Donald Trump doesn't understand soft power. He doesn’t trust it, doesn’t believe in it, and certainly doesn't know how to wield it. To him, power only works when it bruises. If it doesn't punch, it doesn't count. As a man, as a leader, as a bully, he is too weak to see the power in speaking softly.

Which is why America under Trump has become smaller, meaner, and less effective than at any point in its global history since the Second World War.

Soft power isn't a vulnerability. It's persuasion without coercion. It makes the world lean toward you instead of away from you. It's why a student in Lagos studies English literature, why a democracy protester in Hong Kong quotes Ben Franklin and Obama, why countries used to line up to make trade with the United States, and why American ideals—flawed as they are in practice—are still magnetic.

Trump bulldozed that - all of it - in a matter of months because he sees diplomacy as betrayal and alliances as scams. He considers every relationship a zero-sum hustle where you own the other guy or get played. The idea that power could be shared or values could be exported without bombs and sanctions makes no sense to him. So instead, he slaps tariffs on allies, threatens airstrikes when diplomacy stalls, and calls the whole sorry state of affairs a show of strength.

He doesn't understand the long game because he's never played one. Every move is transactional, reactive, and performative. It's not about winning people over; it's about dominating the moment. And if you need proof, look no further than his latest "deal-making" playbook: threatening Iran with bombing unless they come to the table on his terms while simultaneously gutting the very diplomatic channels that once led to a multilateral nuclear deal that actually worked.

When Trump pulled out of the JCPOA in 2018, he didn't offer a better strategy — he threw a tantrum. He replaced inspectors with threats, and now he floats the idea of flattening Iran if they don't fall in line. That's not negotiation. That's extortion dressed up as foreign policy. And it has left the U.S. isolated and the Middle East teetering.

He does the same thing with trade. While South Korea, China, and Japan work toward a regional agreement to stabilize markets, Trump barrels in with new tariffs and calls it "liberation." He can't see cooperation as anything but capitulation. He thinks a win means someone else lost and that anyone who doubts him is disloyal, even if they're an ally.

This is a man so addicted to blunt force that he doesn't realize the walls are closing in. America used to be the country that built coalitions, kept peace through strength balanced with restraint, and wielded influence through culture, values, and diplomacy. Trump has taken a sledgehammer to that legacy.

The world is adapting. Regional powers are forming their own pacts. Former allies are hedging their bets. Dictators are emboldened. The U.S. is still powerful but less trusted, less admired, and less listened to—not because its weapons have stopped working, but because its word has utterly failed.

Even within his own government, Trump prefers loyalist wreckers to competent experts. He fires generals who warn him, guts the intelligence community, and purges the diplomatic corps. He closes embassies and mocks development aid, failing to understand that helping build a school in another country can do more for American security than a dozen fighter jets.

He thinks symbolism is substance, that deleting a tribute to the Tuskegee Airmen is a realignment of priorities, that pulling embassy staff is an act of fiscal toughness instead of a retreat from relevance, and that culture wars at home are more important than stability abroad.

The result is a hollowed-out State Department, a demoralized military, and a foreign policy run on bluster. America under Trump isn't feared because of its strength. It's avoided because of its ignorance. It's the drunk, belligerent, and painfully racist uncle at the party that nobody wants to get stuck talking to. It is, in fact, the perfect representation of Trump's own voting base.

Meanwhile, adversaries study the chaos and capitalize on it. China expands its diplomatic footprint. Russia exploits America's diplomatic 4-year (at least) sick day. Even longtime partners find new footing away from Washington because they can't depend on a man who governs by vendetta and governs alone.

Soft power is credibility. It's showing up, staying engaged, and listening more than shouting. You cannot fake it with a flag pin or a fighter jet flyover. It’s earned. And under Trump, it's squandered.

You don't have to be a foreign policy expert to see the pattern. Trump doesn't read briefing books. He picks fights with allies. He leaks military plans on commercial chat apps. He governs by instinct, which might be less terrifying if his instincts weren't so shallow.

