How to fight back against Gen-Z socialism

 

The me-first doctrine is a threat to prosperity

June 4th 2026

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5 min read

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AI Narrated

Something new is stirring on the left. A fresh crop of socialists want to remake the economy with price controls, hefty wealth taxes and a spree of nationalisations. Supercharged by fury over Gaza, they are winning voters at a formidable pace. Many rose to prominence only recently, like Zack Polanski, who leads the Green Party in Britain, or Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York. Others are long-standing political fixtures: the septuagenarian Jean-Luc Mélenchon is on his fourth swing at the French presidency, but thumping support from the 20-somethings of “Generation Z” has put the Elysée back in his sights again.

Call it Gen-Z socialism. Not because all its adherents are young—or because it is new for young people to lean leftward—but because it is the brand of leftism, made for the TikTok era, that today’s young revolutionaries support.

Forget weighty collectivist ideals or seizing the means of production. Gen-Z socialism is a me-first doctrine. Climate change and race, preoccupations of the 2010s and early 2020s, are now much more peripheral concerns. So are social issues, barring Gaza. Angst about inflation, housing and artificial intelligence have replaced all that with something cruder. “This country is awash in wealth,” says Avi Lewis, freshly elected leader of the New Democratic Party in Canada, a country where productivity has been all but flat for a decade. “We can have nice things.” Saying that prices should be capped to keep your bills down while someone else pays for your public services is a seductive, shareable message.

Plenty of the grievances that animate Gen-Z socialists do stem from real issues. Inflation has been too high, rent in big cities is now often unaffordable and AI could upend the labour market. Dismissing these worries would be foolish. Yet Gen-Z socialism is wrong about how to fix the problems of capitalism. It must be resisted, because it is a profound threat to prosperity.

No country’s Gen-Z socialists are quite alike. The realities of power have forced some, like Mr Mamdani, to become more moderate. But they broadly agree on three core principles. First, that growth does little to help ordinary people. Theirs is a zero-sum mindset, where a better outcome comes not from creating but from taking—as they fear ai barons will soon do on a vast scale. Second, that spending can be paid for by the richest. Once the left wanted higher taxes for everyone; Gen-Z socialists demand handouts funded by billionaires. The third tenet is a remarkable hostility to private enterprise. Gen-Z socialists are uninterested in letting the market rip and redistributing the proceeds. They would have chunks of everyday life, from housing to groceries, governed by state diktat.

Politics has always had zany fringes. The far right is no less barmy—and more dangerous. But what is so worrying about the Gen-Z socialists is how deeply their ideas are bleeding into the centre-left. Desperate to compete, even mainstream Democrats in America now propose mad schemes like exempting over half of tax filers from federal income tax. In Britain the Labour Party, having won power on a centrist platform, has been spooked by the Greens and is rekindling its zeal for higher taxes and state control. Increasingly, the ideas of the Gen-Z socialists can win even when their candidates lose.

That is bad news. Rent controls would worsen housing shortages by crushing the incentive to build. The profit margins of big supermarket chains, demonised by Gen-Z socialists, are already wafer-thin after years of ruthless competition—a miracle of modern capitalism. Wealth taxes would become confiscatory and deter innovation. Do not assume that the failure of these policies, if implemented, would bring about an automatic course correction. Europe has struggled for decades to escape the low-growth funk left by its own over-regulation; the rise of statist “Peronists” in Argentina helps explain its century of relative decline.

Resisting Gen-Z socialism is therefore an urgent task. The first step is for free-market liberals to stop apologising. A series of popular criticisms of capitalism, each containing a grain of truth, has in aggregate obscured the fundamental wisdom that private enterprise is at the root of human prosperity. Yes, people aren’t always rational, as behavioural economics shows. True, inequality matters and growth is better when broad-based. Free trade and globalisation create losers as well as winners. But this is the best time in human history to be born, given record real incomes, high life expectancy and low rates of extreme poverty. A punchier defence of capitalism would work better in the social-media age than hand-wringing by uncharismatic centrists like Sir Keir Starmer.

