border; they are already woven, albeit invisibly, into the fabric of Spanish society. They clean homes, harvest crops, care for the elderly, and fill the kinds of jobs that aging populations increasingly depend on but native workforces often cannot or will not.
Europe’s demographic crisis is not looming; it is here. Birth rates across much of the continent are well below replacement level, and the ratio of workers to retirees is steadily declining. Without intervention, pension systems will buckle under their own weight, and public healthcare, so often cited as a cornerstone of European identity, will struggle to maintain both quality and access. The uncomfortable truth is that economic sustainability requires more workers, not fewer. And workers, in this case, are already present.
Regularization does something that restrictive policies fail to achieve: it pulls people out of the shadows and into the tax base. Undocumented migrants, by definition, operate in informal economies where exploitation is common and contributions to public systems are minimal or indirect. Legal status changes that equation. It creates accountability, encourages integration, and transforms individuals from invisible labour into recognized participants in national life.
Critics will argue that such policies risk encouraging further migration or undermining the rule of law. These concerns are not entirely unfounded, but they are often overstated. Migration flows are driven by complex global forces, conflict, climate, inequality, not solely by the promise of legal status in one country. Meanwhile, the rule of law is not weakened by adapting policy to reality; it is strengthened when laws reflect practical, enforceable conditions rather than aspirational rigidity.
There is also a deeper, more uncomfortable layer to the debate: xenophobia dressed up as economic caution. It is easier, politically, to frame migrants as a burden than to acknowledge their necessity. Yet the evidence is visible in everyday life. Who staffs the late shifts in hospitals? Who keeps agricultural sectors afloat? Who fills the gaps in elder care as populations age? The answer, increasingly, is migrants, documented or not.
Spain’s approach implicitly challenges a broader European reluctance to confront this dependency. It asks a simple question: if these individuals are already essential, why maintain the fiction that they are outsiders? Legal recognition is not just a bureaucratic adjustment; it is a social acknowledgment that belonging can be earned through presence, contribution, and adherence to the law.
Of course, regularization is not a silver bullet. It must be paired with coherent immigration systems, labour protections, and integration policies that extend beyond paperwork. But dismissing it outright ignores the scale of the challenge Europe faces. Aging societies do not have the luxury of ideological purity; they require pragmatic solutions.
The real test is whether other countries are willing to follow this kind of pragmatic lead. Europe cannot simultaneously fear demographic decline and resist the very people who can help mitigate it. At some point, the contradiction becomes untenable.
Spain’s policy may not solve everything, but it does something more important: it replaces denial with decision. In a continent caught between nostalgia and necessity, that alone is a step forward.
