For decades, space has been treated as the last respectable neighbourhood in an increasingly disreputable world. Down here, on Earth, nations have accumulated enough missiles, submarines, drones, cyberweapons and artificial intelligence to make the Cold War look almost artisanal. But above our heads there remained, at least officially, a certain innocence. Satellites watched, listened, photographed, guided missiles, spied on enemies and helped us find the nearest pizza restaurant, but weapons in orbit belonged largely to the realm of suspicion, military jargon and science fiction.
Then the Americans decided to say the quiet part aloud. The announcement that the United States has deployed “on-orbit space control weapons” is remarkable not necessarily because the weapons exist, but because Washington has chosen to acknowledge them. Nobody with even a passing acquaintance with military history should be shocked by the idea that the major powers have spent years, perhaps decades, preparing for war beyond the atmosphere. The real mystery is why the United States has suddenly decided that secrecy is less useful than publicity.
This is where space becomes less Star Trek and more Kafka. The first possibility is deterrence. Perhaps Washington wants Moscow and Beijing to know that American satellites are no longer simply expensive cameras floating helplessly through the darkness. Perhaps the message is: touch ours, and we can touch yours. In the old language of nuclear strategy, this was called stability through mutual terror. The new version comes with solar panels.
The second possibility is political. Announcing weapons in orbit is also a useful way of telling Congress, taxpayers and allies that the Space Force is not merely a collection of uniforms designed for recruiting posters. Bureaucracies, particularly military ones, thrive on threats, and nothing says “please continue funding us” quite like the suggestion that the next war may begin somewhere between the International Space Station and a communications satellite.
But there is a third possibility, and it is the one that should make us most uncomfortable. Perhaps the Americans are announcing these weapons because the strategic competition in space has already moved much further than the public has been told.
Russia and China have both developed and demonstrated capabilities designed to interfere with, disable or destroy satellites. The United States, meanwhile, has spent decades building the most sophisticated military dependence on space in history. Modern armies do not merely use satellites; they depend upon them for communications, navigation, surveillance and targeting and early warning. Destroy enough satellites and a technologically advanced military can suddenly discover the strategic advantages of being blind.
Britain and other established military powers undoubtedly possess capabilities that remain classified. The important question, however, is not simply who has weapons in space. It is what kind of weapons they are.
There is a profound difference between a satellite capable of jamming another satellite, a robotic vehicle able to approach and disable one, a conventional projectile, a directed-energy system, and a nuclear device. Yet the secrecy surrounding space warfare encourages the public imagination to throw everything into one large orbital suitcase marked classified.
The greatest danger remains nuclear weapons in space. A nuclear explosion above the Earth would not need to destroy cities directly to cause catastrophe. It could devastate satellites, communications and electronic infrastructure on which modern societies depend. Chemical weapons, meanwhile, make considerably less strategic sense in the vacuum of space, where there is no atmosphere in which a poisonous cloud can conveniently drift towards its victims. But military planning has never been famous for respecting common sense simply because physics happens to exist.
And that may be the real significance of this American announcement. The weaponization of space is no longer merely something everyone suspects everyone else is doing. It is becoming part of the public vocabulary of military competition.
For years, humanity has looked upward and imagined the future. Now the great powers are looking upward and seeing the next battlefield.
We should not be surprised. We should, however, be worried. Every frontier we have discovered has eventually acquired a flag, a military base, a commercial logo and somebody explaining that the weapons are there only to preserve peace. Space, apparently, has finally joined the family.
Every time Donald Trump announces a ceasefire before the people supposedly involved in it have agreed to one, he hopes that diplomacy performs backwards. First comes the declaration, then perhaps the negotiation and finally, if everyone is still interested, the reality. In the meantime, the president gets to stand in the middle of the stage and announce another achievement.
Except that Ukraine and Russia did not appear to receive the script. Trump declared that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to stop attacking each other’s energy infrastructure. Kyiv, however, said there was no final agreement, while Moscow offered the sort of qualified enthusiasm normally associated with a salesman discovering that the customer has not yet signed the contract. The war continued, including attacks on energy facilities.
This should no longer surprise anyone. Trump has developed a peculiar theory of international relations in which saying something with sufficient confidence is almost equivalent to making it happen. The distinction between an agreement, a proposal, a conversation and something that simply occurred inside his head has become increasingly decorative.