Centrist governments must also solve the problems driving popular discontent. “Abundance” liberals are right to want to build cheap and plentiful housing and infrastructure. Politicians must stop saddling the young with the burden of funding excessive pensions. The tax system must ensure that meritocracy prevails over inheritocracy: broader-based inheritance taxes and levies on property would help. The hardest challenge will be the disruption caused by advances in AI. The Gen-Z leftists have set out their stall with calls for a moratorium on data centres and a government jobs guarantee. Liberals must be more positive and imaginative in their own prescriptions, using a mixture of taxes, distributed capital ownership and support for workers to make sure that the upsides of labour-market disruption are widely shared.

The world is ruled by little else

Populists have the wind in their sails; it can sometimes seem as though market liberalism is doomed to political failure. The Economist disagrees. A robust defence of the ideas that have brought unprecedented riches has barely been tried. Many of the problems that animate Gen-Z socialists, like high rents, are the result of markets that are insufficiently free, not excessively so. There is time yet for liberalism to once again produce results—and to win the argument. 

Donald Trump says Pete Hegseth loves war. That should disqualify him

 

How did standards for military leaders fall so low?

Jun 4th 2026

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5 min read

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Of all the jokes President Donald Trump has told at his aides’ expense, none has been more demeaning than his remark in late May about his civilian leader of the armed forces, Pete Hegseth. “He loves war,” Mr Trump said during a cabinet meeting, grinning as he patted Mr Hegseth on the arm. Mr Hegseth, fawning, chortled along. If Mr Hegseth meant what he has often said about America’s need to restore its warrior ethos, he should have winced instead. In the code of America’s greatest generals, hatred of war has been as foundational as grim awareness of the necessity to prepare for it.

“War is mankind’s most tragic and stupid folly,” General Dwight Eisenhower told the graduating class of the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1947. Fifteen years later, General Douglas MacArthur, no one’s idea of a pacifist, cautioned the cadets against becoming warmongers. “On the contrary,” he said, “the soldier above all other people prays for peace.”

Mr Trump may just have been teasing Mr Hegseth, as he had before, for his early advocacy of a war with Iran that is stuck in a costly stalemate. Yet with his knack for naming discomfiting truths, the president put his finger on an unsettling quality in his “secretary of war”, the title that he and Mr Hegseth prefer. Where past military leaders treated violence as a tragic necessity, Mr Hegseth celebrates it as righteous and even thrilling. His favourite word—it does sound pretty cool—is “lethality”. When he got his own chance to address West Point cadets, at their commencement on May 23rd, he deployed the word five times, not counting two mobilisations of “lethal”. By contrast, “peace” clouded his vision of ferocity only once, thus: “You feel comfortable inside the violence,” he instructed the cadets, “so that our fellow citizens can live peacefully. Lethality is your calling card.”

The essence of Mr Hegseth’s message would strike past leaders of the military as conventional: troops must be ready to fight and win. From his years in the National Guard, Mr Hegseth has a horror of being exposed as under-equipped. In his book “The War on Warriors”, published in 2024, he twice refers to a recurring “standing-naked-in-front-of-the-class nightmare” about being on a mission. “I’m racked with anxiety,” he writes. “Where is my weapon? I can’t find my rifle. I’m hoping nobody will notice.” (Well, Freud might have observed, sometimes a rifle is just a rifle.)

But, like hanging on to one’s rifle, the readiness to kill when called upon has traditionally been only a baseline requirement in the eyes of America’s greatest warriors. They have usually asked more of rising military leaders. When, as president, Eisenhower again addressed a West Point commencement, in 1955, he reflected on his own complacency upon graduating there 40 years earlier. The pace of change, the arrival of catastrophically powerful new weaponry, had since sharpened a “need for wisdom, and the caution that wisdom enforces”. Cadets had to prepare not just to command but to understand the economic, political and spiritual aspirations of other peoples: “Your entire lives may and should be as seriously devoted to leading toward peace as in preparing yourselves for the tasks of war.” For his part, MacArthur urged “the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength”. Since the cadets must have known that President Harry Truman fired MacArthur in 1951 over resisting a ceasefire in Korea, his exhortation to leave politics to the civilians must have landed with particular force. “Great national problems are not for your professional participation or military solution,” MacArthur said.