He doesn't comprehend soft power because it requires vision, patience, and an ounce of humility — qualities he neither possesses nor respects. And while he plays the strongman for crowds at home, the rest of the world sees what he really is: a man screaming at a mirror, mistaking volume for leadership.

America can be strong without being cruel. Powerful without being petty. Respected without being feared. But not under a man who only knows how to bludgeon.

Trump's America is loud, brittle, and alone. That isn't power. That’s abject failure.

This is how they kill free speech. It's not through Twitter suspensions or cancel culture. It's done the old fashioned way, just like they did it a century ago: With thugs in masks bundling someone into the back of a car.

Rumeysa Ozturk was walking down the street in Somerville, Massachusetts, when she was approached by a man in a hat and a hoodie. At first she tried to be polite. She had that unmistakable look of a woman hoping a threatening stranger was not going to attack her. Then he grabbed her arms. She cried out in fear. Another man appeared and wrenched her phone from her hand. Several other officers appeared wearing masks and sunglasses. They handcuffed her and put her in an unmarked vehicle.

At this point she effectively dropped into the administrative abyss. A district judge ordered law enforcement not to move her out of Massachusetts without two day's notice, but it made no difference. She was shipped to the other side of the country and held in a Louisiana detention facility.

The Department of Homeland security claims that Ozturk, a Turkish psychology student doing a PhD, had "engaged in activities in support of Hamas". Tellingly, secretary of state Marco Rubio did not bother to make that allegation when he responded to the incident yesterday. He suggested that she wanted to "participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalising universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus".

Rubio's suggestion is several steps down from the Department of Homeland claim of terrorism. It essentially amounts to disorderly protest. But there's no more evidence of Ozturk's disorderly protest than there is of her allegiance to Hamas. There's just a March 2024 comment piece in her university's newspaper in which she criticises Israeli foreign policy.

Rubio was clear that foreign students were no longer able to participate in protest movements. "If you come into the US as a visitor and create a ruckus for us, we don't want it," he said. "We don't want it in our country. Go back and do it in your country." Authorities seem to have developed a set tactic when it comes to foreign students they consider ideologically unsound. First they revoke their visa, leaving them with no legal status. Then they effectively kidnap them and send them to a detention centre. Rubio suggested he had been involved in targeting 300 people in this way although who knows. These people lie as easily as they breath.

The Louisiana complex where Ozturk is being held is in a remote former town around 170 miles from New Orleans, making it hard for detainees to access legal advice or communication with family and supporters. It was a hub for immigrant detention during Trump's first term but is now fast developing a reputation for where the Trump administration detains political undesirables.

Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist who'd been visible in Columbia campus protests last year, is being held there. When his wife showed documents proving he was a green card holder, agents said it had been revoked. Like Ozturk, he was also accused of "activities aligned to Hamas".

Subscribe now

While these individuals are detained, institutions are also silenced. Trump yesterday signed an executive order putting JD Vance in charge of overseeing efforts to "remove improper ideology" from the Smithsonian institute - including museums, research centres and the national zoo. He has also demanded that the women’s history museum does not "recognise men as women in any respect".

Similar actions are being taken against universities. The government pulled $400 million in research grants for Columbia university recently and demanded nine separate reforms, including the presence of security personnel to make arrests on campus and a ban on protests in academic buildings. It also secured academic control, with a demand that the school "ensure the educational offerings are comprehensive and balanced" and that the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department were put under "academic receivership". Shamefully, the college agreed to these demands.

Just a quick side note on that. These are the times in which we find out what people are made of. Many people, in the US and around the world, have covered themselves in shame for the manner in which they have preemptively buckled before authority. One day that will haunt them far more than their present acquiescence has convenienced them.

