Sunday 12-04-2026 4:42am

Vance not so radical

When JD Vance arrives in Islamabad for talks today with Iranian officials, it will fulfill a wish for Tehran's remaining leaders, some of whom have quietly sought the U.S. vice president to take a lead role in negotiations to end the war, according to several sources familiar with the matter. Iran views Vance as one of the most anti-war figures in President Donald Trump's inner circle, said one regional official and four people familiar with the talks. That reputation, long a fixture of his political brand, has led Tehran to believe Vance is the most likely among Trump's close associates to seek a deal in good faith, said the sources, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic matters. There is no indication Vance would adopt a more accommodating negotiating stance than any other representative sent by Trump, who has threatened to renew the U.S. bombing campaign if talks fail. A White House official said it was Trump's decision alone to send Vance to Pakistan for the talks, and that the president will make the final call about what deal is acceptable. But the vice president's presence ∼ and whether Tehran's instincts about him are right ∼ will nonetheless be one factor determining whether the first face-to-face talks since the war broke out on February 28 have a shot at succeeding. The stakes are high for Iran and the Trump administration, which is seeking an off-ramp to an unpopular war seven months before competitive midterm elections in November. Vance, an early frontrunner for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination, stands to benefit politically if talks succeed. But he also risks becoming further associated with a foreign quagmire that has killed thousands of civilians and pushed up gas prices and inflation if talks drag on or fail altogether, analysts say. "If this peace negotiation goes well and the result is one that's popular, it could help Vance's image," said Stephen Wertheim, a historian and senior fellow at Carnegie Endowment. "But I think there's also some danger for Vance that he becomes more the face of the war." Vance will be joined by Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff. Iranian leaders view both men with distrust after previous talks with them on two occasions failed, leading to U.S. strikes, the sources said. — Reuters


 SPORT:

Hard work Friday and cricket record

The Cowboys gave the Broncos a hard time and won 35-31 while the luckless Dragons vainly tried the Sea Eagles losing 18-28. Down South Fremantle worked hard to beat Collingwood. The score was Fremantle 45 to Collingwood 39. [click to read more]

The Australian reports Sir Donald Bradman owns the most iconic stat in cricket, with his Test average of 99.94 considered the benchmark for unbreakable records in the sport.

But now there’s a new insane mark that could prove to be similarly tough to topple.

Because cricket officially has a new insane record, with Brazil’s Laura Cardoso registering the best-ever figures in men’s or women’s T20 internationals.

Cardoso took 9-4 from three extraordinary overs against Lesotho in a thumping victory on Thursday, rolling her hapless rivals for a mere 13 in reply to Brazil’s 202.

The 21-year-old had a hat-trick inside her first over, and picked up four more in her second in the BCA Kalahari Women’s T20 International Tournament in Botswana.

A further two wickets in Cardoso’s third over had her on cusp of perfection — only for teammate Marianne Artur to spoil the party by picking up the final wicket.

The previous record ∼ an eight-wicket haul by Bhutan spinner Sonam Yeshey, who claimed figures of 8-7 in a men’s international last year ∼ was shattered inside 18 deliveries.




 STOCKMARKET:

Poor Friday — the new trend

U.S. stocks closed mixed on Friday, with investors pressing pause as they headed into the weekend and kept an eye on ongoing Middle East peace negotiations, Reuters updated on today's website. [click to continue reading]

A closely watched inflation report showed consumer price growth accelerated as expected, due to price pressures arising from the war on Iran.

The Dow and the S&P 500 ended lower, while tech stocks boosted the Nasdaq to gains on the session as investors assessed unfolding developments in the Middle East.

The fragile two-week truce has been threatened by claimed violations of the ceasefire. These included Israel’s continued bombardment of Lebanon, even as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he was seeking direct talks with Beirut.

The vital Strait of Hormuz was kept closed by Iran, which demanded a ceasefire in Lebanon and the unfreezing of assets as a condition to resuming negotiations.

