Trump's exit from climate bodies an act of 'profound cowardice'

The Trump administration's decision this week to pull the United States out of key climate bodies is an act of "profound cowardice" designed to escape accountability for the country's greenhouse gas emissions, says leading French climatologist Valérie Masson-Delmotte.

Issued on: 09/01/2026 
RFI

An oil refinery in El Dorado, Kansas. The United States is the world’s largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases and a major producer of fossil fuels. © AP - Charlie Riedel

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump ordered the withdrawal of the US from 66 international organisations – roughly half of them linked to the UN.

Masson-Delmotte, former chair of Working Group 1 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and now a climatologist at France's Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, accuses the White House of "sabotage" aimed at destroying scientific knowledge and keeping it from the American people.

RFI: How do you interpret this latest US attack on global climate diplomacy?

Valérie Masson-Delmotte: Under the Trump administration, the United States is breaking away from multilateralism on climate and biodiversity. It's also breaking away from objective, rigorous and factual scientific assessment work.

This is reflected in the withdrawal from the IPCC, the biodiversity panel IPBES, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

The move forms part of a policy of brutal attacks against climate science, environmental science and biodiversity science in the US, but also against the place of scientific facts at all levels within the American federal framework and internationally.

RFI: For Donald Trump, these organisations no longer serve American interests. Yet the United States, like other countries in the world, is affected by climate change.

VM-D: Yes, of course. The National Academies of Sciences, Medicine and Engineering have updated their assessment of the state of knowledge on the links between greenhouse gas emissions and harmful impacts on the health and wellbeing of Americans. The state of knowledge on this point is only becoming more refined, showing just how much climate change is a threat to Americans.

And what we can clearly see is that the Trump administration is pursuing a policy of obstructing all environmental regulation, going as far as destroying scientific facts and the production of scientific knowledge.

It's also an attack on academic freedom, which is one of the legacies of the Enlightenment and a key aspect of democratic life.

RFI: Is the United States shooting itself in the foot?

VM-D: I'd call it sabotage. Sabotage aimed at making scientific knowledge inaccessible. At destroying the capacity to produce knowledge by targeting climate research centres, adaptation centres and water research centres.

In fact, the American administration is trying to present itself as powerful and brutal, but it's above all profound cowardice because ultimately, the policies being implemented are designed to avoid any accountability.

The US is the world's largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases and the second-largest emitter today, with highly polluting oil and gas multinationals. I think the goal is simply to escape all responsibility and accountability.

This is an administration whose compass seems to be guided only by fossil fuel interests and nothing else.

The impact of US withdrawal from global climate pacts

Tamsin Walker 

DW with EPD, AFP

01/08/2026

The US has pledged to pull out of dozens of international organizations and treaties established to advance the protection of the planet. But it doesn't spell the end of environmental action.

The Trump administration dismisses climate science despite the evidence of increased extreme weather events connected to the burning of oil, gas and coal

Image: BRYAN R. SMITH/AFP

Described by US nonprofit science advocacy organization, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) as a "new low", Donald Trump is planning to withdraw his country from 66 organizations on the grounds that they no longer serve American interests.

Besides cutting funding and contact with groups including the UN Democracy Fund, UN Women and the Global Forum on Migration and Development, there is a clear anti-climate, anti-environment tone to this latest White House move.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature, the International Renewable Energy Agency and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are among the environmental bodies on the list of 66. As is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which is based in the German city of Bonn and organizes the annual UN climate conferences.

In 2015, parties to the convention adopted the 2015 Paris Agreement, pledging to prevent runaway heating. Trump, who makes no secret of his support for the oil industry and who has referred to climate change as a "hoax," announced his plans to exit the accord shortly after taking office for his second term.

In a statement issued following Wednesday's White House announcement, Rachel Cleetus, policy director and lead economist for the Climate and Energy Program of the UCS, said Trump's withdrawal from the UNFCCC is "yet another sign that this authoritarian, anti-science administration is determined to sacrifice people's well-being and destabilize global cooperation."

Hawaii's youth forges path out of climate crisis 16:45

Petter Lyden, co-head of the international climate policy division at environmental NGO Germanwatch, said the move is bad news both in terms of missing out on funding that the US has provided in the past, but also because "the substance to agree on international cooperation to address the climate crisis is more difficult when one such big country is missing from the negotiation."

Reactions from Europe

In response to the White House announcement, European Union climate chief Wopke Hoekstra wrote on LinkedIn that the UNFCCC "underpins global climate action," adding that the decision to "retreat from it is regrettable and unfortunate."

But he said Europe would "unequivocally continue to support international climate research, as the foundation of our understanding and work."

German Environment Minister Carsten Schneider said the decision "did not come as a surprise." Referencing the UN climate conference in Brazil at the end of last year, he said it was clear the US was alone in its stand on climate protection.

He cited "numerous new alliances" on international carbon markets, accelerating the phaseout of fossil fuels and even combating fake news about climate issues, as evidence that other countries were committed to taking action.

The global uptake in renewable energy sources is higher than ever before

Image: BildFunkMV/IMAGO

Lyden said the US direction of travel would not change the fact that the transition to a low-carbon future is ongoing. "The expansion of renewable energy will continue," he said, adding that countries transitioning to climate-friendly solutions were gaining economic benefits.

Will it slow climate action in the US?

Trump's latest play has met with condemnation from American climate leaders.

Gina McCarthy, the first national climate adviser to the White House under former President Joe Biden and now chair of the climate action coalition America Is All In (AIAI), said pulling out of the UNFCCC was "a shortsighted, embarrassing, and foolish decision."

McCarthy said it would mean forfeiting the "ability to influence trillions of dollars in investments, policies, and decisions that would have advanced our economy and protected us from costly disasters wreaking havoc on our country."

But she added that the AIAI coalition, whose members include local governments, states, businesses, universities and more, remained committed to collaborating at an international level to deliver on the goals of the Paris Agreement.