The problem is not merely that Trump gets ahead of negotiations. The deeper problem is that he treats reality itself as negotiable. A ceasefire is not a press release. It is not a Truth Social announcement. It is not a presidential adjective attached to an unfinished conversation. A ceasefire exists when missiles stop flying, drones stop arriving and the people who operate them have orders to stop. Everything else is theatre.
And Ukraine has every reason to be cautious. Russia has used pauses, negotiations and supposed de-escalations before. Kyiv therefore wants something remarkably unfashionable in Trump's world: guarantees. If Russia genuinely stops attacking Ukrainian electricity, energy infrastructure and other critical targets, Ukraine says it is prepared to reciprocate. That is not rejection of peace. It is the minimum requirement for believing in one.
The irony is that Trump appears increasingly interested in the price of diesel than in the architecture of peace. That is not entirely surprising. Fuel prices are immediate, measurable and politically painful. A refinery somewhere in Russia is easier to explain to an American driver than the complicated strategic consequences of allowing Moscow to destroy Ukrainian infrastructure. Trump can point towards the petrol pump and declare that Ukraine is responsible for the bill. Geopolitics becomes a domestic price tag.
But wars are not spreadsheets. Ukraine attacks Russian energy infrastructure because energy is part of Russia's war machine. Russia attacks Ukrainian energy infrastructure because Moscow has repeatedly used the destruction of civilian infrastructure as a weapon of pressure. Pretending that these actions exist in some neutral economic universe, detached from the military logic of the war, is convenient but intellectually dishonest.
There is another danger in Trump's premature diplomacy. Every imaginary breakthrough eventually becomes somebody else's failure. If the truce collapses, Trump can say Russia or Ukraine violated it. If there was never a real agreement, nobody will be able to prove precisely who broke what. The president's claim floats safely above the wreckage, untouched by accountability.
This is diplomacy as personal branding. The tragedy is that there really could be value in an energy ceasefire. Protecting power stations, refineries and civilian energy systems would save lives and reduce suffering. It could become a modest first step towards something larger. But precisely because it matters, it cannot be manufactured through presidential improvisation.
Peace requires boring things: written commitments, verification, enforcement, trust built painfully over time. It requires people to negotiate the details Trump tends to leap over because the details are where reality lives. Trump prefers the headline.
Ukraine needs the agreement behind it. Russia needs to demonstrate that it means it. And the rest of us might reasonably ask that the next time Donald Trump announces that Russia and Ukraine have agreed to something, someone checks with Russia and Ukraine first. Otherwise the world's newest diplomatic institution may be the Trump ceasefire: announced in Washington, discovered nowhere else, and apparently operational only inside the president's imagination.
There are deaths that close a chapter, and there are deaths that reopen the book. The funeral of Ratko Mladić in Belgrade belonged firmly to the second category. Mladić died as a convicted war criminal, serving a life sentence for genocide and other crimes committed during the Bosnian war. Yet in death he was transformed, for thousands of mourners, into something quite different: a military hero, a Serbian patriot, a man deserving ceremony rather than shame. The spectacle was not merely disturbing. It was politically revealing.
The most poisonous element was not that ordinary people attended. Democracies, unlike dictatorships, cannot legislate grief. Families mourn their dead; societies argue about history; even monsters have relatives and admirers. The real scandal was the presence of senior political figures, including Serbia’s justice minister, at a funeral staged with military honours. When the state lends its dignity to a convicted architect of mass murder, it is no longer simply tolerating historical revisionism. It is participating in it.
That distinction matters. Mladić was not condemned because he lost a war or because his politics became unpopular. He was convicted because a court established his responsibility for some of the gravest crimes committed in Europe since the Second World War. Srebrenica was not a battlefield misunderstanding, a tragic footnote or another episode in the endless Balkan catalogue of competing grievances. It was genocide.
And yet Serbia continues to struggle with the elementary moral arithmetic of the past. The dead are counted according to nationality, while the perpetrators are measured according to political usefulness. History becomes a supermarket in which governments select whichever facts fit the day's shopping list.
This is where Serbia's European ambitions collide with its domestic politics. Joining the European Union is not simply an economic membership card. It is supposed to represent acceptance of a political culture in which courts matter, minorities possess rights, borders are not sacred excuses for aggression, and historical crimes cannot be repackaged as patriotic achievements whenever elections approach.