At first sight, this looks like basic fascism and it is. It's precisely what the Nazi's did when they came to power through their Gleichschaltung policy, which ensured all civic bodies were aligned with the Nazi worldview. It's what Viktor Orban has done in Hungary, bringing universities, NGOs and museums into ideological uniformity with the Fidesz movement. The only real difference is the speed of the American societal collapse.

It is also patently a free speech issue. The removal of "improper ideology" is an attempt to eradicate the free speech of institutions. Let's see what happens when they try to talk about the genocide of the native Americans or the treatment of slaves. The demand that a museum does not "recognise men as women" is obviously an attempt to deny the existence of trans people, but it is also the removal of an institution's right to recognise trans people in their displays or communication. The demand that "educational offerings are comprehensive and balanced" allows the government to wipe away inconvenient academic discourse and insert its preferred type in its place.

Subscribe now

Right wing authoritarians are doing what they always do. They’re attempting to destroy free speech. What not been clear, until this point, is whether there are enough progressives who are prepared to stop them.

Free speech started to go out of fashion in left-wing circles in the late noughties. You can see it pretty clear in the data. Recent More in Commons research, for instance, found progressive activists were more likely to prioritise protecting people from harmful speech over protecting free speech. A King's College study with Opsos Mori found 60% of those aged 55 and above disagreed with no-platforming while just 32% of 16-to-24-year-olds did. The figures are not earth shaking - the Generation Snowflake bollocks has always been overblown - but there was clear movement.

Online, it felt more frenzied than that, probably because the most vocal activist types were overrepresented and the algorithm encouraged their most extreme expression.

I was once in a video game called Watch Dogs Legion. I know that's an absurd sentence, but it happened. I was one of the voices you heard on the radio when you drove around in a car in a future fascist Britain. When the game came out, some online campaigners targeted another contributor because of her views on trans issues, which were critical but well within the realm of acceptable debate. The game developer removed her. I spoke out. I was then hammered for a week or so online. You'd experience it as this great and terrible wave. First Britain would tell you that you are a monster and a scumbag, then America would wake up and reiterate the argument. To defend someone’s free speech was not just wrong in itself. It was an insult to minority groups.

The basic progressive attack was that free speech was just an excuse for hate speech, allowing dominant groups to make marginalised people feel afraid in public space. It derived from colonialist attitudes towards freedom. You can see the broad outlines of this latter aspect in a new book by Fara Dabhoiwala. John Stuart Mill developed the strongest modern argument for free speech. John Stuart Mill was an imperialist. Therefore, John Stuart Mill's "argument about freedom of expression was saturated with imperialist presumptions".

None of this is true. It is simply the assumption that what is bad about a person must necessarily negate what is good about them. More importantly, it fails to understand how crucial free speech is for weaker groups during political conflict. This was why the initial ideas around individual liberty were developed by the Levellers in the English civil war and radicals in the French revolution - because they knew it was their only chance against executive power. It's why they were adopted by campaigners for Indian independence and civil rights activists in the US. The powerful do not need free speech protections. They can do what they damn well like. It is the powerless who require them.

We know what happened next. The populist right embraced free speech as their own. Neuron-free grifters like Piers Morgan and Julie Birchill wrote books about Generation Snowflake. A circus of GB News types warbled on about how easily offended young people were nowadays. None of them had the slightest idea what they were on about.

It was all so tremendously boring. But it was also a disaster. First, it alienated young progressives from free speech values, because the only people they ever saw celebrating them were these absolute clowns. And second, it left one of the most complex and radical principles of political life in the hands of those with the fewest possible brain cells to understand them. Progressives had vacated the land of their birth.