California is prone to drought and fire, but the wildfires that reached LA in January 2025 wiped engine residential areas off the map

Image: Mario Tama/Getty Images

Lyden of Germanwatch believes it would be hard for California or other states to fully fill the gap left by an absent federal government. However, he said there is a lot happening beyond "formal decisions" where "local and regional levels could even have more agency than the federal one."

McCarthy said AIAI will expand its efforts "to work at the local level to build hope and opportunity," and would not allow this administration to deny Americans access to the "huge health, safety, and economic benefits clean energy provides."

Rachel Cleetus also said forward-looking US states and the rest of the world understand the mounting threat of climate change and recognize that "collective global action remains the only viable path to secure a livable future for our children and grandchildren."

Additional reporting from Jeannette Cwienk.

Edited by: Anke Rasper

Tamsin Walker Senior editor with DW's environment team

‘The deepest sort of spiritual disorientation’ Historian Joseph Kellner on the zeitgeist of the Soviet collapse and its lessons for today’s democracies

January 1, 2026
Source: Meduza


For decades, Russia’s “wild 1990s” have been remembered for economic hardship, libertarian freedoms, and rampant crime. Historian Joseph Kellner suggests another defining feature of the era: profound spiritual disorientation. In his book, The Spirit of Socialism: Culture and Belief at the Soviet Collapse, Kellner tells the cultural story of the “end of history” and argues that the USSR’s disintegration was the final blow to a centuries-old European idea of progress. He also describes what emerged from the ruins as a “seeking phenomenon” — an explosion of mystics, astrologers, and fringe sects in Russia in the early 1990s. For Meduza, journalist and author of the Playing Civilization research project Georgy Birger spoke with Joseph Kellner about what drove post-Soviet Russians toward radical new worldviews, how this spiritual crisis paved the way for Putinism, and why the West — now facing its own crises of meaning and truth — might be walking a similar path.

The following Q&A has been lightly edited and abridged for length and clarity.

Joseph Kellner

— For those unfamiliar with your work, can you briefly describe what your book is about?

— The book is, I believe, the first cultural history of the Soviet collapse. There are many good studies of late-Soviet culture; it’s a booming field right now. Previously, historians would have called it the Era of Stagnation and said that nothing significant happened in the 1970s and 1980s. Now, there’s a major effort by many scholars to reverse that and reassess late-Soviet culture. There are also histories of the collapse — roughly 1989 to 1993 — that focus, for good reasons, on the economic crisis and the various traumas of transition.

Instead, I focus on a spectacular and visible flourishing of new and radical worldviews, spiritualities, and orientations that cropped up all at once around the time of the collapse. That includes the popularity of Hare Krishnas, astrologers, apocalyptic sects, and [Anatoly] Fomenko’s New Chronology. I see all these things together as an acute manifestation of the cultural crisis that comes with the collapse.

What’s all this about?


The book takes up the people I collectively call “the seekers” and looks at two things. First, why did they come to believe the things they did? For instance, why was astrology so credible to so many people all at once? Or “extrasensory healing” [by TV psychics] like Kashpirovsky and Chumak? And second, why the seeking? Why in this period do you see this amazing public searching? Because not every crisis brings this kind of cultural ferment.

Essentially, I find that what unites all these people is a set of deep questions about the world. They are looking for orientation in a world where it has been lost. There are questions of intellectual authority: who can we believe, and where does true knowledge derive? Then, [there are] questions of identity: what does it mean to be a Russian at this time? In Russia, the identity question often takes this form of East versus West: are we Europeans, or are we not? And finally, questions about the direction of historical time — where it is headed and where it has been. There is a deep spiritual orientation to all this: how do we affix ourselves to something permanent when so much of our world has eroded?

— The question about time was probably tied to the concept of the “end of history.”

— Certainly. The concept of the “end of history” didn’t survive very long, but the notion was a triumphal one in the West and in the United States, where it was coined. In the Soviet Union, there was another, real sense to this concept. Soviet ideology was fixated on history, historical meaning, and the “right” direction of history. So, when that great vision collapsed completely, it left people afraid and unsure where anything was headed.

That is why people were looking to astrology, for instance; it offered a cyclical understanding of the world, putting the crisis in a much larger context. Or they looked to nostalgic worldviews — Hare Krishnas are, in fact, very nostalgic. They looked for different golden ages because the Soviet one so obviously failed.

— How did those questions about the direction of historical time manifest?

— When I look at these different groups — like the one around Fomenko’s New Chronology — I see a fixation on time. Fomenko is a Soviet mathematician who, in the 1990s, came out with this extraordinary revision of history, claiming all history happened in the last 1,000 years. He shifted all of history around and made a total, psychedelic new understanding of time.

I think the reason everyone was so fixated on time was that, during the crisis, there was a sense that the past was now unknown. Glasnost and the revelations of the Soviet press of the 1980s were all about uncovering Soviet crimes. Everything you learned in history class turned out to be untrue. History teachers were writing to the newspapers saying, “I can’t believe I’ve been lying to my students all this time.” There was no consensus anymore about what the past was.

Then, when the crisis is so acute, the future becomes equally dark. There is no natural “bottom” to the crisis, no sense of when it will end. People feel isolated and completely lost in time. That lends the sense of temporal displacement — of being nowhere. That is the deepest sort of spiritual disorientation.

— The way I understand it is that the loss of the Soviet timeline was, in a way, more psychologically damaging than the loss of the Soviet economy.

— The two things are hard to compare. The material crisis was staggering — male life expectancy dropped six years, murder and suicide rates spiked. But I do think the spiritual crisis is a meaningful compounding factor. After all, you can have an economic crisis of a similar scale — like the Great Depression — without this fundamental loss of orientation or this desperate attempt to reimagine everything about the world.

The spiritual crisis came from how certain Soviet ideology was about the big questions. Knowledge derived from reason along Western scientific lines; Soviet identity was a fixed thing with a clear place in world history. Even if people didn’t literally believe in communism per se by the 1970s and 1980s, it was the water they swam in. It was in the media and the education [system]: the values of Soviet society still rested on these Enlightenment values and the sense of progress. Seeing it collapse in a couple of years was spiritually jarring.