Brussels can negotiate chapters, regulations and accession benchmarks. It cannot manufacture historical honesty. Ursula von der Leyen was therefore right to describe the scenes as deeply regrettable. But regret is a rather weak word for what happened. Europe has spent decades insisting that the Balkans must confront the ghosts of the 1990s. Every time those ghosts are dressed in uniforms and greeted as heroes, the European project discovers that the past has not disappeared at all. It has merely been waiting for another political procession.
There is also something profoundly cynical about celebrating Mladić now. The general is safely dead. He cannot embarrass anyone with new revelations. He cannot contradict the mythology being constructed around him. He has become politically convenient precisely because he can no longer speak.
The danger is not that Serbia will suddenly become a dictatorship because thousands attended one funeral. The danger is subtler: that democratic institutions slowly become compatible with the glorification of people those institutions have already judged responsible for atrocities.
Europe should not humiliate Serbia or punish an entire population for the sins of its nationalist extremists. But neither should it pretend that membership negotiations can proceed as though this were merely another disagreement over agricultural subsidies or customs regulations.
A country seeking to join a political union built partly from the ruins of Europe's twentieth-century catastrophes must understand one uncomfortable principle: reconciliation begins where hero worship ends.
Mladić's funeral was supposed to bury a man. Instead, it exposed a country still arguing over whether he deserves to be remembered as a criminal or a hero. That argument is not ancient history. It is Serbia's European test.
Dino is a vegetarian virgin dinosaur and his best friend is Anty, a carnivorous nymphomaniac ant. They call themselves the AntySaurus Prick and they are still here waiting for the comet to come!
For more AntySaurus Prick, HERE! For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!
The problem with the Greek debate over Ilias Kasidiaris is not that people are too alarmed about him. They are not alarmed enough about the larger political disease his return exposes.
Kasidiaris is dangerous. Golden Dawn was not merely another nationalist party with unpleasant manners; its leadership was convicted as members of a criminal organisation, after years in which political violence, racist intimidation and fascist symbolism became part of its public identity. His return to politics deserves vigilance, not nostalgia.
But there is something intellectually dishonest about treating Kasidiaris as though Greek democracy encounters fascism only when fascism arrives from outside the respectable political establishment.
For years, the Greek political system has demonstrated a remarkable capacity to condemn the far right in public while absorbing, accommodating or rehabilitating parts of its political vocabulary and personnel when convenient. That is the contradiction that should make democrats uncomfortable.
The question is not whether Kasidiaris is worse than every politician who has ever occupied a ministerial office. Such comparisons are ultimately a distraction. The question is why the boundaries of democratic respectability have sometimes been drawn so selectively.
Consider Makis Voridis. His political past is not a secret footnote. Before becoming a senior figure in New Democracy and eventually a government minister, he was a prominent figure in Greece's far-right political milieu. Yet the passage from the political fringe to the centre can apparently be accomplished without the centre being asked to explain very much about the journey.
Thanos Plevris presents a different but equally uncomfortable case. His father, Konstantinos Plevris, became notorious for antisemitic and Nazi-associated writings and politics. Thanos Plevris later distanced himself from those positions and condemned antisemitism. That distinction matters. But so does the extraordinary fact that a political family so deeply entangled with Greece's far-right history could ultimately become part of the governing establishment.
And then there are the recurring allegations and controversies surrounding contacts between mainstream conservative politicians and Golden Dawn figures. They have been claims that Dora Bakoyannis secretly negotiated with Kasidiaris over political cooperation when Golden Down was still ‘legal’ and in Parliament; and following Tsipras return and fear, who knows if some in the governing party haven’t thought that time has …arrived again. The point is that the broader history of contacts between establishment politics and the far right is hardly imaginary.
This is where the argument should become uncomfortable. A democracy cannot protect itself merely by pointing at the most obvious fascists and declaring them uniquely toxic. Fascism becomes politically durable when respectable institutions teach citizens that extremism is monstrous in one setting but negotiable in another.
Golden Dawn did not become powerful because Greeks suddenly forgot what fascism was. It became powerful because economic collapse, political rage, immigration fears, institutional distrust and social desperation created an audience for authoritarian politics. Mainstream parties did not create all those conditions but they operated inside them and sometimes competed for the same anxieties.
Kasidiaris understands this. His political opportunity is not created simply by his prison release. It is created by a country in which the far right can repeatedly reinvent itself while the political establishment argues about where, precisely, the line should be drawn constantly moving the red lines..