Subscribe now

On the Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo film podcast the other day, something interesting happened. A listener pulled up Kermode on one of his verbal habits. He'd always pronounced Timothée Chalamet's name in a mocking way. They made a short rational argument - why should someone be mocked for having a foreign name, especially given that he'd probably turned down the pressure to anglicise it? At the end of it, Kermode simply replied: ""OK, alright, I'll stop doing it." (You can hear the clip from 01:08:25 here)

I loved him for that. It communicated a central truth. Free speech is not only about aggression. It is also about modesty. It is about receptiveness. It is actually about vulnerability. The idea was not that we would simply scream at one other. It was that we would listen. That our ideas would be improved by being challenged. That the only way for that process to happen was to allow the maximum degree of freedom for communication.

It is an abstract idea, but it is also a practical one. A plan for reforming social security, for instance, will be flawed if we don’t test it against the way that people really live - how much they earn, what work they apply for, how the benefit system responds to a job offer. Our proposal for a transport network will collapse if we do not scrutinise it for traffic flow and human behaviour. It is only by exposing ourself to arguments and information that we develop viable policy.

How interested are the right-wing free speech warriors in hearing other people's ideas? Not at all. How likely are people like Morgan or Burchill to change their view? Not in the slightest.

Elon Musk claims to be a free speech absolutist. Obviously this is laughable politically - he rigged his site to promote people who agree with him and bury those who do not. But it is also extremely telling practically. The reason he is making such a godforsaken mess of things at his made-up efficiency initiative is precisely because he does not try to assess the information which contradicts his instincts.

They thought free speech was about machismo: thrusting, penetrating, dominating, talking over, shouting above. They did not understand that it is about taking in, about absorbing. And so now they fall about pathetically, without the values which would offer them guidance.

Subscribe now

In a speech in Arizona last week, the left wing Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said: "I want to live in an America where you have free speech to express yourself and not be afraid of being put on a list or deported." The applause rang out around her. But it wasn't just that. Those words fit like a glove. They were the kinds of things which progressives used to say, the kind of territory they used to stake as their own. They were the kind of principles we once felt confident defending. And now, perhaps, will again.

A new generation of activists are learning one of the core liberal lessons: That liberty never belonged to the tyrants. It was always the weapon of the marginalised. If we’ve any luck, progressives will now rediscover these values, just in the nick of time.

Odds and sods

My i column this week was on the Spring Statement, obviously, and my increased sense of alarm that the chancellor has got herself stuck in a damaging economic and political position. Honestly, watching her fiddle around with the numbers, at a huge cost to those involved, so she could rebuild the same headroom she had last time with no effort to insulate herself against the same reevaluation next autumn was dispiriting in the extreme. It's suggestive of a government which simply doesn't have any idea of what to do except hope for the best. I also took part in the i verdict on cuts, which you can find here and I took part in this i documentary about Nigel Farage, in which I offered my usual sense of gushing praise. Or suggested he was a cunt. One of the two.

Oh and for culture: Sorry, it's Adolescence. I know. An incredibly boring suggestion. I don't want to join the massed ranks of advocates either. But the thing is: it's very, very good.

See you next week, have a lovely weekend.

Think globally, act locally, they used to say. If it’s true, why does it matter that the US has — again — withdrawn support for international co-ordination on climate change? In the mid-20th century, the US emitted about as much carbon dioxide as every other country in the world combined. Now its share of global emissions is less than 15 per cent. It is a shame that the US administration can’t take climate change seriously, although a solid majority of Americans are concerned about the issue. But even without them, why can’t the rest of us just “act locally”?

That might seem a foolish question. The US stance undermines global agreement, and global agreement is important because climate change poses a collective action problem. Greenhouse gases emitted anywhere in the world, by anyone, mix in the atmosphere and contribute to the general problem of a warming world. It’s a little like splitting a restaurant bill between a large group. Order the Wagyu steak and vintage champagne, why not? Everyone else is sharing the cost. The trouble is that everyone else will do likewise and you’ll be paying for their extravagance, just as they pay for yours.

Finding a better way to split a restaurant bill is a topic so taxing that the writer Douglas Adams believed it needed its own academic discipline, Bistromathics. Finding a way to co-ordinate a response to climate change is even more of a challenge.