Perhaps the book’s biggest claim rests on the fact that Soviet communism and its value system were an heir to the Enlightenment and saw itself explicitly as carrying that mantle. And in this way, Soviet communism derived from the same time and place as 19th‑century liberalism. So, the collapse represented the end point of a very long, shared European arc of history, thought, and philosophy — a major, and perhaps the final, blow to the broader idea of historical progress, that shared 19th‑century belief among liberals and socialists that progress was effectively a law of history. Even after World War II, both sides of the Cold War remained fundamentally optimistic about progress, whereas 1989 and the Soviet collapse marked the end of this centuries‑long arc. This is an event whose consequences are still unfolding, including in the West, and whose full scale will be hard to grasp without greater historical distance.

In this sense, the “seekers” of the late-Soviet and early post‑Soviet period are like the canary in the coal mine: they are the first to go out actively searching for entirely new worldviews once this big idea of history has died.

— One thing I’ve found surprising is the claim that figures like Chumak or Fomenko were not just anti-rational charlatans, but also a way to preserve a scientific way of thinking. Can you explain that?

— Certainly. Kashpirovsky, for example, claimed authority as an educated psychiatrist; it was his medical background. The astrologers I focus on almost all have backgrounds in the hard sciences, such as mathematics, astronomy, or physics. At no point do they forsake that education; they still put enormous value on science. The dispute was over who defined science. And the truth is that it’s impossible to define pseudoscience. It is defined by whoever holds the scientific authority to do so.

In a time when official Soviet authorities were losing credibility, these people offered alternatives, but they did it in the language of science because there was still a deep understanding that science is a powerful window to the world. Even the Soviet Hare Krishnas, unlike their American counterparts, tried to demonstrate the scientific validity of their beliefs. It demonstrates a deep, lasting Soviet respect for science, even while, from the outside, it looks like unscientific ideas coming to the fore.

— Can you recall any immediate impact of seekers on Russian politics in the 1990s?

— It’s interesting because the seekers themselves were almost universally not invested in politics. They considered politics to be superficial and were not after political solutions. That is an important thing that gets lost. People try to draw lines from the 1990s to the Putin era to explain Putinism, and while one helps explain the other, these seekers were not necessarily proto-Putinists.

Rather, political fatigue was almost universal in the early 1990s. Having invested so much hope in Gorbachev’s reforms and seen them fail, then seeing [Russian President Boris] Yeltsin as an inspiration and quickly hating him — there was no sense that the political system was going to save people. So, as they had in the 1970s and 1980s, they looked elsewhere for meaning. They looked outside the official political world.

— But did this movement still affect the current state of Russia?

— Yes. What is remarkable is that Putinism has concrete, confident answers to the driving questions of the 1990s: the shape and direction of history, what it means to be Russian, and who you can trust. It has a clear view of the West and where Russia stands. The questions that plagued the 1990s are now “settled” in a somewhat frightening mode that is hostile to pluralism. That may be one reason for the appeal of Putinism — it provided answers in a very uncertain world. The right wing always has a very simple story to tell, and it can be a very compelling story.

— So, did these fringe theories of the 1990s simply migrate from the grassroots to the Kremlin?

— I think most of these specific currents that I wrote about subsided by the end of the 1990s. The energy behind extrasensory healing, astrology, and the Hare Krishnas was in retreat by the time Putin came on the scene. However, there are still mystical currents within Russian culture — for example, people often see Eurasianism as a mystic, quasi-scientific nationalism. So, there are continuities you can find, and I think Eurasianism is probably the easiest one to point out.

— In an article for Jacobin, you argue that similar things are happening in the U.S. now. Who would be the Kashpirovsky or Fomenko of this process?

— I don’t think we have them yet. We don’t have an equivalent seeking phenomenon, although we certainly have a lively world of conspiracy thinking. We don’t have a similar cultural crisis, at least not in the form that I described in the Soviet case. And we haven’t had a big economic crisis yet — though everyone is expecting it, whether from the debt ceiling games, an AI bubble, or fossil fuels. I wouldn’t be surprised if such a crisis caused a dramatic spiritual seeking or “Great Awakening.”

For now, the major cultural figures setting trends are more explicitly political and tend to be on the right wing — people laying out visions that get a lot of followers. People like [white nationalist] Nick Fuentes and [right-wing blogger] Curtis Yarvin. But I don’t know anyone who I would draw parallels directly to Kashpirovsky and Chumak.

[Billionaire Peter Thiel’s theories about the Antichrist] might be as close as we get — the merger of reactionary politics and fundamentalist evangelical Christianity with tech utopianism/dystopianism. That is the making of a frightening ideology. All the ingredients are here. If an American “Fomenkoism” were to emerge with a charismatic leader, I think it’s easy to imagine millions of readers because there is nobody in America who has the authority to dispute such a theory anymore.

— Historians rarely draw parallels between Russia’s case of de-democratization and current worldwide and U.S. trends. The usual explanation is that democracy was too young and fragile in Russia, and that’s why it crumbled. What arguments do you have in favor of learning from post-Soviet Russia’s experience?