That is why the comparison that matters is not Kasidiaris versus Voridis, or Kasidiaris versus Plevris. The comparison is between what Greek democracy says fascism is and what Greek politics has sometimes been willing to tolerate from people who came dangerously close to it.
There should be no confusion here: none of this diminishes Kasidiaris's record or the danger posed by a political movement built around authoritarian nationalism and the mythology of Golden Dawn.
It makes the warning larger. The real democratic failure would be to condemn Kasidiaris and then congratulate ourselves while preserving the habits that made his political world normalized and possible. Fascism does not become less dangerous because someone puts on a suit. Sometimes, that is precisely when democracy should pay closer attention.
I write this in the hope that readers will take in the sheer explanatory power of the Cologne Cathedral, a frozen hymn and may one day behold her in quiet reverence.
In addition to nature surprising us with mild showers and bursts of sunshine on our ride to Cologne, we surprised ourselves with food stops and by prompting kids in passing cars to reciprocate our waves and smiles. Occasionally, Navina’s playlist let our vocal cords take a much-needed rest.The changing colours outside the window reminded me of the cliché: change is constant. Occasional drizzles and rainbows above the faraway meadows led me to where I belonged, ‘the land of fairytales’. Navina gave me an account of how she felt upon seeing the Kölner Dom for the first time. “Its magnificence engulfed everything,” she said. She wasn’t expecting something of that size to appear before her soon after alighting from the train. Her friends had taken her there without giving her any real heads-up about how she might feel. She kept telling me, over and over again, exactly how it looked and how my brain might process it. Maybe she thought she was doing me a service. Whatever her intention, I enjoyed the way she narrated that place of defiant beauty. I was ready to handle the Cologne Phenomenon. Before me, I saw it, humongous and mighty. My eyes stuck to the spires as if they were gospel rising higher to the heavens. Words failed me. I began walking toward it; then, in a sudden frenzy, I broke into a run. Navina followed suit. The cold wind felt like an invisible palm that brushed against my face, blowing my hair away from my forehead before pausing one precious moment to whisper “Agape.” Both of us turned performance visitors. We twirled and went merry-go-round to the entrance. It wasn’t just excitement that drove me, but the staggering thought of how I would even begin to process such an awe-inspiring, majestic architecture. It was truly one of a kind that would cut across all generations and cultures and likely earn more aura over the decades as a timeless testament to human imagination and reverence for the spiritual realm.
The soot-black appearance gives the entire neighborhood a “thriller” aura. My imagination stalled for a moment when I learned that this was built using 50 different types of stone, and that the black patina results from accumulated grime caused by air pollution, coal heating, and industrialization, combined with the chemical reaction of rain with its sandstone. I wished my ears had a filter to block any information that might meddle with my fantasies.
Pose game strong
The queue to the interior wasn’t too long. Eavesdropping gave me an idea that the queue comprised everyday tourists, once-in-a-lifetime visitors, architecture enthusiasts, history buffs, and travel bloggers. It gave me enough time to imagine the visual feast awaiting me, given the number of architects, master builders, and the labour of 150,000 people over 756 years. For a structure to survive fourteen bombings is no trivial matter in architecture, but it is a possibility with divine intervention. Thus, it can pass off as an old-world charm, a new-world aggressive monument, and a sacred marvel. Immediately after I stepped in, the fascinating stained-glass windows on either side caught my attention. As per the tour guide, those on the left were old and those on the right were new. To me, all seemed fresh and vibrant. I could discern no flaw. The great Bible Window behind the altar glowed with brilliance. Crafted in 1260 CE, it tells the story of Scripture in color, the Old Testament unfolding on the left, the New Testament shining on the right, like two halves of a divine conversation. Standing before it, you can almost hear the cathedral breathe, the sunlight transforming into storytelling. For the countless people who once couldn’t read the Bible, these windows were their sermons in glass. And for someone with a vivid, hyperphantasic mind,it’s a living vision. Along with the light that pours through the medieval glass, it’s easy to hear that ancient whisper echoing through the nave: “Let there be light.”
Twirl squad activated!
