This week on Critical Conditions, Claire and I found ourselves once again circling the same agonizing center of gravity — Gaza — where an ambitious ceasefire, described by ambitions American hyperbolizers as more like the end of a million-year war, shows signs of unraveling.
Yet even as jubilant crowds in Tel Aviv celebrated the return of the 20 living hostages, Hamas, true to form, delivered partial compliance — nine bodies out of 28, claiming that the rest were “lost” in the rubble. Perhaps. But as Claire noted, it is equally plausible that the group is playing its usual leverage games. They know the bodies are currency in a twisted way.
To support the defense of democracy, decency and reason, consider unlocking full access to Ask Questions Later by upgrading to a Paid Subscription (unless you have one!)
Of course, Israel cannot resume the war without the permission of Trump, who has swung between threats to depopulate Gaza and grand promises to rebuild it as a “Riviera” — leaves everyone guessing which is to be taken seriously. Still, he has said that if Hamas doesn’t disarm, “we’ll do it for them”; one can’t entirely dismiss it, though it’s also not clear if he’ll remember having said it next week.
For Netanyahu, the reckoning could be brutal. Because if “all” that was achieved — after two years of war — was the release of hostages who could have been freed in December 2023, then thousands of deaths, including hundreds of Israeli soldiers and many of the hostages, will have been for nothing. He will, of course, claim that the extended war led to strategic gains — Hezbollah weakened in Lebanon, Assad defenestrated in Syria, Iran’s nuclear and missile programs set back. But when the full devastation of Gaza is documented by journalists and human rights investigators, the optics may overwhelm the narrative.
And at home, the delayed inquiry into the October 7 disaster — Netanyahu’s own colossal strategic failure — still looms. Indeed, we spoke about Israel’s refusal to hold the kind of independent commission of inquiry that has followed every previous calamity in its history. The government insists any investigation must be appointed by itself and not be headed by a judge, as is traditional — a transparent ploy. This, I argued, is part of Netanyahu’s “Putinization” of project: deliberate erosion of institutional independence, casting of judges as political enemies, corrosion of democratic culture itself. It’s a crime bordering on treason — and part of a global pattern that unites Netanyahu, Orban, Erdogan, and, in his own chaotic way, Trump.
Ah, yes — also Trump, whose administration this weekend caused the walkout of almost the entire Pentagon press corps which it had tried to domesticate (see our story here). Claire recalled her early career as an American abroad — proud, certain, convinced of her country’s democratic virtue. That’s gone, she said. The “shining city on a hill” feels like a relic of myth.
I added that few empires in history have truly recovered from a massive decline — save perhaps China, which collapsed and reconstituted by force of will (and a huge population). America’s decline, if that’s what we’re witnessing, feels different — even though, it must be said, the economy hums along.
We discussed the idea that Western societies are trapped in a false binary. The true ideological landscape still contains a vast, moderate center — but political systems and social media conspire to force citizens into artificial tribes. Macron tried to engineer a centrist coalition in France; Britain, with its first-past-the-post chaos, is disintegrating into splintered factions. The result of that could be utterly random — I called it “a thousand monkeys throwing mud at the wall.”
Critical Conditions is a co-production of Ask Questions later and Claire’s The Cosmopolitan Globalist. The CG is well worth checking out.
The episode closed, inevitably, where it began — with Gaza, but refracted through the West’s uneasy mirror. Reports of antisemitic chants in London, of universities expelling students for open incitement, reveal something darker: a host culture losing confidence in its own moral core. Antisemitism, Claire argued, is always a symptom — never the disease itself. It signals a deeper sickness in a society that no longer believes in its own liberal values. Unless that confidence returns, she warned, the contagion will spread.
In the end, perhaps that’s what “critical conditions” really means — a state where systems survive on paper, but their vital signs are faltering.