— Well, I can’t dismiss out of hand that democracy requires institutional memory. Imagining a democratic Russia is a very difficult task, especially compared to the United States, where there is a deeply rooted sense of popular power. But the common feature of both countries, as they move in the opposite direction of democracy, is the current state of capitalism. In the 1990s, Russia got the business end of capitalism — the sharpest and most aggressive form of the system — applied to a country that, coming out of the Soviet experience, simply could not compete on the world market and was picked apart by foreign capital and by its own state through corrupt privatization under Yeltsin. The rise of the oligarchs in a state with weak institutions and a huge concentration of wealth in a small circle of people is very hard to square with democracy, because those people end up functioning as a kind of pseudo‑government, producing the mafia state of the 1990s.​

The Yeltsin government attempted to install neoliberal capitalism as it existed in the United States: eliminating subsidies, leaving no real space for unions, keeping taxes low, and placing great faith in markets to solve every problem. In Russia [this was a] catastrophic and very fast [process], whereas in the U.S., it has been a slower, forty‑year process with similar results. In both countries, this has meant huge inequality, a dramatic loss of faith in the political system and in democracy, and a concentration of power in a very small set of oligarchs — though Americans are allergic to that word, even as today’s billionaires surpass the Rockefellers and Carnegies of their time. These shared developments make the similarity of the reaction unsurprising, and what we are seeing now is the long‑standing conflict between capitalism and democracy becoming extremely sharp.

AI points toward a new paradigm for fully automated processor chip design

Researchers propose an AI-driven framework that aims to enable fully automated processor chip design, offering a pathway to more efficient and customizable chips.

Science China Press

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Potential framework for fully automated processor chip design, including three core components: a) A domain-specific LLM to comprehend the specification and generate a primary design; b) An automated repair mechanism based on functional  verification to guarantee the design’s correctness; c) An automated search mechanism based on performance feedback to address the problem of enormous solution space.

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Credit: ©Science China Press

Processor chips are the basic engines of the digital world, powering everything from smartphones and personal computers to cloud servers and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. As demand for computing continues to soar, chip design has become a critical bottleneck: it is slow, expensive, and heavily dependent on scarce human expertise.

In a new Perspective article in National Science Review, researchers from the State Key Laboratory of Processors，Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, argue that incremental automation is no longer enough. They call for a fully automated processor chip design paradigm that can take high-level functional requirements and automatically deliver verified, high-performance hardware and software stacks.

Traditional electronic design automation (EDA) tools and recent AI methods have significantly accelerated individual design steps such as logic synthesis, placement, routing and design-space exploration. However, most current AI-driven approaches act as local optimizers inside a conventional flow. They improve efficiency at specific stages but do not fundamentally change how entire chips are conceived and built, and thus cannot keep pace with exploding demand and growing design complexity.

The authors identify three challenges that block the path toward fully automated processor design:

1) Specification comprehension: In real projects, requirements for a processor are usually written in informal, sometimes ambiguous natural language, while existing tools expect precise formal inputs such as C/C++ or hardware description languages (HDLs) like Verilog and VHDL. Bridging this gap still requires substantial manual work by experts.

2) Correctness guarantee: Processor chips must meet extremely strict correctness standards. For example, the functional verification of a modern CPU may target 99.99999999999% correctness or higher. Yet large language models (LLMs), which operate on probabilistic generation, cannot directly satisfy such deterministic guarantees.

3) Enormous solution space: A processor design spans foundational software, logic and circuit design, and physical implementation. Modeling this at the bitstream level leads to an astronomically large design space. For example, a 32-bit CPU possesses a solution space whose size is approximately 10^10^540.

To overcome these challenges, the Perspective proposes a three-part framework centered on a domain-specialized “Large Processor Chip Model”:

1) Domain-specific LLM for specification comprehension

The first component is a large language model trained specifically on processor design data. Its job is to read informal natural-language specifications, resolve ambiguities, and generate an initial formal design in HDLs or other suitable representations. Because high-quality training data for processor design is scarce, the authors highlight the role of LLM-based data synthesis and cross-verification to automatically build better corpora at scale—an approach already shown effective in recent reasoning-enhanced RTL design work.

2) Automated repair driven by functional verification

The second component addresses correctness. Instead of trusting a single model output, the framework integrates automatic verification tools to check intermediate designs, and uses their feedback to repair errors. When verification detects a functional bug, the system rolls back to a previously verified version and regenerates the faulty part based on error signals, iterating until the design passes all checks. This idea has already been validated in the fully automated CPU “Enlightenment-1” (QiMeng-CPU-v1), whose logic is represented with a novel graph structure called the Binary Speculation Diagram (BSD). Using Boolean distance as a verification metric and BSD expansion for repair, QiMeng-CPU-v1 reportedly reaches over 99.99999999999% functional accuracy and can successfully boot Linux, providing a concrete proof-of-concept for correctness-aware automation.

3) Performance-feedback-driven search in an enormous solution space

The third component tackles performance optimization under a huge design space. The authors suggest organizing candidate designs as a hierarchical search tree. Performance predictions or real measurements are fed back at intermediate nodes, allowing the system to prune poor branches and focus exploration on promising regions. Similar search-with-feedback ideas have already been applied to automated foundational software design. Systems such as QiMeng-TensorOp and QiMeng-Xpiler use Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) guided by real execution time to automatically generate high-performance tensor operators and to transcompile tensor programs across platforms. Extending such performance-aware search frameworks from software into full processor design is expected to dramatically reduce the effective solution space while still discovering highly optimized designs.

Importantly, the authors emphasize that this fully automated framework is not meant to replace the existing EDA ecosystem. Instead, AI models can orchestrate and call mature tools—such as logic optimizers, floorplanning and placement engines, and formal verification suites—by generating appropriate scripts and constraints. In this way, a “large processor chip model” acts as an intelligent conductor sitting on top of today’s design tools, coordinating them to deliver end-to-end automated solutions.

 

The State Key Laboratory of Processors, housed at the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ICT, CAS), is one of the first national key laboratories formally approved for construction by CAS. The laboratory is chaired by Academician Ninghui Sun, who serves as the Chair of the Academic Committee, and is directed by Prof. Yunji Chen. In recent years, the laboratory has achieved a series of landmark accomplishments. It received the first-ever National Natural Science Award in the field of processor chips, along with six national-level science and technology awards. The laboratory consistently ranks first in China in terms of publications at leading international conferences in processor architecture and chip design. Internationally, it has pioneered several influential research directions, including deep learning processors, which have since become major global research hotspots. The laboratory has also played a pivotal role in fostering China’s domestic processor ecosystem: it has directly or indirectly incubated several leading Chinese processor companies with a combined market valuation of hundreds of billions of RMB, significantly advancing the country’s strategic capabilities in high-performance and AI-oriented chip technologies.

