The Return of the Thin White Ghoul

Tony Blair and our Age of Monsters

Today marks ninety-two days since the US and Israel carried out the military strikes against Iran that began Operation Epic Fury on 28 February. Since then, millions of people have woken up each day knowing that their security, their livelihoods and their survival are dependent on what the criminal-lunatic in the White House and his Israeli sidekick decide to do. The ceasefire on 8 April has provided no respite from the madness, as the Trump administration has lurched between wild threats and unsubstantiated claims that Iran, not the US, is desperate for a ‘deal.’

Last week, Trump announced that the a peace agreement with Iran was dependent on Pakistan, Turkey and various Gulf nations signing up to the Abraham Accords normalising relations with Israel. In the same week, Trump also casually suggested that he might ‘blow up’ Oman - a US ally, because Oman and Iran were in talks about managing traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.

Meanwhile, Israel has continued to bomb Lebanese cities, and depopulate much of South Lebanon. In January, Netanyahu claimed that Israel ‘has no intention of permanently occupying Gaza or displacing its civilian population’. Yet last week, he announced that the IDF was going to occupy 70 percent of Gaza - a breach of the ‘ceasefire’. In the same week, Israel’s defence minister Israel Katz announced that the government would facilitate the ‘voluntary migration’ of Palestinians from Gaza ‘at the right time and in the right manner.’

All this is happening in front of the eyes of the world, and throughout this dismal process, the world has remained largely silent and quiescent, as the psychopath-in-chief and his minions continue to break all the rules and conventions that supposedly uphold the ‘international order’ with little or no pushback from the defenders of that order.

I don’t use the P-word lightly. Trump, Hegseth and their cronies exude narcissism, aggression, manipulativeness, duplicity, lack of empathy and humanity, and emotional coldness - the essential characteristics of the psychopathic personality. Whether gloating about killing Venezuelan fishermen or threatening to annihilate Iranian ‘civilization’, these are sick little men, devoid of compassion and intoxicated by violence and cruelty, and pumped up to the gills the destructive power at their disposal.

But as monstrous and obscene as these men are, they are by no means unique in their willingness to wage war with countries they know nothing about, and in their indifference to the human consequences of these wars. They did not spring into the world out of nowhere. Often they have acted with the complicity and support of politicians who are smarter than they are - not difficult - and not necessarily wiser, who are as committed to death and destruction as instruments of American and Israeli state policy as they are.

The Psychopathic Gaze

Consider the latest ‘intervention’ into British politics from Tony Blair. The former prime minister has been widely criticized by his Labour colleagues and others for his indifference to inequality; for the relationship between the wealthy contributors to the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) and the positions he has taken on AI and net zero. But some of the most striking passages from his rambling screed are concerned with Trump, Trumpism and America’s latest war.

For Blair, leaders like Trump, Giorgia Meloni and Javier Milei are ‘unbound, not constrained by conventional thinking.’ In Blair’s analysis, the conventional leader ‘sets a destination down the road. They drive towards it. They come to a brick wall barring the way. They stop at the wall. Sit down and consider all the options.’

Trump, on the other hand, ‘drives down the road, sees the brick wall and accelerates.’ Such impetuosity might produce ‘a fair amount of debris and damage’ along the way, and leave the passengers feeling ‘mildly nauseous’, but ‘with luck, he’s through the wall.’ In other words, Trump is pursuing the same aims as ‘conventional’ leaders through different means, that combine ‘potential risk and…potential effectiveness.’ Therefore, with regard to security, there is no need for Europe to be anxious, because:

Though American security strategy is couched in very ‘America First’ terms, it identifies the principal threats – in the Arctic from Russia; longer term, globally, from China; and in the Middle East from Iran – no differently from how Europe sees the world. President Trump has demanded increases in NATO spending not dissolution of the alliance.

And Iran is also as much ‘our’ enemy as it is Trump’s. On 6 March, Blair made this clear, when he told a private lunch hosted by Jewish News that Starmer ‘should have backed America from the very beginning’ and allowed the US to use British airbases to attack Iran. In his essay, he repeated the condemnation:

To be clear, we were never asked to ‘join’ America’s military action in Iran and, never having been part of the planning for such a mission, could not have been part of it. The initial request was simply for the use of our military bases for the refuelling of American planes. I understand the reasons for refusal but it’s not the best way to treat our ally.

Notice the complete absence of any criticism whatsoever of the legality of the war, its poorly-defined strategic aims or its calamitous impact. Did it bother Blair that the US and Israel killed the leader of the country the US was negotiating with? That both Trump and Netanyahu briefly sought to put the former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in power - the same Ahmadinejad who, we were once told ad nauseam, wanted to ‘wipe Israel off the map’ with a nuclear bomb? Is Blair even remotely aware of the jaw dropping cynicism that this aborted attempt involved?

It’s’ not for the visionary statesman or his admirers to concern themselves with such details. The only thing that matters to Blair is that Britain does its duty, and its duty is always whatever America asks it to do, no matter how many people die or how many countries go up in smoke.

I know how hard it is to be an ally of the USA. We were its staunchest supporter post 9/11. We went through Afghanistan and Iraq together. But it mattered deeply to America and so it mattered to us also. America remains the indispensable core of Britain’s security alliance. But staying with it means even when it is difficult or unpopular.