In his own speech, Mr Hegseth namechecked Eisenhower and MacArthur. But if technology is transforming the battlefield, if new threats darken the horizon, if the question of the military’s role in politics is again being asked, the cadets got no guidance from the secretary of war. “The world today is at a crossroads,” Mr Hegseth intoned, then swerved into a cul-de-sac, “just as it has been for the past 250 years.” Iran merited a bare passing mention. He dwelled instead upon the menace of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). “Woke and weak leaders” had tried to undermine West Point, but “you can’t throw your pronouns at the enemy.” It would not be surprising if DEI programmes committed some excesses for a time in the armed forces, as elsewhere in American life. But Mr Hegseth’s hysteria is hard to square with his rapture for the proficiency of the fighting forces. If DEI de-lethalised the troops, where is the evidence? If the battle against DEI is won, as he says, why is he still fighting the last war?

The old-boys preference

When Mr Hegseth told the cadets, “You’ve seen an obsession with race and gender,” he might have been speaking of his own pattern of stunting the careers of black or female officers. His boast that merit alone now determines promotion seemed a smokescreen for his efforts to promote loyalists, or possibly for himself.

Even before becoming chief of America’s biggest employer and the world’s mightiest military based on his performance as a Fox News commentator (“Central casting” was Mr Trump’s high praise for him at that cabinet meeting), Mr Hegseth was not averse to seeking preferential treatment in hiring. When he rejoined the National Guard in 2019, there were scant openings in infantry battalions for majors like him. “Thankfully,” he writes in “The War on Warriors”, “my good friend” had just become the commander in New York. When Mr Hegseth telephoned, this “great dude” promised to hire him “even if they had to create an additional slot”. But the perpetually aggrieved Mr Hegseth again winds up a victim because, he claims, the appointment was blocked for political reasons. One does not need DEI training to marvel at his sense of entitlement, or much common sense to long for a return to high standards for America’s most important jobs. 

How Trump hacked the presidency

By Jason Willick. 

Like Anthropic's Mythos AI model, the president has a supercharged ability to find a system’s weaknesses.

May 31, 2026 

 Think of Donald Trump as the Mythos president. Anthropic’s Mythos artificial intelligence model created a media sensation for its purported ability to find and exploit vulnerabilities in thousands of computer systems. It didn’t create vulnerabilities — they were there all along and occasionally caused problems. But Mythos apparently has a special knack for smoking them out.

Trump has a similar ability for the presidency. He has cleverly found and exploited ambiguities in the office to circumvent traditional limits. His lawsuit against his own government, and the resulting “settlement” involving an extrajudicial payout fund for allies, is a prime example.

That lawsuit took advantage of the fact that the president is “the only person who alone composes a branch of government,” as the Supreme Court put it in 2020. There are more than 300 million American citizens who can sue the federal government to right a perceived wrong. The president is the only one among them who, if he does so, is actually suing himself.

Trump was wronged by the leak of his tax returns in 2019 and 2020. It wasn’t out of bounds for him to sue the IRS over the breach. But for Trump’s “public” self to settle a suit with his “private” self? That doesn’t compute.

The administration didn’t hesitate to exploit the vulnerability. The Justice Department announced its intent to “settle” Trump’s suit with the creation of a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund.” The idea is to pay people the administration thinks have been mistreated by the government, most likely the president’s political allies such as participants in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

It bears repeating that Trump is pressing on a vulnerability that already existed, not blowing up the system outright. As the University of Chicago law professor Aziz Huq writes, past administrations have used federal settlements to generate payouts “to politically preferred groups even when there was no real prospect of a legal challenge against the government prevailing in court.”

