The popular conception of politics, taught in schools and reinforced by every TV sofa politics show, is that the people elect representatives, the representatives debate the laws, and the laws are then administered by a neutral civil service. Anyone who has spent ten minutes inside a government department knows this is a children’s story. The civil service is not neutral; it has its own institutional preferences, which it pursues across the lifespan of any number of ministers. The representatives do not write the laws; the laws are written by lobbyists, sometimes copied verbatim from documents prepared by the very industries they are meant to regulate. And the elections, which are the part the public is invited to participate in, select between candidates who have already been vetted, financed, and in some cases compromised by the same network that will tell them, once elected, what they may and may not do. The financing is the obvious filter. Any candidate who wishes to rise above the level of constituency MP requires money, and the money comes from people who expect a return on it. The return is rarely as crude as a brown envelope. It takes the form of a directorship after office, a speaking fee at the right conference, a publishing contract, a foundation grant, a quiet word with the regulator. The candidate who refuses the money does not rise. The candidate who takes the money and then refuses to deliver discovers that there is always a story, somewhere in his past, that a sympathetic journalist might run.
The compromise is the less discussed filter, and it is the more important one. Every senior politician in the modern Western system has, somewhere in their history, an episode they would prefer not to discuss in public. The selection process favours those who are already entangled, and the entanglement is the qualification. Someone with nothing to hide cannot be relied upon to keep the network’s secrets, because they have no reason to fear the network. Someone with something to hide will do as they are told, because the alternative is the front page of a tabloid they have spent their career courting. This is the function of the apparatus that the late Jeffrey Epstein operated for several decades on a private island in the Caribbean. The popular framing of the Epstein affair, which holds that a single financier of mysterious wealth ran a sex trafficking operation for his own amusement, is laughable to anyone who has examined the documentary record. No one private individual, however charming, accumulates a flight log containing presidents, prime ministers, royal princes, billionaires, scientists, and senior figures from every major intelligence service over thirty years by accident. The apparatus existed before Epstein and existed after him; he was the operator of one iteration of a much older mechanism. There was a Charles Kushner before there was an Epstein, and there was a Roy Cohn before there was a Kushner, and there was a Meyer Lansky before there was a Cohn, and the moment one operator is exposed the network builds another. The function is unchanged. To rise to the top, a man must be compromised, because mutual compromise is the only currency in which a network of competing predators can transact.
When the current PM was Director of Public Prosecutions, his office made certain decisions about certain investigations that have not – clears throat – aged well. When Bliar was PM, he made certain decisions about certain wars, and the lobbying empire he built afterwards has been paid for by the regimes those wars benefited. When the current PM meets Mr Larry Fink of BlackRock at Number Ten, neither man is in any doubt about which of them is the senior partner in the conversation. Mr Fink is not a head of state. He has not been elected to anything. He commands twelve trillion dollars of other people’s money and the proxy votes of half the British stock market, and the Prime Minister will adjust his policy paper accordingly, because not to adjust it would be unprofessional.
The clearest expression of the system in operation is what it does in war. The popular understanding of recent Western foreign policy is that a series of well-meaning interventions, undertaken in good faith for reasons of human rights or collective security, have unfortunately produced disappointing results. The actual record is different. Every major Western military adventure since 1990 has produced predictable, repeatable, and richly profitable outcomes for a small number of identifiable corporations, and the disappointment expressed by the political class at the lack of broader strategic gains is itself a piece of theatre.
Consider Afghanistan. The Western press has spent four years asking how it was possible that twenty years and two trillion dollars of expenditure ended with the same Taliban government in Kabul that had been displaced in 2001. The framing assumes that the goal was to defeat the Taliban. It was not. The goal was to spend two trillion dollars, and the goal was achieved in full. The money flowed to Lockheed Martin, to Raytheon, to General Dynamics, to Halliburton, to the contractor companies that flew the food in and the contractor companies that flew the soldiers out and the contractor companies that wrote the reports that justified the next year’s appropriation. The poppy fields, which the original Taliban had succeeded in eliminating to a degree that startled Western drug agencies, were carefully restored under coalition occupation, and Afghan opium production rose to historic highs during the years the United States Marines were notionally guarding them. When the time came to leave, the new Taliban that took over was not the old Taliban; it was a negotiated successor that had agreed to permit certain commercial arrangements to continue. The poppies remain. The contracts have moved elsewhere. Two trillion dollars was added to the American national debt, which means two trillion dollars of inflation, which means two trillion dollars transferred from the holders of cash and wages to the holders of assets. The asset holders did not lose this war. The asset holders never lose this war.