The week began on an ominous note, with U.S. President Donald Trump threatening to destroy an entire civilization if Iran failed to comply with his demands. But as a truce began to take shape, stocks rallied.

All three indexes scored weekly gains.

Traders are pretty hesitant to have exposure going into a long weekend where there’s going to be an Iran-U.S. negotiation, said Jed Ellerbroek, portfolio manager at Argent Capital Management in St. Louis, Missouri. Investors are expecting a lot of news and the market being closed for 2-1/2 days is a long time for things to change.

For that reason, there is this recent trend over the last month-and-a-half, where the market does well on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, and it does poorly on Thursdays and Fridays, Ellerbroek added.

The Labor Department’s consumer price index (CPI), the first major inflation indicator released since the onset of the war, showed consumer prices logged their largest monthly jump in nearly four years due to an expected spike in energy prices, which prompted a 21.2% surge at the gasoline pump.

Core CPI, which strips out food and energy, was cooler than analysts anticipated. Still, the shock from spiking crude prices is likely to be felt more acutely in the coming months.

On Thursday, San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly told Reuters the oil shock from the Iran war would extend the timeline on bringing inflation back to the U.S. central bank’s 2% target.

A separate report from the University of Michigan showed consumer sentiment plunged this month to a record low, while near-term expectations dropped to their lowest level since May 1980.

According to preliminary data, the S&P 500 lost 6.76 points, or 0.10%, to end at 6,817.90 points, while the Nasdaq Composite gained 78.64 points, or 0.35%, to 22,901.06. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 282.62 points, or 0.59%, to 47,903.18.

Chipmakers took the lead, touching a record high.

Financial stocks underperformed ahead of major U.S. banks posting earnings next week, marking the unofficial start of first-quarter reporting season. Analysts currently predict aggregate year-on-year S&P 500 earnings growth of 13.9%, according to LSEG.

Hopefully earnings season might switch at least some of the narrative back to corporate fundamentals, which is really what the stock market’s all about, said Tim Ghriskey, senior portfolio strategist at Ingalls & Snyder in New York.

U.S.-listed shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing , the world’s largest contract chipmaker, rose after it beat first-quarter revenue forecasts.

CoreWeave surged following its announcement of a multi-year agreement with Anthropic.


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 NEWS:

😳 Could
if we
wanted to

The man whose company discovered Australia's biggest offshore oilfield this century reveals how an entire industry 'ecosystem' conspired to kill domestic oil production reports The Australian today's newspaper. [click to continue reading]

There’s no one better placed to talk about how Australia left itself so exposed on fuel than Adrian Cook.

After all, listed explorer Carnarvon Energy, which he ran for more than a decade, discovered the nation’s biggest offshore oilfields of this century.

On a contingent resource measure, at last count there were nearly 250 million barrels of light crude and more than 1.1 trillion cubic feet of gas sitting in relatively shallow water about 150km offshore from Western Australia’s Port Hedland.

The field is better known as Dorado and it’s an underwater energy goldmine. The resource estimate keeps growing the more it’s looked at. But like its name suggests, it is frustratingly out of reach. The project has sat idle for years due to a lack of support.

Cook retired from Carnarvon two years ago, deeply frustrated that, despite years of effort, he couldn't move Dorado to production. His explorer’s instinct tells him there’s plenty of upside in the field and surrounding wells, but that would require capital and commitment from a whole chain of players.

Even as war in the Middle East exposes our vulnerability and reliance on oil, Cook reckons that from a standing start it could still take decades to get any serious oil projects up and running here again.

He describes an entire ecosystem that choked off Australia’s once booming oil industry — whereby oil didn't fail due to a lack of resources but because overlapping political, financial and social pressures slowly created an environment in which development became impossible.

It was this ecosystem that fed on itself around the climate change thematic, Cook tells The Australian. The entire system needs to pivot.