As always, Blair presents his catastrophically reckless decisions as acts of courage and leadership, with the implication that Britain and the US went through some kind of shared blood sacrifice. But Blair sacrificed nothing in these wars. On the contrary, his relentless support for American and Israeli geopolitical interests has been instrumental to the staggering wealth he has acquired since leaving office.

But Blair is also entirely ideologically aligned with the plutocrats and billionaires he spends time with - no matter how immoral, corrupt and downright evil they may be. It’s not for nothing that Blair was an eager signatory to Trump’s sleazy Gaza Board of Peace, and hailed Trump’s plan as ‘the best, indeed the only hope for Gaza, the region and the wider world.’ Blair also praised Trump for recognizing Gaza’s potential based on ‘Twenty-five miles of Mediterranean coastline, proximity to great regional and global markets and a young, dynamic population with a median age of 19.’

Blair has spent so many years in the company of men like Trump, Kushner and Witkoff that he also regards mass slaughter and the destruction of Palestinian society as another real estate opportunity. Unlike Trump, Blair does not swear or rant. No late night rage tweets for him. Just the same icy subservience to the wealthy and powerful; the same placid acceptance of war and militarism as the indispensable levers of American/Israeli/ Western policy.

For Blair, the Iran war is merely another ‘wall’ for Trump to drive through, where more ‘conventional’ leaders might have baulked. As far back as January 2011, during his second appearance at the Chilcot Inquiry, Blair described Iran as a ‘looming challenge’ to the international community that needed to be confronted by military force if necessary.

Blair accused Iran of sponsoring terrorism and condemned its ‘negative and destabilising’ impact on the Middle East. He urged the ‘international community’ to discard its ‘wretched posture of apology’ towards Tehran and take action against ‘extremists’ who ‘disagree with our way of life and are not about to stop.’

At that time, the international community was not ‘apologizing’ but engaged in the negotiations that led to the 2013 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – the agreement which Trump tore up in 2018. But even in an inquiry in which he was being held to account – up to a point – for his decision to join in the war on Iraq, Blair was advocating another war based on equally flimsy premises.

In a speech in 2020 at the Council on Foreign Relations on the ‘road ahead with Iran’, Blair urged the world to follow the US and declare the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) a terrorist organization. Blair rejected what he called a ‘superficial and Western-oriented analysis’ which regarded the IRGC’s actions as ‘governed by a primary attachment to national interest’ and a ‘conventional desire for regional hegemony’ on the grounds that:

We miss in this superficial and Western-oriented analysis the core motivator which is, was and forever will be, the promulgation of an ideology rooted in an extreme version of Shia Islam which is the Shia equivalent of the more radical elements of the Muslim Brotherhood and of Salafi jihadism.

This ideology, he claimed, was responsible for ‘Iran’s determination to wreck the idea of an independent Iraq and the mobilisation against coalition forces and in favour of sectarian government.’ Did the invasion itself unleash the mobilisation against coalition forces? Don’t expect Blair to admit any such thing. When his fantasies fail, it’s always someone else’s fault, in this case Iran’s - the result of the IRGC’s al-Qaeda-like ideology.

As an analysis of Iranian state behaviour, Blair’s analysis was as ‘superficial and Western-orientated’ as the analysis he set out to critique. Not only did it elide the very real policy differences within the Iranian regime itself, but it also ignored the repeated evidence that the regime does take decisions in order to defend or advance what it sees as Iran’s national interests, from the JCPOA to the current war.

This is not to argue that the way in which it has done this has always been legitimate, but the idea of an irrational theocratic regime in hoc to some Shia equivalent of Salafi jihadism is something that sounds learned, but is really rather stupid - and also very convenient for his intended audience. This is what Blair has always been good at: pronouncing banalities in a public school accent that sound well-researched, plausible and thought-through to audiences that want to believe what he tells them.

Blair may also have used these skills to influence Trump’s decision to attack Iran. According to Byline Times, a lobby group called United Against Nuclear Iran (UNAI) - chaired by Jeb Bush -and advised by Pete Hegseth - provided information for the incoming Trump administration in January 2025, which used flawed polling data supplied by the Tony Blair Institute, to argue that the Iranian population was overwhelmingly in favour of ‘regime change’.

Trump seemed to believe this, at least for a day or two, at the beginning of the current war, and Blair clearly believed it too, just as he once believed - or claimed to believe - that Saddam Hussein was harbouring weapons of mass destruction. This is why, twenty-three years after that war, he could be found supporting another ‘regime change’ war, with the same fervour and conviction, and the same complete indifference to its regional and global consequences.

And now it has become quite clear that Iranians, as much as they might despise their rulers, are not ready to overthrown their government while their country is being bombed. Yet Blair does not bat an eye. This is a man who has reflected on nothing, researched nothing and learned nothing: a jarring combination of Richelieu and Elmo, a ridiculous pseudo-expert on the Middle East who haunts the region like a bird of ill omen, hoovering up incomprehensible sums of money, whilst schmoozing with the ‘unconventional’ leaders who smash through walls and leave nothing but rubble and corpses.

The fact that such a man can continue to flourish and exert such baleful influence is a testament to the moral bankruptcy of the circles in which he moves. It’s also a reminder that the psychopathic gaze is not limited to the savage buffoons who have plunged the world into another dark chapter of violence and chaos that it does not need.

And in this new age of political monsters, we should also remember that when it comes to war, many of their predecessors were no less monstrous, even if they sometimes seemed more plausible and spoke with more polished vowels.