Huq cites as one example the Clinton administration’s monetary settlement with Japanese people from Latin America whom the United States interned during World War II, even though the law only provided for payments to Japanese who were U.S. citizens or residents. “There is, to be sure, no moral equivalence between the interned Japanese and the Jan. 6 rioters,” Huq writes.

That statement is so obviously true it’s jarring. But it’s essential to understanding Trump’s Mythos quality. He can look at a system coldly, without regard for moral judgments. If a vulnerability exists, then it can be exploited to benefit morally deserving and undeserving groups alike. A Democratic-appointed federal judge on Friday launched an inquiry into the settlement, but that seems to reflect a moral objection rather than a strictly legal one.

Another part of the settlement claims to shield Trump from certain future legal actions by the U.S. government, including IRS audits based on his already-filed tax returns. Scholars debate whether a president can pardon himself, but in some ways this deal is broader, because a pardon applies only to criminal charges. The agreement, signed by acting attorney general Todd Blanche, covers civil fines as well.

Once again, the president is exploiting a bug in the law that was not entirely unknown. When the Biden Justice Department was prosecuting Trump in 2024, it tried to persuade the Supreme Court that former presidents didn’t need broad immunity from prosecution. After all, a lawyer for the Biden administration told the justices, a president is already shielded from prosecution for doing things his attorney general tells him are legal.

The idea is that the attorney general represents the U.S. government, and the U.S. government can’t go back on its word to anyone — even the president. Now the U.S. government has formally agreed to limit future Trump investigations. But when the president is the government, the whole theory short-circuits, and Trump is happy to benefit from the ensuing confusion.

Another “hack” the administration may be perfecting is the use of indictments of foreign leaders to justify military interventions. The indictment, unsealed last week, of Cuban strongman Raúl Castro over the 1996 shoot-down of two planes wasn’t really a law enforcement action; it was a military threat. After all, the administration took care to describe its January military incursion into Venezuela to arrest dictator Nicolás Maduro and take greater control of the country’s politics as a “law enforcement” operation pursuant to a criminal indictment for drug and gun trafficking. Now it’s signaling Castro could be next.

The Constitution intended for Congress to play a key role in decisions to award government payouts and launch wars. That role has been eroding for some time, but Trump has been particularly cunning about finding vulnerabilities. Want a taxpayer fund for allies? Just sue the government in your private capacity and order your Justice Department to settle. Want to send U.S. forces to a foreign capital to kill its security forces and seize its ruler? Just get a grand jury in New York to rubber-stamp an indictment of the tyrant.

Mythos’s hyper-competence at finding software weaknesses has prompted a frenzy of bug-patching in the software that makes the world run. The executive branch needs some bug-patching, too.

By Jason Willick

Jason Willick is a Washington Post columnist focusing on law, politics and foreign policy.follow on X@jawillick

Harvard vs. Trump is the result of a massive error

The university argues its scientists are a public good. It needs politics to make that case.

The Washington Post. 

May 27, 2026.

6 min

By Harvey Mansfield

Harvey Mansfield is a retired professor of government at Harvard University and the author of “Where Harvard Went Wrong,” from which this op-ed, published originally in the Harvard Crimson, is adapted.

Lack of viewpoint diversity is the main field of the battle still raging between Harvard and the Trump administration, which in March sued the university for allegedly failing to protect Jewish students from discrimination and sought to halt its federal grant payments. Until recently, “diversity” referred to race and sex, but opponents of this sort of diversity argued that the term should include opinion as well. “Viewpoint diversity” is their term. Clearly diversity is the darling of the left, and viewpoint diversity the counter from the right.

Harvard’s one-sided fondness for the left, comprehensive and prolonged, provoked its clash with the Trump administration. It also revealed a deeper division between science and the humanities — quiet now, but with a Harvard history.