I was struck, then, by a new research paper with the intriguing title, “Does Unilateral Decarbonization Pay For Itself?” The paper, by the economists Adrien Bilal and Diego Känzig, argues that a US government entirely uninterested in global co-operation would still find it cost-effective to reduce America’s carbon emissions by more than 80 per cent. Much the same calculation applies to the EU.

If Bilal and Känzig are right, international agreements may be less important than they seem, because the major economies have selfish reasons to decarbonise. The logic behind this surprising conclusion is very simple: Bilal and Känzig estimate that the local damage from global warming is enormous. Acting alone, the US or the EU might only be able to make a modest contribution to reducing that damage. Yet they should still act, because a modest reduction of a catastrophic cost is something worth having.

The only problem with Bilal and Känzig’s argument is that it relies on their estimate of the costs of climate change. Those costs are uncertain, unknowable until it is too late, and endlessly contested. In the US, for example, the official benchmark for the social cost of carbon was $43 a ton under President Obama. The first Trump administration put it at between $3 and $5 a ton. Under the Biden administration, it was raised to $51 and then $190 a ton. Bilal and Känzig estimate it to be $1,367 a ton. Somebody who believes that the social cost of carbon is $3 a ton is not going to be much moved by the conclusions of economists who reckon it is 450 times higher.

There is, however, an alternative line of argument. Perhaps we should refrain from a diet of Wagyu beef and champagne, not because even our small share of the bill is too expensive, but because there are healthier and more interesting things to eat and drink. Or, in the case of climate change, perhaps we should decarbonise not just because it is perilous to trap more heat in the planet’s atmosphere, but because a low-carbon society offers many incidental benefits.

Some of these are obvious. Having more access to electricity from ever-cheaper wind and solar sources, coupled with energy storage, reduces our dependence on imported fossil fuels and our vulnerability to spikes in the price of those fuels — the kind seen after Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Equally obvious, if people choose to walk or cycle instead of drive, they will reap the health benefits of their physical activity.

Other benefits are more surprising. Many of the richest and most productive places in the world are big cities, but these concrete jungles have much lower environmental footprints than sprawling exurbs. Urbanites live in more compact spaces that require less energy to heat and cool and they travel by mass transit, or that most efficient of mechanised people-movers, the counterweighted elevator. Far from perceiving all this as a deprivation, many people are willing to pay a premium to live in an eco-paradise such as Manhattan. (Let’s not even start on the topic of Venice, a city whose unparalleled charms depend not only on those beautiful canals, but also on the complete absence of cars.)

Chris Goodall’s recent book Possible gives further examples. Even though petrol and diesel vehicles are much cleaner than they once were, they still cause lung diseases and a significant number of premature deaths. Electric vehicles are quieter and emit no tailpipe air pollution. Gas hobs fill the home with harmful toxins. Induction hobs do not, and are a pleasure to use. There are plenty of technologies whose initial selling point — less carbon — is just one of a list of attractions.

The battle to slow climate change would be easier to fight with the US government on side, of course. But “act locally” is not just a hippie cliché. There is plenty we can do to decarbonise, and many of the benefits of doing so are closer to home than we might think.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 28 February 2025.

Loyal readers might enjoy the book that started it all, The Undercover Economist.

I’ve set up a storefront on Bookshop in the United States and the United Kingdom. Links to Bookshop and Amazon may generate referral fees.

You can also watch it on YouTube.

Below is the edited essay version of this video.

Why Notorious is a great example of a culture of data security #

One of the best examples of how to think about organizational data security, access control, defense in depth, how you handle security leaks, and the like, doesn’t come from computer science, organisational theory, or case studies, but from spy media – specifically Hitchcock spy movies.

The idea that you should make sure the Germans or the Nazis didn’t discover any information or secret in the UK that might have been of use to them during the Battle of Britain was ingrained not just in the popular culture at the time, but also in just the general culture.