---

Journal

National Science Review

DOI

10.1093/nsr/nwaf532 

Method of Research

Commentary/editorial

The fully automated QiMeng-CPU-v1(Enlightenment-1) CPU demonstrates that correctness-driven automated repair can produce a Linux-capable processor with extremely high functional reliability.

Credit

©Science China Press

PAKISTAN

‘Failed’ economic model

Shahid Mehmood 

Published December 27, 2025  

DAWN

ABOUT two weeks ago, the head of the Special Investment Facilitation Council declared that Pakistan has a ‘failed’ economic model. As an eco­nomist, though, I was not surprised because the failure of our ‘economic model’ (whatever that is) has been known for long. Importantly, though, how did we end up with a ‘failed’ model? And, what does a ‘successful’ economic model look like?

I’ll address the second query first, partly owing to the recent award of the Nobel Prize in Economics to three economists (Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt) and also because it will give us a fair idea of the first query.


The recorded history of mankind’s economic activities shows that real income growth followed a pretty flat trajectory, but saw a remarkable uptick in the 19th century as the Industrial Revolution picked up pace (the ‘hockey stick’ phenomenon). What factors underlay this stupendous transformation? The work of the three winners addresses this very question.

The two most famous long-term growth theories are that of Robert Solow and Paul Romer (both Nobel Prize winners). Solow identified population growth, savings, and technological change as the factors that drive economic growth. Of this, technology is the most important component since by itself, population and savings alone can drive growth to a certain level, but beyond that, as depreciation catches up, the economy reaches a ‘steady state’ beyond which returns of these two factors keep falling. It was persistent technological change that would keep the economy above its steady state level. However, for Solow, technological change was ‘exogenous’ (the ‘black box’) — determined outside the system.


The staggering number of talented individuals leaving Pakistan would trouble any serious policymaker.

Romer came up with his theory in his paper ‘Endogenous Technological Change’ (1990). He agreed with Solow’s contention that technological change is the most critical input in long-term growth. Where he differed was that it was determined within the system by the ‘intentional’ actions of innovators who had incentives to innovate in order to earn more than average earnings. One of his contentions, which he called the ‘most fundamental premise of his theory’, was that the process of technological innovation has a fixed cost, meaning that an innovator can build upon that knowledge with zero marginal expense. At the heart of his theory were two variables — high-quality human capital, and the endless possibility of profits with the expansion of the size of the market, which would mainly come courtesy of international trade.


Aghion and Howitt wrote their seminal paper ‘A Model of Economic Growth through Creative Destruction’ around the same time (1992) as Romer. They based their work on the idea of ‘creative destruction’, a term coined by Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950) who hypothesised that the workings of capitalism are underpinned by “gales of creative destruction”; the most creative would survive but the less creative would not be so lucky.

If creativity also carries a destructive tendency, how did industrialised countries end up with steadily increasing real income growth? They answer this by pointing out that there are thousands of sectors functioning in an economy; creative destruction in one is usually balanced out by creative growth in another. There are countless examples: BlackBerry replaced by iPhones and Netscape replaced by Google. Or take stock of the fact that Google or Amazon were merely blips on the vast canvas of the New York Stock Exchange at the start of the 21st century (few had heard of Elon Musk). Now, these three are some of the largest companies on the planet.

Many companies and businesses vanished, but new were born, thus balancing out the destructive tendencies. This process critically depends upon innovators who take risks, and also an enabling environment.

Mokyr’s work is the most phenomenal in terms of the broad sweep of technological history. One of the most interesting queries he propounds, amongst countless others, is why England (and Europe in general) took the lead during the Industrial Revolution. His answer, for the most part, rests on the importance of traits like curiosity, knowledge diffusion and exchange, a tolerant environment and persistent push by curious innovators. The price incentive, so important in Romer, Howitt and Aghion’s work, is relatively subdued in his hypothesis. Gautier, the inventor of the hot air balloon in the 1870s, did so out of curiosity. Bacon and Newton helped foster a culture of ideas and exchange, carried out by various scientific ‘societies’ founded in England, without any price or profit incentive. It was a cultural revolution (the ‘Enlightenment’) from whose bosom sprang the Industrial Revolution.

In his writings, we again find the critical role of high-quality human capital (‘upper tail human capital’) as in Romer’s, Howitt’s and Aghion’s theories and why it is so important for long-term economic growth.

Although what I stated above does not do justification to the vast expanse of research of these three, it does give us a fair idea of the factors that constitute a ‘successful’ economic model. Now contemplate which of these factors are historically at play in Pakistan? None. For example, what of Pakistan’s ‘upper tail’ human capital? The staggering number of highly skilled individuals leaving this country for decades would deeply trouble any serious policymaker, except for those who revel in the prospect of more remittances.

And what of the tremendous opportunities afforded by the global economy, where the trade in goods and services stands at a staggering $23 trillion? What’s our share? Not even $100 billion. Can there be any bigger reflection of our calamitous failure?

But why take risks, for example, when it’s easy to make gazillions from export permits for commodities like sugar, create a shortage and then import the same at triple the price? Why incentivise upper tail human capital to contribute at home when pushing them out of the country would mean more remittances?

Suffice to say, economic growth does not rest upon accounting and PR gimmickry. Above all, any serious attempt at ‘successful’ long-term economic growth in Pakistan should begin with those in the state machinery sticking to their job requirements.

The writer is an economist. His current research focuses on long-term analysis of various issues plaguing Pakistan’s economy, economic reforms and history of economic thought.

shahid.mohmand@gmail.com

X: @ShahidMohmand79

Published in Dawn, December 27th, 2025

Iran Rejects US Terms at UN Council

by Faramarz Farbod / December 24th, 2025

DV coeditor Faramarz Farbod joined AnewZ.tv (Baku, Azerbaijan) this morning to discuss the escalating U.S.-Iran nuclear standoff and the sharp divisions at the UN Security Council over the status of UNSC Res. 2231, the snapback mechanism, the reimposition of sanctions against Iran, and uranium enrichment.