I can’t remember the number of times I’ve decided that there is nothing as marvelous as the hues of sunlight and no man-made object can rival nature’s lights. One look at the ‘Symphony of Light’ and I froze. All the other facts that were told went over my head. I was spellbound.Right away, I knew if there is something that can complement natural wonders of light such as auroras, atmospheric and solar phenomena or meteor showers, then this is it. Silently, I chanted ‘sun, sun, sun, here it comes’ more than a dozen times. The Beatles would surely forgive me. Lights danced their way into the cathedral along with the fairies of the sun, moon and stars enveloping me. In a sense, my quest for identity was stirred up and my soul was ready to be moulded again. With my eyes still closed, I thought it was nowhere, but there, where I stood, could imagination take on a whole new dimension urging anyone to observe keenly and rediscover one’s soul. The very fact that I am able to recall from memory so much from my visit five months ago bears testimony to the evocativeness and impact this cathedral can have on a person. But for Navina’s prodding, I wouldn’t have moved an inch.
The Shrine of the Three Kings kindled my curiosity even before we reached the Kölner Dom. Throughout the car ride, we discussed what they carried for baby Jesus, how well they managed as celestial navigators, choice of gifts, if they travelled together or separately and duration of travel. Little did the other two know that I was very much part of the discussion only to prove one of the wisemen named Gathaspa was Indian. Wowie! Zowie! There it was, the sarcophagus as if it just walked in from the world’s finest smithy. The spiritual opulence of the wise men’s hearts was depicted in gold, silver, jewels and beads. ‘Visually intense’ is the right word. Caught in the moment, I hummed one of my favorite Christmas carols ‘We three kings of orient are’. Another perfect stranger beside me joined in. It didn’t surprise me that certain people around me shared my amazement.
At the top
Walking through the cathedral, I found myself abruptly halted by a wooden Crucifix which seemed to be partially gilded. The one who had hummed along with me just minutes earlier told me it was the Gero Crucifix. Before I could be impressed by his apparent knowledge, she simply held up the pamphlet in her hand.Carved from oak and dating back to the 10th century, it is one of the oldest surviving crucifixes in Germany. The crucifix itself and the crossbeam are believed to be original, while the radiant sun behind the cross and the marble altar were later additions. She read out facts from the leaflet. Standing before it stirred a complicated tide of emotions in me. I realized that my inability to pray in front ofor toa cross was one thing. But the deeper feeling that rose within me was anger, a sharp awareness of the brutality of crucifixion and the haunting question of how an empire could devise such a barbaric form of punishment. Yet, beyond the conflict of thoughts, I couldn’t ignore the extraordinary artistry before me. Whoever sculpted this crucifix was a genius. The figure of Christ is rendered with striking humanity: a heavy, sagging body, a distended abdomen, and a head slumped forward in exhaustion and pain. It is not an idealized image but a deeply emotive one, an unflinching portrayal of suffering that feels almost painfully real. This Crucifix will compel anybody to look, to feel, and to confront the weight of the story it carries.
We paced in silence, whispered, added visual elements and sounds to discuss the magnificence in a just way, posed, and sat on the dark wooden pews in almost all aisles, unaware that we were saving energy for the tower climb that awaited us, to go find out from the spires who and what kept them standing even while the massive structure underneath was crushed by the bombing of World War II. In my view, if the spires survived 14 heavy aerial bombs and incendiary devices, it is definitely something beyond human comprehension. Isn’t this a clean claim to immortality! A panoramic view of Cologne was never my interest. I decided to climb up for three reasons: 1. To review my stamina. 2. An unforeseen yet possible apparition that would explain the secret behind the mettle of the spires. 3. To make sure the spires have stopped reaching for the skies. “No lift, no joke” at the entrance pricked my ego. My heart screamed, “533 steps, here I come.” Expectedly, the stone spiral staircase seemed unending, exciting, and not so invigorating. Just when I couldn’t do it anymore, I found myself by St. Peter’s Bell. It looked like the much-awaited spot to take a break and catch a breath. We were only halfway up. Climbing down didn’t even look like a choice, so I rested more than I wanted to. Meanwhile, I noticed that what began in 1248 CE seemed still unfinished or renovated. I could see certain sections of it under scaffolding. The thought that I was nowhere near the top bothered my head more than my leg muscles, which were already crying for an explanation. Flights of metal stairs summoned me, and I followed half-heartedly. By then, I wasn’t counting the number of steps. Someone in the front sighed, “finally,” when we came to a narrow spiral metal staircase. For the first time ever, the adverb “finally” made sense to me as a powerful temporal marker. During my final push to the very top, I panted and suffered near asphyxiation. Whether or not I had the energy for a secret tête-à-tête with the spires, or the disposition to handle an apparition, was questionable. And there it was! An external stone walkway traversing the circumference of the southern tower, allowing us to circle the top and fathom the views through the intricate Gothic tracery and mesh wiring. The River Rhine in its splendour greeted us. Eudaimonia! In one gasp, I took in all the oxygen that was needed to rejuvenate every cell in my aching body. Even as I posed for pictures, I was conscious of the equivalent descent that awaited me. As I stood staring at the Rhine, the whooshing wind brought me whispers from the spires. When the bombers came, Frau Holle, the keeper of the winter clouds, shook her feather bed, and the clouds thickened around the spires like a cloak. The pilots saw the silhouettes, but the air shifted strangely around the towers. Currents twisted. Aim faltered. Bombs slipped from their paths and thundered elsewhere instead.