Not just military and top secret information, but information about like shift changes in a factory, or how production was going on a manufacturing line. All of that was valuable information to an adversary.

This meant that most of the people watched Hitchcock’s World War II movies, or the movies that were made immediately after, would have been intimately familiar with the idea of containment – of making sure that only the people who needed to know were allowed to know, because loose lips sink ships. The more people know, the more likely it is the adversary will discover it.

When you look at a movie like Notorious made in 1946, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, you would have to remember that the audience at the time knew what was needed to make sure an enemy didn’t find out information that threatened the security of the nation.

So if you aren’t familiar with the movie, you should absolutely watch it as Notorious is is one of the best examples of a Hitchcock thriller.

You’ve got Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman as the leads. Cary Grant is the American spy, Ingrid Bergman is the daughter of a notorious Nazi traitor (hence the title), and he convinces her to infiltrate a group of Nazis that have managed to flee after the war by any means necessary, because they know that the Nazis are planning something.

Because Nazis are always planning something.

And it was vital for the national security of the US and other countries to discover what they were planning and prevent it.

That, right at the start, is a good first example of operational security in that the Nazi group that Ingrid Bergman is supposed to infiltrate makes sure that whatever vital strategic data they’re protecting is only accessible from within the organization.

They’re not keeping it in a mailbox or safety deposit box in London or somewhere where the US can access it. They make sure it’s stored somewhere away from where adversarial authorities can store it.

Similarly, if you’re worried about the US, you don’t store your data on a US-based server or with a US-based company.

This is not a new concern.

The US has a history of compromising the data security of their allies #

From the time I got my first job at a software company, there’s been this concern about the safety or security of whichever data you store with the US server. And that comes down to George Bush, the Patriot Act, and the laws that followed that effectively mean you can trust that if the US authorities are interested in any given piece of data that’s stored with a US-based company or in a US-based server they will be able to access it.

That’s what the law is for.

What many warned about at the time was that we don’t always know that the US government will respect whatever safeguards they might have in place, that this was proto-fascism, or the first step towards the mechanisms of fascism, even though you might not have an actual fascist movement behind it.

That’s kind of what’s happened now.

It also demonstrates one key difference between the security concerns of a European company or organization today versus 20 years ago.

When I was working in a software security company based here in Iceland they hosted all of their data in Icelandic data center, specifically because they were worried about the Patriot Act.

What’s new is that movements have converts #

One of the things that they didn’t have to worry about at the time were zealots or converts. You wouldn’t have an Icelander or a European suddenly convert to “Bushism” and think that the ideals of following George Bush would trump their own current national interests, or the interests of the company they’re working for, or the colleagues they’re around.

But today there is a decent chance that if somebody has authoritarian leanings or authoritarian ideas, or has sympathies to fascist ideologies, they might see the rise of Trumpism as something that they can relate to and follow.

There’s a very real possibility that a security leak would not necessarily come from accidentally hiring a North Korean agent or hiring an undercover agent or infiltration such as the Nazis were facing in Notorious, but from somebody who has been working for your organization who suddenly believes that the cause of Trumpism is more important than the organization they work for, or the country they belong to, or their colleagues that work around them.

The infiltration isn’t just the unfamiliar, or the new, or an employee, or manager getting hacked. It potentially is converts and zealotry.

That’s an aspect of this, that wasn’t the case 20 years ago, 10 years ago.

You didn’t really have to worry about somebody in your organization suddenly converting to Putinism or becoming a Chinese sympathizer overnight. There has nonetheless always been a contingent among tech with fascist and authoritarian leanings.

I remember conversations in companies where I used to work, where you’d ask a developer what they were reading, or talk to them about politics

and you’d end up thinking to yourself “that’s kind of fascist”.

You do actually need to worry about somebody inside your organization turning, especially if you’re in tech.

It’s not just the converts. As I mentioned earlier, people have accidentally hired North Korean agents and executive’s phones or email accounts have been hacked meaning they became an unwitting infiltrator.