Faramarz Farbod, a native of Iran, teaches politics at Moravian College. He is the founder of Beyond Capitalism a working group of the Alliance for Sustainable Communities-Lehigh Valley PA and the editor of its publication Left Turn. He can be reached at farbodf@moravian.edu. Read other articles by Faramarz.

Iran and the Price of Sovereignty: What It Takes Not to Be a Client State

Behrooz Ghamari Tabrizi

 December 25, 2025

The U.S. State Department Poster: We ask the Iranian regime to halt the execution of Pakhshan Azizi and release her immediately.

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On June 12, 2025, for the first time after more than twenty years, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) board of governors passed a resolution declaring that Tehran was breaching its non-proliferation obligations. The day after, on June 13, Israeli warplanes began a campaign of bombing Tehran and other major Iranian cities. With the help of their proxies inside the country, they assassinated top military commanders, killed leading nuclear scientists at their residence along with their families, bombed the cabinet meeting in Tehran, wounding the President, indiscriminately shelled urban residential areas, and even targeted Evin prison where most political prisoners are incarcerated.  The U.S. offered intelligence, refueled their jetfighters in mid-air, and finally entered the war directly by bombing the Iranian nuclear enrichment sites with bunker buster weapons.

This unprovoked Israeli attack happened in the midst of seemingly constructive negotiations between Iran and the U.S. in Rome and Muscat. The Friday the 13^th attack happened just before the two countries were to meet on Sunday the 15^th to finalize a framework for further agreements on the Iranian enrichment program. In all close to 1000 people were killed in the Israeli attacks, thousands injured, and hundreds of families lost their homes.

There is no solid evidence whether the IAEA board coordinated the release of their report with the Israelis. But the suspicious choreography of the timing of the report’s release with the Israeli attacks affords credibility to the Islamic Republic’s claims that some of the IAEA inspectors spied for Israel. In its report, the IAEA excavated questions from twenty years earlier about highly enriched particles found in three Iranian sites. The case for the Iranian noncompliance is primarily based on the Agency’s conclusion “that these undeclared locations were part of an undeclared, structured programme carried out by Iran until the early 2000s, and that some of these activities used undeclared nuclear material” (my emphasis). Obfuscated in the report was the fact that the IAES has found no evidence of any weaponization program or military component in the Iranian nuclear activities. It was only a few days after the attacks that the IAEA’s Director General, Rafael Grossi, reiterated that “Iran has not been actively pursuing a nuclear weapon since 2003.”

Israel used the IAEA report to legitimize its unlawful military actions. However, such all-out attack was in the making for months, if not years. It could not have been launched simply in response to the IAEA report. For more than two decades, since the established one of the most intrusive regimes of inspections on the Iranian enrichment program, the IAEA had not cited Iran for breach of its obligations.  This was not unprecedented. In the 1990s, the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), whose mandate was to eliminate Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program, worked closely with the U.S. intelligence agencies. Through UNSCOM, during Clinton administration, the CIA carried out ambitious spying operations to penetrate the Iraqi intelligence and defense apparatus.

Now, the so-called 12-day war is over. Iranians have returned to the devastating perpetual violence of U.S. led sanctions and targeted assassinations by the Mossad. The Trump administration and its European allies have called on Iran to accept its defeat, surrender unconditionally, and “return” to the negotiating table. They ask Iran to dismantle its nuclear technology, halt the production of its advance missile program, cease its support of the Palestinian cause, and terminate its network of what is known as the “axis of resistance” against the Israeli and American expansionism. In other words, become a client state. Iran is one of the few remaining fronts of defiance against the American extortionist posture and the Israeli carnage that has engulfed the Middle East. That defiance comes with a very hefty price.

The United States desires a return to the pre-1979-revolution Middle East alignment, complete with Iran as a client state that shields American interests in the region.  For more than four decades this objective has informed the U.S. strategic position toward Iran. Successive American administrations have pursued this policy with campaigns of intimidation, building more than a dozen permanent air base and naval facilities in the region, sabotage, military threats, draconian sanctions, and ultimately, under the Trump administration, bombing nuclear enrichment sites. The U.S. does not necessarily aspire to bring the prerevolution monarchy back to power, though the CIA uses the son of the disgraced Shah as a scarecrow in photo-ops.  But it seeks to install a state that lacks the authority to challenge the American regional influence—a state without sovereignty.  In the absence of that, perhaps a failed state will do…

The United State has surrounded Iran with permanent military bases to contain any influence the Islamic Republic might assert in regional politics.

The avowed objective of the Israeli government has been the overthrow of the Islamic Republic and the Balkanization of Iran. The Israelis, with the help of their American and European supporters, wish to exploit the multiethnic composition of Iran, particularly the Kurds, Azeris, and Baluchis, and to deepen the tensions between the minority Sunni communities and the ruling Shi‘ite class to replicate a Syrian/Libyan model of the failed state. Since the end of Iran-Iraq war in 1988, the Mossad and the IDF strategists have devised and executed a variety of plans to infiltrate minority opposition groups to foment ethnic unrest to partition Iran. Israel also supports opposition parties, particularly the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) and the royalist organizations of the exiled son of the late Shah, with intelligence, funds, and a vast network of propagandato create instability inside the country. The emergence of the MEK as a Zionist proxy and as mercenaries of the American neocon project shows how deeply the politics of the Middle East has been transformed since the 1979 revolution. A Left, anti-imperialist revolutionary organization in the 1970s, the MEK now hosts John Bolton and Rudy Guiliani as the keynote speakers in their conventions. Israel’s  June 13^th, 2025, unprovoked attack on Iran was primarily made possible by the Mossad-trained Iranian commandos inside the country. They successfully sabotaged or destroyed the Iranian air defenses prior to the Israeli attacks and made it possible for the Israeli jetfighters to roam the Iranian skies freely.

