As you may have noticed, the Libertarian Alliance team has shown impressive unanimity on Mr Trump’s war with Iran. This was started without the pretence of a just cause. It began, indeed, by pretending to negotiate with the Iranian Government, and then killing its members while they were assembled to consider the American offers. The war was begun without any effort to understand how it might be won, or what victory would mean. No attention was paid to the probability of a wholly focused Iranian response that might turn Tel Aviv into a copy of Gaza and send the world into a depression.

The result is what might have been expected. The war appears to be lost, and, short of using nuclear weapons, the Americans have no obvious alternative to retreat. An honourable nation would remove Mr Trump from office and prosecute him, while apologising to the Iranians and paying full reparations for its wanton destruction of life and property. But that will not happen. The Americans are proud of their barbarous conduct in war. And the natural effect of this is that, until they are utterly humbled, the Iranians would be mad to negotiate with them. The war, therefore, will continue some while yet.

Turning to immediate causes, the most likely explanation of this insanity is that Mr Trump was blackmailed by the Israelis, or threatened with the murder of himself and his family if he failed to comply. Less likely as a main cause, he is suffering—if his social media postings are his own work—from a defect of reason so radical that none of us can dare sleep soundly at night. However, if I turn to causes, it is only to remember them. We have said all that needs to be said. There is no point in repeating it. What I wish to discuss instead is what this car crash of a war means for my people.

Last year, I spent much time arguing for a series of propositions about the nature of power in this country. I will summarise them here.

Britain, since at least 1979, and probably for some time before that, has lived under the hegemony of a monied interest located in the City of London, though tied closely to a similar interest in America. This interest does not regard this country as a nation in any meaningful sense, but regards it as a base for its activities throughout the world—activities that are often disreputable and almost always parasitic.

The governing class is a wholly-owned subsidiary of this monied interest. How it governs from day to day is not dictated in detail. There are no daily instructions. Instead, its actions and their justification are left to whatever the governing class finds congenial, or can sell to the governed. But these actions must accord, in the last resort, with the interests of the monied interest.

To keep this base quiet and stable, the monied interest has required required the destruction of all independent power within Britain. Industry was the first target. A country with a broad manufacturing base is not easily controlled. It produces wealth outside the financial system. It sustains a working population that cannot be reduced to dependency without resistance. It supports local elites with interests distinct from those of the City. It therefore had to be destroyed.

This destruction was achieved, in the first instance, by a set of trade and monetary policies presented as free trade, but arranged in such a way as to produce steady deindustrialisation. The combination of high interest rates and continued heavy state borrowing in the early 1980s made it impossible for many otherwise viable enterprises to survive. After that, much production was deliberately offshored. The result was not an efficient non-financial economy, but an economy crippled by design. More recently, globalisation has been joined by a set of environmental policies designed to make energy unaffordable, and therefore manufacturing uneconomic.

A corollary of deindustrialisation was the destruction of an autonomous working class. This has been achieved by making workers economically redundant, and by atomising them through mass immigration. The more unassimilable and objectionable the immigrants, the better, since the point was never enrichment, but fragmentation.

For many years, this was the directing force behind British politics. It worked because there was no serious external challenge. Our ultimate rulers could afford to hollow out their base and still, in cooperation with New York, which was demanding a similar approach in America, dominate the world.

The problem, evident after about 2008, was that this external situation has changed. First, Russia began to recover. Then China grew into an alternative economic power to the subjugated West. And China, in particular, represents an existential threat to the system. This is not a matter of ideology. It is a matter of capacity. China is an industrial civilisation on a scale the West no longer matches. It produces goods, controls supply chains, and is increasingly independent of Western finance. A globalised financial system requires dependence. It requires producers who need access to Western markets and capital. China does not need these things. It is therefore not merely a rival, but a potential replacement.

Russia complements China. It provides resources, strategic depth, and military capability. Together, they form the core of an alternative system that does not depend on the West.

The first response of the monied interest and its agents was to attempt to break this emerging bloc by destroying Russia. The idea was simple. If Russia could be weakened or overthrown, NATO military bases could be extended across its territory. China, now threatened from every direction, could be bullied into subordination. The entire Eurasian landmass could be brought under effective control.

This failed. Russia was not undermined by the defection of Ukraine, but instead invaded. Its weapons were better than those supplied by the West. Its determination was greater. The assumption of effortless Western superiority was shown to be false.