Consider Iraq. The same template, with different sand. Consider Libya, where a functioning North African state with a non-Western central bank and ambitions to back a pan-African gold-denominated currency was reduced, in the space of one summer, to an open air slave market. Consider Syria, where what began as a civil uprising was steered, by means now amply documented, into a multi-year proxy conflict that produced no political settlement until the moment a former al-Qaeda affiliate, refurbished and presentable, was installed in Damascus, met with the President of the United States in the White House, and immediately presided over a series of forty-year land deals divvying up the country’s coast and oil fields between Western and Gulf-aligned banks. The man who ran the regime that was overthrown was, on every reasonable metric, a brutal autocrat. The man who replaced him is also a brutal autocrat, with a longer history of beheadings. The difference is that the new autocrat will sign the contracts, and the old one would not.
Consider the war in Ukraine, which is the cleanest contemporary example of the pattern, because the players are still on the field and the money is still flowing in real time. Russia, since the early Putin years, has been one of the small handful of significant economies that operate outside the BlackRock-IMF-BIS grid. It has its own central bank, which is not a member of the Bank for International Settlements in any meaningful sense. It nationalised the oil industry that the 1990s oligarchs had attempted to sell to foreign majors, and it arrested the oligarchs who had been front men for that sale. It has a sovereign wealth fund, low public debt, and a trade surplus. None of this makes Russia a particularly pleasant place to live or its government a sympathetic actor, and a Christian moral seriousness about the conduct of the war does not require pretending otherwise. But Russia is, by the standards of the global financial order, a sovereign nation, and that sovereignty is the offence for which it is being punished. The war in Ukraine, at the level of capital flows, is a war between the financial-industrial complex of the West and any nation that still imagines it can sit outside the complex’s architecture. The Ukrainian and Russian dead are paying the tuition fee. The share prices of Lockheed Martin and Rheinmetall have approximately doubled since the war began. The reconstruction contracts have already been allocated. BlackRock signed an agreement with the Ukrainian government in 2022, before the first counteroffensive, to manage the post-war investment fund.
The EU has spent seventy years morphing itself from a coal & steel cartel into an institution presenting itself as a peace project, a continental answer to the catastrophes of the twentieth century, and a bulwark of liberal civilisation against the rougher tendencies of the wider world. The institution does not lack for genuine believers, and a good number of its civil servants will go to their graves convinced of the project’s nobility. But the architecture, viewed from outside the cathedral, is a financial holding company with diplomatic privileges. Its currency was designed in Frankfurt and runs on rails that were laid in Washington. Its energy policy was, until 2022, a managed dependence on Russian gas, and is now a managed dependence on American liquefied natural gas at four times the price. Its military procurement is steered through NATO, which is to say through the American defence majors. Its foreign policy is conducted by an unelected commission whose members rotate, with the smoothness of long practice, through the boards of the same global asset managers that hold the debt of every member state. When LaMerkel ran Germany, she ran it, in significant part, on the assumption that cheap Russian energy and an export-oriented industrial base could keep the German middle class affluent enough to underwrite the European project’s social-democratic pretensions. That bargain was deliberately broken. The Nord Stream pipelines, the physical embodiment of the German-Russian energy compact, were destroyed at the bottom of the Baltic Sea in September 2022 by an actor that the American executive branch has spent three years not quite naming. Germany has since deindustrialised at a pace not seen in its peacetime history. BASF, the chemical giant whose Ludwigshafen complex was for decades a symbol of European productive capacity, has shifted production to Louisiana and to China. Volkswagen has closed German plants for the first time since the war. The Mittelstand, the network of family-owned medium-sized manufacturers that was the actual engine of German prosperity, is bleeding capital at a rate that no political party is prepared to discuss in public……….
To be continued
© DJM 2026