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 LOCAL CHATTER:

Open today and tomorrow, Man Mountain is a selection of Wollongong University art teacher Jelle van den Berg paintings in a speciaL showing in God's Waiting Room church hall alongside the Museum in Remembrance Park in downtown Murrurundi. Open from 10:00 to 12:00 both days, the showing comprises 30 local paintings.
♦♦♦♦ Just something to lament over. This month in 1976 (50 years ago) Continental's 2 serves Cup-a-Soup cost 32 cents. Today it costs $2.33.
♦♦♦♦
The football is on again on the oval today with the womens Mavericks at 2:00 playing the Magpies. The mens game scheduled for 3:10 has been cancelled following a Muswellbrook forfeiture.
♦♦♦♦
The White Hart has turned the lights back on serving beers and even lunch and dinner Wednesday to Friday. Got to go somehwere else for food over the weekend!

 NEWS:

🌀 The real
damage of
that arrest

Afghan war veterans are rallying to protest against Ben Roberts-Smith’s arrest, warning the prolonged war crimes investigation risks alienating an entire generation according to the Daily Telegraph newspaper today. [click to read more]

Many veterans have warned the devastating impacts from the drawn-out war crimes investigation following the 2016 Brereton Report could ostracise this generation in the same way those returning from Vietnam were shunned more than 50 years ago.

That dramatically cut future defence recruitment.

The arrest of Roberts-Smith this week was felt by every Afghan veteran and their loved ones, Former commando and SMEAC veterans charity spokesman Peter Richards said.

It is not just Ben Roberts-Smith who has been dragged through the dirt here, it is every soldier who fought in a war the Australian public does not understand, he said.

Mr Richards and other veterans will be meeting with One Nation leader Pauline Hanson, who has publicly stood by Roberts-Smith this week, at a rally in Queensland today.

Roberts-Smith was arrested at Sydney Airport in front of his two teenage daughters on Tuesday and charged with five war crime and murder offences.

Australian Federal Police on Friday vehemently denied tipping off media, who were present as Roberts-Smith was led off the plane.

Former SAS Association national chairman Martin Hamilton-Smith said the process of investigating alleged war crimes had been mishandled by successive governments since the Brereton Report found evidence of them in 2016, to the detriment of veterans and their families.

This is Vietnam repeating itself. An unpopular war. The politicians and the senior generals who helped design it have walked away. And we're now blaming corporals and sergeants for things that may have gone wrong in the war that politicians and generals designed, he said.

We lost the war. We all saw the exit from Kabul, just as we lost Vietnam and we saw the exit from Saigon.

Former navy clearance diver John Armfield said the handling of the investigation has real consequences for morale and recruitment".

Young Australians and their families are watching how this plays out, he said.

They see soldiers being investigated years later, which is appropriate if evidence supports it. But they also see unresolved questions about leadership, decision-making, and accountability at higher levels.

Coalition defence spokesman Phillip Thompson posted pictures of medals sent to his electorate office, asking him to return them to Canberra because veterans had lost any trust in government and felt my service and my father’s service was for nothing

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🏛 Harry sued
by his
own charity

The charity Prince Harry co-founded in honour of his mother Princess Diana is suing him in the High Court of London reports news.com.au website today. [click to read more]

Sentebale filed a complaint against Harry last month with the High Court of London, according to Reuters.

The complaint also named Mark Dyer, who was a trustee of the charity which was founded in 2006 in memory of the late princess to support young people living with HIV and AIDS.

Harry and co-founder Prince Seeiso of Lesotho stepped down from their roles at the African youth charity Sentebale in March 2025, following a dispute between the charity’s board of trustees and its chairwoman, Dr. Sophie Chandauka, over a scathing report that accused him of damaging its reputation.

With heavy hearts, we have resigned from our roles as patrons of the organisation until further notice, in support of and solidarity with the board of trustees who have had to do the same, Harry and Seeiso wrote in their joint statement

It is devastating that the relationship between the charity’s trustees and the chair of the board broke down beyond repair, creating an untenable situation.

The trustees were reportedly unhappy with Dr Chandauka’s appointment and wanted her to step down, prompting her to file a lawsuit against the organisation in England’s High Court.

At the time of the public fallout, Dr Chandauka claimed misogynoir was to blame for the princes' resignations.