The twelve-day war on Iran produced two major unexpected results. With their superior airpower and the capacity to decapitate the Iranian military and intelligence apparatus, the Israelis expected a quick dismantling of the regime. They were confident enough to send a voice message to the key military leaders at the commence of operations – instructing them to step down or be killed along with their entire families. The message, leaked to the Washington Post, heard in Farsi, warned: “I can advise you now, you have 12 hours to escape with your wife and child,” said an intelligence operative, whose voice had been altered in the recording. “Otherwise, you’re on our list right now.” Not only did the Iranian military leaders reject that “advice,” but they pulled their wounded command structure together and launched formidable counter offensive missile attacks. Iran inflicted unprecedented destruction deep inside Israel, forcing the Israelis to ask the U.S. for a more direct involvement in the war. As they faced an alarming depletion of their anti-missile interceptors, the Israelis pleaded for an immediate ceasefire. A week into the war, Iran managed to breach the supposedly impenetrable Israeli “iron dome” air defense system.

The second unexpected event of the twelve-day war was the way Iranians rallied around the flag. The debilitating sanctions and the crony capitalism they have fostered have resulted in grave economic hardships for most Iranians. The Israelis believed that their attack would turn that hardship and the ruling classes’ rampant economic corruption into mass protests against the Islamic Republic.  Moreover, the political order appeared particularly vulnerable  after the year-long “Women-Life-Freedom” protests. Israeli strategists believed that the social discord around gender politics in Iran would resurface after the bombing campaign.  That calculus proved wrong; in fact things worked in the opposite direction.  Striking Iran with American-made bombs, delivered by American-made fighter jets, falling on peoples’ homes and neighborhoods, revived nationalist sentiment and only gave credibility to the Islamic Republic’s long framing of the United States and Israel as existential threats. The public perception that the Supreme Leader is plagued by “blind paranoia” about Western powers no longer could hold. That fleeting sense of solidarity might not last. But the calculus that said Iranians were ready to accept anything but the Islamic Republic proved to be premature.

For several decades, Western intelligence agencies promoted the idea that Ayatollah Khamenei suffers from a chronic case of paranoia that the United States and Israel are plotting to overthrow the Islamic Republic. These types of images are commonly used in the Western media to depict Khamenei’s paranoiac mindset.

As is so often the case, after the fighting stopped, a war of narratives began. President Trump claimed that the American bombs annihilated the Iranian nuclear sites and forced the Iranian regime to accept their inevitable defeat. He asked the Islamic Republic to surrender without conditions and consent to the American demand of shutting down their enrichment programs. The Israelis celebrated the public demonstration of their intelligence prowess and military might without revealing the extent of damages inflicted by the Iranian missile attacks. Iran proved that they are not another Iraq, Syria, or Libya and can withstand the assault of two nuclear powers.  They showed they can and will respond in kind with their own homegrown military muscle.

The war of narratives determines what the next steps will be in the conflict between Iran and Israel and its western allies. The U.S., Israel, and their three willing partners, the UK-Germany-France troika, have made it clear that Iran faces two options, both of which will lead to the client status that the US demands. When they ask Iran to “return” to the negotiating table, never mind that Iran never left it, never mind that Israel is in the habit of assassinating the negotiators, they mean that Iran needs to submit to their terms: stop the enrichment program, shut down their missile production, and terminate their relations with their allies in the region.

To a varying degree, Iranian opposition groups have tried to exploit the Israeli attacks to advance their own agenda. The monarchists, the MEK and other defenders of military intervention believe that the Islamic Republic is now at the brink of collapse and the West needs to act promptly to overthrow the regime in Tehran. Their members collaborated with the Mossad and promoted that collaboration as their patriotic mission to liberate Iran from the yoke of the Islamic Republic.

After the war, a coalition of groups and personalities who have been working from within the existing political order to transform the Islamic Republic, the Reformist Front of Iran, release a statement arguing that the only solution to overcome the current crisis is to accept the terms and conditions put forward by the United States. The statement asks for a series of reforms, such as the release of political prisoners, respect for the freedom of expression, revising laws that promote gender discrimination, free elections, and anti-corruption policies. These are demands that need to be respected. There are many political and civil society actors who have been organizing around those demands and have gain considerable successes on those fronts in the past decades. Many of those actors have paid a hefty price for their activism, from long-term imprisonments to exile or worse. What is troubling in the statement is the coupling of these legitimate concerns with the way it situates Iran in the existing world order–Iran as the pariah. Iran needs to end its hostility toward the existing world order, the statement asserts, and end its international isolation! But how is such a goal accomplished and what conditions do the Islamic Republic need to meet in order to be accepted in that world order? Is there any room in that world order for a nation that refuses to be a client?

A considerable number of those who have worked from within the ruling classes to reform the political order, as well as many public intellectuals subscribe to this hegemonic narrative which maintains that (a) the threats of war against Iran will subside if the Islamic Republic initiates meaningful structural reform to guarantee civil liberties and consent to free and fair elections; (b) Iran needs to respect the existing international order and abide by its laws and conventions; (c) the Islamic Republic is the source of instability in the region and needs to halt its enrichment program, degrade its military capabilities, abandon its regional allies, “the axis of resistance,” and recognize the state of Israel, without holding it responsible for the genocide in Gaza and for attacking Iran.

There is no need to delve deeply into the logic that holds the authoritarian character of the Islamic Republic as the culprit for the Israeli attacks and American hostilities toward Iran. Had repression in Iran disturbed the conscience of American strategists, the United States allies in the region should have been the cradles of democracy in the Middle East. The instrumental appropriation to the cause of human rights and civil liberties in Iran is a mere smoke screen for the Israeli and American expansionist ideologies.