Touch the spire
“Elsa, ready to descend?” Navina and Christian chorused, so perfectly in sync that I was convinced they had rehearsed it.A hot sit-down meal was the only thing on my mind. On our way down, the Vietnamese proverb, “When eating a fruit, think of the person who planted the tree,” danced through my thoughts. This masterpiece we call the Kölner Dom, which has stood the test of time, was the best idea that landed on a receptive mind. How marvelously that vision has been chiseled and polished with such finesse! The vision of Archbishop Konrad von Hochstaden reflects the perfect balance between creation and evolution.
Back at the Domplatte, I stumbled upon a few friendly photographers and a couple in a rickshaw to whom I turned a tourist guide for a few minutes. I amused them a bit by trying to cycle them around. I leave the place after establishing a passionate relationship with the Cathedral and everything in it, top to bottom.
When I started writing this piece, I was overwhelmed to the extent that I was almost convinced I can’t do justice to The Gothic. After almost five or six minutes of staring at the blank virginity of my notebook, my thoughts swirled and words flowed. Ithaka replayed in my memory
‘But don’t hurry the journey at all
Better if it lasts for years’
Trust me, Hohe Domkirche St. Peter und Maria is a living, breathingmonument that stands as a testimony to how humans visualized the majesty and holiness of their creator.
A political convention is supposed to be theatre with a purpose. There are flags, balloons, slogans, choreographed enthusiasm and enough red-white-and-blue symbolism to make the national anthem feel like a marketing campaign. But there is a point at which political theatre stops being merely theatrical. When a party convention becomes a demonstration of how deeply a country can be divided against itself, Americans should pay attention.
The Republican gathering in Dallas offered precisely that warning. The troubling part was not simply that Republicans disagreed with Democrats. American politics has always contained disagreement, sometimes spectacularly so. The problem is that disagreement increasingly appears to have become the organising principle. Politics is no longer about competing visions of the same country; it is becoming a struggle between incompatible ideas of what the country itself is supposed to be.
That is much more dangerous. The modern Republican coalition increasingly speaks in the language of cultural siege. America is portrayed not as a complicated democracy containing people with different histories and aspirations, but as a territory that has supposedly been stolen by enemies: immigrants, liberals, journalists, universities, bureaucrats, urban voters, minorities, judges, civil servants and anyone else who refuses to salute the latest ideological orthodoxy.
This is politically effective. Fear is an extraordinary organising tool. It gives voters a villain, a simplified explanation and the intoxicating promise that somebody can restore the country to an imagined moment when everything was supposedly simpler and better.
But a democracy cannot function indefinitely on political nostalgia and permanent grievance. The Dallas convention matters because conventions reveal what parties want their supporters to feel. And the feeling increasingly seems to be less about confidence in America than suspicion of fellow Americans.
That should worry Republicans as much as Democrats. A political movement that regards compromise as betrayal eventually discovers that governing is much harder than campaigning. Governing requires negotiating with people one dislikes, accepting institutional limits and recognising that an opponent can be wrong without being evil. Democracy depends upon precisely this distinction.
The danger is that once every disagreement becomes existential, every institution becomes an enemy. Courts become political obstacles. Journalists become traitors. Elections become legitimate only when one's side wins. Public servants become ideological enemies. Universities become factories of subversion. Congress becomes a battlefield rather than a legislature. Even members of one's own party can become targets if they fail to demonstrate sufficient loyalty.