Beneath all the victim narrative and fiction that has been syndicated to press is the story of a woman who dared to blow the whistle about issues of poor governance, weak executive management, abuse of power, bullying, harassment, misogyny, misogynoir and the cover-up that ensued. I could be anyone, the Zimbabwe-born entrepreneur told the London Times, per Page Six.

Misogynoir, by definition, is hatred of, aversion to, or prejudice against Black women.

A spokesperson for the Duke of Sussex and Mr Mark Dyer responded to the legal action, saying: As Sentebale’s co-founder and a founding trustee, they categorically reject these offensive and damaging claims.

It is extraordinary that charitable funds are now being used to pursue legal action against the very people who built and supported the organisation for nearly two decades, rather than being directed to the communities the charity was created to serve, they said in a statement to news.com.au.

The spokesperson added that Harry was committed to finding new ways to assist the children supported by Sentebale in Lesotho and Botswana.

Prince Harry, alongside Prince Seeiso and the former board of trustees, nurtured Sentebale from a mere concept into a thriving force for good, they said.

With the original mission in mind, the Duke will continue to support the children of Lesotho and Botswana. [click the intro to return to front page]





📳 What social
media bans?

Fifteen-year-old Noah hasn't been kicked off any social media platforms - he's still fighting Australia's under-16 ban in court.Millions of accounts have been deactivated since the ban came into effect in December but Noah Jones found it was easily circumvented according to government data, reports the The Guardian website. [click to read more].

Since Australia’s under-16s social media ban began four months ago, Noah Jones’s online experience has been pretty much the same.

The 15-year-old Sydneysider says he hasn't been kicked off any social media platform since the policy came into effect late last year.

[I] had a minor inconvenience on Instagram but then got past it, he says. One of my mates got banned on Snapchat but then got around it.

That’s pretty much my whole experience of the ban.

But Jones is one of two teens challenging the social media ban in Australia’s highest court — part of the Digital Freedom Project high court challenge that is due to be heard later this year.

The case is being fought on the grounds that Australians have a constitutional implied right to freedom of political communication, and the ban will prevent teens under 16 from engaging in political communication on social media platforms.

Jones’s online experience since December is similar to that of most teens under 16 in Australia.

The eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, revealed last month that despite over 5m accounts being deactivated, more than two-thirds of teens were still on the 10 platforms subject to the ban — Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, X, Twitch, Kick, Threads and Reddit.

Children were easily bypassing facial age estimation technology if aged within two years of 16 and half of the platforms initially included in the ban were being assessed for non-compliance.

eSafety also found 66% of parents whose children remained on social media said that the platforms had not asked their child to go through age verification, while others reported that if the age on an account was said to be 14 or 15, the platforms asked users to go through facial recognition and adjust their age rather than deactivating the account.

The communications minister, Anika Wells, has said Inman Grant should throw the book at non-compliant tech platforms, with fines of up to $49.5m per breach able to be sought through the federal court.

The fines are being threatened but the High Court will probably determine the law’s validity before any potential fine cases are heard.

Wells has also committed to legislating a digital duty of care that would require platforms to take reasonable steps to prevent harm taking place on their services, with legislation due to hit parliament this year. [click the intro to return to front page]




 COMMENT:

Murrurundi Times news site with items covering national news and Upper Hunter region including the township of Murrurundi
Bob Hawke famously challenged the federal Liberal Party in the 1980s: If you can't govern yourselves you can't govern the country. The Victorian Liberal Party is in much the same position. writes Peta Credlin, in The Australian today. [click to read more]

Its internal inadequacies mean the worst state Labor government in the country may be re-elected for a fourth term, not because it commands any real voter support but because the alternative has even less.

That the Liberal Party failed to win the last state election, in 2022, against a government that had turned Melbourne into the most locked-down city in the world showed almost epic ineptitude.

But intimidated by premier Daniel Andrews and plagued by factional wars, the Liberals thought their best plan was to out-Labor Labor with a leader, in Matthew Guy, whom voters had already comprehensively rejected in 2019.