For example, on September 30, 2025, the U.S. State Department Farsi X account posted a photo of political prisoner Pakhshan Azizi on which they plastered a US flag and State Department seal, calling for Iran to revoke her death sentence and immediately release her. The State Department original message in English also called on the Islamic Republic to respect peaceful acts of protest and to stop targeting Kurdish and other ethnic minorities for their legitimate anti-discriminatory demands.

Pakhshan Azizi’s message from prison: The United States must stop warmongering, military attacks, and committing crime in the region

Pakhshan Azizi is a Kurdish social worker who has been active in providing social services and counseling to victims of ISIS in northeastern Syria. She returned to Iran and was arrested in the summer of 2023 on charges of being a member of a Kurdish armed group. She was sentenced to death by a lower court and awaits the results of her appeal. In response to the U.S. State Department’s call for her release, from her death row cell in Evin prison, she sent out a message casting off the American sinister instrumentalization of her case.

I reject all the baseless accusations leveled against me and am in process of appealing the judiciary’s unjust death sentence. I also would like to address the recent statement released by the U.S. Department of State, which appeared to express support for me. If the United States government truly believes in the principles of human rights and humanity, it must first cease its warmongering, aggression, and crimes in the region. It must also end its explicit support for the Zionist regime, which has committed genocide against the people of Gaza. For decades, the U.S. has imposed sanctions and economic blockades that have caused immense suffering and hardship for innocent people. If America genuinely values human dignity, it must bring these inhumane policies to an end. I also hope that the American people will realize that their government’s statements are far removed from compassion and genuine respect for human rights. (translated from Farsi by Yassamine Mather).

From almost the morning after the revolution of 1979 that toppled the Shah’s regime, opposition parties have advocated regime change, believing that the days of the Islamic Republic are numbered. The opposition to the Islamic Republic has taken many different forms, including organized labor movements, civil liberty campaigns, freedom of the press, women’s movements for equal rights and against gender discrimination. But there have always been those who advocated foreign intervention, from the Iraqi invasion of Iran in the 1980s to the latest Israeli-American war on Iran. The 12-day war offered a new hope to those interventionists who believe that servitude of the empire is the price of freedom. Pakhshan Azizi’s message powerfully reiterates that the struggle for social justice cannot find its solution in acquiescence to empire.

Holding Iran solely responsible for regional instability and calling on the Islamic Republic to abide by international treaties and conventions is a curious matter. There is no doubt the Islamic Republic refuses to become a U.S. client, and this refusal explains much in how they resist American dominance in the Middle East and have been competing with the U.S. allies, particularly Israel, for influence in the region. During the past four decades, Iran has built an anti-Zionist coalition primarily as a deterrent, rather than an expansionist, project. The Islamic Republic’s support for the Palestinian cause has always been composed to prioritize the Iranian national interests over the liberation of Palestine. Despite their provocative rhetoric, Iran has never committed any aggression against Israel. Indeed, inside the country, the radical proponents of the Palestinian cause have criticized the state for their inaction in the face of Israeli aggressions, such as a decade-long assassinations of the Iranian nuclear scientists, bombing the Iranian consulate in Damascus, the assassination of the Hamas chief negotiator, Ismael Hanieh, in Tehran, and various kinds of sabotage in the Iranian infrastructure.

The Orwellian demand on Iran to respect international laws when Israel has repeatedly violated the Iranian sovereignty and the United States has illegally bombed Iran’s nuclear sites has no meaning except asking Iran to capitulate to American and Israeli conditions. No other countries in the world have breached international laws as many times as Israel and the United States. The global order to which Iran is bullied to join requires total submission to the interests of American imperialism.

As became evident with the release of Trump’s 20-point Gaza peace plan, negotiation in Trump administration has no meaning except take it or we annihilate you. Like their unilateral proposals to Iran, the White House drafted the Gaza peace proposal without any input from the Palestinians. They revised the original proposal after consultation with Netanyahu and published the final draft as a peace plan without having the other side of the peacemaking, the Palestinians, at the table. The US allowed Netanyahu to create key loopholes in the deal to ensure Israel can continue its Gaza genocide – regardless of the ‘ceasefire’ agreement. In effect, as with Iran, the U.S. and Israel follow the same political logic with Hamas: either surrender or be killed. This logic lacks any assurances that if they do surrender, they will not be killed. And to ensure this lasting peace, they have composed a new “mandate” to govern Palestine under the viceroyship of the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The uncanny reference to a “mandate” is another display of unbridled imperial ambitions that the U.S., Israel and their European allies pursue.

Many Iranians are exhausted from decades of sanctions and a repressive state apparatus to which the sanctions afford more legitimacy and longevity. It is not surprising that many inside the country are ready to throw up their hands and take whatever deal the United States offers. There is an awareness inside the country of the Balkanization of Iran as a real possibility, so too the “failed state” Libyan/Syrian/Iraqi scenarios of total disintegration of society. At the same time, continuing life in the purgatory of constant threats of war and destruction, while managing the effects of the draconian sanctions inflicted on the country has been pushing large segments of the polity, public intellectuals, and general population toward a politics of resignation.

There remain no good options for the Islamic Republic and for the subjects over which it rules. The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran momentarily collapsed the distinction between the state and the nation. As the unifying influence of the war fades, Iranians of all walks of life find themselves faced with the unresolvable economic deprivation and disparity while the beleaguered state grapples with the boundless avarice of the American empire and its cronies. Iranians need to decouple the defense of the country’s sovereignty from the struggle for social justice and civil liberties.  It remains to be seen whether Iranian sovereignty will remain intact after the dust of the war settles. That is if the dust of war ever settles with the Israeli ambitions and the West’s desire to hold the pen for redrawing the map of the Middle East.

Behrooz Ghamari is affiliated with the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies at the University of Toronto. He is the former Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University and the author of Islam and Dissent in Postrevolutionary Iran (2008); Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment (2016); Remembering Akbar (OR/Books, 2016); and the forthcoming book The Long War on Iran: New Events and Old Question (OR/Books, January 2025).

Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi is an Iranian-born American historian, sociologist, and professor.