At that point, politics begins to resemble tribal warfare conducted with constitutional vocabulary. America has survived extraordinarily bitter political periods before. It survived civil war, industrial unrest, racial conflict, economic depression, two world wars and Watergate. But survival was never guaranteed by American exceptionalism. It depended on institutions and, crucially, on people who were willing to accept limits.
That is the uncomfortable lesson today's Republicans and Democrats should remember. The Republican Party is not dangerous because it is conservative. Conservatism is a legitimate democratic tradition. It becomes dangerous when conservatism is replaced by permanent mobilisation against fellow citizens. Likewise, progressive politics becomes dangerous when disagreement is treated as moral contamination rather than democratic argument.
The real crisis is therefore larger than one convention or one party. America is becoming a country in which political identity increasingly determines who deserves trust, which facts deserve belief and even which neighbours are considered legitimate members of the national community.
That is how democracies become brittle. The frightening question is no longer whether Republicans can defeat Democrats, or Democrats can defeat Republicans. Elections will answer that, temporarily.
The deeper question is whether Americans still recognise that the people on the other side of the political divide are Americans too. If the answer eventually becomes no, the flags, the anthems and the grand speeches will mean very little. A republic can survive an ugly election. It cannot easily survive citizens deciding that their fellow citizens are the enemy.
There is a particularly cowardly trick developing in modern corporate life, firing someone without actually firing them. No letter. No meeting. No “your position has been terminated”. Instead, the employee watches their job slowly disappear.
First, the important meetings stop. Then the interesting projects are reassigned. A responsibility that once gave the job purpose is suddenly handed to someone else. Invitations stop arriving. Decisions are made without consultation. The employee is given smaller tasks, routine administration and work nobody particularly wants. Perhaps a promotion mysteriously vanishes from the horizon. Perhaps training is “not a priority right now”. Eventually, the employee sits at a desk performing the professional equivalent of breathing into a paper bag.
The company has not fired them, of course. The company has merely made staying unbearable. This practice has acquired fashionable names such as “quiet firing” and “quiet cutting”, but there is nothing particularly modern about it. The terminology is new; the cowardice is ancient. The technique is remarkably simple: remove responsibility, recognition, opportunity and purpose until the employee concludes that leaving is preferable to remaining.
It is corporate warfare conducted with stationery. There is an obvious attraction for management. A formal dismissal requires a conversation. Conversations create questions. Questions create documentation. Documentation creates accountability. And accountability is terribly inconvenient when the objective is simply to make somebody disappear from the payroll without having to say so.
So instead of management making a decision, the employee is encouraged to make it for them. That distinction matters. If an employee is genuinely underperforming, then management should say so. Explain the problem. Set expectations. Offer support. Establish measurable objectives. If the employee still cannot perform, terminate the employment honestly and professionally.
That is what management is for. Stripping away somebody's meaningful responsibilities is not management. It is avoidance dressed up as organisational strategy. Worse, it can be psychologically brutal. Work is not merely a transaction between labour and salary. For many people, professional responsibility provides identity, competence and a sense that their experience matters. Take those things away and the message becomes unmistakable: you are no longer wanted, but we would prefer that you announce it yourself.
There is an especially ugly irony here. Companies spend fortunes talking about engagement, purpose, culture and employee wellbeing. They commission surveys, employ consultants and create glossy presentations explaining how every employee is “our greatest asset”. Yet the same organisation can quietly turn an experienced employee into office furniture and then congratulate itself when that employee resigns.
The corporate vocabulary is wonderfully inventive. “Restructuring.” “Realignment.” “Role optimisation.” “Business transformation.” Behind these magnificent phrases there can sometimes be a very simple reality: we would like you to leave, but we don't want to tell you.
And the consequences rarely stop with the targeted employee. Colleagues notice. They see who suddenly disappears from meetings and whose responsibilities migrate elsewhere. They understand that loyalty can be rewarded with invisibility. The lesson spreads: do not become too expensive, too independent, too inconvenient or perhaps simply too old-fashioned to fit the latest organisational fashion.
Trust begins to evaporate. The sensible alternative is almost offensively straightforward: tell people the truth. If their performance is inadequate, tell them. If their position is redundant, tell them. If the business has changed and their role no longer exists, tell them. Treat adults like adults.
A company brave enough to dismiss somebody honestly may lose an employee. A company that quietly dismantles somebody's career can lose something considerably more valuable: the belief among everyone else that management deserves their trust. There is nothing clever about making someone quit. It is simply firing with the courage removed.
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.