Predictably, offered a choice between an oppressive and incompetent Labor government and a Liberal opposition aping it, voters stuck with the devil they knew.

If anything, since then it has got even worse. The Liberals have had a further three leaders in the past 12 months.

Plus almost no policy other than the no-brainers to repeal the emergency services levy, which taxes farmers for the volunteer firefighting they mostly do themselves, and to repeal the Victorian version of the voice — the federal version of which Victorian voters rejected 54-46 at the 2023 referendum (but which, earlier, state Liberals had supported).

Despite this, the Labor government’s travails - the latest being its complicity in CFMEU corruption claims that have added perhaps $15bn to the cost of its much-hyped Big Build - mean the Libs are now just marginally ahead in the polls.

Not by enough to be confident of the 7%-plus two-party-preferred swing needed to win, yet by enough to know that if only they could avoid making themselves the issue they might finally fall over the line.

But that was then, this is now, and two things have hit them hard: the inexorable rise of One Nation and the Moira Deeming preselection debacle which, given the fight they have to win 16 seats, is an extraordinary act of self-harm.

Deeming is the upper house Liberal MP who helped to organise a women’s rights rally in 2023 that was gatecrashed by neo-Nazis; who was accused by her then leader, John Pesutto, of herself being a neo-Nazi sympathiser; who was subsequently expelled from the Liberal partyroom, only successfully to sue Pesutto for defamation; and who was then readmitted to the partyroom and promoted — only to be beaten last weekend for preselection by a serial candidate accused of ethnic branch-stacking.

Who was then dumped as the endorsed candidate himself for giving a convicted pedophile a glowing pre-sentence personal reference despite knowing what it was for and subsequently denying that he'd done so.

You cannot make this stuff up, can you?

There are recent precedents where head office has simply endorsed candidates, but instead of doing this with Deeming ∼beaten by someone who should never have been allowed to run ∼ the Victorian Liberal Party has now called for a fresh preselection with nominations to close at noon on Thursday.

Already, moderates are hitting the phones to marshal the ousted Dinesh Gourisetty’s bloc of votes against Deeming, so it is hard to see that she will face a fair fight. Gourisetty, it should be noted, donated to Pesutto’s legal defence, as disclosed in the latest parliamentary returns (as did Heath Williams and former MP Louise Staley, who both publicly abused Deeming online this week).

Right now, Deeming is considering her position, unsure whether to give the Libs one last chance to treat her fairly or to walk, perhaps to join One Nation, a party that would welcome her with open arms, as a conservative woman who has become a hero to everyone who thinks trans rights should not trump women’s rights.

But apart from the preselection, there’s another related but even more troubling issue arising from the whole Deeming saga; namely the Liberal Party’s decision to bankroll the legal costs awarded against Pesutto last year by the Federal Court, costs that he'd previously said would be covered by donors who are, as yet, anonymous but who are refusing to pony up for their mate.

It’s said by those senior Liberals challenging the party’s decision to lend Pesutto the $1.5m he owes Deeming (and thereby to stave off bankruptcy and expulsion from the parliament) that the state party president, Phil Davis, refused to provide state executive with details of the Pesutto loan agreement, any advice about its legality or the names of Pesutto’s supposed guarantors before ramming it through on factional numbers.

It’s thought that the discovery process in this case could expose more factional skulduggery, hence there’s an attempt to delay further hearings until after November’s state election.

Ponder this. The Liberal woman who won a court case over appalling treatment by a Liberal man is turfed out, whereas the Liberal man who lost is given millions out of party coffers to save his skin and gets preselected without a contest. And these clowns wonder why they have a problem with women?

It is no wonder there’s now a formal motion from state executive member Colleen Harkin calling on Davis and his state party vice-presidents to resign, as well as a Change.Org petition from rank-and-file Liberals demanding he go.

Add in the now serious demands for federal intervention and you can readily see that the Liberals have no chance of a November win unless this is resolved.