Viewpoint diversity means wanting more conservatives, not a further sprinkling of garish extremes. To lack a proper mix of left and right is not legally a crime — a reasonable point for Harvard — but it is a massive error, one that has forced Harvard into the courts. To depend on the courts to defend the university’s independence from federal oversight is still dependence, and it offers only tenuous relief from a Trumpist siege. One can see the risk in depending on courts within the very policy of diversity, when that word was suggested to universities in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Supreme Court’s 1978 case on affirmative action in student admissions. Yet in 2023, the court reversed itself, stymieing the universities by declaring race-based affirmative action in admissions illegal and unconstitutional. At this point, “viewpoint diversity” redeems diversity only by calling for the inclusion of diversity’s opponents.

If Harvard wants to prevent further trouble with Republicans, it needs to change its attitude. As the Harvard administration has begun to see, it needs to drop its gratuitous partisan posture. There is much to gain and little to lose in welcoming conservatives to the university.

Who risks the most in Harvard’s battle? The scientists, who need the government’s money to carry on their work of usually expensive experimentation in laboratories. This opens up a second problem of viewpoint diversity within universities that is not so easy to fix: the divide between the scientists and the humanists.

When I arrived as a freshman at Harvard, I took a course, Natural Sciences 4, taught by the university’s then-president James B. Conant. He was a scientist who took a leading part in the direction of the Manhattan Project, which produced the atomic bomb. Absorbed in the question of whether this was a good thing for humanity, he inspired a new program at Harvard called “General Education,” to which this course belonged. To make education “general,” including both science and humanities, seemed to be the goal.

After this course, the differences between these fields became clearer to me. Science deals with numbers, the humanities with persons — the particular human beings from which science abstracts. If a course takes up proper nouns like Shakespeare and Goethe, it belongs to the humanities; if it concerns impersonal objects as common nouns, it is science.

Our names are essential to us. Every human being has a proper name, each different, to respect the human desire for self-importance. Yet a doctor using medical science does not need to know your name to treat your human body. Science is a nameless, collective enterprise of what “we know.” Humanities professors write their own books and make “contributions” to Shakespearean literature.

Science progresses by discarding old hypotheses and finding new ones. The humanities do not progress — who now equals Homer and Shakespeare? — but offer insights into permanent human truths of honor and beauty that the scientific method cannot discern or recognize.

Humanities pore over dusty books and archives. Science, with its “pioneering research,” can, by contrast, deliver manifest benefits, above all in modern medicine. But science or its technology also delivers risks to humanity from possible atomic warfare and climate change. Perhaps science has remedies for the dangers it brings, but perhaps not.

Moreover, science needs to address and convince the nonscientific public that its research is worth funding. This is difficult, because the exactness of modern science arises from its use of mathematics, which keeps it remote from the great majority of human beings who are not adept with numbers. The public has to be addressed with rhetoric — which is inexact and often promises too much. Experience shows that science itself is both hypothetical and open-minded, while the task of conveying science is often partisan and closed-minded.

Science dominates the university, but it cannot defend or explain itself without departing from scientific rigor. There is no scientific proof that science is good.

Yet turning from science to the humanities for assistance, one encounters postmodern arguments that flounder in helpless relativism. Far from giving reasons science might be good, the humanities fail to justify even themselves.

Why should Harvard be independent? Because it helps society, the university’s advocates say; it’s worth the money! But doesn’t the university need some standard from outside society to justify itself as independent? Something like Veritas (Harvard’s motto) that combines science and the humanities — a Harvard that looks for the wisdom that makes science valuable to human beings.

A political scientist myself, I like to think that this wisdom centers on politics. A wiser politics than devotion to a single party would have protected the scientists and corrected the humanists.

 

Otzio test for dialogue with speech marks

“Hi there Zack. You texted me?”

“Maya, hi. I did. You’ve been lying on me! You told me that Japanese curries are mild and inoffensive, when they’re not at all.”

“I wasn’t lying. Japanese curries ARE mild. You won’t find any milder in any other country, at least not in Asia. I can’t speak for Europe.”

“What about Coco Ichibanya?”

“Oh.”

“Exactly. You never told me about their spice level. ”

“Yes, you’re right! Completely slipped my mind. It goes from —”

“— from 1 to 20. We went there last weekend, to the franchise near our train station. I must have walked past it countless times and never once thought to go in.”

