Perspectives on Iran; Hans Kohn leaves Zionism; Natasha Stagg on Jeffrey Epstein
Reading, Watching 03.22.26
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When the Clock Broke is now out in paperback and available wherever books are sold. If you live in the United Kingdom, it’s also available there. The UK edition is also apparently available all over the world, too! I’ve received reports now of book sightings in places as far as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Christchurch, New Zealand. It seems relatively easy to find in Commonwealth countries and at English-language bookstores abroad.
I also do a film podcast with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times. On our Patreon, we have a lot of bonus content, including a weekly politics discussion.
There are just a few (free) tickets left for my lecture this coming Thursday, March 26th, at King’s College London. Today’s newsletter may be a little abbreviated because I’m working on my talk.
From a few weeks ago, Natasha Stagg on the banality of Jeffrey Epstein’s type of evil.
Beyond luxury purchases, big trades, political sway, and a massive underground ring of women, Epstein sought close relationships with linguists, gurus, scientists, political advisors, movie directors—the people considered, at the time, responsible for shaping our culture. He had a yen, it seems, for finding out what was missing from their lives so that he could offer it to them, using that exposed vulnerability to place them on his big ugly chess board. There is more speculation than ever about to what end this game was being played; the Files we can see have provided more dead ends than answers.
Sifting through the neutered notes, judging the tacky art and furniture in flash photography taken of Epstein’s homes by detectives, matching the names on sycophantic appeals to emeritus professor titles, fashion model agency heads, government officials, the co-founder of Microsoft for crying out loud, that grinding circus ballad “Is That All There Is?” plays in my head.
The version sung by Peggy Lee was famously named by Donald Trump as “a great song” in a 2014 interview conducted by biographer Michael D’Antonio, on the subject of how unfulfilling fame is. The lyrics, on the other hand, describe someone experiencing what she understood to be the height of intensity—a childhood home burning to the ground, the Greatest Show on Earth, falling in love, heartbreak—and coming up empty.
I’m sure everyone has the war on their minds and is trying to understand this baffling catastrophe; I found a few discussions on podcasts helpful. In no particular order:
Stephen Wertheim, of the Quincy Institute, and Robert Malley, who was the lead negotiator on the “Iran deal” during the Obama administration, visited Time To Say Goodbye.
Historian Stephen Kotkin interviewed by Foreign Affairs on the strengths and weaknesses of authoritarian regimes.
Adam Tooze on the economics of war with Iran.
Former Bernie Sanders foreign policy advisor Matt Duss on Know Your Enemy.
Vali Nasr, a former State Department official and author of Iran’s Grand Strategy, whose family fled Iran in the wake of the revolution in 1979, was interviewed by Bloomberg.
You can also read an insightful review of Nasr’s book by Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi in the London Review of Books:
Underlying Nasr’s analysis – though this is not made explicit – is a familiar question in academic work on revolutionary states concerning how, and to what extent, they undergo ‘socialisation’, that is, accept the global interstate system and abandon their universalist ambitions in favour of a more conventional pursuit of national interest. Nasr’s treatment is more subtle than some versions of this argument. At times he advances a largely realist explanation centred on deterrence: by this account, Iran has attempted to offset its military disadvantages by dispersing risk, using missiles, proxy forces and different forms of retaliation, thereby raising the costs of direct military aggression by the United States. It’s an approach with considerable explanatory power, but elsewhere he follows a line more common in Washington, according to which the Islamic Republic is pursuing regional hegemony through its support for proxies. One limitation of this analysis is that it pays insufficient attention to local conditions and degrees of agency within the Axis of Resistance itself. It also obscures important distinctions: some actors are not proxies at all, but are pursuing their own political and ideological projects, while others have relationships with Tehran that are far more contingent and autonomous than is usually acknowledged in Western accounts. It is no secret, for example, that Hamas came into direct conflict with Hizbullah and Tehran during the Syrian civil war, or that the Houthis ignored Iranian advice when they moved to seize Sanaa, Yemen’s capital.
I’ve been meaning to write an extended response to Alana Newhouse’s atrocious Tablet essay, “Zionism for Everyone,” but haven’t found the time. I’ll just say this for now: her sketch of the origins of nationalism sounds like it’s taken, maybe at second or third hand, from Hans Kohn, the great 20th-century historian of European nationalism.
Kohn’s account in The Idea of Nationalism (1944) is that the ancient Hebrews, along with the Greeks who took a different path, were the first people to develop a national consciousness — not based on ethnic kinship, not imperial subjecthood, but a people constituted by covenant, law, and shared historical destiny under a universal God. The prophetic tradition then universalizes this: the particular nation becomes the vessel for a universal ethical message.
Newhouse is repeating a simplified variation of this argument. Jews gave the world the nation-concept; Zionism extends and preserves it, therefore, Zionism is both particular and universal simultaneously. It is a “gift” to the world. It’s Kohn’s first movement almost verbatim.
But what she misses is Kohn’s entire second movement, which is the distinction he draws between Western civic nationalism, which is rational, voluntary, universalist in aspiration, rooted in the Hebrew-Protestant tradition, the nationalism of the French Revolution, and Eastern ethnic nationalism, which is “organic,” blood-and-soil, and the product of German Romanticism. Kohn thought Zionism in practice had reproduced the “Eastern” model.