Under the Liberal Party’s federal constitution, the federal executive can intervene in the affairs of a state division if it is unable or unwilling to perform its functions or if its conduct is seriously detrimental to the interests of the party".

Although this threshold has surely been met, given factional divisions on the federal executive, talk that 80-year-old federal president John Olsen wants to retire and the relatively fragile positions of both the state and federal parliamentary leadership, the appetite for intervention is unclear.

What is clear, though, is that One Nation poll numbers in Victoria are surging and, as SA shows, that would mean a win for Labor.

If the Liberals don't remove the Allan government, on top of all their other recent failures, the party’s doom spiral would be cemented.

Without decisive action, what has been the most successful political party in Australian history, like its predecessors the Nationalist Party and the United Australia Party, could itself be passing into history.


Murrurundi Times news site with items covering national news and Upper Hunter region including the township of Murrurundi
It may seem eccentric ∼ if not positively blasphemous ∼ to suggest that Donald Trump is a child of the Enlightenment. Voltaire, Hume and Kant would scarcely have recognised him as their progeny; they might have winced, incredulous at history’s cruel irony, Henry Ergas writes in the The Australian today. [click to read more]

Yet the family resemblance is real. For it was the long 18th century’s great philosophers who advanced one of modernity’s most consequential wagers: that interests would subdue passions. If human beings could be induced to pursue their interests rather than defend dogmas and chase glory, conflict itself might be domesticated — shifted from the battlefield to the bargaining table.

This was, in other words, the intellectual origin of the art of the deal: the belief that, in the end, every actor has a price, and that rational self-interest will draw antagonists toward compromise. Strangely, the 19th and 20th centuries ∼ whose wars grew ever more destructive ∼ did not abandon that conviction but entrenched it, even as the evidence mounted that it obscured more than it revealed.

The intellectual genealogy, too complex to detail here, runs from the early modern rehabilitation of self-interest to Mar-a-Lago on the Gaza shore — but the crucial moment lies in Duc Henri de Rohan’s 1638 distinction between passion, grounded in impulse, and interest, grounded in calculation. His maxim, rendered in English as interest will not lie, eventually became, in JA Gunn’s phrase, the most fashionable political concept in the 17th century.

Passion, irrationality and barbarism

Interests, Rohan maintained, were stable, reasonable and predictable. Passions, by contrast, connoted volatility, irrationality and barbarism. The genius of the moderns was to transform conflicts over values into conflicts over interests — interests that could be divided, negotiated and settled.

What gave this idea its force was the rise of commerce, the domain of calculation par excellence. A powerful chain of reasoning followed: a commercial society would cultivate habits of calculative rationality; those habits would permeate social norms and expectations, and; over time, coolly defined interests would supplant tempestuous passions. The result would not be the disappearance of conflict but its intelligent management: regularised, negotiated and, above all, contained.

Montesquieu coined that proposition’s most celebrated formulation in 1748. The natural effect of commerce, he wrote in The Spirit of the Laws, is to bring about peace. Two nations which trade together render themselves reciprocally dependent; for if one has an interest in buying, the other has an interest in selling. In this way, the spirit of commerce unites nations.

More ambitiously still, commerce offers a cure for the most destructive prejudices; for, wherever there is commerce, there we meet with agreeable manners — the mild (doux) habits that sustain contracts between traders and agreements between states.

Science plays a part

In Montesquieu’s thought, this tendency had a providential cast. The 19th and 20th centuries translated it into a secular idiom. It was no longer commerce alone that would inculcate rationality but the expanding authority of science and, even more, of complex technology — domains whose effective operation seemed to require disciplined, instrumentally rational thought. Although rarely stated so baldly, much of the modernisation literature of the 1950s and 1960s implied a simple syllogism: anyone capable of building missiles must reason as the boffins in Langley do — and, sooner or later, will act with similar calculative restraint in both conflict and co-operation.

The consequence was that fanaticism ∼ what David Hume called enthusiasm ∼ would gradually recede. Hume argued that disputes from interest are the most reasonable and the most excusable, precisely because they admit of bargained resolution; those of religion, by contrast, are more furious and enraged than the most cruel factions that ever arose from interest.