It happened to Microsoft.

It can happen to you.

Access control #

So the first step, if you follow in the playbook of the Nazis in the movie Notorious is access control. Even though Ingrid Bergman managed to infiltrate herself into the household of the Nazi played by Claude Rains, she didn’t have access to everything – all of the secrets of the organization.

Similarly, just because somebody works for you or is a manager, or is allowed in your office,that doesn’t mean they should have access to every database.

Access to any given data store in your company should only be open to those who need to access it.

Even a developer who says, “I need access to the database to develop software that works with it”.

No, they don’t need to work with the production database.

They need to work with something that looks and works like the production database.

They should never ever touch actual customer or client data, because you don’t know what they’re gonna do with it. They could even accidentally leak it, which is honestly just as bad because when it comes to regulatory compliance and your duty and obligation to report on security issues, regulators don’t care that much how it happens.

Unintentional or not, you need to still need to report leaks, so it still exposes you to liability and issues.

Be selective about what you store #

You also need to make sure that you don’t store what you don’t need.

Much of this goes unsaid in the movie, but the Nazis make sure that they don’t name too many names. They don’t store too much detail because they know that anything that is stored can get leaked. The same thing applies to us when we’re developing software or structuring an organization.

The data that you don’t store doesn’t get leaked, it doesn’t get stolen, it doesn’t get confiscated or accessed through a warrant by an American organization who’ve just criminalized a section of their population and are wanting to use you to find people to arrest.

If you don’t store that data, you’re not gonna be a target.

Containment #

Another item from the Nazi saboteur ring playbook is compartmentalisation: they organized into cells where the data that was contained within each cell wasn’t collected at a central point. As each spy cell was discovered, they didn’t know enough to harm the rest of the organization.

In terms of business strategy, that means data should be stored where it can be acted upon.

The more data you control centrally, the more data is stored away it is from where it can be acted on, which is bad idea in the first place.

Centrally storing all of your data also makes you a bigger target.

But the closer you store the data to where it’s acted upon, the tighter the feedback loop is for that part of the organization and that faster decisions can be made.

It’s not just a security issue to keep information at the edges rather than in the center.

It’s a functional organizational issue – a question of maneuverability.

Storing information at the edges makes an organization more limber and more capable of action at a short notice, often even before central management notices the issue.

One example of this were chains of bookstores. An issue that plagued bookstore chains in the UK, for example, was that many of them, decisions about book stock and orders for any given bookstore were decided upon centrally.

They collected all of their purchase data into one big pool and then some hoity-toity manager decided what any given branch would order.

(Borders UK had additional issues, such as an inventory system that required the use of custom bar codes instead of the pre-printed ones, but this central management of stock, if I remember correctly, was also a factor in Waterstones when it was owned by HMV.)

The people on the ground have a much better sense of of what works for their given store. Just because your bookstore is at a train station that doesn’t mean that it should order the same books as another bookstore in another train station.

It depends on what sort of customers come in on a regular basis and what neighbourhoods or employers are in proximity with the station.

When James Daunt, who now runs Waterstones, one of the first things that he did once he took on management of Waterstones, was to make sure that most inventory decisions for a bookstore were made in that store.

That meant that they would be able to focus on their actual clientele, and could respond to changes more quickly.

From the perspective of your average business organization, the logical next step after that is that non-essential data – all the data that doesn’t have to be stored centrally – is only stored at the edges in the branches or offices where it’s needed and not stored centrally.

You’re not gonna be able to apply this idea to every single piece of data you store, but it applies to more than you think.

The software equivalent #

If you’re making software, the equivalent would be to store things in the client, whether it’s in the browser, or in the app, or in the user’s file system.

Anything that the end user stores and controls locally is something that they can act upon quicker, more reliably, and makes you as an organisation less of a a target.

It’s much harder for an attacker to go through all of the edge locations and gather the data one by one.