“I guess it’s got that family chain restaurant feel. I’m not a big fan of curry, but every now and then I tag along with my husband to Ichibanya. I never have anything too spicy — I suppose you’d say I don’t beat the stereotype! But he loves his curry.”

“What spice level does he order?”

“It’s usually in the high digits, never spicier than 10. And you? Where did you land?”

“I’m rather pedestrian, so I opted for 5. Joseph wanted to show off and try 15, but they wouldn’t let him!”

“What? Did they think he was a kid?”

“That wasn’t it. They said he had to have tried 10 first. They were willing to take his word for it, but he couldn’t lie; this was his first time at Coco Ichibanya. So he said, fine, I’ll try 10. But then they said he had to have tried 5 first!”

“No!”

“Yes! So in the end, we both had 5, which was kind of spicy but definitely left us wanting more. Next time, we qualify for 6 to 10.”

“I think I know where you’re going next weekend.”

Test for Otzio

The pageant has been a headlining event at Gathering of Nations, a massive and at times controversial event that bills itself as the largest powwow in North America, for more than four decades. Young women from across the U.S. and Canada competed for the prestigious title and iconic, intricately beaded crown.

Maya: Hi there Zack. You texted me?

Zack: I did. You’ve been lying on me! You told me that Japanese curries are mild and inoffensive, when they’re not at all.

Maya: I wasn’t lying. Japanese curries are mild. You won’t find any milder in any other country, at least not in Asia. I can’t speak for Europe.

Zack: What about Coco Ichibanya?

Maya: Oh.

Zack: Exactly. You never told me about their spice level.

Maya: Yes, you’re right! Completely slipped my mind. It goes from —

Zack: — from 1 to 20. We went there last weekend, to the franchise near our train station. I must have walked past it countless times and never once thought to go in.

Maya: I guess it’s got that family chain restaurant feel. I’m not a big fan of curry, but every now and then I tag along with my husband to Ichibanya. I never have anything too spicy — I suppose you’d say I don’t beat the stereotype! But he loves his curry.

Zack: What spice level does he order?

Maya: It’s usually in the high digits, never spicier than 10. And you? Where did you land?

Zack: I’m rather pedestrian, so I opted for 5. Joseph wanted to show off and try 15, but they wouldn’t let him!

Maya: What? Did they think he was a kid?

Zack That wasn’t it. They said he had to have tried 10 first. They were willing to take his word for it, but he couldn’t lie; this was his first time at Coco Ichibanya. So he said, fine, I’ll try 10. But then they said he had to have tried 5 first!

Maya: No!

Zack: Yes! So in the end, we both had 5, which was kind of spicy but definitely left us wanting more. Next time, we qualify for 6 to 10.

Maya I think I know where you’re going next weekend.

Oil markets are still in La La land

The Economist

Prices have risen sharply. Unfortunately, they still have further to go

Apr 30th 2026

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6 min read

SoMEONE WAS sniffing the butane. Energy experts have long warned that the war in Iran was causing the biggest oil-supply shock in history. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz shut in 14m barrels a day of oil. To destroy that much demand, they said, the price of Brent crude should be more than double its pre-war level, at well over $150 a barrel. But oil traders were in a stupor. As recently as April 17th prices were below $90 a barrel. Over the past week, on talk of renewed fighting, they have been waking up. On April 30th prices spiked above $125.

Unfortunately, as bad as things are, the disconnect with reality endures. Not only may spot prices have further to climb, but the oil-futures market, in which speculators bet on where the oil price is going, says prices will fall every month for the rest of the year, ending 2026 at about $88. That implies most of this shock will soon be reversed. If so, traders must believe three things are true: that America and Iran will soon strike a peace deal; that their agreement will reopen Hormuz; and that, soon after the strait is clear, petrol and jet fuel will once again be plentiful. All those are in doubt.