But the extinction of enthusiasm did not require religion’s disappearance. It was, said Alexis de Tocqueville, enough that religion evolve toward forms that reinforced the mundane virtues of co-operation, moderation, tolerance and self-mastery. And that, the modernisation theorists believed, was precisely the direction the major faiths would take in technologically savvy societies.

Inflaming not taming

Clifford Geertz cast doubt on that optimism. In Islam Observed (1968), synthesising years of fieldwork in Morocco and Indonesia, he argued that modernisation ∼ and the spread of education ∼ could inflame rather than tame religious extremism.

Minds trained to prize analytical coherence had, in his experience, recoiled from the tolerant syncretism of Moroccan Sufism and from Indonesia’s gentle blend of Islam, Hinduism and animism, turning instead toward more rigorous, purified and uncompromising forms of faith.

It was therefore no accident that, as Albert Hourani observed in Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (1983), Jamal al-Din al-Afghani anticipated later currents of Islamic fundamentalism, despite being one of the 19th century’s most influential Muslim advocates of science and technology. If someone asks: why are Muslims in retreat?, wrote al-Afghani, I will answer: when they were truly Muslims, the world bore witness to their excellence. Nor was it accidental that several of the September 11 terrorists were highly trained engineers.

Hasten the apocalypse

Technical mastery did not inevitably advance the spirit of bargaining and moderation. On the contrary, the ability to build missiles could give zealots the means to hasten the apocalypse, dismember the infidels and honour a compact not with other men but with God — a compact that admits neither compromise nor restraint. Utterly irrational ends could be pursued by eminently rational means.

That conjunction ∼ technical sophistication in the service of fanaticism ∼ is the Iranian regime in miniature. That does not mean the regime will never enter into agreements. But, following the precedent set by the Prophet Muhammad at the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, any such agreement is a hudna or temporary armistice at best, a fleeting ceasefire at worst, to be systematically violated whenever possible, and openly repudiated as soon as practicable.

Far from vindicating the Enlightenment’s hopes, those agreements show how readily fanatics can advance their cause by exploiting the West’s illusions, knowing that it lacks the stomach for a prolonged fight. And to make things worse, the agreements' record is a miserably poor one. As John Stuart Mill ∼ whom no one could plausibly accuse of warmongering ∼ warned, the lesson of the centuries is that barbarians cannot be depended on for observing any rules, nor to reciprocate concessions.

Compromises and capitulations

Time and again, the tiny seed the Due de Rohan planted has therefore borne bitter fruit, as striking deals with fanatics becomes, all too often, an excuse for compromises that turn out to be capitulations.

Yet the art of the deal and the confidence that every conflict is merely a high-stakes version of a real estate negotiation, has a magnetic hold on the Western mind — and on few minds is its grip firmer than on that of America’s 47th president. That his negotiators with Iran have been commercial deal-makers, not hardened experts in handling rogue regimes, should therefore come as no surprise.

Yes, as they look down from on high, Voltaire, Hume and Kant may shake their heads in disbelief. But this much is undeniable: Donald J. Trump is the Enlightenment’s bastard son.



 OVERSEAS:

Chris Evans writes in The Telegraph (UK) Jet fuel shortages have put half-term holidays at risk of cancellation. European airports have warned that their stocks will run dry within weeks unless the Strait of Hormuz reopens. Christopher Jasper, our Transport Industry Editor, reports. Elsewhere, JD Vance has warned Iran not to "play" with the US ahead of peace talks in Pakistan, in which his team hopes to "extend an open hand". Latest headlines: ♦ No 10 prepares for mass protests over Iran war cost of living crisis. ♦ Mandelson to be fined for urinating against a wall. ♦ Worker who couldn't take time off for 25 years awarded £400k by tribunal. ♦ Sailors who track Russian warships to go on strike. ♦ Bafta apologises over broadcasting of N-word.






The Murrurundi Times is owned, compiled and written by Des Dugan. Email