With the Ukraine war lost, the monied interest fell into a brief internal dispute. The winning faction then changed the imperative. There could be no easy destruction of China. Therefore, Britain and America, and the West in general, needed to be rebuilt as effective long-term enforcers of the globalised financial system.

This implied a reversal of previous policies. The destruction of industry had gone too far. The atomisation of the population had gone too far. A system that had weakened its own base could no longer function effectively in a world of great power competition. There needed to be some degree of reconstruction.

This meant, in practice, a retreat from multiculturalism and environmentalism. It meant reindustrialisation, cheaper energy, tighter immigration, and a partial restoration of social cohesion. The election of a second Trump administration, and the rapid dissolution of the Labour Government headed by Keir Starmer, should be understood in this light. They were not revolutions. They were adjustments—signals that a change of direction had been decided far above, and perhaps without the full understanding of those employed to front them.

This argument pointed to an optimistic scenario—not optimistic in the sense of restoring what had been destroyed, but in the sense that the settled course of engineered decline might be interrupted. There might be reindustrialisation. There might be some lessening of the police state. There might be a partial restoration of national capacity.

Have I been proved wrong by the Iran war? At first sight, it does seem that I have. The Trump administration has, in effect, committed suicide. It came in, promising an end to wars of regime change, only to start the biggest ever. It supporting coalition is fracturing by the day. Whatever is done with Mr Trump, the administration will be swept from office. The radical leftists will be returned to government in America. Whatever pressure the Trump people were putting on the satellite countries will be removed.

But I do not think that I was wrong. I repeat that the Israelis are the most immediately to be blamed for the attack on Iran. They want their Greater Israel, and Iran stand in their way. On the other hand, this was at most an immediate cause. They had been pressing for an American attack on Iran since the early 1990s, and always without success. It is possible that they used their leverage this time with unusual effectiveness. But I think the present war is better understood as a diversion from the change of strategy—as a gamble, as a last attempt to regain hegemony without the need for dangerous compromises at home. Iran is part of a wider system linking Russia and China. It supplies energy. It is one of the key routes between Asia and Europe. To control Iran would be to strike indirectly at China—to limit its access to resources and disrupt its trade. If this had succeeded, the need for reconstruction might have been at least postponed. Now, the gamble has failed.

The gamble has failed, and has failed spectacularly. The weapons made by the Iranians have proved superior to those made by the Americans. This has been as great a shock, in its way, as the appearance of heavily armoured Persian cavalry in the wars with Rome in the third century. It has changed the balance of power against the West. The days of effortless military victory against non-Western peoples are at an end.

There has been no internal reason for this reversal. Without going into matters that would attract the attention of the police, I will say that, in terms of intellect and innovation, the European peoples are greatly superior to all others. Whether this superiority is genetic, or cultural, or some combination of both, is open to argument. That it exists, and has existed, is not. The present weakness of the West does not reflect the disappearance of these qualities. It reflects their suppression. The monied interest has diverted talent away from production and into finance and bureaucracy. It has dismantled the industrial base. It has reduced populations to dependence. It has, in short, stabbed its own societies in the back.

This is a problem for us. It is also a problem for the monied interest. It has weakened the societies on which it depends. There is no place for a parasite in a corpse. The failure of the Iran war makes this clear. It shows that the old methods—military intervention, coercion, the assumption of technological superiority—are no longer reliable. It shows that the system cannot continue as before.

The new strategy that appeared to have been settled with the election of Donald Trump in 2024 is therefore both inevitable and urgent. The Trump administration will collapse—Mr Trump may be sent to prison, or at least bankrupted by civil actions against him. But the agenda that his administration was called back into existence to implement will continue.

Indeed, it will need to be implemented faster, and more radically, than previously thought. China remains. Russia remains. The Western nations are more relatively weakened than most of us realised. There is no alternative but to rebuild—to restore enough industrial capacity, enough social cohesion, enough national strength, to function in a hostile world. This will not be done for our benefit. It will be done because the system requires it. Even so, it will involve a change in direction. Policies that were previously insisted upon will be abandoned or modified. The process of deliberate weakening will be slowed, and in some respects reversed.

For England, this means that the present order of things is unlikely to endure in its current form. There will be a transition. There will be a loosening of control. There will be contradictions within the system that cannot be easily resolved. I therefore look forward to a speedy end to the present order, and its replacement by something less calculated to the destruction of my people. I also look forward to the opportunities that such a transition may provide.

The change will not be made for us. But it may create conditions in which something can be made by us. What those things may be only time will say.