One thing everybody should be able to agree on is that for the strait to stay shut would be a disaster. At the start of the war, lots of oil was in stocks or tankers at sea. But the ships that passed through Hormuz before the conflict had all docked by April 20th. Oil stocks will soon be at their lowest since satellite tracking began in 2018. Volumes of petrol, diesel and jet fuel at sea are already so low that gaps in supply will be inevitable. And in America petrol demand is about to surge, as the summer tempts people to get in their cars and drive.

Everybody should also acknowledge the stakes. Asia’s petrochemical industry has already idled capacity. Since the war prices of diesel and jet fuel have doubled in Asia and more than doubled in Europe. Unlike stockmarkets, where bubbles can be sustained by animal spirits alone, the price of oil is tethered to the economy at petrol pumps, docks and airports. If supply falls short of demand, prices must rise to bring about balance. There are already reports of barrels of diesel selling for $600. Good cheer cannot supplant reality.

The case for optimism is obvious. Donald Trump’s wild posting signals not just that he is rudderless, but also that he will step in whenever oil prices rise too high. Iran’s economy is broken: it urgently needs cash, which means it, too, will want a deal. If an impasse brings ruin to both sides, it will end.

The Economist is loth to second-guess those who have the facts to hand and billions of dollars at stake. However, markets have a poor record of pricing geopolitical risk. And with oil, they struggle to assess the complexities of the physical trade.

Even if a deal is in both countries’ interest, it could be hard to nail down. Each side may be underestimating the other. Mr Trump seems to think he holds all the cards. But Iran has endured long disruptions to its oil exports before, at the onset of Mr Trump’s “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign in 2018. Iran is not a democracy and the regime can survive while its people suffer. It has an incentive to hold out in the hope of a good offer for as long as it can. Mr Trump can resume the bombing, but that is as likely to delay a deal as catalyse one.

Likewise, with midterm elections looming in America, Iran’s leaders may think that Mr Trump cannot tolerate a high oil price. Yet Mr Trump is selfish. He may try to constrain price rises at home by limiting exports of refined products. The midterms are already lost, in the House at least, he may think. He is surely less bothered about the careers of Republican politicians than his own humiliation if he strikes a nuclear deal with Iran that looks worse than Barack Obama’s in 2015. His latest signal to Iran is that he is hunkering down for a long blockade.

Even if a deal is struck, the strait may not completely re-open. For one thing, the fearsome details of a nuclear pact will take months to negotiate. Now that Iran has discovered that it has leverage, it may be tempted to apply pressure with threats to close the strait again. And threats can lead to attacks. Perhaps Mr Trump will put the eradication of the nuclear programme before the complete re-opening of the strait—after all, America is an energy exporter. Supposing that America agreed to let Iran treat Hormuz as a tollgate, what then?

And even if the strait is open in principle, getting fuel into fuel tanks in practice will remain vulnerable to many unknowable delays. You can expect a rush of oil as waiting tankers escape fully laden into the Indian Ocean. But for empty tankers to return to the Persian Gulf will be more complicated. Many will have taken up bookings on other routes. The strait will need demining, which could take months. Insurance rates could be prohibitive, so governments may need to organise a scheme to cover extreme risks. Shutting down production could have damaged oil wells. Restoring output will also take time. Partially mothballed refineries won’t immediately return to full capacity.

The world is only starting to get to grips with what may lie ahead. Central banks may soon face the second inflationary shock of the decade, after the covid-19 pandemic. In Asia many governments have already taken drastic measures, such as shortening the working week. Europe’s governments will also have to change gear. So far they have focused on supporting consumer demand. They may have to deal with demand destruction—and, given the possibility of shortages of diesel and jet fuel, plan to protect food-delivery and vital services.

It will never happen, will it?

Bullish investors could be in for a nasty shock, too. The recovery from covid, Europe’s adaptation to the loss of most Russian gas and Mr Trump’s moderation of his tariffs have all led traders to trust that things always work themselves out. Amid strong corporate profits in America it may seem as if the world economy can bear any shock—and that Mr Trump will obviously back down before a catastrophe. The pain of a scenario that oil analysts have feared for decades is approaching. It will not be pretty. Get ready. ■