Anything that slows them down gives you time.

Anything that gives you time gives you more opportunity to notice and react, makes you more able to do the right thing and protect your own interest.

Because this is about pure pragmatism.

There are liability issues for a European company if an outside entity accesses private data. It doesn’t matter if it’s the US government or some fascist leaning employee who leaks whatever to whichever ultra-right-wing website is en vogue at each time.

Make it “shreddable” #

If you have to store data, make sure you can actually delete it.

Or, technically, you don’t need to delete it completely, because that can be difficult when you’re using distributed storage.

But if you encrypt a data item and store the encryption key separately for each user, then deleting the key means you’ve effectively shredded the entire data set for that user.

Making sure that the data is impossible to access is almost as good as actually deleting it, because it can come down to effectively the same thing.

The weakness of Nazis #

But the final lesson is what caused the downfall of the Nazi organization in the movie Notorious.

One of the recurring themes for authoritarians, both in media and in real life, is the need to command and control – the rule through fear and discipline, and the treatment of people as if they were cogs in a machine.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s Star Wars or Notorious, the standard tactic for authoritarians is to punish those who shows weakness.

This is surprisingly common in modern businesses, depsite numerous studies showing that the approach is self-descructive.

When a substantial percentage of a company can expect to get fired every year, and at the same time you have performance reviews and you have management reports, anybody who shows any kind of weakness or mistake or flaw can expect to be at risk for losing their job.

This happens in Notorious, albeit in a more extreme way. The Nazis kill anybody who shows any weakness.

That meant that when the Claude Rains character started to suspect the Ingrid Bergman character, his wife who had infiltrated his organization, he didn’t report it.

Even though that’s what you should do whenever you suspect your organization or your business has been infiltrated, whether it’s because you accidentally clicked a link or an email and your computer started to behave weirdly, or whether it’s the new employee doing weird things, you’re supposed to report it because that’s the only way an organization can prevent bad things from happening.

But if you punish people who report, even indirectly, that means that everybody’s first instict will be the same as that of the Claude Rains character’s in Notorious: he prevented the infiltration from being discovered and tried to handle it himself.

Instead of immediately shutting down the security risk and giving them the opportunity to salvage their operations and basically ensuring victory for the Nazi saboteurs in Notorious, he ensured their doom because he was afraid.

His fear of discovery or of him being purged for having made an understandable human error meant that the good side won.

This is what authoritarians never understand, they never grasp. This iron fist control over the organization, this rule through fear and weeding out weakness, actually makes an organization weak.

Robust organizations understand that people make mistakes, that people vary and that it’s the system of the organization that is the actual decider of the overall productivity or effectiveness of the organization.

The organization that understands that people make mistakes and works—makes sure it’s a safe enough environment for them to let you know that something has gone wrong.

That’s the organization that lasts, that tolerates crises and survives them, even thrives on change.

The authoritarian organizations that weed out weakness create weakness in themselves because you’re always going to need people and people will always make human errors.

You need to create an environment that benefits from human variation, from people noticing the odds and the strange and the weird.

You want people to be human and let you know when they see something.

But that’s not what authoritarians want or managers with an authoritarian bent.

That’s why they lose in the long run.

That’s why the rest of us will win eventually.

With the US threatening unilateral withdrawal, even from the top Nato military post, five European nations must fill the vacuum

In the face of Vladimir Putin’s aggression against Ukraine and Donald Trump’s destabilisation of the Atlantic alliance, an embryonic European security council is taking shape on the hoof. Whether it will prove strong enough to protect Europe’s liberal democracies and deter Russia without US military support may be tested all too soon.

Nato was created under US leadership to keep the Soviet Union at bay while suppressing centuries-old rivalries among European powers. The alliance stayed united through the cold war and attracted new central European members after communist rule collapsed. But the spectre of US disengagement now threatens to leave Europe without its nuclear-armed protector.

Paul Taylor is a senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.